While the rest of the champions remained indoors, dealing with the press and their own grief, Jackson Barnes was outside, training on the hotel's flat rooftop. Truly, there was little else for him to do. He had been out cold virtually as soon as the Nagoyan disaster had begun, and so he had virtually nothing to say to the press. He got the feeling that they weren't much interested in him anyway. They had bigger fish to fry.
That left him mostly alone. After waking up, he had done all that he could to find out about what had happened, how this unbelievable disaster had come to pass. He had seen all of the footage, from every angle, heard all of the stories and later on, the spin. In the end, the endless recountings and recriminations had just exhausted him. After almost a week of going round and round and nowhere, he needed to get his head into something else.
Others among the Champions still found their battle on the screens, he knew. Cypress had left that morning for a studio in Akasaka. He'd given her an encouraging high five on her way out, and in doing so, he had temporarily copied her abilities. Being a jack-of-all-trades who shared other peoples' powers meant that he was not a master of any of them, but he wanted to be at least familiar with some of the powers from people on his team, the ones he'd probably be sharing the most. This morning, it was Friction's turn.
Friction, it turned out, was a very tricky power. Some abilities he copied weren't subtle at all. Super strength, for example, let him hit things harder, and there wasn't much to learn with that. Friction mostly just made him fall on his face. It took a lot of skill to skate along the ground as he had seen Cypress do: it required that he shift the slipperiness of different parts of his feet back and forth with every stride. Too little, and he couldn't accelerate or steer, but too much and he would barely move at all.
The work was difficult, and at times frustrating, but he much preferred it to the fallout of the last week. Here at least, he could feel like he was making some progress. The new skills weren't easy, but with practice and dedication he could master them. Well, perhaps not master them in the hour he had, but at least he could move about some while falling on his face less often. He'd have to come back to this ability some time. It was interesting to work with, to say the least.
Having used up about three quarters of his time borrowing Cypress's abilities, Jackson turned to Inertia. This turned out to be a simpler power to work with, at least in the basics. He enjoyed himself for a few minutes, shoving crates around and controlling their motions with a snap of his fingers.
A pair of crates smacked together, and just as they did Jackson almost missed the sound of his earpiece buzzing into life. He was going home to Australia, it seemed, or at least to Melbourne. Still, even running into a bunch of magpie-loving meatheads would be worth it for being back on home soil, and hearing people speak without that ridiculous half-american accent.
He checked his watch, and saw that he still had about ten minutes before his borrowed power ran out. That should be enough to try some more... practical applications while getting himself to the airport. It was time for him to do something reckless, but potentially very cool if he was able to pull it off. Which he would, probably. Hey, he still needed to blow off some steam.
Jackson backed up against one edge of the roof, and then sprinted for the other side. He planted his feet on the low concrete wall that ran around the edge of the rooftop, and took a flying leap out into the space beyond. Just as he passed beyond the safety of the rooftop, he dialled his own inertia up to the max.
And then he was flying. Well, kind of. He couldn't steer at all, but nonetheless he soared out over the city in the direction of the airport. His inertia was so great and his friction so small that he continued to rise as he flew, almost loosed from the bounds of gravity. Not quite, of course, since he couldn't turn off the force entirely, but as things were it only bent his flight towards the ground very slowly.
His aerial arc took him over and then down through the towering buildings of Nagoya, until he finally approached the ground more than a minute later. He hit the brakes hard, releasing almost all of his inertia and dialling his friction way up. Gravity's effects returned like a load of bricks, but the high-friction air beneath him was just enough to cushion him as he landed in a roll. The momentary heat of it made his skin feel baked and itchy for a second, but as he came up to his feet and the friction drained away, he felt nothing but exhilarated.
He took off again, running down the street past startled pedestrians and drivers alike, before launching into another enhanced jump. He didn't have the skyscraper's height to start this time, but the hop still took him a hundred meters down the street, well over the heads of the other traffic. He continued bounding through the city this way until he reached the airfield, out of breath but grinning like a madman. That had been fantastic, brilliant, thrilling. He could definitely see why some other supers loved flying so much.
