I slam back down into the seat with one arm wrapping around Legit’s chest while the other reaches into my Pocket. The chill rising up my arm barely noticeable against the bucket of ice the highly recognisable voice has dumped over my head.
My fingers brush against and discard a dozen different and equally useless things as I turn to look in the direction of the voice. Getting only a glimpse of a figure that I’ve previously seen only through a screen before Legit throws the bike near sideways in a turn that sends the hero flying past us rather than into my back.
He’s going far too fast for me to get a good look but I hardly need one in order to know what the hero looks like. A young sounding man of average height dressed in a red full-body suit of some flexible material, striped and swirled in varying shades of yellow and dotted with unlit LED’s. The splashes of colour form the impression of his own spinning ball emblem on his chest. His helmet is the only part that offers any protection and, even that, only to the back of his head. The front being a curved pane of frosted amber plastic that obscures the details of his features while still letting his general expressions through. Not that he’s choosing style over practicality, Pinball doesn’t need his costume to act as armour when his power makes him all but invulnerable.
“Fuckin’ Pinball?!”
I’m too busy trying to track where the hero’s gone before he can sneak up on us again to do more than nod in agreement. Gripping tighter to Legit as he pulls us back upright with a snarl of frustration. The bike mounts the curb as he does so, bouncing up onto the pavement for a moment and sending a jogger jumping into one of the small front gardens of the houses down this street. The gentrified air of the place, and its proximity to the ring road, are likely the only reason it has escaped being re-developed for this long. I barely hear the jogger’s angry shout, keeping my death-grip on Legit's chest while still twisting my head around to look back down the street at where Pinball has just flown out of sight.
‘If he hadn’t announced himself, we’d probably be on the ground already.’
Pinball comes back into sight at just the right moment to let me ignore the unhelpful thought. The hero choosing to bypass the turn in the road to instead rise over the cute little corner house in an arc before reaching the zenith of his jump and dropping like a stone. He spins over into a diver's pose to barely miss the edge of the roof in his fall. His hands slapping down onto the front step and sending him bouncing away as if he were made of rubber. A distortion in the air covers him, wavy lines that track all his movements and which multiply and flow faster when he makes contact with the ground. On video, motion blur had reduced him to a hard to focus on squiggle whenever he hit something. Now, I can see clearly how he spins over again to slam his hands up into the streetlight that he should have broken. Bouncing off again with even greater speed and heading directly towards a parked car.
“Dodge!”
I scream the warning just in time as the angled surface of the windshield launches Pinball straight at us. The hero abandoning his diver's form to instead lash out with his hands and just barely clip the bike's side before Legit can pull us far enough to the right. At once, the hero comes to a total stop. The madly wiggling lines that had coated him flowing down his hand and into the bike which is launched sideways away from him. I grip Legit tight as he throws our combined weight towards the hero, somehow managing to keep the motorcycle from tipping over entirely but not able to stop the wheels from leaving the ground. We mount the curb again without first touching its lip, Legit wrenching our weight back the other way so that the bike levels out on the raised pavement with only a slight wobble.
“Holy shit! I am so fuckin’ legit! Woo!”
I look up from where I’ve stuffed my head into Legit's back, whole body trembling with adrenaline and hands almost numb from how tightly I’m gripping his now laughing chest. Shakily, I release the breath I’d been holding. Too filled with adrenaline myself to judge Legit’s outburst and wishing again that I could have gotten a power with a more direct use. Mostly though, I just feel thankful to still be on the back of the bike. Breathing out doesn’t make me any calmer but I do gain enough sense of myself to feel that my left arm is still getting cold inside my Pocket. Pulling it free with a grimace at its numbness, I glance at the last thing I’d gripped hold of before Pinball had caught up to us.
‘Just maybe…’
“Take us under him! I need to get close!”
I feel Legit give only the smallest of nods as his laughter continues and he starts whooping like he’s at a concert. My mind filtering out the sound, along with the panicked shouts of people jumping off the sidewalk as we continue racing along it and towards the highway that we’d been planning to avoid. Wide open lanes, fast moving cars and a direct path for anyone interested in catching us to follow. The chance that disrupting traffic, or worse causing a crash, will draw out more of a response would also go up significantly.
