not entirely theoretical

Where the hell am I going?

Piper had walked the entire length and breadth of the school, her faced buried in a large, all-consuming pile of books and maps. She had never expected, when she first arrived at Starlight not more than a few days ago, that the school would be so damn huge...Needless to say, she was having a very difficult time with navigation, an had thus procured herself a set of school maps, on which she had neatly marked in pencil certain key landmarks along her day to day route.

But why couldn't she find the damn fields?!

Normally, Piper wouldn't dream of setting foot near any sort of athletic facility. Working out the mind had always been top priority; working out the body, however, had never been an issue. She got enough exercise sprinting from class to class every day that she never once felt the need to participate in "sports."

Nevertheless, this was an entirely separate matter than improving her athletic prowess. She figured the track field would easily have a vast number of particles that she could use to practice her art- loose bits of turf, rocks, dirt, and the like. It would be an ideal place to experiment, she thought. "After all," she muttered, bitterly recalling her power class from the hour before, "'my technique needs extensive polishing.' Tch." Honestly. She hardly thought she was that bad, but her professor seemed to find nothing but flaws in the way she handled her power…

Buried in her maps and her thoughts, Piper did not realize that moment that she had, in fact, just stepped onto the field in question. Consequently, she also failed to notice the teenage boy and his spectral counterpart a few feet to her left, looking pretty beaten down. And she also did not take into account the giant rock structure protruding out of the ground directly in front of her.

And so it was a bit of a shock when she crashed directly into said stone edifice, books, papers, and body falling with a smack to the ground.

She immediately looked downward, feeling along the ground below her until she felt the rim of her circular glasses. She quickly brought them to her face- and, to her relief, found that they were perfectly intact. Placing them back on her face, she looked first at the boy, taking his hand and hoisting herself up.

“Nothing, thank God,” she said, addressing his concern. She then shot him a halfhearted scowl. “Though next time, watch where you put your rock walls…someone else might not be so lucky.”

She then diverted her attention to the armored spirit beside him—but rather than marvel at this remarkable manifestation of the boy’s power, she looked down matter-of-factly at the pile of supplies in his arms.

“I’ll be taking those back now, thank you,” she said, trying to sound as polite as possible, whilst inwardly cringing at the horrid way they had reorganized her stack. The books should be arranged in order of class period…Oh, this won’t do at all. As soon as she had recovered her things, she nonchalantly restored the books to her preferred order, and breathed out a sigh of relief.

She then looked between the two of them, and back at the wall. “Erm…if you don’t mind my asking,” she began, tilting her head with curiosity, “what, exactly, were you doing out here?” And how did it produce a giant stone block in the middle of the field, she implied.

Piper smirked at the boy’s nervous little expressions, her own confidence boosting considerably. She quite enjoyed being in this rare position of power—it was not often that she was able to intimidate people so well. She wanted to drink up every last second of it before the boy came to realize how awkward she herself could be…

As the spectral figure faded away into the boy, Piper’s suspicions were confirmed. The being was some sort of manifestation of the boy’s powers. Made sense, she thought. And likely it was the source of the augmented strength that would be required to produce a giant block of solid rock…you could almost hear the gears turning in Piper’s mind as she calculated all of this for herself.

She shrugged off the boy’s apology—“Forget it even happened”— however, his next sentence instantly intrigued her, her eyebrow quirking upward, and she pursed her lips for a moment in contemplation. “Hmmm….”

Well, she thought, he did say he wanted to practice…

“If it isn’t too much trouble…could you blow it up?” Her smirk softened, and she adjusted her glasses. “You see, I had come down for a bit of practice, myself—only thing is, my power works on a much, much smaller scale. So, this way, we’ll both get a bit of work done.” She shrugged. “Plus, who doesn’t love a good explosion now and then, am I right?”

Having carefully heeded Ian’s warning, and having performed some minor calculations in her mind, Piper concluded that the safest place to observe would be directly behind the boy. So, there she stood, as he got to work.

She had not paid very much mind to Up to Me on first sight, she had to admit—but after this spectacular demonstration, she couldn’t help but gawk at the sheer might of it. Damn. She certainly did not expect that kind of power from someone like Ian. One might say that she was noticeably impressed.

Only it wasn’t that noticeable. Not yet anyway.

Because Piper was laughing too hard.

There was something about explosions-- the way they broke things apart into millions of tiny pieces in inconceivable bursts of chaos— that effectively reduced Piper’s sense of humor to that of a five-year-old. She had fallen to the floor at this point, next to her books, and was holding tightly onto her stomach, tears threatening to stream down her face, wearing a grin so wide it looked like it would tear her face off. She could barely even get a coherent sentence out.

“That…that was….it went….boooom!!…..and then…everywhere….that was awesome!...” she said between fits of laughter.

Once she had (finally) calmed herself down, she caught sight of Ian and Up to Me’s injuries. The brightness of her expression faded. “You alright?”

Piper looked around at the scattered rubble from the explosion, thinking to herself for a moment. “Well…” She was trying to determine whether or not she’d be able to move particles of this magnitude. Granted, the largest rock she could see was still large enough to fit in her palm- but still, on this sort of scale, with rocks and pebbles scattered haphazardly around her….it would take immense concentration. She understood this, nodding to herself. She took a deep breath, and closed her eyes.

She stood there for a little while, drowning out any surrounding noises—the wind, the birds, the sound of Ian’s breathing from a few feet away. The only thing that she allowed herself to hear was the soft, slow tempo of her own heartbeat, as she relaxed herself into a completely focused state.

She began to sense the varying types of particles around her, but focused in particular on those that had come from Up To Me’s explosion. Slowly, she raised her hands out in front of her, and, like a puppeteer tugging at a set of strings, began to gently move her fingers.

As her fingers twitched and turned through the air, so did the rocks around them, flying up from their spots on the ground and shooting back towards the area where the rock had just stood. Some of them just nearly grazed Ian as they flew past him-but Piper was keen to make sure that none of them actually hit him. The rocks kept moving, flitting from one place to another, until they all congregated in front of Piper, still hovering and vibrating in midair. When she opened her eyes, they froze.

The pebbles had fallen into a perfect pyramid, stacked by size, with the largest rocks on the bottom, and the tiniest chunks forming the tip. She smiled, content, and turned to look at Ian’s reaction.

“I can move relatively small particles with my mind,” she said, cheerful yet matter-of-fact. “Pretty neat, huh?”