Believe it or not, my family actually had something resembling a vacation after that. I’d expected us to go straight back to Detroit, but it turned out my parents weren’t up for that just yet. Mom was actually pretty insistent that we spend time together relaxing, even if the actual games were over. She thought the ending had been a bit too stressful (to say the least), and didn’t want the vacation to end on that sour note. So, we spent a few more days down there in Phoenix, just hanging out and having… dare I say it, fun. Actual mindless fun, with no real responsibilities.
That also meant it was easy for me to show up at the arena as Paintball and give my full statement about everything that happened to the event organizers. They, in turn, gave me a new LEAT ring. One they promised was completely safe from any tampering. But I was still gonna have Wren take a look at it back home before even thinking about actually putting the thing on.
And, of course, having those few extra days with no responsibilities gave me more time to spend with Paige, whenever my family was busy. And that was just… seriously the most amazing time I could imagine. We hung out, not as Paintball and Poise, but as Cassidy and Paige. We went to a couple movies, a theme park, even a museum (Paige’s choice). We had fun, without thinking about Pittman or any of the problems back in Detroit. And one of those afternoons I actually spent with the rest of the team. We took in the sights, screwed around, forgot everything else. It was finally a real, honest, amazing vacation. I hadn’t even realized how badly I had needed that.
It was Wednesday, June 24th when we finally called it quits and went back home. Which was the main part I wasn’t looking forward to. Not the being home part, I was kind of ready for that. No, what I was dreading was the going part. Because going involved taking the private plane back to Detroit. Which meant testing whether that airsickness thing had been a one-time fluke.
It wasn’t. Oh boy was it ever not. In some ways, it felt worse. Maybe because I’d actually been anticipating it. Either way, I felt even more sick than I had the first time, almost as soon as we took off. Ulp, this was bad. So bad. Thankfully, Mom had anticipated it too, and brought along some nausea medication. That… didn’t get rid of the effect entirely, but it did help some, at least.
At least the flight didn’t take that long. I had no idea what I was going to do the next time we had to fly somewhere like Europe, or Africa. Maybe I could just take a very strong sedative and sleep through the whole thing. Even if the thought of being unconscious during a whole extended flight with my parents right there made me more nervous than I was willing to admit, even just to myself. It was bad enough feeling like I was being drugged on that anti-nausea medication for that flight. I’d spent far too much time paranoid that being drugged like that would make me say something I really shouldn’t. I’d even whispered a demand to Izzy to shut me up if she had to.
Fortunately, it didn’t come up. I kept my mouth shut, focusing on not letting my stomach do too many loop-de-loops, and the flight passed without incident. And just like that, the flight was over. After what had turned out to be a very eventful couple weeks in Phoenix, we were finally home.
We’d come back early in the morning, before even eating breakfast. That was intentional, not only to give me a chance to go through that without having a full stomach, but also because Mom wanted to have a big brunch at a nice restaurant that we all loved here in Detroit. She and Dad were both about to have to throw themselves into work again. They had important meetings scheduled all day long, apparently. And no, I wasn’t sure how many of them were legitimate things, and how many had to do with the Ministry. Either way, they were going to be busy, and Mom wanted all of us to have one more nice meal together before they jumped back into all that.
So, we did that, which was great. The food was even more delicious than I remembered. Maybe at least partially because I was relieved about being off the damn plane. Then Mom and Dad went off to their meetings, Simon bounced to do whatever he was off to do, and Izzy had to go do Minority stuff. Which left me all by myself, standing in front of the restaurant. I’d told my parents I was going to meet up with some friends from school, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to say, ‘hey, I’m gonna go hang out with my Tech-Touched teammate so she can take a look at this LEAT ring and tell me if it’s got any mind-control or spy tricks in it. See you later!’”