The thoughts of future problems are pushed from my head as I spot Pinball closing in again, red-yellow suit now glowing from the LED’s peppered across it in a way that makes the lines flowing across him almost painful to look at and difficult to focus on. A flash of annoyed gratitude gets through my mounting panic and excitment. Without the anti-glare of the visor Legit chose, I’d probably be unable to even look at Pinball’s rapid bouncing.
I manage to make sense of his position on the way up after the next bounce, lines flowing slower than before as he rebounds off the tarmac and is launched back up into the air. Our eyes meet as he approaches the apex of his leap as high as the roofs to either side. His own, clearly professional helmet, still letting me see the impression of a grin through the visor. Again, I feel a moment of gratitude over Legit's terrible fashion sense as my half ski mask hides how my mouth drops open. It’s one thing to see the hero styling on villains through a screen, it’s another to have him do it to me.
He makes a star shape at the highest point of his bounce then switches to a lounging pose as he starts to fall before, with a little wave, he rolls his shoulders and spins over completely to dive headfirst at the road. He impacts the tarmac at a speed that would have me expecting to hear breaking bones from anyone else. Hands shifting oddly at the last moment and sending him flying upwards at a diagonal where he bounces off the side of a delivery van. I frown, confused for a moment as we pull further away while he just ping-pongs back and forth to either side of the street. Moving forwards only slowly as he bounces off parked cars, streetlights and then houses with his velocity far greater than his height.
After just a few seconds, I’m left squinting against the shifting glare of Pinball’s suit. The mess of light bad enough that even my visor can't block it all as his still building speed leaves a streak of swirling red and yellow in the air behind him. My stinging eyes struggling to keep track of him as the occasional parked car to our left becomes a wall that intermittently obscures the hero from sight. That cover must have been what he was waiting for as, after I lose sight of him while we’re driving past another van, I don’t see him reappear on the other side.
“I lost sight of him! Can you check the mir- Down!”
I barely have time to appreciate the skill of what Pinball’s done before he’s on us. Waiting until I’d lost sight of him to change his trajectory into a skimming bounce just barely above the road which then let him get close without being spotted. From one gymnast to another, there’s no way anyone else could pull this off, I can’t help but respect the move more than a little.
The light of his suit is visible through the windows of the car to our left for not even a full second before he’s gliding just barely over its roof and on a direct collision course with the bikes front wheel. Legit must have caught sight of him in the mirrors because my own shout comes far too late to have saved us. His Power proving its versatility yet again as he throws himself to the right and drags me with him. Hands jerking on the handlebars hard enough to send the bike screeching near horizontal across the sidewalk and just under Pinball's grasping fingers. Metal screams against stone tiles and dirt filled cracks as I throw my handful of paint into the air at what instinct says is the right time. My arm just a fraction of a second too slow in pulling back as Pinball’s legs sweep out in a kick that manages to tap against my wrist.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
The madly squiggling lines across his body disappear at once as all the energy that he’s built-up flows into my hand and smacks me down into the pavement. My shoulder feeling like a giant has just flicked a finger against my wrist. I feel, in the moments before shock fades and pain arrives, as my elbow is bent back over itself until the back of my wrist is touching my collarbone with enough force to make me unsure which is more likely to be broken. Someone screams as I feel my other arm, then head, bounce off the pavement while all the air is knocked from my lungs and my vision becomes nothing but flashing lights and growing darkness. Ringing static fills my head for a time until it passes with a snap and I hear Legit swearing loudly as the bike skitters and bucks beneath him. His hand wrapping around my wrist and holding tight.
“Fuck!”
I kick my left leg out into empty air while trying to grip myself tighter to the seat with the other. My right leg the only thing keeping me from flying off the back where it is caught against the extra exhaust Legit had added when ‘improving’ the bike. An instinctive scream from finding myself half in the air becomes a sucked in hiss of agony when I try to move my left arm. Leg slipping from where I’d almost got it back in the seat as the pain messes up my coordination. I glance at my spasming arm and immediately look away, pale faced and wishing I hadn’t. Definitely dislocated at the elbow and probably at least fractured in a few places.
I grip tight to Legit’s jersey with my right hand, feeling him squeeze my wrist as he glances back at me in the wing mirror with a relieved smile. I don’t get a chance to shout at him to stop so I can climb back on before he performs a repeat of his sharp turn back in the mall. Juking left to send me whipping around to bounce onto the seat behind him with a hiss of pain before he cuts right again with the front wheel kicking up smoke before we squeal away between the gap of two parked cars and back onto the tarmac of the road.
