Also, some of them look quite hard.  Sometimes he manages them but sometimes he goes flying off to get swung around or - wow, okay, this one he recovers even though he was 45º upside down and falling away from his board for a second there.

How do you recover once you've completely lost contact with the board, is there a way to make the bracelets help or what?

It happened pretty fast, but from what Kyeo can tell it's not so much that the bracelets looked like they were pulling Zane up as it is the board kept going along a curved path and ended up under Zane as he uninverted.

Neat. Plausibly requires those enhancements that Zane has and Kyeo does not though, and he is still a beginner. Conservative nyooming for Kyeo.

Sometimes Zane stops and watches him do that from afar.

After Kyeo's gone a decent chunk of time only moving in ways he wants to, Zane approaches.  "You wanna try out some slaloms?"

"Sure! How do I do that?"

"I have some flags set up this way."  He putters along at a speed Kyeo can safely keep up with.

And Kyeo will attempt slaloming the flags.

It's harder than floating around willy-nilly!  He falls the first few times.

That is not unexpected and he will tolerate it like a good sport.

"So, that section from about two-thirds of the way through to the end might actually be easier if you take it faster."

Kyeo contemplates this counterintuitive advice, then nods and gives that a try.

He - well, first he spills before he can get to that section.  But on the next try he completes the course!

Hooray! Better try it again to make sure it wasn't a fluke.

On this one he nearly falls off towards the beginning but recovers and, yes, makes it to the end again.

Yay.

Over the next few days, Kyeo gets pretty good at hoverboarding.  The media selection and the third contestant both continue to be weird; the food continues to be decadent.  The non-contestant residents continue to range between offputting and unobtrusive.

The idea that this set of neighbors is supposed to acculturate him is really disconcerting about the culture they want him to have. Is he supposed to be offputting and unobtrusive? Well, he doesn't have to take the hint.

A few nights in (there are stars, here, artificially vivid with colored clouds of facsimile stardust around them) Zane knocks on his door with a hoverboard under one arm and a hefty bag under the other.

Kyeo is inside (he did watch the stars for a while but it's so cold and a few days hasn't adjusted him enough to stay out looking at them for hours) and lets him in. "Good evening."

"And to you!  Want to have a safety fireworks fight?"

"You'd have to teach me!"

"It's hard to mess up."  He pulls one out of a pocket, aims it away from the cottage, and pulls a string.  A trail of golden sparkles shoot off before exploding into a satisfying dandelion puff of a sphere.  It sizzles and pops but doesn't really boom.

"And these can hit anything and it's fine?"

"Well, Vira-la doesn't really like them, so we should head out and farther away, but they won't hurt anything."  He takes a little one - it turns out to be a sparkler - and offers it to Kyeo, pointy little bits of light bouncing and dancing off his hands.