Tightrope

[hit-girl-mindy.livejournal.com]

It had been a few days since the Outsider's gathering, where Hit Girl had finally been able to utilize her strength and talent to help others. All in all, it went pretty well: choices were made, friendships were had, blah blah and kumbaya. What SHE had wanted to show was that she was the type of girl who got the job done, and if anyone needed to be reminded, she would show that to them. Grabbing the flag had just been the start: now she wanted to make sure that whatever happened next, she would be ready, she would show people the type of person her daddy trained.

Which led to today's excursion in the Sensorium: she was doing tightrope walking, one of her weaker points, in order to maintain balance and poise. Jumping from rooftop to rooftop had demanded both, and while she had mastered that, she had not yet made her foray to really careful jumping in tight spots. To give her some energy, she had this playing in the background, and she jumped from rope to rope, her eyes concentrating, her tongue sticking out slightly in concentration.

Each step took courage, and the slightest imperfection would result in her falling, although of course it wouldn't be that big of a deal when you were in the Sensorium anyway. Despite this, Hit Girl demanded nothing less than imperfection: once she had this mastered, going to Negi and learning the delayed spells would be next, not to mention training Sasami.

Comments

[zouichi.livejournal.com]

Zouichi hadn't been sure where that music was coming from, but when he looked up, well... there was a young costumed girl jumping around on tightropes. What was this, some sort of new aerobic routine?

"...what are you doing?" he asked, shading his eyes with one hand as he called up to her.

[hit-girl-mindy.livejournal.com]

Hit Girl paused and looked down. She recognized this guy: he was one of the people from the Outsider's skirmish, and he was one of the pretty good fighters. Without thinking about it, she jumped down, making sure to hit the ground lightly enough where it wouldn't hurt, and walked over to him.

"Making sure I'm able to keep balance. You never know when you're going to need to be jumping narrow gaps and all of that. You were one of those guys in the Outsider's simulation, right?"

[zouichi.livejournal.com]

Zouichi watched her land -- she did it with grace and relative ease, so it didn't look like she was hurting for training in any way. It made sense, though; balance was essential for fighting, especially when speed was a factor. It could mean the difference between dodging a blow and having a limb lopped off. Or worse.

"Outsider's simulation?" He looked a little puzzled. "Did that take place in one of the Sensoriums? I certainly wasn't there personally, though I did pay a recent visit to the headquarters building."

[hit-girl-mindy.livejournal.com]

"Are you sure? As far as I knew, there was one of those things that took place, and then the Overlord went all crazy with the stuff he was showing us, with all the obstacles..." Well, if that wasn't him, oh well. It's not like it was that big of a deal, right?

"So what's your deal? You training too?"

[zouichi.livejournal.com]

"Overlord? Obstacles? Are you talking about Zetta?"

"Well, I do train here fairly often, but it has been getting a little repetitive lately. Mostly, I was just curious about where the music was coming from."

He paused. "May I ask why you're wearing that costume?"

[hit-girl-mindy.livejournal.com]

"Yeah, the Overlord. He's actually the guy that's been training me, and I've actually gotten better because of him."

She grinned. "Well, I was feeling a little homesick, and I wanted to train, so I decided to play a little Pantera to get me in the mood. It really gets the blood rushing to the skin you know?"

She nodded. "In my world, we were talking down some pretty tough guys. So we were in disguise. We were heroes, in our own way."

[changelingdude.livejournal.com]

"Is it true what they say about not looking down?"

Beastboy watched her with a big toothy grin munching on some pop corn, "This is kind of a neat idea, I wonder why we never did this back home. Probably because three of the titans can fly and one is too heavy."

[hit-girl-mindy.livejournal.com]

Hit Girl heard the familiar voice and nodded. "It helps to not look down, believe me. Dad had to repeat that to me several times when I was first doing this stuff. Jumping rooftops is easier than actually keeping balance on tightropes though. You hardly have time to think about it."

