Libbs blinked at him, and she thought about how to process that. "Well. So, generally speaking, well, the best thing to say is, that horses only go so fast. Like.. 55 miles per hour. A mile is 5280 feet." she explained. "That's about the side of your arm right here." she pointed to her forearm, from wrist to elbow. "And that's the cap for a horse. That's if they're sprinting super fast. The gallop is normally around 20-30..."
"Now, I'll admit, I exaggerated, but it's still really fast. Cause let's say.. this icey place called Halo was 1000 miles away.. then, it'd take about 18 hours, not counting any breaks or feeding you'd have to do with the horse.. to get to Halo." she explained. "But, a car didn't have any maintenance and feeding. All you had to do was fill it up with fuel, and that'd take around 5 minutes. And a car, depending on make and model, can go up to.. what? 150 to 200 miles per hour? Not to say people DROVE that fast, just that they could. Most interstates would take 75 to 90 miles per hour. It'd shave a minimum of five hours off."
"And sure, Gano!" she responded happily. If Jigano requested it. Then it was he got. She was pretty straight forward like that and bendable. As long as someone voiced it before it got out of hand. "As for the ball, it's.. a ball. But it's made of rubber. So it's bouncy. Very, very bouncy. And filled with lots of air to make it even bouncier. In fact, the bouncier the ball; the better. So any super bouncy ball would work." she explained. "And as for the hoop, all we gotta do is stable a basket to a board and suspend it somewhere."
He grinned as he listened to Libbs, absorbing the knowledge she shared even if it didn't always make sense. He knew what a foot was, and he had a general idea of how fast horses could go, though he still wasn't sure what the difference had to do with the number of horses involved, or how one hundred horses were faster than one. "Isn't 'fuel' just another word for food, though?" he asked curiously. It certainly sounded like the cars were getting fed, even if they could eat faster than a horse, and perhaps avoided the danger of colick.
Makes, models, and interstates were words that desperately needed context, and the thought of traveling two hundred miles an hour sounded, frankly, both unhealthy and dangerous. Even ninety miles an hour seemed like it would be courting a great deal of danger. His many questions, however, were tucked away for another time, as he sensed that pursuing them would only drag them off into distant tangents that they'd never find their way back from.
'Gano' brought an oddly youthful smile to his face, childhood memories stirred up with bittersweet nostalgia for a moment before he focused on her description of the ball. "Rubber and filled with air? How big is it, and what color?" He had an image forming in his mind but it was still fuzzy, and there was a strange itching deep inside his ribcage, his magic tingling with an uncomfortable discordance, like a guitar fret that didn't have enough space between the strings. "Ah, and... the goal is to get the ball into the basket?" He guessed, putting together the elegant simplicity of the name 'basketball' in a way that suddenly made perfect sense. "First one to get it in wins?"
"Oh! It looks like this."
Libbs drew a circle, with the curved lines of a basket ball. "It's orange and black. The ball being orange. The lines being black. It's also got these weird.. pimply texture on it. Kinda like an orange." she pointed, before she dropped the charcoal.
"Yeah! That's kind of the goal. You shoot the ball into the basket. You get more points depending on where you shoot the ball from. So like doing it close, gets ya one point. Doin' it from far away- gets ya three. And there's one catch. Ya gotta do something called a dribble. It's kinda hard to do without actually havin' the ball, but essentially, you have to push it against the ground, and it should bounce back up into your hands. Cause the person you're against is gonna try to knock it out of your hands. Keeps it from becomin' a tackle fest ya know? That way, you just swipe for the ball, instead of pushing them to the ground."
"I think that'd be really fun! Do you think Ludo would play a game like that?" she looked hopeful. "Cause basketball is SUPER fun."
The more she drew and described it, the firmer the image grew in his mind. His left hand started to itch as well as his chest, palm and fingers tensing as if he was trying to hold something that wasn't there as magic stretched and sizzled, seeking an outlet. As she explained the game he found himself distracted, focusing on that moreso than her words. The description of a 'dribble' was lost on him completely as a roaring rush of silent music filled his ears--
and with a pop of displaced air an orange rubber ball appeared in his hands, an oddly textured sphere with curving black lines painted on top of the rubber. Since Libbs hadn't given him a size to imagine the ball in his hand was about half the size of a true basketball, fitting easily into his long fingers. He looked at it in shock and no little consternation before tentatively setting it on the table and watching it roll towards the mechanically-inclined Outlander, eyes wide as it didn't disappear once he let it go. "Ah... well... something... like that?" he asked her weakly, clearly taken aback by this new manifestation of power.
Libbs just stopped. Dead quiet.
She blinked at him for a good solid moment. The ball rolled quietly past her, and fell to the side of the table, the silence growing awkward and uneasy. Her head turned towards the ground, picking up the ball, and running a finger over the texture. Holy hell, this felt EXACTLY like a basketball. And it was bouncy like one too. She put it back on the table, dribbling it just a little bit.
"Did.. you just summon a mini basketball Jigano?" she said slowly.
The quiet grew to a deafening roar, before suddenly she screamed. "THAT IS FREAKING AMAZING JIGANO." she hopped up and down, literally jumping up and down repeatedly. "How did you DO THAT. HOW. " She stuttered uncontrollably. "Though, not gonna lie, it needed to be a teeny bit bigger but YOU JUST SUMMONED A BALL OUT OF AIR WHO CARES." she shouted.
Libbs just sat there and looked at him, letting the ball roll past her, and Jigano couldn't blame her. He was still in shock himself as he prodded at the new sizzle of magic in his soul, so very different from the earth and healing magic he had found there before. It was... bronze-ish? And even as he poked at it, it seemed to twist and then settle, the new magical 'string' vibrating slightly next to his Earth magic and taking on its tones.
His friend's question broke through his internal contemplation and he bit his lip, then shook his head. "Not... exactly..." he started to say, wondering if he should explain the semantic difference between 'summoning' and 'creating' but Libbs gave him no chance. Her voice rang out and echoed through the usually-quiet Atheneum and he winced at the sudden change in volume.
"Shhh, shhh, we're in a library," he begged her, half-pleading and half-laughing at her excitement, feeling it bubbling in his own veins as a grin threatened to spread wide enough to split his face. "I think... I think I just awakened some more magic in myself," he admitted in explanation, looking a bit sheepish at the news. "Ah... creation, not summoning, technically. But it feels... strange." Smaller than he expected, as if that first burst was the best he was going to get out of it for awhile.
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