Yeah, I didn’t think that’d go over too well. Though it might’ve been interesting to make that be the way I finally told them what I knew. The fact that it was at all tempting was probably just the nausea meds talking. But in any case, I was left in front of the restaurant, and made my way to an alley a few blocks away before changing into my costume. A minute after that, I was painting my way to the top of that building, then leaping to the next one over with a loud whoop that echoed down through the alley, and made a few people out on the street look up curiously. I just waved down at them before flinging myself to yet another roof with an even louder whoop of joy.
I didn’t go straight to the shop just yet. I’d been out of town for two weeks, and then I was cramped up in that damn plane, feeling sick for hours. I’d spent all morning with my family, being anxious about the flight, about coming home, about all of it. I needed to stretch my legs a bit first. I needed to take a long run through the city and just… let myself live in the moment here.
God, this felt nice. I was home. Sure, being on vacation was fun. Hell, going through Phoenix like this had been cool. I didn’t know that place at all, every roof was different, every jump took me somewhere I hadn’t been before. It was a fun feeling. But this, the familiarity, running across the roofs of a city I knew so well, this was nice too. It was more than nice. I’d missed Detroit. I had missed being here. Having a vacation was nice, but there really was no place like home.
I spent about an hour or so like that, getting reacquainted with the place while playing up a bit for a few crowds here and there. People shouted encouragement to me, welcoming me back, and going on about how they’d won money off the games thanks to me. A few called out questions about Casura, but I didn’t engage with those. I wasn’t exactly ready to get into it at all, let alone for a crowd of normal people and the cameras they were holding. I just wanted to chill.
In hindsight, maybe I wasn’t just taking a simple run through the city. Maybe I was also running from anything serious, at least a bit. But I deserved it, after all the shit I’d been through recently. I deserved a chance to just be happy that I was alive, that my friends were alive, that I had told Paige how I felt about her, and… and all of it. I deserved the chance to just enjoy things right now.
Later, I would get back to work. There was still plenty to deal with, between whatever the Garden of Badb people were doing in the city, the ongoing war between the gangs, Deicide’s fake death and what would be an eventual return under a new identity, the Ministry going through whatever they were doing to reaffirm their control over the city after Sleeptalk, whatever secret Abyssal-related stuff Maki was researching, and probably plenty of other shit I wasn’t even thinking about right then. There would be time for all of it. But right now, I just needed this.
Eventually, after thoroughly ‘stretching my legs’ and getting reacquainted with the city, I made my way toward the shop. The last couple blocks were spent going through the alleys and making sure I wasn’t being followed, especially after I’d made such a big scene earlier. The last thing I wanted to do right then was lead a whole crowd of onlookers right to Wren’s back door. I had a feeling she and Fred both might not exactly enjoy being put under that sort of attention.
“Hey, Paintball!” The greeting came before I’d even made it into the shop itself. I’d just come around the corner through the maze of alleys leading up to the back door, when Wren herself popped up from behind a stack of crates that were lined up there. She was waving cheerfully. “Come on, come on, I wanna show you something! I got a present for you, it’s really cool!”
“Uh, a present?” I hesitated, then shrugged before walking that way. “You know it’s not even close to my birthday, right? Besides, weren’t you supposed to be taking a break for awhile?” On the way over there, I couldn’t help but look around reflexively. This would kinda be a bad time for some random guy to come strolling around the corner looking for a wall to pee on, only to see me having some casual conversation with the girl who ran the pawn shop right next to him.
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Okay, when I actually tied my paranoia to a chair and thought about it like a normal person, that probably wouldn’t actually be that suspicious, or revealing. But still, we didn’t need an audience.
“Don’t worry!” Wren assured me, bouncing up and down excitedly while her hand gave a quick, absent wave toward her own face. “I’ve got Security Contacts! Err, I don’t mean I have contacts in security, I have contacts and they’re connected to the security system! If there was anyone close enough to see us, they’d be on the cameras, and then they’d show up in my contacts!”
“Oh. Uh, useful.” Coughing once, I shrugged and gave up looking for spies. It sounded like she had that pretty thoroughly covered. Instead, I went right over to join her. “And what about the break thing? You know you don’t have to keep working on stuff when you’re on vacation, right?”
