NOVEL NEXT Chapter 8: Wall-Flip Double-Kick
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Karen: I just used your last roll of toilet paper. Haaaalp.
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Saturday, November 9th, 2091, about 9:00 am MST, Montana City, Gordon's Suite
When Karen had first told Gordon about Ghostlands, the description had been a little bit unclear.
"It's a VRMMORPG with customized player-generated motion capture elements!" he was told. There's a rule for acronyms—if you can't pronounce it as a word, don't use more than three letters. People can't remember phone numbers on one hearing because they can't process the six to nine digits involved, and the same is true for letters.
Gordon could remember all the letters, and he knew what they meant, and it still did nothing more than narrow down the genre. Player generated motion capture could just mean the game supported modding your appearance, which also meant nothing specific.
More digging led to "you can record yourself doing moves, and add them to the game!"
In point of fact, no, that wasn't quite right. Your stats would determine base damage for a roundhouse kick, for example, and the default animation would have a given speed and hit arc, which determined how much actual damage it did and whether or not it hit. If you tried to upload a curb-stomp move, it just wouldn't let you - but a better, faster roundhouse kick, which covered more effective area, like Karen's, or a much, much faster roundhouse kick with a narrow effective arc, like, Gordon's, would provide different bonuses—Karen's would knock the legs from a small crowd of goblins, while Gordon's hit half again as hard as he was meant to be able to. Different strokes for different folks.
And it was all limited by stats—no matter how fast your animation, you only got credit for moving as fast as your stats say you should be able to move, or for hitting as hard as your stats said you could hit.
Gordon had only recently discovered that he could convert maneuvering animations into attacks.
"So, this is the wall-flip animation," he said, pulling it up. His avatar obligingly ran at a wall, jumped, kicked off, and did a backflip, landing on his feet a distance back from the wall—and, potentially, whoever was chasing him, assuming they were dumb enough to rush at a wall. "I've seen variants where they did a front flip, spin flip, or converted it into a wall run—but I had the idea the other day, and it sort of worked, to make a wall-flip kick."
Karen tucked her hair behind her ear and leaned over the desk, getting closer to the screen to read the stats on the move in real-time, leaning on Gordon's arm as she did so. Her mock top was cut off at her ribcage, and her skin was warm against his arm.
She smelled like lavender.
His avatar again ran at the wall, but this time did a kick-off into a roundhouse kick at chin height, through where a direct pursuer would be, carried by momentum even further back—to where a more intelligent pursuer might be—and then landed. Messily.
Most players just used the wall-flip as an escape maneuver, but Gordon wasn't most players. If he could turn it into an attack, it would be another notch in his belt. Animations in Ghostlands weren't just about looking cool—they had rules. Every slot came with context requirements that couldn't be ignored. Wall flips, for example, required a wall to run at and a landing on the same side you started from. Deviate too far, and the system would just spit out a useless file you couldn't upload. That's why coming up with something new was so satisfying—if it worked. That, and the faster you finished one animation, the sooner you were freed up to do the next one—so keeping the time down per move meant you were also more responsive and got more attacks per game tick.
This move followed all the system's rules—it started and ended in the required positions, didn't break the animation slot's context, and somehow still managed to deliver a satisfying hit arc, all in about three quarters the time. Unfortunately, the heels hit the floor first on the landing, causing the avatar to stumble, invalidating the move.
"So that's my version, but I can't stick the landing, so I can't use it yet. I was wondering if I could have some of that Karen magic."
"Uh-huh," she said, skeptical. "You could have done this yourself. Are you running out of excuses to see me?"
He looked up, eyebrows raised ironically. "You basically live in my sister's bed or on my couch. I see you all the time, and if I close my eyes, I see the afterimage. I do appreciate the company in the gym, but… no, I honestly wanted your thoughts on it."
"Mmm-hmm. And what's that?" She indicated the other tab up on his screen, six-hundred odd animation files with names like 'romance_graceful_bow'. He closed the tab. "Personal project, it's not related."
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She gave him an unimpressed, steady gaze from inches away, her bangs blowing into his face slightly with her movement. "Looks like you're burning the midnight oil," she told him. "You need to take care of yourself. The circles under your eyes are THIS big."
