Right, so, I was supposed to be impressing people right now. This wasn't about survival, or fighting anyone. I didn't have to worry about bullets flying at me, or any other projectiles or powers. The only thing I had to do right now was give these people an exciting show. Not just a few bystanders hanging out in doorways or carefully watching through windows. It was, in a word, intimidating. If I had stopped to really think about it at all, if I had allowed myself to actually consider the amount of people who were watching me right then, I probably would have frozen up.
But I didn't let myself think about that. I didn't let myself dwell on it. I put all those thoughts and feelings out of my mind instantly and simply threw myself into action. All those pesky voices going on about the crowd and the cameras, especially the cameras, were shoved away. I was just by myself, like when I was skating at the park. This obstacle course in front of me was nothing but a fun playground for me to practice with. I was showing off for myself, and that was something I was very good at. I knew how to lose myself in the moment.
So, that was exactly what I did. Starting off with a bang, I put green-blue paint on the bottom of my shoes while sprinting forward along the first platform. In that same motion, I activated twin green lightning bolts along my legs to pick up some speed. The platform at this point was about ten feet wide, narrowing gradually as it went until it was only one foot wide, roughly twenty feet ahead of me. About ten feet beyond that was a glass or clear plastic tube, suspended several feet higher than the platform. The inside was tall enough for an NBA player to stand up in, and just about as wide. Along either side of that tube were a couple narrow ledges one could run along if they wanted to rather than using the inside. And there were two other smaller (only about two feet wide) circular platforms, these ones hovering in midair, that kept orbiting around the tube basically level with it. They were set opposite one another, so when one was at the front of the tube, the other was at the back, and were moving just quickly enough for each to make a full revolution around the twelve-foot-long tube in about five seconds. All of which was meant to give runners options about how to move through that area. The entire arena was like that, with several ways to get around at every turn.
In my case, I aimed straight for the tube. At the end of the first platform, I activated that blue-green paint on my shoes, launching myself up as my momentum carried me forward. Just before my feet came down, I made my skates pop out, angling so that I would immediately be sent up along the sidewall of the tube, all the way to the ceiling so I was fully-upside down before continuing on back to the bottom, all while moving forward. That single revolution, skating up and around the tube, carried me to the opposite end. I hit the edge of it and used another shot of blue to bounce further out, just slightly too soon. The nearest rotating platform was still a bit too far away to casually land on, which made some people gasp slightly when they realized. But I simply activated a yellow parachute image on my back, slowing myself down just enough that the platform managed to make it there in time for me to land on it, retracting my skates.
Landing right there on the platform, I knew everyone’s eyes were already moving forward to see me jump to the next obstacle. But I didn’t. I stayed there on the platform while it continued to spin, carrying me back around toward the front of the tube, the way I had come. Needless to say, there were a few murmurs of confusion, and a couple people out there in the audience started pointing and waving for me to go forward already. It was like they thought I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing right then. Which, given how short-notice my appearance here was, was probably fair.
But I didn’t listen, or give any indication that I could hear them. After all, the point of this exercise wasn’t to finish quickly. Hell, it wasn’t even technically to go any particular place. The point was to move around the arena with style. Which was just what I was going to do. Tuning the people out for the moment, I continued to crouch there on the platform for another couple seconds. Which was around the time when the crowd noticed what I was doing. The platform under my feet was already green, picking up speed. I had to use a bit of red on my shoes and directly under them to keep myself planted firmly, as the platform spun twice as fast as it had been going before. Which also meant that I had to shoot a spray of green to the other platform as we started catching up with it, so there wouldn’t be a very nasty collision. They’d made it clear that any damage to the things out here could be easily fixed or replaced, but still. That just seemed like a pretty bad way to go.
I didn’t stop at doubling the platform’s speed either. Just as it came around the front of the tube again, I disabled the regular green paint. But, of course, that didn’t just immediately stop the thing, it maintained momentum. Almost as soon as the regular green paint was gone, I put it back on and reactivated it. That way, the platform’s speed was doubled based on how quickly it was moving in that particular moment.
