"Don't you guys have some power thingamajig to talk about or something?"

"We probably do but I can't just let an opportunity to tease you just pass me by like that."

Right. (Dipshit. Idiot. Moron.)

"Ah, yeah! Sorry." (Fuckhead. Nimrod. Fool.)

She pauses a bit, to wait and see if she's supposed to talk first. (Imbecile. Dimwit. Dunce.)

"Sooo, how much do you know about my power? If anything."

"Not a ton? You can pick two things and fix their velocities relative to each other, in a way that can either produce or destroy kinetic energy and costs you more backlash the longer you hold things together and the more massive they are?" (Dummy. Simpleton. Numbskull.)

"Cost in mass isn't that high. Cost in mass difference is higher, and cost in speed difference is even higher.

"I can be pretty creative with it, though. I could simulate something like a forcefield with it, which I've been using to squish the worms while they breach, and the first worm I fought I locked its head segment to a bullet for like a tenth of a second and then it no longer had a head."

Flywheel considers this. "If one of the objects accelerates after you're holding them, is that extra cost?" (Dullard. Stupid. Airhead.)

"Yes, but not that much extra cost, and it depends on where the acceleration comes from exactly."

She nods. "My power is - momentum transfers, basically, most efficiently to or from me but I can do a pair of transfers almost instantly so in practice it doesn't matter. Since my power respects kinetic energy conservation and yours doesn't, we might be able to do something pretty powerful together?" (Bête. Crétine. Débile.)

"Oh. Probably! I'm very bad at physics, though. You'd think five years doing this would make me better at it but it did not."

She shrugs. "Ah, yeah. Physics is... really annoying, I get it." (Imbécile. ...that's a cognate, does it really count? Whatever. This is fucking stupid.)

"You reckon Seungjoo-sunbae's still awake at this hour? He's really good at this."

"Hmmmmm."

"We can always check!"

"Assuming Flywheel wasn't also just being Korean and actually turns out to have a ton of good ideas, at least."

"Ah. I wouldn't say a ton, but - if one of us is holding the other, you lock us to a worm in motion, and then I grab the worm's momentum and transfer it to us in the other direction... the worm comes along, right? At - substantially increased speed." (Idiot. Idiot. can we stop now-)

"Hang on say that again more slowly I think I'm stupid."

She starts to open her mouth to literally say it more slowly again, because her backlash is fucking stupid. She bites her cheek to stop herself.

Oh hey it's the part of the movie where the cool action hero yells "In English, nerd!" to their nerd (though presumably in this case it being in English is part of the problem! But she can't explain it Korean because she never got good at Korean just like she's never actually gotten good at anything that matters)  ...man it's actually abstractly funny to be on this side of this kind of interaction, she's so used to being the idiot who needs it broken down...

None of that was useful!!!, she snarls at her brain, which makes things quieter, at least for a moment.

...It's relevant that he's not a native English-speaker?, part of her pipes up, which. Yeah, fair.

"Ah, sorry," she says, because she shouldn't be quiet for too long. "Let me see if I can break it down..." is there anything around here she can use for props? (If not, she'll dig into her bag.)

(They're in some kind of office building that's been temporarily repurposed - there's a whiteboard on the wall.)

"Oh, good -" Cara will attempt to draw her idea out on the whiteboard! (Her running internal critique of her artistic skills has been omitted for brevity, but it is continuous and vicious.)

Tae-hwan stares at it and hmms.

"So I think as described the plan actually makes your power fight mine, 'cause if I'm attached to the worm and then the worm's momentum goes to me my power is trying to make me stop moving and your power is trying to make me move, but I can swap the targets after I'm locked onto the worm and make the worm be locked onto me instead, and if we time that right it just works."

Wow, it's like you didn't know how his power worked at alllll (...she said didn't know a ton! that was correct! fuck off!)

"Okay, nice. If you give me some kind of signal that involves motion - flip your power as you move an arm, or something - I can react to that with mine almost instantly, if I know in advance. Side effect of how I do targeting." She looks at the diagram. "I'll need to catch us before we hit the ground, after, but that's straightforward. And it should be very very bad for the worm."

"I can do that, yeah. But it'll also be noticeable because I will suddenly be affected by gravity.

"Oh I'm so stoked we're gonna be so deadly."

Awwww. His smile is infectious even if she's too broken to really feel anything about it

"The gravity might be harder for me to notice when I'm using my power." (that's not the relevant thing, it's the timing it's fine to not fully lay out the reasoning, we are being social) "But yeah! Worms won't know what hit 'em."