2022-08-14 - Fundamentals
| Title: Fundamentals | |
|---|---|
| Summary: Kyouka sets out to improve her mastery of magic by working on her fundamentals. | |
| Who: | |
| Where: Somewhere in the city | |
| OOC - IC Date: 2022-08-14 - Monday January 04, 2016 | |
Kyouka had a lot to think about. She'd finally met another device user, a girl 5 years her junior, with such fierce eyes…
Somewhere, deep inside of her, where those ever-burning embers of her heart lived, those eyes stoked a fire.
Not at the girl in question, certainly not. No, instead at whatever could have transpired to make a kid have eyes that hard, at whoever could have caused or stood by while those events transpired.
And even when she had tried to offer some small encouragement, to commend her on her willingness to look out for others… To compliment on one of those values that she held most dearly, the reaction she'd gotten…
It made her heart ache. And that fire burn hotter.
But it wasn't all bad. She'd seen ferocity, yes, but also shyness, mirth, and a beaming smile. And that helped ease the righteous anger, at least a little bit.
Not to mention, she was obviously a stupendously talented mage. And she'd been honest and frank in her evaluation of Kyouka herself, which meant that not only she had raw talent and power, but real, genuine skill and knowledge about her craft.
And she'd offered to help train her.
That thought got her blood pumping, and helped sooth over any other anger she felt, at least for the moment.
Fate had said she should work on the fundamentals, and Kyouka agreed. She'd intuited her way into a specific set of running and jumping skills, but if she was going to advance–if she ever had any hope of catching up to Fate's level–she needed more than just intuition.
(She'd seen just how insanely fast Fate could move–so blisteringly fast that prior to two weeks ago, she'd never have believed it but now… It was a goal, and that got her blood pumping, too.)
All skills could be broken down into their component parts, each piece studied, analyzed, practiced, honed, and perfected. And then the pieces themselves carefully put back together, one by one, and the resulting whole practiced and analyzed, broken down again so adjustments could be made, reconstituted once more, and so on.
That was how Kyouka viewed her martial arts experience–she had seen so many different ones that she could recognize most of the fundamental pieces by now, and could quickly assemble them into the new shapes–or even adapt them on the fly to fit her needs. The problem with magic was… she didn't have any of the pieces yet, or even the completed forms to break down into pieces.
Well, for the most part, anyway. Fate had encouraged her that the spell she'd been using to run around with was, in fact, a spell. And she'd encouraged her to work on developing it, until it came so naturally to her that she could call on it in any situation or manner she needed it in. That was a process she was familiar with, at least.
And Fate had, wittingly or not, given her an additional piece of inspiration, as well. The second of the two attacks she'd tried in their… Fight? Spar? Demonstration? Whatever it'd been, when she went low for a kick, Fate had responded with a spell called 'Defenser Plus', and it had an appearance remarkably like her own spell circles that she used to make her way around.
Only… it was free floating, in the air, placed by nothing more than Fate's will. And that got her gears turning.
When the mage she rescued Strike Wolf from had taken to the air, she'd known she needed a way to reach him. Her first instinct had not been flight, it had been to adapt her skills to the situation. Her barrier jacket increased her strength and speed (not fo Fate's ridiculous and enviable levels, but certainly far beyond non-magical levels), and her inclination had been to jump–first at a building wall, and then up from there, arcing into the sky to attack the mage.
Of course, the problem with hurtling herself at a wall, foot first, at her increased mage speeds, was that she was liable to put her foot through the wall instead. She understood the problem, and so had Strike Wolf, and the answer had been to place a barrier on the wall, made of magic, that could take her force, and protect the wall underneath. And that was how she'd thought of it–just protection for the wall.
But if they weren't confined to a wall or any surface in particular…
"Alright, Strike Wolf. Fundamentals. We're gonna do this all bit by bit."
<Understood.>
She didn't really need to say the words out loud, but she liked hearing the verbal feedback from her partner.
Kyouka had selected a skyscraper that had a section with a wider footprint beneath, and a smaller footprint above. This left a clearing of sorts where she could practice and run around well out of sight, and the dimmed windows hopefully signified the building was currently empty. The design also left several large, empty, vertical sections on the side, which would also be handy for controlled practice.
She started by simply facing the wall, lifting her right foot, and pressing it against the wall. No spell circle sprung up, which didn't surprise her. Strike Wolf handled so much of that automatically, for which she was grateful. And he had detected she wasn't moving with sufficiently dangerous force to cause damage to the building. Fair enough.
Time to find the threshold, then. Kyouka brought her foot back down, setting it behind herself. This time she jumped at the wall, extending her right foot forward to make contact. She let her knee compress, absorbing the impact, but then let her body drop back down to the ground due to gravity's influence. Still nothing.
That was okay. Kyouka performed another jump, a bit faster this time, ramping up the speed bit by bit until–there! She could feel Strike Wolf's feedback–not words so much as a knowing placed into her mind through their connection, but she could also see it, feel the difference under her foot. And now that she was focusing solely on the exercise and not distracted by other concerns, she could feel the ever so slight draw of mana required for the action.
"Okay, good. We've got a baseline now."
Next, it was time to break it all down. She repeated that simple jump, again and again, noting every little facet she could. The amount of time it took until the circle started to form, the amount of time it took to fully create the circle, how long it took to dissipate, how much it pushed back against her foot, and a thousand other details. Kyouka knew Strike Wolf would manage all of that for her, of course, but she needed to break down her conceptions of how things worked, and open herself to the possibilities.
