Chapter Forty - Parkour!

Chapter Forty - Parkour! I spent the next loop... I think it was loop seven? Yeah, loop seven. I spent that one learning the fine and beautiful art of parkour. I found some parkour artists online--I was really iffy on that title, but then someone who practiced jiu-jitsu or karate or any other combat art was called a martial artist, so I supposed it made sense--and contacted them. One of them, a tall African American guy with the most chill disposition ever, was happy to take five thousand off my hands for a full-day session of parkour practice. I played up the fact that I was a D-ranker and that the corp I was working with had us fighting in this portal world that had a lot of different elevations, and that I wasn't trained for that. He took the story at face value and helped me through the very basics. I wanted to immediately start with a way to mitigate that initial fall through the portal. There had to be a way to quietly land on the other side without breaking my everything and making a ton of noise, but my trainer insisted that we start smaller than that. We started with vaults and jumps. I wasn't in the ideal physical shape for this, but I wasn't too far from it. I had slightly above the average cardio and endurance. I meant like, the national average, not the average for even E-rankers. Still, it was enough to put the early stuff down. I really wanted to skip ahead, but I understood that a solid foundation was more useful, so I endured until early evening. And then I Reloaded. The eight loop was the same, only this time I had the basics more or less down, and so my teacher agreed to show me how to land a fall without having to land in a hospital. Unfortunately, it was kind of hard to gauge the actual fall height. The place I'd jumped into the portal from was about two standard containers high. That was about sixteen feet. My teacher could safely drop from twenty, dissipating that landing with a roll. But he had a decade's experience on me. We started with a six feet drop and roll... Actually, I started by chickening out on the edge about six times. Why had I been so confident in that one loop? Was it because I couldn't see the ground at all? Eventually, I remembered that I was a big girl and that consequences were for others, and I did the jump. I was ass at it, initially, but I got better. Then we rose to ten feet, and my new confidence made that not so bad. A few rough landings had me wincing, and if I was to keep this loop, then I'd have bruises in the morning. Then we rose up to sixteen feet, and I didn't break anything. It hurt. It was hard on the sides and ankles, but I could do the tuck and roll and come back up to my feet. It was possible. I changed into my combat gear and tried again, this time with a backpack at my side and... not as doable. I still came out of it with no broken bones, but I'd definitely gotten a few bruises. So, I folded the backpack up tight, and held the crowbar in one hand. Then I tried again, and it was possible. Right, so, I could do it. I could sneak past the first two, dive into the portal, and hopefully not alert the two guys within. Yay! All that effort just to be sneaky. Some small part of me wanted to just go in gun's blazing, but a bigger part of me wanted to do it right. A perfect run though. Be a damned ghost. Anyone could walk into a place, firing like a madwoman, but it took someone special to sneak past a half-dozen guards unnoticed. Plus, not murdering people was... morally the better option. I still felt a little bad about shooting those idiots in a timeline that would never be real, I didn't need to kill them in the real world as well. I Reloaded. Attempt number nine. Honestly, for only nine loops, I'd gotten a decent ways in. I got changed at home this one, because... well, why not? Took a taxi out to the hardware store to buy a crowbar, then rode over to the warehouse, and got off right in front. I slipped in. Neither Jack the borg or that fiery woman noticed me as I went around and climbed up a few containers to come up behind the portal. I stayed low, keeping to the shadows as best I could. The issue was noise, really. Cargo containers were all steel, and stepping on them wasn't subtle. Unlawfully taken from novelhall, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon. Maybe they'd chalk it up to something else. I would, as long as there was nothing but a few random clinks. I took a few deep breaths, trying to calm down. I could do this... I ran, making sure to keep my steps as light as possible, then I jumped, already in the motion of rolling. The portal accepted me with ease and I came out the other side already rolling in the courtyard. I was out in the open, but I'd barely made any noise, though the landing had stung a little. Seventeen feet instead of sixteen? The roll hadn't been perfect. The Earth mage was there. Sitting on a chair by the entrance down, casually reading from a book. He didn't even look up. I slipped to the side, quick and quiet, then hugged the outer wall of the courtyard. It was pretty dark here, and there were several walls along the edges that only rose up to about mid-waist. One of these had a staircase going up, and others seemed like small walls to separate... was that a stable? Yeah, this place had the look and feel of an ancient, abandoned castle. I didn't know history well enough to guess at the era, but... 'old.' I peeked over the edge. The Earth mage had shifted a bit, but was still reading. I think what had saved me was the angle I came in from. Entering the portal meant coming out of the portal from a different angle. So, by jumping in from the 'back' I'd rolled in with the portal more or less between me and the Earth mage. The portal which was wiggling and moving constantly. Otherwise, he might have noticed some amount of motion from the corner of his eye. Good. Next time, I'd come in from a couple of feet to the right... or was it left? No, right. Then I'd be exactly on the other side. The other thing that helped was the lighting. It was bad. The kidnappers had set up a stack of car batteries to one side. I counted five in a neat row, with some sort of converter doohickey next to them. Lots of booster cables too. The lighting was plugged right into that converter. When working for Luna Corp, we actually had something similar, though it was a whole lot nicer-looking. A stack of lithium-cell batteries on wheels that could be pulled into a portal and set down, then there were these high-efficiency spot-lights on tripods and this sort of hangable lighting thing, depending on the portal world's environment. This was the redneck version of that. The lights ran back and behind the Earth mage. Now... how to distract him? Actually, I had an idea. I circled around the far end of the courtyard, then opened my bag. I had a length of rope in it. I made a loop on one end, then snuck close to the battery bank and slipped the end of the loop around one of the booster cables. High school science was a ways behind me, but I could tell this was plugged in series. So, taking one booster off at the end should shut the whole thing down. Slowly, I cast See Darkness. When I opened my eyes again, the shadows in the corners of the room had receded, and the distant stars far overhead had become that much more obvious. Cool. Now... I went back a ways and yanked the rope. The booster cable came off, and I pulled the rope in faster, ditching it in a corner before running. "What the?" the mage asked as he looked up, but he couldn't see jack, I bet. Staring at the white page of a book only to go into near-total darkness would do that. I heard him fumble with something before he pulled out a light. Someone else was shouting from deeper in the portal. "Oi? What the shit was that for?" "Gimme a minute!" the Earth mage replied. He walked over to the cables and swore. "Hey, one of these snapped off, how do I get it back together?" Then, to my infinite relief, two bumbling idiots stepped into the courtyard, both with flashlights. They started to argue over how to fix things, but by the time the lights came back on, I was past them like a damned ghost. ***