I did that a third time, then a fourth, in between doing the same for the other one to keep it out of the way. The crowd was really paying attention now, as the spinning platform was moving so quickly it probably should have made me sick. The world was passing around me in a blur, all those faces nothing but random splotches of color. Fast, I was spinning around so fast. It was all my red paint could do to keep me there.
And then, in the next moment, I disabled it so nothing was keeping me there. I carefully timed it, mainly through instinct and my weird special ability to sense my surroundings, so that the paint holding me on the platform would turn off at the exact right moment for me to be flung off in the direction of the next obstacle. Which, in this case, was a series of five foot wide, ten foot tall vertical walls hovering around one another at staggered heights. The idea was that you could stick to the walls or run up them or whatever, jumping from one to the next back and forth until you reached the platform at the top. But you probably weren’t usually supposed to be flying at the things at the blinding speed I was heading for them. I caught loud gasps coming from the crowd, who seemed to be afraid that they were about to watch me do my best fly against a windshield impression.
Instead, I shifted my entire body into my paint form and turned blue. When my body slammed into that first wall, I was ricocheted backwards and up against the next wall, then up again, and so on. I just kept pinballing back and forth up through the staggered walls. At the top, I flipped over, hit the platform with a shot of blue-green paint after shifting back into my solid self, and rocketed straight off of that toward another obstacle.
This one, as it happened, was a spiral ramp that twisted up and around, higher and higher toward the top of the arena. Like the tube, it was clear so the audience could easily see everything.
Despite the absurd speed I was moving at as I pinballed off that last wall and launched myself from the platform, I still managed to aim myself so that I was rocketed directly at the entrance to that spiral ramp. My skates came out just as I hit the lower part, and I immediately angled my body so my momentum would carry me up around the ramp rather than flinging me straight off of it. Up and around I went, all the way through the spiral while the crowd oohed about how fast I was going. But honestly, they really hadn’t seen anything yet.
At the top of the spiral, there was a long slide leading down to another platform. That was the much safer and more sane option, considering how high up I was by that point. But there was also an angled ramp that would launch me even higher than that, and send me to a long series of hovering hoops. They were all different sizes, some stationary, some moving back and forth, and still others spinning in place. And yes, there were a couple that were both moving and spinning, just to add another layer of difficulty to the whole thing. All of them suspended around forty feet above the ground.
Yeah, three guesses which of those options I decided to take. It wasn’t the safe choice.
Just before hitting that top ramp, I used a green race car image on my chest to boost my speed even more than it already was. By that point, I was probably going almost as fast as an actual race car. It certainly felt like I was, at the very least. This was wild.
Rocketing off that top ramp and through the air, I extended my hand, shooting red paint in a wide spray ahead of me, angling to hit all of the hoops along the line. Though I didn’t do anything with that paint just yet, simply allowing it to stay where it was. The first hoop was coming up, and I tucked my body into a ball to pass through it, somersaulting through the air. The next hoop was moving back and forth, and hadn’t quite made it into position yet. But I simply used a bit of yellow to slow myself down a fraction. Then the hoop was there, and I passed through it, still tucked into that ball.
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The rest of the hoops were almost all lined up properly. My spatial sense told me that. I just had to speed myself up for the fifth hoop (one of the spinning ones), then again for the eighth (a spinning one that was also moving back and forth), and finally slow myself down juuuust a hair for the last one. About halfway through the line of hoops, I had extended my arms and legs in a sort of classic Superman pose rather than staying tucked into my ball, shooting through that last hoop like I had been fired out of a gun.
There was a series of flat platforms ahead of me, but I didn’t angle myself to land on top of them. Instead, I painted myself pink-orange and aimed straight for the edge of the nearest platform. At the last second, I canceled the paint, giving myself a second of being both incredibly bouncy and tough. I could’ve gone with blue again, but it felt right to mix things up. That was when I hit that platform edge and was immediately bounced back the way I had come, rocketing to those same hoops.
