Spread those wings

[learntofly]

WHO: Stormriders and anyone else!
WHERE: Around Nonah
WHEN: Feb 9
WHAT: Time for some dumb birds to show off how cool their rollerblades are
WARNINGS: Broken physics probably

[It's a good day to be out—crisp and clear in the light of a bright moon. And as the bustle of people rushing home from work begins to die down, a few teenagers are heading right back out again. Probably for some kind of sketchy teenager antics, no doubt.]

Comments

[burnmetwice]

[Kazu's coasting along on his A-T, pulling ahead of the group so he can make tight little twisting turns to loop him back to the other memebers of Kogarasumaru. Wondering at the pleasant burn, the smooth way his bones slide along his sockets when he makes those precise little shifts.]

[learntofly]

[Yayoi's more careful on her A-T, occasionally circling around the group almost like she's practicing turning, but mostly she's keeping a watchful eye on Kazu while he stretches out and tests how things feel after the tuning.]

How's it feel?

[burnmetwice]

[Kazu's face goes red, because even after a couple weeks that whole tuning session was still not any less embarrassing. He fidgets with the rim of his beanie, leaning his weight into his left to send him in an easy loop, a little further away from Yayoi.]

Great—Awesome. 110% HP!

[He felt like he could run again. His heart was racing a little, eager.]

[learntofly]

[She grins brightly, circling round to bring herself closer to him again. Clearly the tuning has been forgotten in favor of more important matters.]

Great! Then you can finally start helping me train.

[burnmetwice]

What've you got down so far?

[He feels a little sheepish having to ask but... he'd been pretty out of it lately. It felt good to be able to shift focus, though.]

[learntofly]

[She crouches down to think, still coasting along in a lazy arc.]

Mm, I've just started wall-climbing, and I can do some jumps . . . It's easier to jump across gaps than trying to jump up or down off of things. I still need to work on mastering those and on speed. . . . I think I'm going to need to be really fast.

[resoundingpledge]

[ She can't follow them everywhere; Nonah's still-occasional snows and ice have pushed getting a bike to the bottom of her list, especially with their funds as limited as they are. She watches their practice from Nonah 5's front porch, though, for as long as they're there—'there' being the road outside, the sidewalk outside, the roofs of the government-issue townhouses along both sides of the street . . .

She's not entirely idle though. What she has managed to get in the past month is a laptop, old by this world's standards but still modern by hers. Earphones plugged into one port, her old (very old, now) cellphone plugged into another, her fingers fly over the keys in a counterpoint rhythm to the strikes of A-T against concrete. ]

[learntofly]

[Eventually, probably some time after she's worn herself down trying out whatever insane tricks the boys have been trying to show her, Yayoi's wheels touch down nearby. She leans over to peek at the laptop's screen, not bothering to speak to get Kururu's attention. She doesn't think it'll do much good while she's got those headphones on.]

[resoundingpledge]

[ She's not . . . wrong, really, about that. Yayoi's seen her world now; she knows what it's like to be deep within those melodies, how easy it is for everything outside of her hands to fade away. And the laptop's screen only reaffirms her guess—waveforms dance across it, born from alphanumeric code and separating into binary streams.

Something blips though, as Yayoi watches. Silence where there should be sound, a moment of anticipation . . . Kururu flips open her old phone and turns to Yayoi, bright and alert as if she hadn't just been worlds away. ]

Ah, you haven't registered yet!

[learntofly]

[She frowns at the screen, but before she can put more than a single thought into what that means Kururu's alert again and saying something—

Yayoi blinks dumbly.]

Registered . . . ?

[resoundingpledge]

Your READ.

[ She offers the phone to Yayoi. ]

We can't reach Skynet here, so I've been . . . rebuilding it, a bit. But your A-T aren't registered yet—would you like to?

[learntofly]

Oh—I completely forgot about it! Of course—

[She takes the phone from Kururu to start going through the registration, a slow realization dawning as she does.]

Wait, you've been doing this by yourself?

[resoundingpledge]

I had to do something while you were training. And they'll only let me use the workshop at the school for an hour after the last bell . . .

I still haven't figured out how to make an app that we can load on the communicators, but if there's a network to attach to it shouldn't be too bad.

[learntofly]

I didn't know you knew programming too! Just how many talents do you have?

[resoundingpledge]

Ahh, this isn't really . . . um, I mean it is, but it's also cheating a little . . .

It's something we do, in Tool Toul To. Encoding information, and decoding it . . . a program is really just a song, when you think like that. We program in song.

It's a little bit hard without real input keys, though.

[learntofly]

I guess . . . I just didn't realize how many different things you—we? Can do? I mean, it feels a little like every time I think I know how amazing you are it turns out there's something else you can do too.

[resoundingpledge]

If you think about it . . . the READ system is part of A-T too. And the Flame Regalia, and mine . . . both can interface with Skynet—with the Sky Regalia's 'core'. In different ways, but . . . it's all connected.

And when I was designing the Storm Regalia, and later, when it was finally complete . . . I . . .

[ She pauses, not . . . really sure how to say how far she'd gone. ]

I was pretty deep into those systems, those times.

[learntofly]

I can't even imagine what that must have been like . . .