camppetoskey | WEEK 4

WEEK 4

Another week begins at camp, though it comes with a bit of a somber note. More than a third of the campers have died or gone missing, leaving a noticeable absence in camp. With five gone in one week, will anyone really be able to make it the full eight weeks? That is yet to be seen.

The weather has dipped a little, going down to the mid-70s. At least the pastier kids won't have to worry about sunburns, right? Though the waves coming off the lake have been starting to get a little high. And the RVs have changed once more, though anyone with a keen eye might notice that some of them look familiar...

The Wii is gone, and in its place is a shiny new WiiU, now sporting Bayonetta 2 and Splatoon in addition to the Wii games left behind. Unfortunately, there's no internet, so you're stuck with single player mode only. Leon, Mami, Clarke, Kon, and Natsume are now gone from the Mii menu, and the music has changed again.

This week there seems to be a baseball diamond set up in the field, and there will probably be sports-themed activities later on. But with only 18 living campers left, will anyone really be in the mood for some games?

18 CAMPERS REMAIN.

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[ When he's addressed, Boa opens his eyes and the now fully formed spinning top falls to the ground with a clanking noise, which causes Boa himself to look down at it in amazement.]

It... It seems so. This is incredible.

[Lenka crouches down to examine it now that it isn't in danger of magically doing something, like spinning at top speed and slicing his fingers. He pokes cautiously at it before picking it up to examine it. This is possibly the first Beyblade he's looked at up close. He finally made it. He's here in the land of spinning tops.]

You can make these now... Can you make anything else?

[He does sound duly intrigued, though he's perhaps not giving this particular creation the credit it deserves. To be fair, he's just curious about the powers.]

I don't think so. Or at least, it wouldn't be intuitive. I can probably make these because it's what I'm most familiar with?

[ which is awesome. Take that, every other blader.]

[Well, at least Boa's taking this week in stride already; perhaps more than in stride, given how enthusiastic he seems to be about this. On the other hand, if he's just using whatever magic he's gotten to make more of these to use... maybe it can keep the younger (and older) kids distracted.

Lenka wisely says nothing about that part, for now. He hasn't tried it for himself, after all.]

So you need to be an expert in something to make it... I don't know whose magic this is.

[Like, honestly, all he knows about Shirou's magic is 'swords', still.]

I don't know either, actually.

[ There are a lot of powers around to all memorize and they're easier to remember when you've seen them - Boa hasn't really watched Shirou summon swords yet. ]

Hey, can you give me that Beyblade? It's the first I made, I need to see how it actually turned out.

[He's watched Shirou summon swords and all, but there's just a bit of a leap to be making between Unlimited Blade Works and Unlimited Beyblade Works.]

Oh. Sorry.

[Here, have your Very First Fate/Bey Night. Maybe it should be mounted on the Cabin 3 wall to commemorate.]

I didn't know this was the first try. It looks... like the real thing.

[Or at least, the glimpses he's caught of the real thing. You'd expect magic shaping to produce blobs on first try or something.]

[ Boa turns it in his hand, pretty amazed with his own work. It's not 100% accurate in every corner, but it looks and feels like a completely functional Beyblade that he just... made. ]

It really does... I didn't believe it before I tried it. Beys are made from three detailed parts after all... Whoever this magic is from has an incredible power.

[It's nice to see Boa get enthusiastic about something, even if Lenka still has no real idea why. There's so much screaming in the camp that he forgets sometimes how resilient their younger members are, on the whole. Kids, man.]

Three detailed parts? You've made one of these before?

[He means non-magically, rather -- it does look like a pretty intricate spinning top, even if he's a little baffled by it, too. It is probably not a weapon like he first assumed (the blade part is a little misleading), but it sure looks like one. Hm.]

I guess we'll have to find out what magic this is. I feel like... we would have noticed.

[If someone could do things like this?? Why haven't they. Fushigi mystery.]

I haven't made one, no. I just used them a lot, so I am very familiar with their makeup. After all, every variation in how they're made impacts their battle capacity.

[ Making one in the traditional way sounds fun, too, now that he thinks about it. It's not a thought he would have ever entertained back at home where everything was in unquestioned order... but here, a lot of new ideas get introduced to his head and he's forced into so many new activities that change as a whole seems more feasible. ]

Battle capacity?

[Isn't it great how Boa's capacity for Beyblade nerdery is being expanded, this is surely character development.

In the meantime, said Beyblade nerdery is confusing Lenka further, but not like, in a bad way. He's lost most of the time about everything here anyway, from the Wii to the woods. He might also spend a lot of time lost back home. Them's the breaks when you're a hick from post-apocalyptic nowhere. He's learned to just sort of... nod along.]

How exactly... does it work?

[ ... right, Lenka was under the impression a Beyblade was a weapon initially and Boa never thought to correct him. He almost forgot about that. ]

When you have to of these, they can fight each other. It's a sport.

[ SORRY LENKA, he... mildly lied by omission in week 1 and now looks a little sheepish about it. ]

Though technically you can break stuff with them too. I showed Lance earlier, that's why there's a bench wrecked in the mess hall.

Oh. So that's what you meant.

[Which means the Beyblades are some heavy-duty toys, more than anything else; despite all the sharp parts and Boa's newly magical way of making them. Lenka's never really done a sport, but he knows that most of them used to be taken almost as seriously as marriage and money and maybe death, too. He's not sure how that works, exactly. The old world is a mystery.

