Mmhmm. She adds a second connection - one at the scruff of his neck, one on the ball. You can break it with raw power, if you're strong enough, but you can also unweave it. Takes longer, but if you're facing someone stronger you'll have a chance of winning that way.

Ah. He likes the one on his neck.

He starts to prod at the connection to the ball, trying to unweave it experimentally piece by piece.

Her grasp is loose, at first, and easy to unravel; she tightens up as he gets the hang of it.

He concentrates, tries to pry her grip open even with her holding it together –

(He has an image of hanging from her grip on his neck that he just can't shake.)

They start to get a headache after a minute or so, from the effort of keeping him and the ball aloft; she doesn't mind, though, and he's so close.

And then he does get it, disrupts enough of her hold on the ball that she can't keep it stable any more, and it falls, and so does he; a drop of only a few millimeters, but it's enough to give him a palpable jolt and the brief sensation of all his weight held up by the grip on the back of his neck before she lowers him to the ground.

He flops dramatically to the ground.

"...did it. Proud of us."

She sits a little more gracefully beside him. "Yeah. Good job." Gotta work on your speed, but that was pretty impressive for a first try. Did you notice how... she points out some details of the grasp, and how he can disrupt it more efficiently.

He nods through it, tries to pick apart what he could have done better, where he noticed things unraveling more quickly.

guess it's going to take a lot of practice – do we get tired out if we do too much?

Not really - not more than any other kind of mental effort, anyway. That gets easier with practice, too. Holding him up that long was a little painful, but that was like holding a stress position where most uses of the Force are more like exercising; it isn't usually like that.

That makes sense.

He tries to remember rather than 'asking', this time, whether mass actually matters in terms of what they can pick up, past "bigger things are sometimes easier".

Not directly. Size matters, but only once you get to the point of not being able to sense the whole thing or conceptualize it as an object rather than a place - ships and other vehicles are easier than random things, that way, since it's easier to think of them as things that can move, despite their size and the fact that you might be inside one.

we could fly a ship with our brains.

Yeah. Not a great idea outside of an emergency, but it can be done; she hasn't seen it, but she's heard stories.

deskyl, we're so cool.

They giggle. Yeah, we are.

i think i like us.

He weighs the possibility of sitting up.

She gives him a little tug. We could work on your personal defense from here. Or take a break, we're not in a rush.

personal defense. we should work on that.

It's almost immediate.

All right. She gives another gentle tug. See how I'm grabbing your aura, when I pull?

–yeah. where it sort of–

He mentally gestures vaguely at stretching-warping-pulling-deforming.

Mmhmm. And if you stop me from doing that, I can't move you. You'll stop someone you're much stronger than automatically - she gives him a very gentle tug, and he can only tell she's doing anything at all because he's watching her do it, there's no sensation of being physically pulled - but you can also arrange yourself so you're harder to move in the first place. See how my aura is sort of bristly, there's no good place to grab it? That's why.

...huh. Yeah, he does see that.

so if i–

He thinks odd angles, sharp corners, bristling fractal spines and barbed wire and shredded metal, and tries to splinter himself into the right shape.

Becoming sharp is easy. It's like breathing.

Yeah. Another tug, and this time it takes considerably more concentration to keep her grip where she wants it. It'll take a little practice for you to hold that without thinking about it, but I bet not much, you're pretty natural at this.

feels right.

He pushes at her hold on him, tries to slip her off his edges.