She grinned. She knew all too well who he was talking about, but she had to make sure not to let on that she knew, otherwise there would be issues, like, Back to the Future paradoxes and what not.

[changelingdude.livejournal.com]

Beastboy shifted into cat form and trotted along the wire as confident as well... a cat.

"Your dad taught you how to do this? Neat! My dad just tried to teach me super science and other languages."

[hit-girl-mindy.livejournal.com]

She laughed, petting Beastboy absentmindedly. "Well, I'm a little young, and I'm not a super genius like you, so dad sorta had to settle with making me one of the toughest S.O.B's out there."

[changelingdude.livejournal.com]

Beastboy snorted and laughed leaning into the petting automatically, "Dude, clearly we have not been hanging out. Me? Super Genius? I wish." His tail flicked amusingly, "Still looks like your Dad knew what he was doing."

[hit-girl-mindy.livejournal.com]

"Well, I mean, that was at least an option, to learn science and languages. My dad used to b a cop, so he had to teach me what he knew about weapons and hand to hand. Sure, there was some geeks stuff thrown in there for good measure, but he wanted to teach me what he could to keep me alive."

[nokosi.livejournal.com]

Nokosi stared in relative silence for a few moments, watching the scene before him. Costumed girl...tightrope walking? And the music...

The music playing from...wherever it was made the scene seem far more dangerous than it was; after all, he didn't even see any angry crocolisks or hungry hyenas snapping at her from below. Then again, every performer needed practice before their shows, right?

"You are training for the Faire? Circus? I loved the Darkmoon Faire!" he suddenly exclaimed.

[hit-girl-mindy.livejournal.com]

"What the..." Who was this guy, and why was he talking about a circus? She hadn't even bothered to consider that was precisely what it looked like, though she had hoped the music might be a giveaway that she was doing something far more involved than just a balancing act.

"Training!" She said, shifting her weight a little. "I'm actually not as good as I should be at this stuff. That's why I'm doing this now!"

Steady, steady.

[nokosi.livejournal.com]

"Not for a Faire? That's...disappointing. Oh well," he sighed, shrugging. And the acrobats were his favorite, too. Maybe one day.

"I see," Nokosi said, turning his head up to look at her again. "Being able to keep balance on something so small does seem like something not that many people around here could do but..."

His eyebrows furrowed, "Why the costume if you're not a performer?"

[hit-girl-mindy.livejournal.com]

Why would Stacy want to rescue someone from a fair? Well, she did stranger things anyway, like bringing that racist on board. If anything, that was proof Stacy rarely knew what the fuck she was doing, and probably only cared about bringing in supers.

"I'm a hero, that's why the costume," Hit Girl said. "Well, I was in a way, back on earth. No one really knew about me, because they weren't supposed to. We were one of those kind of heroes that existed because we have to, not for fame or any shitty reason like that. It's the reason most heroes war a costume too: the criminals see who you actually are, they kinda want revenge."

[nokosi.livejournal.com]

"Noble causes, then?" Like a Paladin or Priest, he assumed. The ones that actually spent time fighting instead of spending all day and night at the Cathedral, looking pretty and chastising Death Knights.

"I suppose so, though none of the heroes I knew wore costumes. Just performers. But, really, if their misdeeds were so terrible that they're going to go back to try and attack you after you defeated them the first time...why not just kill them?" After all, he'd seen people killed for silly things with no real proof of misdeed beyond belonging to an organization.

[hit-girl-mindy.livejournal.com]

"Well." Might as well not lie. "Some of it was for hero purposes, but there was definitely a revenge angle too. Bad guys took my mom from me, and made dad's life some hell before he was finally released from prison."

She laughed. Wow, somebody actually got it. "Oh I killed them, don't get me wrong. But in my world bad guys have ways of finding out who you are, and once they know that they can send a whole bunch more thugs your way. You never let your real self get known. I just decided to keep that persona on this ship too."

Who was this guy anyway? Somehow he reminded her of Ronnae a bit. "What brings you here?"