Right now, she saw the circle as responding to a need: her need to not damage a building with her power. That was a mental block, of sorts. She had a hunch, now, that it wasn't limited to just that. But in order to cross the gap to where she wanted to go, she needed to filter that need out, to separate the ideas of I need to protect this wall and I need to make a jump.
That meant proving to herself those spell circles were a real, substantial thing. Intellectually, she knew that was the case. But to be useful in combat, she had to burn it into her instincts. The same way that her body instinctively knew how to walk, run, and jump. How she had trained her body to jump off a wall, vault over an obstacle, or slide as naturally as she drew breath.
Kyouka took a deep breath. "Okay, let's… give this a try."
She turned away from the wall, and so that she was parallel with the building's edge. Plenty of room in front of herself in case she made any mistakes. She focused not on the building that was no longer in front of her, but the need to make a jump. Right foot back, and jump–
Her foot made contact with something solid–but she was crouched against the air itself, seemingly suspended for a moment in time. Kyouka took in everything she could, before gravity returned both feet to the ground.
"Woo! Alright! Good work, buddy."
<Affirmative.>
It was tempting to take this technique now and to run with it, to start plotting out fantastical, death-defying leaps and stunts. But that would be foolish. Detaching it from the need to protect a building wall meant that the possibilities were even more numerous than before… and that meant there were a lot more variables to consider.
Kyouka returned to doing drills. Repeating the same basic jump, absorbing the impact, and then dropping to the ground. Then variations: working with Strike Wolf to modulate the timing, height, and angle. And then… to repeat all of that with progressively faster starting jumps. Then jumps from a running start.
And after each little variation had been practiced with her right foot leading off, then it was practiced with her left.
Next was adding the jumps themselves. Starting with a simple jump to take her just beyond her starting position. Then larger and larger ones using more and more of her power (but not too much–she only had so much runaway on her current training ground, after all.) Jumps at angles–both angling herself off of the temporary surface to go higher or lower and angling the platform itself to increase the range of directions she had access to. Then backflips. And each variation done with the right also done with the left.
Some time later, Kyouka landed from a backflip into a handspring, and then pushed off into a flip to land rightside up in a crouch.
Strike Wolf announced, <20!>
"Whew," said Kyouka, as she stood up and stretched her arms overhead. "Thanks, Strike Wolf."
<You're welcome.>
Kyouka switched from stretching to gently twisting her body from side to side. "Alright, I think we've got a pretty good start on that. We'll have to find a place where we can really give that a good shakeout and start working it into other motions, but for tonight, there's something else I want to start investigating…"
Strike Wolf wasn't exactly a conversationalist, but Kyouka knew he was listening, all the same.
This was the reason she'd chosen a skyscraper for tonight's session. She needed a surface with a long vertical stretch to test this next technique with. She'd been elated to discover that her Barrier Jacket let her continue her wallrunning essentially indefinitely–normally you could only get a few useful steps in before you ran out of momentum and had to grab for the top of the wall, make a jump, or take some other action.
Unlike with doing a supercharged jump off a wall, though, the spell circles that appeared here had the opposite purpose. They let her feet stick to them, giving her more friction to kick off with to take the next step. But this had its own issue. Gravity was still a factor, and she could only maintain the drive and momentum to continue her upward ascent thanks to her enhanced capabilities. She could veer, but not by too much, and she still had to keep physics in mind if she wanted to take any other action than running straight up.
And so she started again, testing all of the little variations that she could think of: starting speed, speed between steps, length of stride, delay in taking steps and on and on.
Then variations: trying to change directions in the run, trying to add a jump, roll, handplant, or anything else. These… were less successful.
After attempting everything she could think of, Kyouka took a step back from the wall, looking up at the skyscraper's peak. A slight frown crossed her face as she contemplated the overall performance. "Okay, Strike Wolf, I think… we need to rethink our approach for this one."
Strike Wolf didn't say anything, but Kyouka knew he was processing the results.
Kyoua was confident that they could reproduce the technique to run up on thin air, but that didn't feel nearly as useful as being able to jump, not unless they could gain some other advantage by doing so. She'd been able to attach herself to the wall–that was something. But she still had to fight gravity…
"Fate was able to fly…" she mused. "That would certainly be handy… Hmmm…" Far more maneuverability, access to all of the open sky…
But flight hadn't been what she reached for first upon activating Strike Wolf for the first time. It wasn't what resonated with her the most, and Strike Wolf hadn't offered any secrets for unlocking it. After tonight she felt like she was a little bit more open to the possibilities, but for now… her gut said she should stick to her strengths. But it was still useful for examining all of the different facets of the problem.
"If I could fly, I could just… pretend I was running around on the wall in any direction I chose… Or if we looked at it another way, what if… if we could just make the wall a floor…"
Now there was an idea…
And what's more, she could tell Strike Wolf was already working on calculating something.
Kyouka looked to the device on her gauntlet. "Whatcha think?"
It took a moment for Strike Wolf to respond. <More processing required. Scheduled time allotment expired.>
"Oh, shoot. Alright, we'll pick this up tomorrow."
She was known for taking long walks or hikes through the woods, but she didn't want to stay out too long, lest her mom start getting suspicious. Kyouka turned her sights towards the woods she had used as cover to for her hike and took off through the city.
