At Perfect’s direction, Dani closed her eyes and concentrated on directing her power towards flying… or she tried to. Comics were always kind of iffy on what that entailed. She could concentrate on a task… sometimes… or on an idea. She could repeat the word “fly” in her mind over and over again. She could scrunch up her face and put a lot of tension in her forehead.
“Try to will visualize yourself going up,” Perfect suggested.
Dani imagined her feet lifting off the ground, her whole body getting lighter, herself moving upward… slowly at first, but then gaining speed so that at first she was barely hovering but then she rocketed to the top of the gap between the buildings.
She pictured it very clearly, but her feet remained where they were.
“I don’t think it’s going to work,” Dani said.
“Okay, but does that mean it doesn’t work, or is it not working because the ring responds to your thoughts?” Perfect asked.
“If I understand what Luna was telling me, the ring… it is what it is,” Dani said. “When I first put it on, its powers became based on my ideas of what a hero would be like.” She blushed. “So… I get to conjure stupid video game items. If I’d known, maybe I would have spent some time convincing myself that true heroes are all-powerful immortal cosmic beings.”
“Maybe it’s best that your notion of a hero has some limitations,” Perfect said. “It would be nice if you could provide a list of them, though.”
“I… it’s not something I ever consciously thought about,” Dani said. “I mean, I had a lot of arg… conversations online with other people about what made a hero great or what would be cool powers, but it’s not like I designed these forms and abilities. The ring just kind of solidified what was already swirling around in my mind, I guess.”
“Well, it’s not a big deal… that’s why we’re out here,” Perfect said. “To figure out the limits, and figure out ways around them. You can’t fly without a prop. Can you do better than wings?”
“Better?”
“Smaller, stealthier, less obvious, whatever,” Perfect said.
“Um, let me try something,” Dani said, and then she clenched her fist and invoked the ring’s most familiar and intuitive power, calling into being a magical object. She jumped about a foot in the air and a blue disk appeared beneath her feet. Though it was very clearly rotating in the air, she stayed facing forward with her feet planted on it.
“How does it make any sense that the ring can’t support your weight to hover in the air but it can make an impossible spinny platform and make that support your weight?” Perfect asked.
“Look, it’s magic,” Dani said. “Magic that’s maybe been influenced by too many video games.”
“Well, it’s good to be versatile but that has a lot of the same problems that the wings do,” Perfect said. “Could you do something like that but smaller?”
Dani flexed her will and the hovering platform poofed away, leaving behind two smaller copies, with diameters a little bit more than the length of her feet.
“That could bring its own set of problems,” Perfect said.
“Jesus, I’m trying, okay?” Dani said, struggling to keep her balance as her feet started to drift apart. “It’s not like I’ve ever done this before.”
“Oh, I didn’t… I’m not trying to be critical, Dani,” Perfect said. “I guess I’m looking at this as like a brainstorming session, where you can throw out a bunch of ideas and we can see the pros and cons of them all.”
“Oh, I guess that makes sense,” Dani said. She banished the floating disks and dropped to the pavement.
“Hey… hmm,” Perfect said. “I wonder if… you know, it would actually be more in keeping with the ‘magic item’ motif than just sprouting wings on your back…”
“What would?”
“I was thinking winged sandals,” Perfect said. “You know?”
“Like what the Greek god Hermes gave to…”
“…Perseus, yeah, exactly,” Perfect said.
“Oh, yeah, him, too,” Dani said.
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