[8wings.livejournal.com]

Anwei wanted to test her Sensoriums telltale, to see if the carefully worded commands, given over different days, would actually work. She walked into the echoing chamber, paying little attention to the music and the person doing some sort of exercise routine, and waited.

Yes! A tiny red-and-green light started to pulse in the corner of her vision, flashing to the beat of the song she had decided on this morning. Excellent; and if she was correct, nobody would be able to see the laser painting its light on just her retina. Now someone else couldn’t trick her into thinking these illusions were real.

Unless of course they were working from inside Stacy's systems. Or they were Stacy...but she put that aside. Instead she turned her attention to the purple-haired person, probably a girl based on her attire, and watched her step and leap from rope to rope. Good balance, she thought.

"Do you ever try and do that with the ropes moving?" she asked, when the other was standing still.

[hit-girl-mindy.livejournal.com]

Hit Girl, for her part, had no idea what was going on, but she did know that there was someone that had popped into the Sensorium. She was still absorbed with making sure that she didn't fall of course: she still wanted to keep her step.

"Not yet," she answered, "I gotta go one step at a time, you know? Once I get this down, I'll go onto moving ropes next. What's up?"

[8wings.livejournal.com]

Good focus, too; her presence hadn't caused the other to falter at all.

"I'm sort of touring the Sensoriums to see what other people use them for," she said. So far everyone seemed to be training or eating; odd that she hadn't seen more entertainment-type creations. Unless of course the combat counted as entertainment. "I apologize if I'm disturbing you."

"They use moving ropes in a lot of space stations, to let people move around in the larger areas," she said chattily. "Cheap, easy to maintain, and they can be cleared out in case of emergency."

[hit-girl-mindy.livejournal.com]

Hit Girl was like that: she tended to stay focused on the task at hand, otherwise it would be a pretty straight fall down.

"Nah," Hit girl said, "Not really. If I got that distracted while I was up here, I'd be pretty much a novice. Where I'm from, you have to keep a calm head right before you jump into things. Don't really have room to be careless."

That, and the Overlord's many simulations would eat her alive.

"Sounds pretty efficient," Hit girl said, trying to visualize that and failing. "How do they work?"

[8wings.livejournal.com]

"It sounds like you had good teachers." Anwei cast through her own memories, but the closest she could come to balance-training was carrying large arrays of ceremonial platters at once, and that had been on a flat floor. Free-fall movement training was a different sort of balance; there you just had to keep track of where your center of mass was, in relation to your motion.

Anwei gestured with both hands, forming an imaginary tube in the air. "Imagine a free part of the station - that means in free fall - that's a few hundred yards across. You could get from one side to the other just by jumping, of course, but you might collide with someone or land on an uneven surface. You could have solid tubes strung across that you pulled yourself through, but then the tubes are blocking the view and throwing off the airflow calculations.

"Or you just have a rope strung across, that cycles like a conveyor belt. You grab the rope, and get pulled across. Minimum impedance to the airflow, maximum visibility. And if you need to move something large through the area, you just unstring the ropes."

[hit-girl-mindy.livejournal.com]

"Yeah, you could say that." Her dad HAD been a cop before, so he did know a thing or two about improvising and protecting yourself. Considering his persona as Big Daddy though, he'd had to learn more than just that, and he made sure that she was trained accordingly.

She shook her head. "That sounds like some pretty futuristic stuff," she said, "but I could definitely imagine it. Actually, if you could simulate it, I could start training with that too: I could use any advantage I can get."

[hit-girl-mindy.livejournal.com]

"It's tough," she agreed, knowing full well that she hadn't quite had to deal with that kind of pain yet. After all, Tavros had been a friend, bug had it been someone like Ruffnut, she would blow up whatever she had to and find out the true story behind what went on when someone was podded. In any case, right now she had many other things to think about.

"Nah, she I'd an actual human. I say watergirl because her powers are based on using water all around her: she called it bending. I don't really know how it works though. She was the one that was co-head of the Outsiders. I don't know why she was podded, but it seemed pretty stupid to me. "