She showed him the circles of her fingers, making most of a finger heart with a rounded lower half, then holding it up beneath one blue eye in demonstration.
"'Execute … order 66!'" he joked. "I can't look that bad."
"You need sleep. Everybody needs sleep. I'll have my eye on you."
Threat delivered, she rewound his animation.
"This is a really niche case," she pointed out. Gordon agreed—he'd rarely used the move. Certain quadruped monsters tended to charge, and this was probably designed for them—and in their case, his 'improved' version would be useless, whiffing over their heads. He'd never needed it for them, though, and this would be great against humanoid opponents—if he could get them into the target zone.
"It would look so cool if I pulled it off," he argued, and she, after a moment, squeezed his shoulder.
"Hell yeah, it would," she said. "S,O what are we doing for warmup?"
It was a good question. Fat snowflakes were drifting lazily down outside, covering the Binary Systems Corporation compound with a frosty coat that left it oddly charming, to Gordon's eyes.
"We could run in the snow," he tried to argue.
"We could run in the snow," she mocked, pantomiming herself stepping into and out of deep foot-shaped holes. "We could break our ankles. Let's do something safe and warm instead."
He glanced at her yoga-pants clad figure, and his own drawstring black-to-white spectrum sweatpants, and had to agree she had a point. It was winter, and they should work out inside.
Pilates it was.
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His shoes, customized and sprayed with grit adhesive, patted three times on the matted wall. The wind was cool on his skin, reaching deeply into his sleeveless shirt. His back arched at an angle, one foot curling toward his waist, one lashing into a kick which whistled through the imaginary attacker's headspace. He uncoiled and dropped in a crouch.
Karen narrowed her eyes. "Wait. You stuck the landing."
She smirked at him as if to say: Yep, you're definitely running out of excuses to see me.
Gordon nodded. "Yeah, but no."
"So why are you calling in the cavalry?"
He ran a hand through his hair, sheepish. "Because I cheated a little. Not technically. But… I shaved the timing. Just now, I brought the landing forward. That way I don't stumble, but it means the arc ends too soon—I'd miss anyone who wasn't practically breathing on my neck when I kicked off the wall."
Karen leaned back slightly, processing that. "So it's a trap counter, not a chasebreaker."
"Exactly," Gordon said. "And I want both. But to get that, I need to stay airborne longer—let the spin carry further. That's where the stumble comes in. I can't land it clean unless I change my takeoff angle, or maybe get the rotation tighter."
She rubbed the back of her neck. "Okay. That's a real problem. And you called me because...?"
"Because you're better at solving problems on your feet than I am. And I don't want to train for three hours just to relearn how to land something I can't even upload yet."
"Spot me," she commanded. He nodded and took position near the base of the wall.
Karen walked the floor once, pacing out the run-up. "No offense, but your takeoff's kinda panicked. Like you're launching out of a cannon."
"That's the vibe."
"Sure. But I'm not you."
She jogged the wall, one step, two, pushed off—paused the motion midair, held her balance in a brief moment of suspension, then dropped down deliberately. Her ponytail flicked behind her as she turned to take in his reaction. He nodded, sensing she just wanted him to let her know he'd been watching.
"That's the timing I need," she said. "Now let's add the spin."
She paused and looked at where he'd landed his own. "It would be SO much easier if we didn't have to land feet TOWARDS the wall," she complained. She squinted at the wall, then flashed a sly look at Gordon. "I've got an idea," she said. "But I'll bet it won't work for you."
"Let's see it. We can always adjust afterwards."
"No, I'm pretty sure about this. Ready?"
He took position again, hands half outstretched preemptively.
She ran at the wall. Jump—contact. Bent in slightly at the waist before contact two. Skidded her foot intentionally, a drag down the wall, for contact three at nearly the same instant, pushed off in what was almost a squat, and rotated her body FORWARDS in a tight circle, extending her arms downwards an instant later. The mat was rushing up at her, and she was in plank position, angled head downward, free-falling to meet it.
She pushed off from contact like she was doing a round-off, her legs carrying their momentum even as her torso rebounded, a whip-crack of a kick arcing downward through where a pursuer might have been. Her body was left rotating from the push-off, and she landed lightly on her feet after bouncing easily from the first impact.
"Well damn."