Luscin does exactly as she observed Terius doing on several occasions. She reaches out to the torrent of energy that permeates everything and pushes with all her willpower. At first, she only diverts a needle’s width of flow. She feels a wave of nausea as her stomach suddenly feels weightless and realizes she’s falling. The amount of potential energy approaching is growing exponentially, grabbing up that much at once will hurt. She widens her stance mentally and pushes on a wider swath of the rushing force permeating everything. This time she doesn’t shove directly perpendicular, she starts by pushing along in the same direction of the flow and brings her opposition up slowly, like a clock hand moving from the six position up to the seven. That does something, the growing potential lessons and feels a little bit behind. She pushes harder and moves the clock hand to eight and then nine. The massive potential below is almost gone now.
She feels something coming at her and realizes her eyes have been closed all this time. Opening her eyes reveals she will strike a building in a few seconds if she doesn’t do something fast. She rotates the figurative clock to the right, causing her to swerve to the right, missing the building.
She’s going to need more altitude or she’s going to smack into something eventually. She digs deeper and turns the clock hand past nine all the way to eleven. Amazingly she is now rising rapidly, it’s only been a few seconds and she’s already moving faster than she thought possible.
The lights of Mammatus fall behind her and rapidly disappear. She’s doing it, she’s flying. Mentally it’s much harder than she imagined. Her ankles feel like they’re on fire and her legs are going numb from the cold. She has to hold her shirt out of her face with one hand. Why would Terius fly feet first? She tries to turn herself to be moving headfirst and finds herself spinning uncontrollably. Now her eyes are burning from the buffeting air, tears flow making it harder to see. Her entire body is going numb from the cold air and breathing is getting difficult.
Luscin realizes she can’t feel anything except the sun. It’s somewhere beyond the horizon, but there isn’t a single object or bit of energy except the freezing cold air that she’s tumbling through. Master Adara’s word, ‘hubris’ consumes her thoughts.
Luscin needs to put her feet on the ground, Teum’s question about landing replaces ‘hubris’ in her thoughts for a moment.
All at once she stops exerting herself and relaxes. In moments that incredible amount of potential energy is once again below her. The wind that has been buffeting her is also changing direction, it’s slacking off and she isn’t tumbling as fast. She flattens out her body, arms and legs spreading out seems to slow her tumbling further. She isn’t quite as dizzy now and realizes the ground is approaching fast, maybe another 15 seconds and she’ll be eating more kinetic energy than she’s ever attempted.
She steadies her will and pushes back on the six position again. Then moves it rapidly back up to nine, her head reals from the sudden direction change. She realizes as she does this it feels like her clothes are dragging her sideways in the opposite direction. Not from the wind, but something else. She pushes that thought away for now. No longer falling towards anything of note she works on controlling her tumbling. She’s still freezing, but the air feels warmer. She experiments with moving her arms and legs, bending them at elbow and knees to see how the air interacts. Eventually she manages to be falling face first, limbs spread, arms and legs bent at knee and elbows, to keep from tumbling again. Now she needs to come down, she backs the clock hand down a little from nine and feels the danger of potential energy ahead. It’s a long way off, at this angle of descent she’ll be flying for an hour or more. She moves the clock gradually down to eight. The impact will be in less than thirty minutes now. She goes down to seven and realizes she’s going to hit in less than a minute. She’s not ready, back to nine, but now she rotates the clock as she’s falling parallel to the ground. Now travelling in a circle, she dials back to eight. She keeps rotating in a wide circle while descending.
Seconds from impact she exerts all her will to the 12-position. Nothing happens, that all powerful force washes through her like she’s made of nothing. She prepares herself to take the weight of the world, her ability to hold fills to its limit, her desire to persevere through any trial has her take more than she imagined was possible. She feels like she’s being torn in half as the kinetic energy from freefalling at terminal velocity is absorbed, held, and overflows.
The trees and bushes covering the forest floor break some of her fall, they also break some bones. She’s awake long enough to realize she has no idea in what direction she was flying.
