basic_powers | Seattle, the invitation for Dinah

Dinah's workout clothes of choice are minimal and efficient; shorts coupled with a sports vest that doubles as a support bra in one garment. It doesn't do anything to hide the fact that she is, in fact, very high on the physical fitness scale - Beauford may not have a six pack, but she's not far away from one of her own.

It says something about how much her normal clothes hide about her - in barefeet she walks deliberately, like stepping into a dojo.

But her excited grin is still all Dinah.

"Hey."

"Hey, ready?"

There's a map this side of the changing rooms...if they continue down the hall they'll reach the regular exercise areas. Swimming pool is right next to the changing rooms, and on the hallway to the left is a sign pointing up some stairs.

Parkour Course.

"Always."

At least part of Dinah's looking around is out of normal wanting to be aware of her surroundings. Some of the rest is the cute guys in shorts. But she keeps up with him anyway.

Good cause he's definitely making some pace to get up into this course and play, without even glancing sideways at the other women in the gym.

Upstairs is... well. It is a maze of blocks, vaults, and walls on the floor. Above, once you see through the strong rope netting, is thick steel pipes, air ducts, rings and ropes. This is the big kids jungle gym, with a nice little map of the possible work-out courses on the side of the wall indicating the two-stories worth of playable ground.

"...last one around the beginner's circuit buys the first drinks!" He declares, taking off in first a sprint, a jump, and then a vault over one of the padded walls.

"Ha!"

Dinah laughs at his back, a second behind him in reflexes that doesn't mean much once she gets going. After the first run up, she leaps and vaults and then she's only behind him because the opportunity to pass isn't there yet.

And there will be chances a plenty to pass him shortly. After all, who says she had to play follow the leader as he double-kong vaults over the top of one wall before launching himself at the next one? There's a perfectly good wall for her to run across if she's so inclined.

There's that.

Or she could flip her legs beneath her and slip by with a dash vault, that conveniently manages to compensate for her shorter stride length. She follows her own momentum and pulls forward.

"Ah hahaha!"

THIS is what he is talking about. So what if she's got the lead? There's a nice big wall coming up ahead, and he's going to make the most of his body length to jump to the wall corner and get that nice wall-to-wall vault climb going and get over the wall just a second before her.

Dinah laughs at the same time, not minding that second in the slightest, because she's smaller and lighter and in areas which involve lifting that weight over walls, just that little bit faster.

They're neck and neck for a time.

Oooh neck and neck and they're halfway through the blue-marked 'beginner' course. The implied rule seems to be that you stick to the blue-marked areas. They're coming up to the harder areas now, the walls now have holes in them, in varying heights and sizes.

And Beauford just went handsprung into one feet first, catching the outer seam of the padded wall, using it to swing forward, get both feet on the wall above the hole and fully launch himself to the next well.

Dinah, with no formal parkour training, doesn't bother going over. She picks the largest hole, halfway up, and dives through. After somersault off the floor that sneds her through the next at a run to scale the next. Having her hands forward, it gives her the opportunity to swithc into a kong vault, going for the next wall.

The next wall is hanging from the ceiling as it turns out. So Dinah won't have to scale it to get to the pedestals coming up, one smaller and one that looks to be higher than the clearence of the hanging wall will allow for. And she won't have to look up as she kong vaults through the second wall, as a thump of hands landing and then pushing off means that Beauford landed on the top of the second wall, and has leapt through the hole in the third hanging wall to land on the pedestal to somersault into a run.

Dinah grabs hold of the bottom of the hanging wall, and she swings herself under and up, landing on a smaller pedestal to the right of the larger. It's then simple to spring up onto the larger one.

And then she's just racing across to the other end - on a flat, she's got speed on her side.

If this were just a flat space ahead, she would! In a few more yards ahead, the pedestal drops out into floorspace again. Beyond that, is a series of not-padded swiss cheese structures meant for climbing, one medium and one very large cylinder to the left, and two rectangles to the right, all interconnected.

There's one shortcut, a series of balance beams going over all of this to the huge cylindrical pedestal at the end. To get up there, Dinah would have to make one HECK of a leap upwards to catch the end of the bar and pull herself up.

Dinah has the two seconds of pedestal to decide on this, and decides that yes, she's going to try, launching herself into the air at the very edge, not without a very quick prayer - if this fails, she'll forfeit the run.

Her fingers hit the run, and she grabs the opportunity, swinging her legs up and over onto the beam, from which she launches into a run again.

Even that slowed her down, however, so it's still going to be close, and now she can't see Beauford.

She'll spot him down below in a second as she moves from the first beam to the second. Or at least the flash of movement as he leaps from one of the small pedestals inside the large swiss cheesed cylinder to a curved wall, executes a spotless run up the side of the inner side of a small curved wall to butterfly leap to the second larger inner pedestal.

For whatever reason, he's opted to skip that obvious shortcut and save what few fractions of a second he had in the lead earlier. He doesn't see Dinah either for now, either, but from the looks, he's just got a few climbs left to get to the end.

Dinah catches sight of him, and grins. She could sprint the rest of the beams, but they zigzag back around and the end is right ahead of her, so she leaps from one straight to the next and uses that momentum to launch herself down, over the final largest pedestal and into the door marking the end. Hitting at high speed, she tucks her head and rolls, and is well clear of the end before she thinks to turn around and look for her companion.

There's a split second before she hears a grunt, then sees Beauford land in a cat-jump onto the giant pedestal grinning.

"Well, DAMN I am out of shape." He laughs, pulling himself up the rest of the way to stand on the pedestal with Dinah. "Guess I'm buying."

"Yeah, you are," Dinah says, too flushed with the excitement of activity to gloat over competition. "You'll just need more practice. Next course?"

To that, he just smiles and points to the wall, where there's a door in red, reading 'Advanced Course' about three feet above the pedestal.

"I usually can't find anyone to practice with is the problem."

"Well, if you keep losing and having to buy the drinks, I can't see that being a problem."

Hey, it keeps her in shape, too. What with all the alien invasions and supervillains she's been dealing with, it's been a while since she had a good ol' fashioned run through the city.

Dinah grins at him and head straight through the door.

Oh hell, he's going to have to pull out everything now isn't he?

Beauford just grins, following after her into the Advanced Course, where there is a certain lack of straight run areas, save for the walls. Still, an hour later, there is no clear winner to the run through the course, and no real need for one.

Just that towards the end, they're both sweaty, decently tired and grinning.

Dinah is laughing with every pant now, hands resting on her knees.

"Please tell me you weren't kidding about the sweet potato fries."

"I wasn't. We do make those at Q57. And I think this week we might have some nice cheese and jalapeno cornbread this week." Beauford teases as they walk back down to the changing rooms.

Yeh, he's just going to enjoy breaking his promise not to spoil the menu at work for her.

At least now he's not putting her at a disadvantage.

"If this is as good as it sounds, you can have an entire evening at the other bar on me," Dinah tells him, even as she disappears into the ladies.

After all, he's technically going to have to buy everything anyway.

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