[b]White![/b]

White is, in her own estimation, not a dorkass loser. She should be able to handle physical contact like this - she's handled more and more intense physical contact, and not nearly with the same sense of self awareness. But under Euna's professional touch she feels exposed, startled, nervous and can't figure out why. She works on the question while listening to Euna's speech and watching her motions - and these she watches in undisguised awe. 

The self discipline, the commitment, the skill. Her eyes set to sparkle and don't come off, focusing on each motion. It's not the speed or strength that impresses her but how they pair with precision. There is a smooth, flawless communication between observation and action and something about it raises the bar in her perceptions of what is optimal. Her previous understanding was that perfection was an operation, well planned and choreographed. Every motion decided and rehearsed in advance - ultimately, a thing of the intellect. Here it was plain that using the intellect [i]slowed Euna down[/i]. The more she got into the task, the less she thought about doing it, the better she got at it. It wasn't a lowering of standards, there was no additional acceptance of risk. The way she moved was thought happening with every part of her body. 

She wanted that.

And it struck her in turn why she'd felt so exposed earlier when Euna had touched her muscles - because [i]she didn't know what her own specs were[/i]. Her body was custom made, she hadn't been given a manual, she'd never done deep testing. Of all her operative assets she was unaware of the details and limitations of her most basic one. She'd just tried to ignore it as though by doing so it might just go away on its own one day. No wonder she felt so... floaty, so stiff all the time. No wonder she couldn't make decisions about texture or feel or physical structure easily. With a few quick professional movements, Euna had learned more about what she was than she ever had.

She wiped the glitter from her eyes. Okay. It was time to find out what she was actually capable of.

"Thank you," she said. "I will do my best."

*

The first thing that she realizes is that climbing is way, [i]way [/i]harder than she ever thought it was.

And that's not to say she's unused to climbing! She used to climb on things all the time! She just did it all in zero gravity, with each step involving either driving industrial talons into crumbling asteroid rock or magnetizing to enormous sheets of metal. She could walk across sheer surfaces with only light brushes of her clawtips. When she starts with the net she instinctively tries to heave herself up using only her hands, and then only her arms. She needs to be stopped and given careful guidance before she restructures to use her legs. It's a painfully slow process, each step involving extremely careful predictive calculations about the nature of the next step. This is a problem too; she's not physically feeling things out, she's just dangling until she's sure she's got the mental image of the motion right. She then performs it exactly and then freezes again until she can update.

She... thinks this is supposed to be how she gets from where she is to where Euna is? Do reams of extremely intense and detailed predictive calculations until the database is big enough that she can speed up the process? But it also feels slow, and miserable, and like constantly being frightened that she's about the fall and she's not really testing what she's capable of. She's just cautiously guessing at every handhold, overthinking every muscle. Better than not thinking about them [i]at all[/i] like she did before but this isn't right either.

"I'm..." she said, stiff as a board. "I don't think I'm doing this right."