I focus on sucking down air as the last of the darkness fades from my vision. Once I’m confident that I’m not about to pass out, I stuff the collar of my jacket into my mouth and force myself to let go of Legit’s jersey. Leaning back to grip the seat tightly between my legs while I grab my bent-back arm and then almost throw up on making the mistake of looking at it. The sight of elbow joint, still bent fully in the wrong direction, causes a wave of bile to rise up in my throat and stain the jackets edges. The only thing keeping me from panicking being the adrenaline pounding through my head and the knowledge that meta healing has been known to fix worse. The adrenaline isn’t enough to stop me from biting straight through my jacket when I force my forearm back into the correct position though. The feel of sucking joints scraping against each other before they find something close to a proper alignment is one I immediately resolve to try and never repeat.
I swallow down a sob and spit out the scrap of ruined jacket, wincing against the pins and needles filling my arm. Shaking some feeling back into the limb before stuffing it into the side of my jacket. A sigh of relief slips free as the tingling pain is replaced by growing numbness as my arm dangles down into the cold of my Pocket. Fingers still twitching as I grit my teeth and force them to close around another handful of paintballs. With all the excitement, I haven’t had a chance to check if my plan actually worked or not.
‘Next time, we’re sticking to the fucking plan.’
The road ends before I get a chance to look back, Legit pulling us onto a wide turn out of the street we’ve been forced down. The intersection we’re entering giving us the choice of driving back towards the city’s interior, turning around or going up the approaching ramp and onto one of the ring-roads that divide the city’s five circles. Each one acting like the age lines inside an old tree and showing where once the urban sprawl had been planned to end. The idea being that we would then be surrounded by an easy to reach road that was still far removed from residential homes. Of the five ring roads now surrounding the city, none have been finished before homes were already being built around them.
Legit brings us onto the highway’s access without prompting, the bike's wheels locking into place on the near vertical mag-lift along with the cars around us. The glistening Meta-material of the ramp humming softly as it starts to rapidly pull us up the several hundred metre climb to the highway. The council has sold off the rights to a lot of infrastructure maintenance to Corps or gangs in the last decade but, everything they do build is made to last long into the city’s future. Another sign they always expected the mega-buildings to reach out this far.
The wind grows buffeting as we accelerate ever faster. Gusts that I’ve only ever felt while safe in a car now cut through by the prow of our bike. The frozen air tearing at me like the claws of some giant cat and making me feel I could be plucked away at any moment. I lean a little lower to better use Legit as a windbreak as he does the same with the tiny windscreen on the bike's front. Remembering through my terror that I still need to check on Pinball and so turning before I can stop myself to look back towards the rapidly disappearing city and the street we’ve just left.
The vertigo sets my head spinning at once. Muscles going weak and vision blurry before I spot a glowing dot of red and yellow that lets me ignore the rest of the world. I can barely make out the movements of the now tiny hero as he pushes away a man trying to stick a camera drone into his face. His hands frantically wiping at the paint covering his helmet as he tries to clear it away without getting it onto his suit. He gets the worst of it off his visor after another second or two, looking around frantically before his head snaps up towards us. Our eyes meeting again across the distance just in time for him to catch my little wave before we level out onto the highway slip itself. Decoupling from the mag-lift as the near vertical ramp becomes something more reasonable and the barrier along the highways edge blocks the hero from sight.
‘Holy hell, I just hit Pinball in the face.’
Or, I threw paintballs into the air which then hit him in the face at least. I don’t try to stop the slightly hysteric laugh that bubbles out of me as Legit merges us onto the highway with no regard for other drivers. The bike revving loudly beneath me as he is able to fully open up the modified engine and start gunning away from the more law-abiding vehicles around us. The shaking of my chest jostles my arm and cuts off my laugh with another hiss of pain.
“We doin’ good, Pocket?”
“Yeah, Pinballs a paint-ball now!”
I immediately click my teeth back together after the awful joke slips out of me. Head lowering and cheeks heating as excitement turns to embarrassment and I suddenly feel very glad that no one can see my face. Legit’s laugh tells me that won’t matter when it comes to bringing this up later and I feel my face heating further from the teasing to come.