That was the moment that I activated that red paint I had left on them. In an instant, all the hoops were yanked together into a jumbled, overlapping mess that left only a very narrow hole. Too narrow for a person to really fit through, even one as small as I happened to be.
Knowing this was probably about to get a bit of a reaction, I shifted myself into my paint form just before hitting that small opening. My body immediately collapsed, parts of me spraying off in every direction while the bulk of my… uh, liquid passed through the hole. And yes, that did get a reaction. There were a few scattered screams, and a lot of gasps. I heard the announcer say something about remaining calm. So uh, yeah maybe I should’ve warned them somehow? Oops. But hey, it made them pay attention.
They were certainly all paying attention when, a second after passing through that small hole in my liquid form, I pulled myself back together. One second there was a scattered spray of me shooting off in every direction in front of that jumble of hoops while the bulk of me passed through, and in the next, I was back to normal. Well, as normal as I could be, really. I looked like myself again, at least.
Yeah, people were a little confused. And they became even more so as I turned my still-liquid body red. Every part of me was red in that moment, like a me-shaped gummy bear. A gummy Paintball, flipping end over end back toward the top of that spiral ramp. On one of those flips, I yanked a piece of myself off and threw it toward that slide that was extending off the front of the spiral. As the paint hit, I used it to yank myself that way. Just before landing, I shifted from red to green. Now I was three times faster than normal, hitting that slide in a crouch so I could go skidding down it in a blur of motion. A blur of uhh, partially-liquid motion. I hit hard enough that my body sort of collapsed a bit and slid down it like jello. This way I had shown the audience that I could use both ways of getting off the spiral.
Just before I hit the bottom of the slide, my hand rose to point back the way I had come, almost exactly at the same spot on the higher platform that I had bounced off the edge of to send myself back through those clustered hoops. That time, I sent a shot of rainbow paint. A second later, I hit the edge of the slide, careened off it, and vanished in midair. Then I reappeared right on that spot high above, teleporting over there with my hands already extending to grab the platform. But I didn’t swing myself up onto it. Instead, I swung myself under the platform, flipping over to plant my gravity-boots against the bottom of it so I was standing upside down. Or rather, cartwheeling upside down, one after another across the underside of the platform. Oh, and I made my paint-self completely white so I could glow in the shadows created by the structure above me. Yeah, maybe I was showing off a little. But wasn’t that what I was supposed to be doing? The challenge right now was to make myself stand out against all the other Touched who would be doing this course. Hopefully, showing off a mix of my usual powers and the new ones would do the trick.
Reaching the edge of the platform, I threw myself into a corkscrewing dive off it, aiming for a crescent moon-shaped one far below. On the way down, I shifted myself from white to blue once more. A murmur ran through the crowd just before I slammed into that crescent platform and immediately rebounded off it, the shape and my angle sending me forward. There was a second crescent moon there, facing the opposite direction, for me to bounce off. Sort of like the staggered walls I’d used my blue bouncy form to climb moments earlier. Every time I hit, my body sort of collapsed in on itself like an accordion or a spring, then snapped back almost instantly as I went flying.
I continued that way through several more obstacles, once again bouncing around like more of a pinball than a paintball. Finally, I angled the last bounce so that I could shift back to my solid shape and flip over, landing smoothly on my skates at the start of a long, narrow bridge that was angled slightly downward. There were half a dozen battering rams at staggered distances along the bridge, which kept swinging back and forth by chains that were attached to higher platforms. They were padded, of course, and there were special impact-absorbing Touched-Tech mats below to land on, but still.