He doesn't really mind the lie by omission, though -- it's kind of amusing, but Boa seems invested. He'll just quirk an eyebrow at him without saying anything else about it.]

... You wanted to show Lance you could break things?

[It is somewhat interesting that he can break benches with spinning tops but...?]

Uh...

[ THIS IS EMBARRASSING IN HINDSIGHT... ]

Essentially, yes. He kept belittling it and didn't believe me when I said it takes physical strength, so I thought a demonstration would be faster.

... You probably should have used a tree, or something.

[He sounds a bit bemused about it, but it's not like Boa was the only one doing harebrained things to show he could defend himself -- or to defend his Beyblade, rather, it's completely debatable where his priorities were. After dealing with Chuuta and Mitsuru earlier last week he's just kind of glad things didn't escalate.

Lenka nods at the new Beyblade, for now.]

So if you want to test that one...

[Just take it outside, apparently. You could call him the responsible one, or you could just call him the guy who learned not to break things inside.]

[ Look, he was inside and it was technically the middle of a meeting, so he didn't really want to drag Lance outside and have all that build-up for what was meant to be a simple demonstration. A kind of unnecessary demonstration, but simple nevertheless. ]

So you're suggesting I try to damage a tree first of all?

[ ... why... not....? Maybe...? A little confusing as an idea though. ]

[Boa, breaking a bench as a demonstration in the middle of a meeting is perhaps more disruptive to the meeting than dragging Lance outside and then yelling at him about Beyblades. But hey, bygones are bygones. Lenka seems to think it over for a moment and then shrugs.]

If you used a bench, then you can use a tree. Or one of the campfire logs, if you really want to.

[I mean, he's wrecked plenty of trees with his God Arc at this point, though not normally for showing off purposes. There isn't a whole lot else in camp you should be wrecking.]

Or... I guess you'd make campfire logs.

[He found this out in week one. Wreck a tree, make a campfire. Or fix windows, as it were. He's not sure if a Beyblade would go that far, though.]

[ Boa just stares at Lenka for a bit. It's not... an ineffective test of strength for a Beyblade exactly? Especially in a context where he may be needing to use them as weapons after all... but for that he'd take Bahamut anyway, which is more powerful than any of the others. ]

I could also just get out the Beyblade stadium and give it a normal test run, you know?

... Or you could do that.

[Look, he doesn't know how hardcore you're going here.

Or what the standards for magical Beyblades made out of thin air are. If he were a warier sort he'd be more suspicious of the whole thin air thing in the first place. As it is, if Boa wasn't bringing up breaking benches for the sake of science then good for him. He gets a head tilt from Lenka for the Beyblade stadium thing.]

What would a normal test run look like, for things like this?

Well, you'd let them fight another Beyblade that you're already familiar with and see how it performs against that. And of course do general tests as in 'how long does it spin' and so on, which doesn't require battling.

And I suppose that is really the only kind of test I can run here. I can teach people how to battle, but... I'm too strong by comparison for those battles to really mean anything.

[ He's been having a blast blading with Mitsuru anyway, skill difference be damned, but nobody here has a chance of catching up to him before camp is over, Boa is sure of that. ]

So you'd use your own for that kind of test. Stress tests?

[Look, he is trying very hard to understand this sport from a world that doesn't really do sports so much; or at least not in his corner of it, in any real capacity. They might knock a ball around in their spare time or something, but professional sportsball? Few and far between, if at all.

You really start paring down on careerpaths when enough of humanity gets wiped out at some point. But hmm.]

I guess you must have been doing this for a long time.

I don't even remember when exactly I started.

[ He probably should remember that? But he comes up with nothing. It's just been in his life for what feels like a very long time when you're 11. ]

I've only trained seriously for the last year though.

[ Seriously in this case means 'torture chamber training level'............. ]

You do train a lot. It's important in your world?

[Beyblading world sure is something, huh.

But yeah, Lenka's definitely noticed Boa's tendency to train as though he's about to go off to spinny top war in the next minute; he hadn't known it was for spinny tops, granted, which is prompting some curious looks from him. But he doesn't say anything about it for the moment. Like with Richie's potty mouth and Eddie's Olympic-level screaming and Chuuta's cooking and Mitsuru's magic, he figures it's a coping mechanism at this point.

And also important enough to actually affect the power swap, apparently? Hm.]

[ He's certainly not wrong to think of it as coping, though Boa himself neither realizes it nor would ever admit it even if he did. ]

As a competition, yes. It's a big deal.

[ He pauses a little. ]

But it doesn't affect the fate of the world or anything like it. It's sport.

[ It feels weird to diminish it like this? But he's heard so many stories of peril in other worlds that goes far beyond his imagining that it's hard to not clarify anymore. ]

[That's what coping is for, really. You don't think of it as coping, you just think of it as the way to move forward no matter what -- something to keep you going despite everything else going on around you. Security and an existing path in the woods.]

I guess it wouldn't.

[It's thoughtful, because he, too, hears a lot about the end of the world and saving the world and all that jazz (and is one of those stories of peril himself, come to think of it), but it's the idea of something just being a sport that's interesting to him.]

But there would be... worldwide competitions? For something like this.

[That's how these things usually worked, right?]

[ Boa nods, now with more emphasis again. It's a damper on his enthusiasm that sport, to others here, would mean absolutely nothing, but... this he can talk about. ]

The God Blader's Cup is the next global one coming up. It's an individual tournament in which only twelve bladers are even set to appear in it.

[ And then a grin. ]

I'm one of them.

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