[for Bitty] ice ice baby

[and_survive]

She'd been in Darrow some two and a half years now, and she was still discovering parts of it. She wondered if it was like that for people who'd grown up with the world like this, or if they just naturally knew all the parts of their city. Or maybe they didn't, and just didn't have the drive to note every part of it. In Ellie, this urge was part curiosity, fascination with the functioning of a city that wasn't ruins and remnants, and part preparation for the day when it might be.

Today, though, the former was winning out. She didn't know why she hadn't spotted this one before, but even today she'd initially thought that Darrow Ice & Aquatics would be some sort of industrial business. But the building's shape and location was wrong, and there were kids in and out, and so she'd followed.

She'd found the pool first, and stared at it for a long time. Some kids had been having a swimming lesson. She'd stared at that, too.

Then she'd gone and looked at the other part of the building and anything she might have been feeling with regards to the idea of swimming had been driven clear out of her head by the fact that they had a fucking frozen lake in here.

She knew about ice skating from seeing people do it in the winter. But that had been in the winter, outside. But this was spring, and inside. They'd built a building and filled it with water and somehow frozen the whole thing and kept it frozen, just to have somewhere to skate around. She almost couldn't conceive of what she was looking at.

"Holy shit," she said, heedless of the fact she was standing directly on an entrance to the ice, blocking the way.

Comments

[and_survive]

"Today, the wall, tomorrow, whoever has the puck," Ellie said, speeding up and then experimenting with letting herself slow down naturally, without just playing it out and ramming into something.

"So, I mean, yeah, let's get Gary on side."

[puckandpie]

Laughing, I nod. "You're gonna be great at this, I can already tell," I say, watching as she pushes ahead again and manages to stop on her own. "I think most of the rec leagues tend to frown on too much physical contact, but it's still hockey. Sometimes it's unavoidable."

And I'm pretty confident I can schmooze Gary onto my side. If nothing else, I can promise him a year's supply of lemon meringue in payment.

"Do you wanna come with me sometime to watch a game? That's really the best way to really get a feel for it. And I explain it all while we watch!"

[and_survive]

"Hell yeah, I wanna see this shit," Ellie said, pushing herself into motion again. "Best way, right? A friend of mine tried to explain football to me, once -- I mean, pretty much for days -- but since no one had played football in twenty years, I still have no idea what it actually looks like."

She knew a lot of the rules, and the theory, but the only way to know what a game of anything like was to see one.

[puckandpie]

"Oh goodness, football would be impossible to understand without watchin'," I agree, grinning as she starts skating forward again. She's still a little wobbly, but her determination is wonderful; I can already tell she's gonna take to hockey almost immediately. "My dad's a football coach back home, actually. He tries gettin' me into it when I was little, but it never really took."

Mostly because of my size, I think. And because I've never really liked hitting all that much. Figure skating was a lot more fun and the only bruises I endured were from falling on the ice.

"Did you have anything like this back home?" I ask her then. "Not the skating, obviously. But sports? Games?"

[and_survive]

"We had games, I guess? But it was always just- kids kicking a ball around, or just, doing whatever, you know?" she said, not sure how to put it, the difference between the sort of thing that happened here and what happened in the Quarantine Zone, where recreation wasn't codified, it was just what you did in stolen time and stolen spaces.

"I sort of come from one of the shitty worlds," she said, shrugging, wobbling again with the motion and putting her arms straight out to the side to regain her balance, which maybe stole some of the dramatic revelation from that one. Kind of how she liked it.

[puckandpie]

Ellie wobbles and I slow just a little, holding out a hand for her to grab if she needs it. But she recovers well on her own, regaining her balance and continuing on in a way that definitely solidifies she's getting the hang of this really quickly. I know she's still got a ways to go before she's ready to gear up for an actual hockey game, but it's obvious she's a quick learner.

And I'm not sure what she means by one of the 'shitty worlds' exactly, but I can probably harbor a guess. "Yeah, it seems like there are a lot of people here from shitty worlds," I agree, grinning faintly at the sound of that word on my tongue. Weird how it feels to use that now and not be referring to a person. "My friend Thomas is, too. He barely remembers anything though, which might be for the best. I've been teaching him to skate a little here and there. Slowly trying to break him into the hockey thing, too." I pause then, wondering how much I should ask given that we've just met before deciding to just go for it. "So what was it like where you're from? If you wanna talk about it, of course. You don't have to."

[and_survive]

"It's okay," Ellie said, slowing down a little, because even if she could talk and go fast -- she couldn't, really -- it wasn't exactly convenient. Didn't exactly fit.

"It was- basically, the world ended," she said. "Before I was even born. There's this fungus that turns people into monsters, and when it showed up everything fell apart." She shrugged. "Like I said. Shitty world. But it was just sort of- how things were. Until I got here, where you still have ice cream trucks and, you know. Buildings where they just keep whole frozen fuckin' ponds."

[puckandpie]

"Oh, wow," I breathe, just trying to even imagine such a thing. I'm not sure what kind of monsters she means, if they're like Thomas's zombies things or something else altogether. I'm not sure I want her to clarify either.

I'm curious though. It's hard not to be when something like a skating rink is so familiar, so normal to me, and she can't stop marveling at it. "Did you ever see one? Or were they all gone by the time you were born?"

[and_survive]

"I saw a lot more than one," Ellie said, slowing down a touch more and then accelerating perhaps a little fiercely, wobbling slightly alarmingly; she wasn't good enough to put that sort of energy into it. "I lived in a Quarantine Zone, didn't see any for a long time, but then- we'd sneak out from time to time, and we had run ins. And then later I left and it was nothing but run-ins."

That was maybe overstating. There'd been long periods where they hadn't seen any infected. But generally every time they hit a population center, anywhere there'd been people, there'd been infected, too.

[puckandpie]

She slows for a second and then zooms a head, wobbling in a way that looks a little worrying, though she doesn't fall. Grinning, I push forward to catch up with her then spin to skate backwards, facing her as she continues talking.

I can't begin to imagine what a Quarantine Zone might look like, but in my head I see a lot of zipped tents and white suits and biohazard signs. "But why would you leave?" I ask, frowning before glancing over my shoulder real quick to make sure I'm not about to stake into anyone. "Weren't you afraid you'd get infected, too? I mean, that's why you were in the Quarantine Zone, right? I mean, I obviously don't much about any of this -- I'm just pulling from things I've seen in movies."

[and_survive]

"It's a long story," Ellie said, looking down to try and work out what parts of it to tell, how to arrange it, or whether to simply demur entirely. "Things kind of..."

This proved to a mistake, though, because looking at her feet turned out to throw her off her hard kept balance, one foot coming down wrong, blade striking the ice instead of gliding across it, and then she was going over, arms windmilling.

Once she'd come to a halt, which was fairly quickly now that she was on the ice, she said, "...fell over."

[puckandpie]

"Oh goodness!"

I don't move fast enough to stop her fall and I'm cringing as I skate up beside her. She doesn't look hurt, at least, if just a little put out and I can't help but smile a little as I bend to check on her. "Are you alright? Is your butt okay? That looked like kinda a hard landing."

Goodness knows, I know a little bit about falling on ice. It's a lot easier when you have ample padding, I'll say that.