Naturally, I didn’t even hesitate. Activating a series of green twisty lines around my arms and legs, I went racing straight across the bridge. As the first battering ram came in on my right side, I ducked under it, twisting my head just enough to let the front of the log-shaped thing pass inches from my skull on its way past. My hand snapped up and back to shoot black-pink paint at the chain holding the thing in the air. The paint combination turned the chain to liquid and made the battering ram crash down onto the bridge before it started to roll after me.
Without losing any momentum, I kept going straight toward the second battering ram as it came back down from the opposite direction a few feet further on. Just before I would have run right into it as it was barring the entire bridge, I leapt up and over it, using another shot of black-pink paint on my way past to make that one fall as well.
By that point, the audience seemed rather confused again about what I was doing. Which was fair. But I continued on through the next four battering rams, avoiding all of them and cutting them from their chains. Soon, I had all six rolling down the slanted bridge hot on my heels while skating just barely ahead of them. On the way, I kept hitting each of them with shots of red without using it just yet. I was picking up as much speed as I could. Then, right at the bottom, I hit the spot in front of me with a puddle of blue. Hitting that launched me into the air. Just for fun, I did several flips and twists on the way up. At the exact apex of my leap, my hand snapped out to shoot rainbow paint high above myself, toward the tallest structure in the arena. It was another slide, one that started near the top of the space, higher than any of the stands. The only way to see what was going on that high was to watch on the jumbotron. The slide sloped down and gradually curved all the way around the edge of the arena, eventually stopping near the base of where it started.
My rainbow paint instantly teleported me all the way up to the top of that slide. The second I got there, my body twisted around to look back the way I’d come. The battering ram logs had hit the blue paint by then and were flying through the air, though somewhat awkwardly, wobbling violently the whole time. Before they could start to fall down, I pointed at them with one hand, before pointing up at the ceiling of the arena with the other. Red paint shot from each hand, and soon the battering rams were being yanked up past me on their way toward the ceiling. I canceled the paint on each one at a time at just the right moment, before turning back to the slide. Even as the logs fell toward me, I pointed ahead of myself and sprayed out a blue-red combination onto the slide, making it dramatically more slippery.
The battering rams were right there, crashing down onto the slide. I leapt up, twisting around to pass between the two nearest ones just before they slammed into the structure and started to roll down it. My body flipped over in midair, landing feet first (I had retracted my skates) on the third log just as it landed as well.
Just like that, the log I was on started to roll down the slide. I had to rapidly run backwards on it to stay in place. How the audience was reacting to this, I couldn’t possibly guess or pay attention to. It took everything I had to focus on this bit. I jumped backwards to land on the log behind that one, almost losing my balance briefly before catching myself and running backward on that too.
That continued the entire way down and around on that slide. I kept jumping back and forth between all the logs, running backwards on them to maintain my balance while making my way down. Just before reaching the bottom, with about ten seconds left on the big timer that determined how long I could keep trying to impress people, I decided to go all in and flipped backwards, going all the way from the front-most log to the one in the rear. But instead of coming down on my feet, I landed upside down on my hands and began to rapidly move those up and down to stay on the log in that position as it rolled. I came down through that last bit of slide in a handstand position on the rolling log. I almost lost it a couple times, but barely managed to keep it going right to the bottom.
Just before my log crashed into the others that had already stopped, I used blue paint under my hands to bounce myself up into the air and flipped over one more time. My hands pointed down to hit two of the logs with red paint right near their ends so that when they were yanked up toward my red gloves, it pulled them upright. I canceled the paint immediately, leaving the logs to land on their ends right next to each other just as I came down on top of them, one foot on each.
I stood like that, raising my arms over my head while balancing on those upright logs, just as the timer buzzed. Which was fine by me, considering how exhausted I was by that point. So, I let myself drop into a quick series of exaggerated bows to one side of the stadium after another. Then I flipped backward off the logs, allowed them to fall, and bowed again after landing smoothly. And that was when the audience really started to roar.
“Hey,” I mumbled to myself as the exhaustion really started to hit me. My knees were wobbling, and I could barely stay on my feet. “... I think they like me.”