She just stuck her tongue out at me. “I like making things!” Though with her tongue out, it was more like, “I ay akik eengs!” Then she repeated herself properly with a giggle before adding, “It’s still a vacation when I can make stuff I wanna make instead of just stuff I need to make. And I really wanted to make this! Dooo you see anything missing?” With that, the kid turned in a circle and spread her arms out wide, clearly waiting for me to look around and spot the difference.
Obviously, I played along. “Hmm… well the shop’s still there, so you didn’t move that… still got a dumpster down that way, looks like you added all those crates… Wait, is this actually just a trick question, and the thing that’s missing is ‘open space’ because all those crates are here now?”
The girl giggled again, head shaking quickly. “Nooo, the crates aren’t the thing, and it’s not a trick question. Your dirtbike, it’s your dirt bike! See, it’s not here.” She gestured again, hand waving toward the spot by the door where it was usually chained up when I wasn’t using it.
“Wh-- oh, you’re right, uh, wait, is that in the crates?” I knew that wasn’t what she was talking about, but it was too fun to tease her about them. “Let me guess, there’s one piece in each of those, buried under a mountain of packing peanuts, and I have to put the whole thing together again.” I thought about it for a second before adding a solemn, “My present is learning patience.”
“That’d be a dumb present,” Wren informed me, before holding out what looked like a metal stick, about two inches thick and a foot wide, with a pair of rubber hand grips on either end.
Taking the thing, I turned it over curiously. “Okay, it sorta looks like the handlebars if you stuck them together into one thing. I--” The girl was pantomiming a twisting motion with her hands, one forward and one backward. So, holding the stick by the grips, I did just that, twisting in either direction. The stick started to pull apart, and I went with it, pulling and twisting at the same time.
That’s when it happened. Even as I pulled the two halves of the stick apart, something on the inside fell into the space between them. Not a small something either, it was a big thing, the sudden additional weight yanking the grip parts out of my hands before I quickly grabbed on again. And with a heavy thump, I wasn’t holding a simple stick anymore. I was holding the handlebars of the dirt bike that had suddenly appeared right there where the central tube part had been. It was as though pulling the handlebars apart like that made the rest of the bike just spontaneously manifest out of nothing.
“Wha-- how di-- you just…” My mouth opened and shut a couple more times with a weak, confused noise as I stared at the thing before managing, “You made this in your spare time!?”
“It’s no big deal,” Wren insisted. “It’s not that different from your costume bag, really. The rest of the motorcycle gets stored in a special shed. When you activate the thing there by twisting the handlebars apart, it instantly transports it over to where they are and attaches itself to them. When you’re done, you hit the button on either end of the handlebars and push inward, and the bike’ll go back to the shed. Then you’ll just have the stick again. So you can use it whenever. It’s cool, huh? It… it is cool?” The kid was staring at me with those big puppy eyes, looking hopeful.
“Okay, dude, first, it is a really big deal,” I started, after testing those instructions until I was standing there with just the stick again. The dirt bike was gone. “And two, it is really freaking cool.” I started to reach out with the stick to lightly bop her on the head, then thought better of it. Sure, it’d almost definitely be fine, but there was always the chance that the bike would pop right back out again, and killing my Techy by hitting her with a motorcycle jack-in-the-box might look bad.
Instead, I carefully set the thing down on one of those crates before pulling the girl into a hug. “I can’t believe you put this thing together in your off time. You’re pretty amazing, you know that?”
Blushing slightly, Wren offered a weak shrug before returning the embrace. “It’s like I said, it wasn’t a big deal. I was testing ways to protect the shop, like, making weapons pop out, and I used the bike in the tests. It worked pretty good, so I just… you know, did a little bit more with it.”
“Well, it’s damn cool,” I assured her, before stepping back. I tried the twist-pull thing again, a quick smiley face appearing on my visor as the dirt bike appeared once more. “Oh yeah, I can totally work with this. A portable Paintcycle? Wren, you are just the coolest Techy in the world.”
