This post's authors have general content warnings that might apply to the current post.
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
Bella likes school. She didn't use to like school one bit. Even when Renée was teaching her when she was in kindergarten (Renée refused to hear of skipping her past her opportunity to teach her only daughter), it was all - coloring and stupid kiddy books. She likes Renée. But she likes learning serious stuff more.
She devours classwork. She plays in the practice rooms and the gym. She loiters in the games room, fingers flying under strips of copper as she controls things, tries things. She loses to older kids a few times with each new game, till she figures it out, and then moving at the speed of thought means she's got the advantage. Bullying happens around her, but she's a girl - this shields her from much of it - and even though she adds up to faster and stronger than all of the other kids, she's still wearing an assistive device, she's still a cripple. That's fine with her; it keeps her out of the way of the nastier kids. She's not sure the Battle School people are looking for quite the right ratio of ferocity to other traits.
She plays the fantasy game, until she hears from other people that you can't win the Giant's Drink, and she uses this as an example in her statistics homework and never bothers with it again. What a stupid game.
autokinetic
autokinetic
"I like being busy," says Bella. "I like my parents but I'm always away from one of them anyway, so two isn't so much different."
autokinetic
"They're nice. They love me. They got me my exo," says Bella, letting go of her perch and landing on one toe to twirl. "They're just not all that interesting."
autokinetic
"What do they do?" she asks. The game console next to him - not the fantasy game, some kind of infinite minefield puzzle that won't interfere with her ability to hold a conversation, opens up; she sits and starts skimming her coppered hands over the controls.
autokinetic
"The copper stuff? That's part of my exoskeleton," she says. "I'm sort of a cripple. This gives me superpowers instead. It's not safe for most people but it is for me 'cause telepaths can't touch my brain and take over the exo like they did with that one guy that one time that made it hard for me to get one."
autokinetic
"It is!" The puzzle game has ramped up to match her speed adaptively; she doesn't even look at her hands, just the screen. "I love it. I never take it off if I can avoid it."
autokinetic
"...No. I'm not. I don't have anything you could diagnose. But I'm so clumsy that I almost died. And now I never fall."
She misses a mine that comes from the edge of the screen at blinding speed; her avatar in the puzzle game explodes bloodlessly. She swaps the minefield skin to start looking for hazardous clouds in a three-dimensional skyscape instead and begins again.
She misses a mine that comes from the edge of the screen at blinding speed; her avatar in the puzzle game explodes bloodlessly. She swaps the minefield skin to start looking for hazardous clouds in a three-dimensional skyscape instead and begins again.
autokinetic
"Yeah. I just think and -" She executes an unnecessarily showoffy sequence in the minefield; it hasn't 'figured out' for this iteration that she's faster than it is, yet. "I move. It was way easier for me to adjust to a battle suit than anyone else in the launch. I could compensate for the stiffness and any flashed parts and learn to move in zero-g without needing special muscle memory for it, I just have to know what to do. Some of them don't think it's fair but if I took off the exo it wouldn't be fair, either."
"Fun," he says.
This time, for a change, he pours one drink into the other and tries the result. His avatar explodes messily all over the giant's table.
This time, for a change, he pours one drink into the other and tries the result. His avatar explodes messily all over the giant's table.
autokinetic
Bella's not looking at his screen, but she hears the sound effect. "There's one that makes you blow up?" she asks.
"I wanna see the rest of the room," he says, "but I'm too slow, the Giant keeps squashing me flat. Think you could give it a try?"
autokinetic
"Sure." The mines adapt to her; one blows up her avatar and she abandons the console. "This game doesn't adapt the speed, just the content, if I remember right..."
She takes over his game. She dodges the Giant and looks around.
She takes over his game. She dodges the Giant and looks around.
The Giant's table occupies the center of a cavernous log cabin. There is food everywhere: sacks of grain piled against the walls, a whole ham hanging from the ceiling.
It's not easy to maneuver here, but it's possible.
At one corner, two sacks of rice lean together with a gap between them, a natural tunnel just the size of the player avatar. It's an inviting place to hide from the Giant's stomping feet.
'Suicide Watch' looks on with interest.
It's not easy to maneuver here, but it's possible.
At one corner, two sacks of rice lean together with a gap between them, a natural tunnel just the size of the player avatar. It's an inviting place to hide from the Giant's stomping feet.
'Suicide Watch' looks on with interest.
autokinetic
Bella doesn't duck in right away - she's not having any trouble dodging the giant, so she makes a complete circuit, and then she squirms through to see where the tunnel goes.
It's dark under there, but the outline of a knothole in the log wall is just barely visible. That in turn leads to a short, twisting tunnel with grainy wooden walls, and from there the avatar falls into a skyskape of endless drifting clouds in peaceful pastel colours, with the Giant's cabin receding above them until it's nothing but a speck, and then nothing at all.
"Cool," he says.
"Cool," he says.