Kayla Stork had long been called all sorts of things by people who were trying to understand her, people who were dismissive of her, and people who were trying to be mean to her alike. Almost none of them came anywhere close to truly describing her, and while labels such as airhead, distracted, ADHD, goofy, silly, stupid, and zany had been thrown around, none of them were really accurate. Sure, she enjoyed being silly when there was no reason not to be, and she did at times stop keeping track of what was going on around her.
But why would she bother with things that didn't matter? She had been a straight A student since kindergarten, and being a Junior in High School. And Kayla figured that record stood on its own merits to show that when it mattered, she paid attention and got things done. Just because she liked getting high on the natural joys of life and didn't go out seeking uncouth sources of titillation didn't mean that she was anything more than a happy person enjoying life.
Did she sometimes walk into objects she wasn't expecting to be in her path because she was thinking about other things? Sure, of course that happened when she let her mind wander too far afield. Did that mean she was an airhead who was too stupid to pay attention? Of course it didn't, she just spent her time on the things she cared about, and let other things pass her by.
She had quit cheer-leading when she started High School and focused more on gymnastics because the other members of the squad started pursuing boys in ways that made her uncomfortable. She still wanted to stay active in a similar sport, and it was pretty fun too, so she stuck with it. She was contemplating a new move she wanted to incorporate into her routine as she walked to her next class between periods when she noticed her surroundings didn't look quite right.
She had taken a turn at the end of a building, but instead of leading to the hallway that she was expecting, she had somehow ended up inside of a Walmart store. The nearest one to her school was at least a few blocks away, and she didn't understand how that was possible. She did a perfect 180 and started walking back the way she came, distracted by how weird things were, and found herself back where she had started, at that same corner she had turned at before.
Confused, but not really caring about it, she turned back around, looked where she was going, and went on with her trip to her next class. Physics was a nice enough class, but they didn't really get into the really interesting stuff until a few courses later and until after a few calculus classes. And so her thoughts meandered away as she kept walking to her class.
She didn't even really give the weird trip any thought until the next day, when she once again found herself somewhere strange after taking a turn at a slightly different angle than she normally did. This time there was a group of her classmates talking to each other where she normally walked, and she turned to go around them, kept walking, and found herself in a doctor's office waiting room. It wasn't one she had been to before, but she had had to take physicals every year for ages now, and she knew how to get out of such places, so she wasn't worried.
Besides, the last time this happened, she just used her athletic prowess and familiarity with her own body to do a perfect 180 and was able to get back on track easily, so she just repeated the performance and was able to repeat the feat and go on with her day. She did spend some time thinking about how weird it was to suddenly show up places she wasn't expecting to, but her thoughts didn't really stay on that train after she sat down in her seat and got ready for her next class. Anomalous anomalies will remain mysterious until a pattern emerges, after all.
Her next surprise actually came that same day as she was walking home, and suddenly found herself in her own room after taking a turn down an alleyway she knew was way too far away for her to have gotten lost in thought for that long. Now, this one was a bit more discomfiting, as she didn't like the idea of people randomly finding themselves in her room in her home, so she took a closer look around her as soon as she noticed the change.
But nothing was amiss. No walls were missing, no strange doors appeared, nothing seemed different than normal. So she looked closer, turning slower as she peered at her room suspiciously. And then she started to see them. Slivers of paths in nearly every direction, except, not quite in any of the three dimensional directions she was used to.
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It was like there were paths between spaces where there was no gap. Confused, she picked on that looked interesting, and started walking, leaving her backpack on her bed were she had put it down when she got home. This path lead to a storeroom of some sort, full of crates of fruits and vegetables and cardboard boxes of all different sizes. Continuing on, she picked another path and found herself in what seemed to be the back end of a police station, to the shock and outrage of several police officers who quickly hid a card game from the table.
Deciding she didn't want to stick around there much longer, she picked a strangely greyscale looking path and found herself in a strange endless landscape of grey dust, feeling oddly lighter than normal. And then she turned to look at the sun, and saw the Earth sitting next to it, and realized she was on the moon, and had probably better pick a more colorful path, and fast.
