I'm having so much fun!!! Okay brb time for moar math!

She smiles encouragingly at him.

"So the other thing that's different is the direction is reversed! And that happens because it starts far away from me and is moving towards me, right? So the 'distance from me' value goes down instead of up!"

"Okay, let's do one more of these. I'm going to flick it away from me again, more slowly than the first time - try visualizing what the graph will look like for that!" 

She waits just a moment, and then flicks. (straight line, gentle slope, same direction as the first time)

Lung tries to pay attention, but finds his attention slipping as his transformation continues. This is really annoying, as he's busy paying attention to this math le- huh. This is not a normal thing for him to get distracted by at all.

Lung has in fact ever encountered a master before, and has found that punching them until they stop is an effective response. And by this point in his transformation, he can punch very hard, and very fast.

Magini barely registers the sudden spike in the masked man's "imminent hostility" rating in her HUD before he lunges at her! She shrieks in surprise, drops the laptop in the space between them, and then jumps, her superhuman strength getting her close enough to the rooftop edge that she can pull herself up with her hair.

"If you weren't interested in more math you could have just said so!", she shouts indignantly, but she's already backing away from the rooftop edge in case he follows her.

(Speaking of tracking the movements of supers, what's bugs girl up to now?)

"GRAGH" is Lung's carefully crafted response to this point. Well, "GRAGH" and a fire ball.

Bug girl is attempting to hide! The bugs on the other hand are swarming several of the gang members, keeping them from interfering.

Well, if bugs girl is hiding, Magini isn't going to blow her cover, since she's contractually incapable of hiding.

She doesn't really want to actually fight the guy who seems to be turning into a dragon, but - she can keep distracting him just fine, she has plot armor Battle Angel. Now, how to lead him away from her squishier future-friend...

math lesson went south fast! Turns out the guy can breathe fire? Is maybe part dragon? And now he's real mad at me, so - time to ruuuuun lol!

Time to go! She coils up and jumps off the roof again. Shielding herself from view with her hair, she activates Dressing Room in midair, replacing her shoes with a very fancy pair of jumping stilts. When she lands, there's a comically loud squeaking noise as the springs compress under the extreme force of a 20-foot landing - and then she's gone, careening through the street in a series of completely unreasonable leaps and laughing gleefully as she does. Time to find out how fast Mr. Dragon Man can run!

Not as fast as her!

Wait uh, almost as fast as her?

Um. As fast as her?

Concerning! She converts as much of her horizontal momentum to vertical, landing on a nearby rooftop and then bouncing up again to see if she can spot a safer direction to run in -

[That Person Over There] is approaching at high speed and fully intends to fight the dragon man.

Oh! Backup! She changes direction, jumping back down to street level so dragon man won't be tempted to destroy any buildings.

Backup apparently sees her coming as well. Or Lung at any rate, who's rather hard to miss. The rather heavily armored man on a motorcycle zooms straight towards them, detonating a small charge on the bottom of his ride a few yards away from them, catapulting him directly into Lung, halberd first. 

Cool!!!

She lands on a nearby roof and Dressing Rooms the stilts away so she can stop moving.

"Thanks!" she calls down, and then perches on the rooftop to watch the fight, using her HUD to keep an eye out for bug girl or other new arrivals.

gosh, things got a biiit spooky there, but a cool guy on a motorcycle just showed up and he's fighting the dragon-man now while I keep lookout from the rooftop.

(Also, Dressing Room is amazing, and Inner Strength makes jumping stilts soooooooooo fun! And it's just - way more obvious to me how to lay out information when trying to teach people stuff. This is all so exciting!!) 

Wow, are you okay? (I'm glad you're having fun, though!)

Yeah, I'm fine! Maybe this isn't the right attitude to be having, but - these powers (Battle Angel especially) make it hard for me to be really worried about my safety in a fight, even against a shapeshifting dragon. And - that guy was telling his goons to find and kill some kids! I'm really glad I got to prevent that (and even teach him a bit of algebra! hahahaha)

Oh dear... yes, I'm glad you could prevent that too. Wow! A lot is happening!

...is it silly that I want to ask about the jumping stilts? You just sounded like you were having so much fun with them!

Yeah! Seems like the Spirit wanted to drop me right into the action, which I don't mind at all C:

<3 it's not silly! Jumping stilts are - easiest to think of as, like, very powerful springs designed to be strapped onto your feet. (That's not what they look like, because the spring part is just a long piece of bent metal, but I am really bad at freeform drawing so I don't have a good way of showing you what they do look like, sorry!)

(she starts writing much faster as she switches into Infodumping Mode, handwriting quality rapidly deteriorating until it is barely flirting with legibility)

They add like 1.5 feet to your height, weigh like 7lbs each, and are a bit tricky to balance on, especially standing still, but as long as you're moving continuously in them, the springs conserve a lot of your kinetic energy that would normally be lost when you make contact the ground, so even without any kind of super strength you can run really fast in them - at home I could almost keep up with my little brother on his bike, at least until I got tired (which would happen pretty fast! I never had much stamina, before).

Also, because so much energy is being stored-and-released with every step, if you know how to shift your weight / angle your landing correctly, you can change direction very fast, including between horizontal and vertical! Earlier I jumped off a roof to give myself a faster running start, and just now I basically did the reverse! :D)\

...Oooh, when I get the chance to experiment, I should see if I can get Dressing Room to make me a specialized pair that has more powerful springs than the ones they sell back at home. On some of those jumps, I could tell the springs were being fully compressed, and I don't think I was pushing the limits of my Inner Strength...

Oh, that sounds so neat! I look forward to hearing about your jumping stilt improvement adventures. ♡

Ehehe, thanks! I'll keep you posted.

...Oooh, speaking of experimenting, I want to try Dragon Fairy Elf Witching the dragon shapeshifter guy. Maybe I'll learn how to breathe fireballs!

She tries it.

UM???

Okay, well, that's - absolutely impossible based on Mediator's understanding of how the universe works, but actually that's also true of several of the things that the new host friend is doing, and Mediator can definitely work with the results, though it'll take a bit to reconstruct the interface...

...huh. It - feels to me like it worked, but also as far as I can tell, nothing is different? I'm trying to turn into a dragon, but nothing is happening...

Interesting! Sometimes heritage works in weird ways. Maybe the way you turn into a dragon is supposed to be by doing something specific, or maybe the heritage just gives you some magical power and the person you met turns into a dragon but you do something else? Or maybe you didn't get enough of their heritage to turn all the way into a dragon? Or maybe turning into a dragon isn't a heritable power at all...

Yeah, I have no idea!

...hey, you said earlier I could use DFEW on a robot. Could I use it on you? (Like - would that work, would you be ok with it, and what would happen?) 

Oh!

...yes, you could do that. And I think I would like that? It would be neat to have a friend who can understand more clearly how I experience the world! I'm not sure exactly what kind of powers you would get, but I imagine they would involve being able to perceive your surfaces really clearly and distribute ink over them however you liked.