fandomhighdorms | 5th Floor Common Room, Monday Afternoon

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5th Floor Common Room, Monday Afternoon

Ringo remembered snatches from from the weekend. Bits of history that had never happened. Laughing during a TV interview, staring in horror at the television as she realized what was coming, her sister's funeral. She also remembered Dante, really relaxed, without that weird tension of his. And she remembered Kathy.

She knew it was silly, but once that memory hit Ringo sprinted out into the hall and to the room next door. The one that school hadn't assigned to anyone for the summer. She burst in without knocking hoping that, well, she wasn't sure what. Maybe that her senpai would be there. Or that the older version of her hadn't left yet and she could get in a last hug.

But, of course, the room still stood empty.

Ringo wasn't really prepared to deal with that today, so she'd returned to her room long enough to get parts and tools, and then she'd set up in the common room.

So now she was sitting on the floor in the corner with a pair of headphones on, one side pulled back off her ear so she'd hear anyone wander in. The headphones were plugged into a box the size of two or three laptops stacked on top of each other, and she kept hitting buttons on the surface of it and listening intently for a few seconds before picking up the ATs in front of her and swapping out a part, or adjusting a fitting. Self-Tuning wasn't nearly as good as Tuning with someone, but it still required a lot of concentration. Which meant that Ringo didn't dwell on the weekend.

Maybe, over the next day or two, the sharp-edged immediacy of who she'd seen, who she'd been, would fade away. For now, she could just lose herself in a comfortable old task.

And take the occasional break to eat a bunch of snacks.

[ooc: Open, of course!]

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He'd been on his way to the roof, for no other reason than to be outside without leaving the building, and had a book in hand.

But when he'd glanced in on the common room, he spotted Ringo. He watched her work for a while, utterly silent as he leaned in the doorway, before eventually he decided it was worthwhile to say something.

"Interesting."

That counted as hello.

Ringo started, totally giving away that she hadn't noticed that anyone was even there.

"Huh?" Her head came up, and she looked around to see if he was talking to someone else that she hadn't noticed.

He was very, very good at being unnoticed.

"What you're doing," Rufus clarified. "It looks interesting."

She still looked flustered, but he was asking about something she knew, and seemed to think it was interesting, so Ringo grinned. "Oh. I'm Tuning. It's where you make little changes to your ATs to keep them as responsive to your natural rhythms as possible."

"I see," he said, coming further into the room, and being careful not to step on any of her things. "Balance and reflexes are obvious ones to adjust for, but is there more to it?"

"Oh, sure! Your stance just naturally changes over time. Like, mine's gotten a lot more aggressive over the past year, which means my weight tends to be shifted forward father. But not only that, your style changes, too."

She tapped at her headphones. "I'm much more prone to acceleration these days, less likely to stand in one place." The Thorn Road was generally at its best in defensive stances, and while Ringo wasn't ready to give that up, she was stretching herself in other directions recently.

He took a seat on couch nearest to where she worked and looked at everything with open interest.

"So while they look much like roller skates, they're quite a bit more advanced, if they can grow, so to speak, with you. Do they have to be adjusted often?"

Ringo grinned. "Well, they don't have to. And proper Tuning takes a lot of work." She sighed. "And, ideally, two people."

"So you could just get a pair and ride them for as long as you want, but you'd be giving up the, um, I guess the best possible ride?" She shrugged. "It's about how important maximizing performance is to you."

But, really, any serious rider should be Tuning. Probably once every few months.

"If you're going to do something, you should do it right," Rufus observed, since he... operated by that way of thinking, not that he bothered to let people know usually.

"How long have you been doing this?"

"Tuning today, you mean? Or, like, AirTrek in general?"

"Both," he said, with a lazy wave of one hand. "If you don't mind indulging my curiosity."

Ringo giggled. "You may regret asking," she warned. "I'll talk about AirTrek for, like, ever."

She pulled out her phone and glanced at the clock on it. "Looks like I've been working on this for a little over an hour or so. And I guess I've been doing AirTrek all my life. Grew up with it, and all that."

"Is it common in your world, then?" Rufus asked. "Or is it... something that's a family inclination?"

"Well, it is a family inclination, I guess. All of my sisters ride, too. But that's because most of us grew up together in the lab."

She considered. "Though it's not as uncommon for normal people as it used to be? AirTrek's starting to get pretty popular."

Rufus blinked, just once and slowly enough that it might barely indicate surprise at all.

"My apologies," he said, "but did you say 'lab'?"

"Oh. Yeah." Ringo carefully put down the small set of tweezers that she'd been fiddling with and held up a hand for inspection. "Pretty good job, right? I totally look human."

She snorted. "To be fair, Gravity Children basically are. Almost completely identical genetic sequencing. Just a couple of extra sensory organs."

"There's a similar program at home," Rufus said slowly. "It's called SOLDIER, for the purpose of making super-soldiers."

Was it like that for Ringo?

"That's kind of a silly name," Ringo pointed out. "Though I guess 'Gravity Child' isn't much better. There were a lot of people trying to shape the project, but we're pretty sure that they were trying to develop a version of humans better suited for space exploration."

"By focusing on the human element rather than the mechanical one," Rufus said, tilting his head back. "That's a different approach. Did it work?"

"Hmm, hard to say." Ringo shrugged. "They proved that Gravity Children can operate extremely well in zero-gravity-like environments, but never actually got the hardware to put us into space."

And before they got the chance, there'd been the break-out, and then the lab had gotten blown up. So they'd probably never know.

Rufus had a million questions about that but he knew he had to pick and choose his questions.

(There'd always be another time to ask more.)

"Do you regret it?" he asked. "Would you have wanted to go to space?"

Ringo looked a bit surprised by that particular question. She hadn't ever really thought about it.

She shrugged. "I don't know. I mean, space was never really my dream, I guess? I'm pretty happy with how things turned out."

"No lifelong desire to hop on a spaceship and see what's out there?" he asked.

Rufus was teasing, though it was hard to tell from his tone of voice.

And Ringo wasn't always the best at reading subtle people like Rufus, so she answered seriously.

"No. I mean, it might be fun, but it's never really been something I thought about much."

The answer still told him something, so he was satisfied with it.

"What do you think about?" he asked and, more openly teasing, added, "AirTrek?"

Ringo grinned unabashedly. "A lot of the time, yeah."

"I'm unsurprised," Rufus said. "May I ask what advantages you gain in this sport due to your modified genetic code?"

"Well, perfect balance is pretty useful spending a lot of time in the air, or changing orientation a lot. I don't get dizzy or disoriented. Oh, and I also have an intuitive understanding of three-dimensional spaces, so I can basically tell you how everything is from everything else down to about the centimeter."

So they were subtle enhancements, but in practice ended up being a big deal.

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5th Floor Common Room, Monday Afternoon

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