That blush deepened as the kid dropped her gaze to kick the ground self-consciously. Then she peeked up to say, in a soft, solemn voice, “I’m really glad you’re okay, Paintball. Er, Cassidy.”
“I’m glad I’m okay too,” I agreed with a quick nod. “And I’m even more glad that you guys are all okay. But come on, you totally swear you actually got some real rest this week after all that was over?” That bit came as I painted a red smiley with a suspiciously raised eyebrow on my visor.
Wren giggled softly before raising a hand. “Tech’s honor, I took a break. Uncle Fred made sure. We took the Cuddles and Qwerty on an overnight drive and camped in the van next to the river. It was fun! We made toasted marshmallows and s'mores. They were really messy, but good! Then we took them fishing. You've gotta see the one Cherry caught!” She dug in her pocket before coming out with a phone, holding it up after a moment to show me an image of the tiny stuffed duckling proudly standing at the edge of a table, using both wings to hold up the tail fin of a large bass that reached all the way to the floor. The fish had to be at least three feet long.
“She caught it all by herself!” Wren cheerfully informed me. “She reeled it in and every-- okay, she only got it about three quarters of the way in before it pulled off the line, and then she had to jump in after it and beat it up before it could get away. But she did that by herself too! And pulled it out. It’s in the freezer cuz she wanted to wait till you and everybody else were back to try it! I, umm, I caught a fish too, but not as big as that one. So did Uncle Fred and Maple. Cherry fished right where Qwerty said she should, and that’s why she caught the big one. We’ve got so much!”
I gave a low, impressed whistle while giving that picture another look. “Well, I know where to come as soon as we wanna have a fish fry. Yeah, as soon as everyone's ready for that, we'll make a whole big thing out of it. We'll have a party. You think Fred can cook those things right?”
“Qwerty can help with that too!” Wren’s head was bobbing quickly as she thought about it. “Ooh, and we can have movies! We can put movies up on a big projector screen in the workshop!”
“That sounds awesome,” I agreed, before looking back at the dirt bike. “For now, I think we need to do a couple things with this. First…” I started moving my hand along it, changing the colors around, making new designs for a moment just to see how it looked before adjusting or simply discarding them. “If this is gonna be the official Paintcycle now, it really needs to look the part.”
First, I made the whole thing black, to have a nice base to work off of. A stylized representation of my helmet, in white with a dark red visor, appeared on the front fender that sloped down over the wheel. The metal wheel spokes were made alternatingly purple and gold (technically yellow, but I was able to adjust the shade to make it gold-ish). Along the rear fender, I put a gloved hand, outstretched with what looked like a line of red paint going right to the end of it. Finally, both sides of the main body were filled with images of Trevithick, Poise, Style, Calvin, Hobbes, Alloy, Qwerty, and me fighting masked ninjas. I figured that was better than putting specific Fells. Along the bottom on each side, I made the name Paintcycle appear in fancy red and gold cursive script.
“Ta da,” I announced, stepping back to gesture at my work. “I was gonna put the Cuddles on there, but I’m not sure they actually want to be that open about being here. They sorta disappeared pretty quick back there when others started showing up. Uh, they’re okay, right?”
“Uh huh!” Wren nodded hurriedly. “They just, uh, yeah, they aren’t ready for everyone to know where they are yet. And… and the fight with Casura, it was… umm… scary. We were all scared.”
“We were,” I confirmed, reaching out to tug the girl into another hug. “But we’re cool now.”
“Definitely cool,” she agreed, before adding, “Hey, you said we needed to do a couple things with this. What was the other thing besides painting it?”
I straightened up. “Well, besides painting it, you need to get your costume on so you can go for a ride across the city with me.”
Wren blinked, then beamed. “Really?”
“Hell yeah, dude,” I tapped the side of my head with my knuckles. “We’ve gotta take the Paintcycle on her maiden drive. So get suited up.
“Let’s go see what this baby can do.”
Joke Tags: Gotta Love How They Just Casually Mention Needing To Be Prepared For The NEXT TIME Their Parents Take Them To Europe Or Africa