Her last thought before drifting into unconsciousness was, “Hubris hurts.”
Hours or days later, she can’t know for sure, she awakes. Sore ribs and a numb left leg inform her which bones she broke. Every breath is accompanied by a stabbing pain in her chest. The temperature was hotter than she expected, the air was damp and cloying. She’s thirsty and a little hungry, she fishes her water flask out of her pack and takes a sip, takes another sip, then another. She can feel her body working on the bone breaks, she’ll need more water and some food soon. The sun has been up for a while, she looks over her arms, she doesn’t see any sign of sun exposure, she was only unconscious for the remainder of the night she thinks. Evaluating the sun and its position has her confused for a minute. When she sorts out magnetic north, she must have been flying north most of her trip because she’s closer to the equator than she would have expected.
The surrounding forest is bizarre in every way. The birds and ravtor sound different, the trees are barely recognizable to her. A few names come to mind, the massive tree that broke her fall is an ahuehuete, she’s never seen one before and wouldn’t know the name had she not been looking at one.
She’s holding a lot of kinetic and it’s starting to make her feel sore inside. Not knowing her surroundings and what predators are lurking she decides to hold on to it a little longer.
Luscin closes her eyes and uses a trick taught to her by Windmaster Wheller. She listened and felt for the chaotic energy of water. Nothing moves like water; it has a distinctive flow that can be recognized if you know what you’re looking for.
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To the east, a quarter mile is a slow flowing body of water. A possible source of drinking water, and maybe some food.
Luscin braces herself for what’s to come and forces herself to stand on her broken leg. She starts walking, wincing in near unbearable pain with each step. She comes across a sturdy stick that’s about her height, picks it up and uses it as a crutch. She’s moving slower but the pain is tolerable now. The forest is thick with sharp plant leaves that slice at her exposed ankles and lower arms. If it weren’t for the ability to detect water, she’d probably be walking in circles trying to navigate through the thick trees and brush. 90-minutes later she sees the water, a shallow pool fed by a small stream.
The water is mostly clear, she can see fish and what she realizes are eels swimming in it. Both should be edible.
Luscin settles down on the bank and dangles one hand in the water to see if anything will approach. One of the larger eels comes for her. She starts remembering data about eels and learns just in time that some have an electric attack. The shock of sudden joules biting her hand makes her gasp as she gathers the static and stores it. The eel, confident in its attack comes up and bites Luscin’s proffered finger. She closes her hand on the eel’s mouth. Then blasts its head with enough kinetic to crush its skull before jerking it out of the water and dropping two yards of eel meat on the shore.
She takes a moment to inspect her hand, the bite is superficial and will heal by morning. She has no knife or other utensils; she’ll have to cook off the outer slimy skin. She casts around for some dead wood, finds enough and makes a stack. She’ll need a good-sized skewer; she sees a tree branch in a nearby white oak that will do. She uses some of the stored kinetic to snap the branch and bounce it to the ground within reach. She uses more kinetic to sheer off all the smaller branches and twigs until she has a near straight three-yard stick.
Luscin proceeds to inexpertly jam the stick down the length of the eel. She gets it more than halfway before giving up and blasting off the butt end of the eel and stick. She throws the back half into the water for the fish to eat.
A slow and painful trip to the river allows her to scrub and rinse off the eel’s slime, and after a minute of gathering thermals, she builds up a store strong enough to ignite her stack of sticks. With a little more effort, she props her eel-on-a-stick over the fire.
She decides to bleed off more kinetic by taking target practice at the surrounding trees while her meal cooks. She remembers one of Master Black Hill’s lessons and builds up as much thermal energy as she can comfortably hold. She’s in an unknown situation and should be prepared to defend herself.
Two hours later, her stomach is full, and she needs sleep. She crawls to a white oak, put her back to it and dozes off, picturing Master Adara running to Thuma with that smug look on her face.