His eyes catch mine in the wingmirror with a tooth-filled grin before he looks away to better focus on steering us around the slow trucks coming up. I only grumble a little as I look away, still riding the high of beating a hero and getting one step closer to a clean getaway. That high helps me to ignore the cars and massive eighteen wheelers around us that seem so much larger when not in the imagined safety of my uncle’s old beater.
‘We must be going near eighty by now. With the verticality of the mag-lift as well. No way he can catch up.’
I glance again at the trucks as we pull up to pass them, realising they’re actually all part of the same convoy. The security in their cabs or riding in pairs strapped atop the trailers follows us with steady eyes and weapons only a few inches from tracking us. The sight of their cold professionalism has me pulling my smile under control and doing my best to look non-threatening until we’re past. A gust of frozen air blasts into me from the side as soon as we are away, the trucks sides no longer protecting me from the wind almost half a kilometre above the ground. The rushing air whips my hair into my face until I pull a tie out of my Pocket to tie it back again. My view of the highway finally clear just in time for my breath to be stolen away by the view of the multiverse’s largest city.
Throne. The fulcrum of everything that matters.
Buildings, green space, road networks, canals and even inland lakes large enough to be small oceans as well as stranger things all stretch away to the horizon. Divided into messy blocks or districts by the Corps or people who live there. Residents and boardrooms choosing the ways to define themselves through an expression of the culture of whatever world they came from. All of it, filtered through the ever-hungry advance of Throne’s own demand for efficiency and spectacle.
Although I’ve seen it hundreds of times before, something about the wind against my face and the pounding triumph in my heart makes me feel as if I’m seeing it for the first time all over again. To our left, is the interior of the second circle. That part of the city constructed once it became clear that whatever original plans the Founders had intended were not enough for the sheer number of people who wanted to live at the centre of all human reality. I stare up with a wonder I haven’t felt in years to where the Nail disappears into the turbulent distortion above the city’s centre. An unimaginably vast spike of dull black that occasional reflects strange colours and shapes from the sky above across the many dents of its hand-hammered finish. Its ends hidden above the ever-warping clouds or buried deep into the fulcrum of the artificial continent its responsible for creating.
Much of its middle length also being hidden by the shining arcologies of the first circle. Each mega-building fighting with colour and style to raise their owner’s names and presence above the rest. The clashing symbols of the city’s might being raised high on hex-grids a kilometre above the false ground. Less stylish but likely more efficient buildings extending down beneath them. I can barely make out the shadows of the city’s original shape hidden away beneath the grids, obscured amongst or consumed by the support pillars holding up the mega-corps and council’s new world.
A world that is visibly encroaching upon the sprawling mess of the second circle that we’ve just left. The office blocks, warehouses and suburbs of what would once have been called a modern city all slowly losing the fight to the mega-buildings advancing from the road that rings the first. Not hex grids or arcologies just yet. The failed ruins of the first, and so far only, attempt at building one can just about be seen on the north-western horizon. Pillars wider than most towns cracked and still smoking all these years later from the aftermath of Bennu’s attack.
Less interesting reasons for the lack of hex-grids are also poking up above the mix of skyscrapers, gigantic apartment blocks and the slow wave of more normal sized buildings that now only extends a few kilometres before reaching the highway we’re racing along. Time frozen kaiju, the blasted wrecks of mecha or their weaponry, chunks of strange material torn from other dimensions and now slowly being mined by the districts that have sprung up around them and even the corpse of some alien titan so large the city decided to build over and through it like a mountain range rather than try to shift it. The thing’s petrified flesh forming a ridge I can just barely make out behind us as it blocks most of my view of the second rings southern half. Portals to various other dimensions, of the three-worlds or not, also dot the place of course. Some hidden away inside fortresses while others are so large that only the constant patrols of their owner’s forces stop them being used freely.
My eyes skate away from where I can see a squadron of Verti-birds breaking off as they engage a flying Supe who’s making a run at one of the larger portals. The now rapidly expanding and glowing figure likely just a distraction for a smuggling operation or otherwise hired by a competitor to the portal’s operator. Or both. Instead, my eyes land on the walled in districts scattered throughout the second ring. Dozens upon dozens of the towering white blots pockmarked all across even this small part of the circle that I can see. Each one a place where the city has been forced to surrender ground to monsters, disasters or Conjunctions.
right!
Story Testbed) to the site where its best to read at if anyone is interested in seeing the first chapters of other stories I plan to write after Writathon.
