but at some point it just randomly starts flying.
“Why would it drive around on the ground at all if it can just fly?”
“I am not Lakrian, don’t ask me.”
The car flies us to the other end of the city, to a building that looks like a big, high-ceilinged cube.
When we step inside, I am surprised—even though I shouldn’t be by now—that it is much cooler and high-tech than a rock-climbing place on Earth.
There are no harnesses or goofy little colored hand grips. There are dozens of different things that look like actual pieces of mountain. Real rock with grass and tiny little trees with resilient roots clinging on for dear life.
Various alien species are climbing with no safety equipment. I watch as a very broad-shouldered alien man with scaly grey skin works his way up a peak. He’s at least 100 feet above me. I have to crane my neck to see him. He tries to leap to a new edge of the mountain, but his foot slips. He grips tight with his hand, but he only has grip with that one hand, and it’s not an especially good place to hold onto.
His muscles bulge as he tries to pull himself up. His feet kick forward and find some leverage, but they slip, and then his hand slips too. He starts falling.
I gasp and cover my mouth with my hands. I want to close my eyes to avoid seeing someone splatter onto the ground, but I’m too terrified to react, and I just watch as he plummets.
When he’s a few dozen feet above the ground, something shimmers and pulses in the air, and each inch down he falls, the shimmering disturbance in the air thickens. He slows down drastically with each additional foot of free-fall, until he’s finally about a foot off the ground, and covered in a glowing purple light.
He shouts out some kind of swear word that I can’t hear clearly, and the purple lights cut off. He drops the extra foot to the ground. His friend tries to say something to him, but he shakes his head and kicks the wall.
“What if that purple stuff doesn’t stop us from falling?” I ask.
“I don’t plan to fall, little human.”
“Have fun, Raiska, because I don’t plan on climbing.”
“My understanding of the rules of a date are that we must do the activities together, Annabelle. The purple stuff will catch you if you fall. Now which mountain would you like to climb?”
None of them? I used to tell people that “hiking” was one of my hobbies because “watching TV” or “binge reading books all day” made me sound too lazy. Hiking, which more or less just amounts to walking around for a few hours, was something that I didn’t do for fun. I most certainly was not climbing mountains.
Raiska is already looking around at all the various cliffs and scratching his chin. A mischievous smirk is filling his face. I realize that this man has seriously never had a hobby or done anything for fun, and this is probably really exciting for him.
Do I really want to be a wet blanket and ruin that for him? Just because I’m worried that I will fall a few hundred feet to my death and splatter on the ground?
“I’ll climb that smaller one over there,” I say, pointing.
“I was thinking of this one,” he says, pointing at one that looks like K2, or one of those insane mountains that kills a few dozen people who are dumb enough to climb it every year.
I frown. “We have to do things together, remember?”
He smiles and takes my hand, and soon we’re at the bottom of the “tiny” mountain, which is still very scary looking, and still more than high enough to kill someone who fell.
I don’t know what kind of technology they used to get these mountains inside. It almost looks like they just chopped big chunks off of full-sized mountains and put them in this building. None of them have actual peaks, the cliff face just goes up flush with the ceiling. I think it’s unlikely they cut pieces out of a mountain with lasers and giant floating construction ships. More likely than not they “synthesized” all of the rocks, trees, clumps of dirt, and all the other little things that make up the mountains.
A yellow-skinned alien who works at the climbing gym approaches us. “Before you climb, let me go over the safety rules.”
Raiska sighs impatiently, but I’m hoping the safety rules are