She devours classwork. She plays in the practice rooms and the gym. She loiters in the games room, fingers flying under strips of copper as she controls things, tries things. She loses to older kids a few times with each new game, till she figures it out, and then moving at the speed of thought means she's got the advantage. Bullying happens around her, but she's a girl - this shields her from much of it - and even though she adds up to faster and stronger than all of the other kids, she's still wearing an assistive device, she's still a cripple. That's fine with her; it keeps her out of the way of the nastier kids. She's not sure the Battle School people are looking for quite the right ratio of ferocity to other traits.
She plays the fantasy game, until she hears from other people that you can't win the Giant's Drink, and she uses this as an example in her statistics homework and never bothers with it again. What a stupid game.
"Yeah. I just think and -" She executes an unnecessarily showoffy sequence in the minefield; it hasn't 'figured out' for this iteration that she's faster than it is, yet. "I move. It was way easier for me to adjust to a battle suit than anyone else in the launch. I could compensate for the stiffness and any flashed parts and learn to move in zero-g without needing special muscle memory for it, I just have to know what to do. Some of them don't think it's fair but if I took off the exo it wouldn't be fair, either."
Bella's not looking at his screen, but she hears the sound effect. "There's one that makes you blow up?" she asks.
She takes over his game. She dodges the Giant and looks around.
It's not easy to maneuver here, but it's possible.
At one corner, two sacks of rice lean together with a gap between them, a natural tunnel just the size of the player avatar. It's an inviting place to hide from the Giant's stomping feet.
'Suicide Watch' looks on with interest.
Bella doesn't duck in right away - she's not having any trouble dodging the giant, so she makes a complete circuit, and then she squirms through to see where the tunnel goes.
"Cool," he says.
"I wonder if there's a point to this part or if this is just what happens when you go off the rails," says Bella. She peers over his shoulder. The console to his left opens up. She tries this game too; it turns out to be more her speed than the minefield, with a space station she can arm and armor against little blinking enemy dots. Winning against the first wave of them earns her the right to name her station and save her progress. She calls it "Aegis".
"Goddess of wisdom, shield," Bella controls her little laser array one handed long enough to tap her head, "my brain - I like the word."
In his game, his avatar is slowly morphing from a tiny mouse into a bird, brightly coloured like the clouds but with darker, more vivid shades. It takes him a little while to figure out the new controls, but then he's happily exploring his new environment, circling through the shifting clouds.
Bella's game has moments between waves when she's out of upgrade credits and she glances over at his screen. "It's not even presenting you with obstacles. It's just a sky of pretty colors. It's like a screensaver," she says. "I think I might've just won the game for you and it's a victory screen."
"It's even more boring than watching your avatar die fifty times in a row," asserts Bella.
His avatar's transformation is still not complete. The patterns on his wings are becoming more vivid, more complex; he has a long curling tail of green feathers flowing out behind him and golden talons tucked up against his blue-purple body.
He flies through a pink cloud that's shifting to orange. His next set of feathers grows out fiery red.
Bella shrugs and spends upgrade credits on commerce infrastructure for the Aegis so she can collect more in tariffs and buy shiny armor plating before the next round.
A path opens up where he doesn't have to fly through any clouds at all. He takes it.
A glitter below him: light on water. An ocean, with a setting sun painting the wavetops red. He circles, now firmly under the multicoloured clouds. There's a cluster of mountains in the distance; an island? He heads that way.