She next found herself in a very nice park, full of green plants and people with really nice tans that didn't seem to be speaking a language she recognized. And then she started getting concerned, because she realized that the temperature was all wrong, and the plants seemed to be showing signs of spring, instead of the fall she left behind. She used a phone app to find north, and picked a path going directly that way, and a few paths later she was hearing people speak Spanish.
As soon as she found herself in an area with English speakers, she stopped using the strange paths between space itself, and made her way to a church she saw nearby and took a nap on one of the benches. She was feeling really tired, and maybe even a bit too scared to think straight, so she figured finding a safe place to rest and get her head back in order was a good plan. When she woke up, she used her phone's map app to find out where she was, which was apparently somewhere in New Mexico, and pointed herself roughly in the direction where her home should be and started taking paths in that direction.
Now, while she had definitely gotten her emotions back into some level of order, it was still hard to avoid the fear and panic trying to force their way back to the forefront, so it took her until long after dinner to make her way back home. As night was falling, and it was started to get dark, she finally found her way onto a street near where she lived, and went the rest of the way using good old mundane sidewalks.
As scared and relieved and excited and worried as she was, her parents quickly realized this was different than the times she would lose track of time and just forget to come home soon enough. As her mother pulled her into a hug and she returned it with more force than she realized, they started talking about what happened. Thankfully people manifesting powers was a regular occurrence these days, so it wasn't as difficult as Kayla had feared to convince her parents that she had experienced what she had.
The outcome of that little family meeting however, was that Kayla had to have location services locked on using parental controls on her phone, and she had to promise to pay more attention to where she was going. She also had to quit normal P.E., which she didn't really mind as they mostly did boring stuff that wasn't nearly to the standard she liked to work out at on her own. The part she did mind was the manifestation training classes, as they frankly seemed to do more harm than help for her.
Kayla finally proved to the teachers that she was fully able to choose when she used her powers by walking down a path that took her out of the special gymnasium manifestation class was in and into another building. Unfortunately, that particular path lead to the middle of the school's pool, and before she could take another step, she fell into it, and had to make her way to the side of the pool and get out to concentrate enough to find the paths again.
She came back into the manifestation paths class soaking wet in her P.E. uniform, and a bit embarrassed, but the teachers finally stopped trying to get her to feel for her powers and learn to use them on purpose. They then focused on having her learn how to control them better and helping her discover elements of her abilities that might enable her to use them more safely. She appreciated the new focus and thew herself into trying to flesh out her skill set into something more easily controlled.
Over the next few weeks Kayla found herself in a men's changing room for some gym – thankfully not the one she used – in an operating room currently in use in a hospital, both of which she quickly left, and various other strange places she hadn't intended to go to. Once she even found herself miles up in the air, and had to use the momentum gravity and air friction gave her to pick a path to safety. She had to wear a specialized squirrel suit when practicing after that. It had a life jacket built in and a pull cord that turned the whole outfit into a giant balloon of nylon like a personal airbag, just in case anything happened.
But even as she found more awkward places to suddenly arrive at, Kayla slowly got a better handle on how to pick where to go and even managed to get a rough idea of where she was going. She was far from mastering her powers, and even walked into embarrassing locations accidentally all the time, like the bar that was in the middle of a sports game fueled frenzy that she stumbled into. When she arrived she nearly knocked a giant of a man over and quickly jumped back, a method she had developed to avoid having to turn around first before escaping a “bad landing” as she had taken to calling them.
As her junior year came to an end, however, she was in enough control of her abilities to graduate from manifestation class, and her records were updated, and sent to the mainframe. Kayla didn't really care about that, and the release forms had been done away with a year ago when the list had become mandatory anyways, so there wasn't really anything she could do about it, even if she did. She did have to be careful with her gymnastics routines now, as she didn't want to find herself somewhere unexpected in the middle of a competition.