She awakes with a start, a loud belching-like noise rumbles through the night air. Then several more, just like it grumbles in answer from some distance. She attempts to see where the sound is emanating, but there are too many surfaces deflecting and echoing the low-pitched noise to locate.
She’s tired, her mending shinbone still hurts, at least her ribs are nearly healed, breathing is much easier now. After an hour the belching noises subside, and she drifts off to sleep.
Later, she’s awakened by another sound, this one much closer. A low rumble, but not like what she heard earlier. This was close, and she feels a creeping sensation of potential energy as if someone is about to punch her from above.
Luscin holds out her hand and envelopes it in light. She looks up and sees the face of a large cat, its eyes reflecting green from her glowing hand. The panther, not knowing what to do when its food has a light, turns, and disappears as it leaps from tree to tree.
She feels each jump as it recedes into the forest. She knows it’s gone for sure when the birds resume their night calls. She drifts back to sleep.
The belching grumbling resumes at daybreak for another hour. What a terrible place to sleep, she thinks to herself. Luscin takes another inventory of her health, her breathing no longer hurts, and her leg is nowhere near as sore as before.
The thought of staying another day does nothing for her already sour mood. She needs to leave, but not until she figures out how to land. Luscin pours through her recollection of that night. It was all going ok until she tried to push 100 percent against that ever present constant energy. She wishes she had a name for it. When she tried to conjure a memory that fits the description all that comes to mind are references to fictional sources. She resigns herself to waiting until her fifth year for that answer from Terius. She had little trouble going from six to eleven when diverting that flow. She wonders what happens if she rotates the clock 180 degrees rapidly. No gentle spin, just all at once, flip it. Will she instantly reverse direction or will she have to bleed off all her forward momentum before changing direction.
Luscin realizes she doesn’t have to leave the ground to try that one. She briefly considers climbing into the water to reduce friction, then she remembers all the joules she picked up from one eel, she doesn’t care to take on more.
A large, leafed plant grows around the pond’s edge, she pulls off one large enough to sit on. The far bank has a sort of muddy beach and will be perfect for this experiment. Sitting on her leaf in the middle of the muddy beach, she prepares for all the thermal and kinetic energy she’s about to generate, then she shoves the clock hand to nine. Gravity started pulling her forward. She siphons off the kinetic energy caused by the friction of her leaf covered butt on the ground. Once she’s moving at a walking pace, she slams the clock hand around to three. She almost immediately stops forward motion and reverses direction. She does it twice more, allowing more speed to build before changing direction each time and is positive that changing her fall horizontally can bleed off speed just as well as vertical, but without completely opposing the universe. It seems obvious now. The force she is interacting with isn’t gravity, it is something else and it is nearly immutable. You can’t directly oppose it. But gravity is just an effect of that force and can be manipulated easily.
Luscin has half a day left and would rather not stay in this strange forest any longer. She tops off her water flask and stows it in her pack.
She pictures how Terius dresses before leaving by air and does her best to apply the same principles to her current clothes. Her shoelaces get double knotted, to prevent them from whipping around and lacerating her ankles as they did before. She tucks her pants legs into her socks to keep them from riding up. She tucks her fresh shirt into her pants and sinches them tight with a strip of cloth she tore from her dirty uniform top. Another strip is used to tie her hair into an inu-tail that gets tucked inside the back of her shirt. The final preparation she makes is to verify her pack is secure and tight.
Feeling under-prepared and a bit foolish, Luscin turns to face north-north-east and back-flips into the air, launching herself at the 10-position into the sky.
She levels herself out at the 9-position after half a minute or so, the forest looks tiny at this altitude as it leisurely rolls beneath her. Facing the ground makes a lot of sense, but why fly feet-first she keeps asking herself. Then she starts thinking about landing, and the idea of headfirst doesn’t sound so good either.
A man with drab dark skin, and drab brown hair who has been watching Luscin since morning slowly stands from concealment. His clothes are colored and patterned to blend with the local fauna, making his outline difficult to notice. He notes her direction of travel and returns to base and reports everything he can recall about the invader from South Cenoka.