Ivy emerged out of the woods into a small clearing with an oddly tiered rock wall that began up about forty feet ahead of them. Lin observed a few campers attempting to scale one of the tiers currently. As she emerged from the woods behind Ivy, she gazed intently at the base of the rock wall, then closed her eyes with hands at her sides and an expression of serene concentration upon her face. The sounds of campers climbing and small rocks and dust falling occasionally and voices all drifted away as she flow-walked back to what had been the scene when instructions were given out.
About thirty minutes ago, she saw a vague image of the twin counselors addressing the campers: "Today we will teach you the beginnings of rock climbing. Now this won't be the rock climbing you've done on walls in school. This is real and will be dangerous. So first everyone will be fitted with a helmet, goggles, and a harness." Lin let herself drift slowly back to the present, only opening her eyes when the sounds of the people around and above her returned. Turning herself to address both Carrie and Ivy directly, she told the younger girls. "The counselors want us to harness up, grab a helmet and gloves, and head on up this wall. Looks like we're late!" She raced past Ivy to grab one of four remaining harnesses, slipping into it with remarkable ease.
Her hands lingered for a few moments on the straps. These sorts of things were not very intuitive. What Lin would have given for simple velcro. She had had a hard enough time in an orphanage just learning to tie her shoelaces. Speaking of which, Lin spied that her right set of bootlaces had come undone. After cinching the harness as tight as she could, she went and put her foot up on a nearby boulder and quickly retied the offending lace. Pulling on a pair of gloves but ignoring the helmet, Lin hooked herself up to an unmanned belay tether attached to the ground with a ballast at the base of the wall and began to climb.
Fortunately for Lin, she was already physically strong, so the first two tiers did virtually nothing to exert her despite the fact that she had just spent an inordinate amount of time jogging and speedwalking after the "runaway" Ivy. Lin spied Kyle at the top of the third tier already and gritted her teeth in preparation for her next encounter with Ice Boy. Stage 3 made Lin pause initially. It was beginning to look like mostly sheer rock. "Now the real fun begins," Lin muttered to herself in total focus mode.
The blonde girl pressed herself flat against the third tier's wall, then scrambled up all of two feet like a spider before her double-gloved hands found purchase on a rough bit of stone. She had to wedge her feet into gaps that made her a bit self-conscious about any male onlookers below. Thankfully Ice Boy was up top so the only view he was getting was a tangled mass of hair. Why did that thought bother her so much? One by one, she bit the second set of gloves off her hands with her teeth, tossing them down behind her where they flopped down on the second tier landing. Then, also one by one, she unfastened her own gloves' fingers once again to let her own human digits wiggle out and find better purchase on the stone. The rock cut into her fingertips a bit, but that just made Lin angry as she yelled out a battle cry and scrambled from foothold to foothold, handhold to handhold. When she was about three feet from the top of tier number three, she leapt the remaining distance and caught the ledge with her bare fingertips. Straining, her fair face finally coated with perspiration, she managed to swing one leg up and hook it over the ledge, but the other half of her body betrayed her and her left leg refused to budge and go up!
Instead, a line of white-hot fire traced it's way down the back of her left calf, seizing the muscle and making Lin gasp in discomfort, nearly losing her death grip of the ledge she half-lay on. She lay there frozen, trying to catch her breath and desperately willing the muscle to loosen. Her cheeks flamed at the thought of Ice Boy seeing her like this. Another less pleasant though occurred to her that she had just been climbing a hill in relatively comfortable jeans, and those jeans would naturally start to sag as she climbed....and now her butt was pointed skyward...towards where Ice Boy was last seen. Growling at the thought, she viciously tugged herself all the way onto the ledge in a surge of adrenaline purely by the strength of her arms and core and lay on her back staring up the tier number four sheer rock wall. She wondered how in hell she was going to scale that with her left leg cramped as badly as it was.
