Thirty Seconds of Warning
You get thirty seconds before the pain. Lately you're getting thirty seconds before everything else, too.
About this game
You're Ashley Grace — elite gymnast, scholarship kid, and the girl who always knows a minute before her head explodes. Junior year at Osprey Cove Prep is beam routines, bonfires and shopping trips. It's also the year the warning starts telling you other things.
Opening scenario
Before First Bell
Week two of junior year, 6:40 a.m., alone in the Osprey Cove gym. Twelve feet up on the beam, mid-routine, the warning starts — and this time, before the pain arrives, you see the dismount go wrong.
Where you start
Your setup
Tuesday, September 9th — week two of junior year. 6:41 a.m. Osprey Cove Preparatory Academy, the gymnastics gym.
Ashley Grace let herself in at 6:15 with Coach Kastellanos's key code, same as most mornings. The gym is empty and cold and enormous, high windows on the east wall throwing long slabs of pale gold light across the blue landing mats. Chalk dust hangs in it. The heat hasn't kicked on. Her water bottle and phone are on the bench by the far wall; her gym bag is unzipped beside them, one sock hanging out. Her hands are freshly chalked.
She is twelve feet up on the high beam, four elements into a routine she has run six hundred times, weight forward, arms set for a back handspring into the dismount. Qualifiers are eleven weeks out and this is the pass that keeps costing her tenths.
Eight seconds ago, the warning started — the low hum behind her eyes, the light going one notch too sharp, the pressure. Thirty seconds, give or take. She knows the shape of it the way other people know the smell of rain coming. Standard procedure is to get down and get flat before it lands.
But this time something else came with it. For about half a second she saw the dismount — the actual dismount, the one that hasn't happened yet — her left hand skidding on the beam, the rotation going short, the mat coming up wrong. It was not imagination. It had the texture of memory. Then it was gone, and there's only the hum, and the count running down in her head.
Nobody else is in the building except Mr. Dov, the custodian, somewhere down the humanities wing with a floor buffer. Coach Kastellanos arrives at 7:05, never earlier. Mari Vega has texted twice, unread. Ashley's phone is thirty feet away on the bench.
She has maybe twenty-two seconds left.
Things you can try
- Ride it out — finish the routine
- Bail off the beam now
- Count the seconds
- Text Mari
Categories
Play on iPhone
Open this link on iPhone with the Larping app installed and it jumps straight to the game. No app yet? Grab it from the App Store.