She sounded like she was telling this to herself more than to anyone else, and Risa shook her head unthinkingly.
“I dunno…”
“Huh…?” Mimosa glanced over at her.
“Even if it was just the one time,” Risa said slowly. “Even if I lost everything, I feel like I’d wanna do the jump if I could fly like that.”
“You mean like Racoviţă when she did that miraculous quadruple flip at the Olympics that one time and then retired right after?” Mimosa lowered her voice just the tiniest bit, and Risa opened her eyes wide.
She looked to her side, and her parent’s face mask, normally so funny and kind and dependable, was tinged with a severity she’d never seen before.
“I mean, sure, Racoviţă’s amazing—wait, she was amazing. In a time when basically no one was even doing the triple flip, she takes on the quadruple and pulls it off perfectly, sticking the landing, even… But the impact from a vault landing’s the biggest of all the events. Racoviţă herself had to have known she could really hurt herself on the landing for a quadruple flip. Okay, sure, it’s possible she was already having some trouble before the Olympics. But a single moment of glory in exchange for your life as a gymnast? That’s not a smart deal. That’s what sports is about…,” Mimosa declared, trailing off to an almost whisper, and she buried her face in the knees she had her arms wrapped around.
Risa understood only too well what she was trying to say. The artistic gymnastics club at the private girls’ junior high and high school they attended had been on the scene for a long time. In addition to the teacher-coach who supervised the club, the school had hired three other coaches. The head coach was a famous gymnast who had made it all the way to the Olympics, but tormented by knee trouble, she’d had to retire when she was one step away from a medal. Her constant refrain was “No injuries for athletes,” and if anyone skipped out on stretching before or after practice, she would tear into them.
The word “sports” came from the Latin word “deportare,” which apparently meant “to move away from sorrow,” which equaled “to engage in recreation, play, enjoyment.” If the original meaning was respected, then pushing your body in pursuit of fame and money and injuring yourself was a perversion of this.
But, Risa thought.
How many people in this world kept going with their sport simply because they enjoyed it? If the only reason to participate in a sport was to have fun, then people wouldn’t need to compete in meets. Everyone had ambitions, ideas, desires, which was why they continued to push themselves to their limits. Risa was sure that the Romanian gymnast Racoviţă absolutely had to fly from the vault in the quadruple flip that day. She didn’t know what her reasons were, but she felt like she understood just the tiniest bit that determination to do whatever it took, even if it meant the gymnast’s life in exchange.
“…Mimo,” Risa said, touching a hand to Mimosa Bongo’s back as the other Burst Linker curled up into herself. “It’s okay. I won’t get hurt. One of these days, I’m going to do that quadruple flip. But it won’t be the one time and then I retire. I mean, I won’t beat Racoviţă like that.”
After a few seconds, Mimosa slowly lifted her face and rubbed her nose. “Yeah, you better promise. Also, if you do make level nine and end up in the worst place, don’t use that physical full burst.”
“Listen,” she said, smiling wryly. “You’re the one who even told me about that command in the first place, Mimo.”
“Well, that’s…” Mimosa puffed her cheeks out, sulking slightly. “I figured if you knew Brain Burst was still hiding all these secrets, you’d be a bit hungrier and fight harder on this side, too.”
“Huh? I thought I was fighting for real, though.” Risa had received the BB program from Mimosa in sixth grade and had caught up with her at level six in less than three years. Even if that couldn’t be called fast, she wasn’t exactly dawdling, either.
As if reading her thoughts, Mimosa poked Risa in the side. “Okay, look. The reason I stopped at level six is ’cause once you hit level seven—once you’re a high-ranker—people come after you to kill you or to join you or whatever. A world of hassle, that’s all. If I wanted to, I could be level seven already.”
“What? Really?” Risa looked at her intently. “So then you’d just have two levels to go till nine.”
The horned avatar slid over so that she was nearly falling off the edge of the roof 124 meters above the ground, but she braced herself with the exquisite balance of a gymnast and let out a heavy sigh.
“So the thing is,” she started to say. “Level eight’s a whole can of worms, but level nine is like ten cans of worms. There’s only seven niners in the whole Accelerated World!”
“I know that,” Risa replied promptly. “The Seven Kings of Pure Color. You could join ’em and be the eighth King, Mimo. But then what would you be the king of…? The cow king?”
“A bongo is not a cow!” the other girl yelped. “It’s an antelope!”
“So then the goat king?”
“An antelope is not a goat! Artiodactyla, Bovidae, Bovinae!”
“So a cow, then.”
“Ah…” Mimosa looked annoyed with herself for walking into that one as she cleared her throat several times, as if to change the subject. Her face grew serious again as she continued. “Well, either way, I’m good where I am. But you, Uncia—no, Risa.”
When she called Risa by name, unusual for her in the Accelerated World, the grin also disappeared from Risa’s face.
Mimosa reached out, clasped Risa’s shoulders, and announced, as if choosing each and every word carefully, “The reason I gave you BB is because I wanted you to know that this world is so, so much bigger than you think.”
“This world…” Risa frowned at her. “You mean, the Accelerated World?”
“No.” She shook her head firmly. “I mean, this biiiiiiig world, the Accelerated World and real world thrown together. I mean, yeah, we’re gymnasts, and we even made junior national, and we gotta live up to the expectations of the club coaches and our teammates and everyone in the organization, and more than anyone else, our families. But, like, if that’s the only thing we ever think about, we’ll lose sight of everything else that’s out there. We’ve only lived, like, fifteen, sixteen years in this world, and it’s full, so full of things we don’t know. It’s hiding all kinds of mad stupid secrets like this Brain Burst of ours. Don’t… That’s the thing you can’t forget.”
She lifted her hands off Risa’s shoulders, patted those shoulders, and then laughed, embarrassed.
“Okay…” Risa slowly nodded in reply. “Got it.”
“Good.” Mimosa smiled. “So then, how about we get back to training hell?”
Risa looked up and saw their duel time was down to twenty seconds. Since they had accelerated during a break from gymnastics practice, when they left this stage, they would be in the school gymnasium.
“Yeah. Let’s kick it in the final half.” Risa closed her eyes and readied herself for the deceleration of her mind.