First, these methods are limited to systems.... 1960s flight research times.

[onceflewicarus]

Characters: Jay & Open
Date & Time: July 27th, afternoon.
Setting: The library. So sexy. :|
Summary: Jay, the great blue and black girl, probably should figure out why she passed out...
Rating: SFW?
Status: OPEN

Comments

[staticsnap]

"Even more important, then," Ben countered as a soft curl of displaced air ruffled his hair, sent over like a reassuring caress by the flapping of her wings. It would have been, too, if not for the way Jay's face tightened ever so slightly in discomfort at the movement. "Birds don't have reinforced skeletons."

And he could still see it as clear as day, how weeks later those tiny little wisps of sparrows (he'd looked them up in a set of musty encyclopaedias that Mr. Wasikowski across the hall owned) had tottered to the edge of their nest and wobbled in front of the grating. They'd spread their half-moon wings and fluttered, fledgling little tufts, and then had flung themselves, one after the other, into the open space.

The city was not a gentle place. When they landed on the stretch of steel one floor below, they did not move again.

Ignoring her attempt to change the subject, Ben did his level best to imitate Alex and he just stared, face steadily determined. "You might be able to heal but that doesn't mean that it's okay, okay? So... don't. Don't do that again, not by yourself. Okay?"

[onceflewicarus]

"You don't want me to fly by myself?" Jay asked, clarifying his request, no. demand with a kindly mocking tone. "Are you offering to go up with me?"

He looked so much like Alex at that moment, she would have sworn they were brothers. Hell, he even sounded like he was implying she fell on purpose just like Alex had. So instead of pushing him further, digging at him like only a big sister would (after all, he was not Jeb. He was not Jeb) she took a step back, and retrieved one of the notebooks.

Inside was a file and in that file was a stack of x-rays of various parts of her body, focusing the most on her wings. "Here. Come here- I want to show you something."

She spread the sheets out on the desk without his yes or no answer, and pointed to the image of her shattered left wing. "I'm hollow. These kinds of things will happen all the time. I just gotta figure out my limits."

[staticsnap]

The offer for a buddy pass on the Guthrie 747 was met with a look of pinned uncertainty. On the one hand, it kind of sounded awesome. On the other, she kind of had a terrible track record. Ben wanted neither to sound like an overeager beaver nor insult her so he wisely settled for remaining awkwardly quiet. It usually worked. People took one look at his wide eyes and waiting face and moved on.

Jay though, she had a purpose in changing tacks and Ben found himself swept along on the current of her intent. She reminded him of Alex, sort of, the same kind of instinctive tendency to share and teach. It must have been a sibling thing.

As he stared down at the ghostly photo, Ben couldn't help but look at her wings again, keen blue eyes tracing the feathered draw of them as he tried to slot together the x-ray with the reality. They really were beautiful, even as beaten as they were.

Sighing, he scraped a nail along the stiff edge of the film. "There's got to be an easier way. At least one with a less dramatic ending," the boy hummed thoughtfully. "Maybe we could get a net. A really big one, like trapeze artists use? Then if you fall, it's copacetic."

Of course, then she'd have to aim for a target. Ben presumed that was probably pretty difficult when hurtling at terminal velocity.

"What happened up there, anyway?" the boy asked.

[onceflewicarus]

"I've been flying off and on since I was twelve Ben, I don't usually get hurt this bad." Jay explained, trying to calm his nerves away from the circus-idea. "I can hold my own up there most times."

She picked up another image, unconsciously moving that arm back and forth- just in case the healing hadn't fully taken yet. "What does copacetic mean?"

It would figure the kid would have a larger vocabulary than she, heck. He probably even understood the book she had been crawling through.

At the question about what happened, Jay shrugged her better shoulder. Hank had asked her, Erik had, as well as Alex. Each time her answer stayed the same- not for the sake of a rehearsed story, but because she just didn't know.

"Alex figures I ran out of air up there, and Hank tried to explain 'terminal velocity' to me... but what I'm guessing is that while I was up there? I stopped running into birds after a few hundred feet. I'm guessing me falling was why. I'm not some jet plane- and I can't pretend to be."

[staticsnap]

"It's like groovy. Mark Allen used to say it." Ben said with a shrug. "His older brother wrote for a newspaper and he went to California and spent three months living with a bunch of discharged Army guys and when he came back to Detroit he said he'd rather die than be stuck in a cage and then he left for the coast again which drove Mrs. Allen crazy. And anyway he was always saying it and so Mark started saying it and I went to school with Mark."

With that squared away Ben turned his attention to the films spread out on the table, hovering at Jay's side. He knew all too well the frustration of getting down to the bare-boned hows and whys of their powers, though Jay's current approach was more academic and less catastrophic. It was probably the sort of thing that he ought to be doing.

"What about a... a suit or something?" Ben's brow creased. "Like how Sean's wings work with his mutation to allow him to fly. You just need something that lets you fly higher."

[onceflewicarus]

"Have you ever been 10,000 feet up?" Jay asked, turning to face Ben a little more. "I think you'd like it, though I'm not sure how you'd fare up there. You can see the curve of the earth."

That last fact was something she had only just learned. An idea that she knew in theory but never in practice. It was- for a lack of a better word, amazing up there- cold. But amazing.

"I say this because. This house for example? It only goes 500 feet or so in the air, most places don't even go over a thousand or two. I'm not sure I'll ever need to go higher than 10,000. So I'm mostly concerned with just getting the strength to do it, and maybe the smarts to know when and where to stop." At the word 'strength' Jay flexed an arm with a cheeky smile. Due to her anatomy, already she had more definition than your average jock, and far more than a girl her age typically would. It wasn't that she lifted weights constantly, but when your body refuses to keep body fat? Other things show up.

[staticsnap]

Ben shook his head, unable to even imagine what it would be like to witness such great heights firsthand. "I've never even been in an airplane," he said. The boy paused thoughtfully, trying to pit his own experiences against the context. "But once we - my uncle and I, I mean - went to the top of the penobscot and threw pennies down. That's the highest building in Detroit."

It hardly compared, of course, to the sort of distance that she was talking about. The only curve one could see from up there was the angle of 34th Avenue turning onto Smith and that wasn't pretty at all; that was where the hobos gathered for bonfires.

Ben tried not to smile in response to her impressive display, a feat he only had marginal success at. How anyone could be so plucky after doing a bang-up impression of roadkill was beyond him but Jay Guthrie was made of resilient stuff, it seemed. And her muscles were bigger than his even without flexing, their wiry strength taut beneath the pale stretch of her skin. It was impressive, especially considering just how small she really was.

"Well, I guess if any geese get mouthy up there, you gotta be ready for 'em," Ben grinned cautiously and mimed a right hook. "Pow!"