Personal Training

[Tigra]

After the last time, Tigra wasn’t about to be caught unprepared again.

She was going to be in shape. She was going to be practiced, ready to use every ounce of her knowledge at her disposal. Moreover, she was going to be more readily able to recognize the environment around her, to see the potential in every crack in the bricks, every rung on the fire escape, or the lip of a building’s rooftop. Everything was a surface that could be traversed. Everything was just a surface to launch yourself to something else. There were no such thing as dead ends.

She whipped through the alley, a harsh, pink blur as she pressed the pink Puma into the gritty, dissolving brick of the wall and lifted herself up with a kick. She pushed herself onto the fence, the chain link providing a footing to lift herself up again, grabbing the lowest rung of a fire escape and swinging her body weight, as light as it might be, upward and onto the escape’s landing.

She landed on the metal, cross-diamond studded grating with a clang of the metal, each footfall after the first was silent as she shot up the escape, flight after flight until she was on the rooftop. There, the world opened up to her in a way it never did on the streets. Here, the world was wide open. She could be anywhere she wanted to be, as far as her eyes could see. Her mind just had to work out the puzzle of how to get there.

Immediately, she picked out a radio tower in the distance.

There were several rooftops between her and her destination. Lots of space to practice, to learn. She vaulted a ventilation duct that ran across the rooftop, her hands pressing flat palms into the hard, icy steel and throwing her weight up and over, her feet landing with a crunch in the snow. She was off like a flash, a tail of soft, light brown hair whipping behind her as she leaped onto the lip of the rooftop and threw herself across an alley, flying through the air to land in stride on the roof of the adjoining building, without so much as slowing down.

This roof split levels, rising another floor on the north half of the building. The leap up was simple enough, even without the use of her anima. She cleared her mind and focused on the task ahead of her, launching herself from the snowy rooftop to the next floor, her small hands clasping the lip of the huge heating unit, swinging her momentum around to land on the piping that ran along the unit and parallel to the split level. She moved with a feline balance, her footing never slipping as she traversed the round surface, finally leaping to the top floor and hauling herself over the divider lip.

The next leap was the real challenge.

In front of her was a wide jump, an alley about twice the width of the last, onto a building two stories higher than the one she stood on. Hazel eyes danced up the cracked bricks as she rushed toward the edge of the rooftop, not so much as slowing down. She scanned the face of the wall across from her, and spotted an open window, level with the rooftop she was on now, just at the corner of the building across. She could make the jump, she was certain.

Her feet pounded the snow, her body lowered in a headlong rush for the edge of the rooftop. She could feel her thighs burning with the exertion, her lungs burning with the icy cold of the air as she made a fluid step onto the lip, launching herself from the rooftop and across the alley, one hand stretched out to grasp the window sill as she fell.