Name: Ronald Sutherland
Aliases: [redacted]
Code name: [FF used for reference purposes]
Ratings: [unknown]
Techniques: none
Weak vs.: unknown
Backup/ Team affiliation: none

FF01 First Step

He carefully pushed open the basement door and felt for the first step.

The boxes in his arms swayed a bit as he approached the bottom of the stairs. As he walked over to the table something seemed not quite right. He set down the boxes and gave the table an odd look. It looked shorter.

He glanced down at the floor and stared in shock at the six inch gap between his feet and the floor. And then stumbled as he fell those six inches.

He couldn't have been standing on air. Could he?

But when he fell it felt just like the jolt when he'd gotten to the bottom of the stairs and found out he was still one step up...

---

FF02 Discoveries

A while later, Ron was in his room with the door closed. He raised his foot gingerly, like someone about to step onto something they weren't sure would hold their weight.

Then he shifted his weight slowly. And raised the other foot, until he was standing on air.

This time, he wasn't startled enough to fall. He walked around a bit, then tried a few things. First he climbed up more invisible stairs. He couldn't go too far as the ceiling in his room wasn't that high.

Then he tried walking down. Soon he was able to treat whatever it was more like a ramp than a set of stairs.

He walked back up until he was a foot above his bed and after a moment of thought dropped to the bed.

He started to get off, but then tried to crawl up onto a ledge in the air. That worked too. He was lying down a foot above the bed. Not bad.

He thought about the way it felt when he walked or lifted himself onto a chunk of air. He couldn't exactly describe it. Then he felt an odd sensation. And felt the bedspread under him.

"Hmm. I didn't fall. I guess I sort of floated down," he thought.

He got off the bed and walked on air again until he was a couple feet up. Then he tried to re-create the feeling. He knew when he had it because he started to sink slowly to the floor.

It hadn't taken any effort. In fact he felt sort of tingly. He repeated it a few more times from higher in the air. His muscles felt much like they would if he'd been going up real stairs. But when he "floated" down, he got more of that tingle.

Floating down had felt sort of like releasing something. A sort of tension. Yeah, that was it. Sort of like letting go of something you'd been pushing on. Like a spring or something.

He tried "pushing" back. And started to rise into the air. Cool!

Just staying there didn't seem to take any real effort. Well, there was a sort of feeling of pressure or something, but it wasn't exactly an effort to maintain it.

Hmm. He pushed that way and went up. What if he pushed this way?

He drifted sideways.

"Omigod. I can fly!"

Late that night, he snuck out and tried it away from the houses.

Flying sideways was easy. Going up was harder. Going down was no effort at all, though control was harder.

By the end of the week, he was moving as fast as his bike. Maybe faster.

He noticed that gliding down gave him that tingle. Flying up seemed to drain it. And he was pretty hungry after doing a lot of flying unless he did more down than up. Living at the top of a several hundred foot hill, he could do that. If he wanted to walk back up.

Even doing a lot of flying over the valley took something out of him. Just not as much as flying up did.

After a month or so, he was flying fast enough to feel the air moving past. Felt sort of like sticking his hand out the car window on the freeway. He'd also found that it was easier to "push" while riding his bike than it was to pedal. He still pedaled, so it wouldn't be obvious.

He even managed to drag his bike along while flying a few times in the daytime. He'd ride it to someplace where he didn't think anyone would see and then fly it along below the treetops.

It wasn't easy, but it was easier than pedaling the same distance.

The wind was getting to be a pain. And hitting bugs was no fun either. It was really hard flying fast as a car. Then he had a thought. Could he "push" the wind away from him?

He kept trying and one day it "clicked" in his head. It suddenly got a lot easier to fly. He could not only feel the "pressure" of maintaining altitude and the "push" of flying, he could feel a sort of pressure against a sort of second skin.

The wind was gone. But he could feel the air pushing on that skin. He could feel it as a sort of rounded bubble around him. Sort of a teardrop shape.

He tried flying through some tall grass slowly at first, and then faster. He could see it pushed out of the way by the bubble. Neat.

He tried several more passes through the grass, faster and faster. It was really odd feeling the grass whipping across the bubble. He could feel the impacts, but it didn't hurt or anything.

There was a sudden jolt and it felt like something a lot bigger and harder had whacked into part of the bubble. It slowed him down and angled his path up and to one side.

He slowed down and circled back.

He'd hit an old fencepost hidden in the grass. A steel pipe several inches across, set in concrete.

He stared at it. The post was bent sharply and the concrete was pulled partway out of the ground.

He landed and got rid of the bubble.

"Unh!" Good grief. He couldn't even budge the post. And he almost ripped his hand trying.

"Wait a minute..." It was a crazy idea, but why not?

He tried to get the bubble back. And wound up floating a foot or so off the ground. He could feel it as a sphere around him.

"Okay, so far so good." Now he tried to reshape it. To pull it back to his skin. He could feel it trying to shift and then it suddenly snapped into place. It felt weird, but he could move and it moved with him.

He got back on the ground and tried to shift the pipe. No luck, but at least it wasn't messing up his hands.

It was definitely really strong, well. actually "tough" was more like it. He stopped.

Or maybe strong was the word. After all, that pipe looked like it'd been hit by a truck. And it wasn't anything more than his .... force field or whatever it was. And his "pushing".

But if it was that strong, and moved with him...

It took a few tries, but he got the skin-field to not just move with him, but to reinforce his movements. Sort of like powered armor without the armor. Just like in some of the stories he'd read.

The pipe creaked as he braced against the base and pulled. And it straightened out.

He stared at his hand. Other than the effort in his head of making the field reinforce his movements it hadn't even been all that hard.

He reached out one hand and with a bit of (mental) effort, ripped it out of the ground.

He said, "Wow. Just like Superman."

And promptly fell over from all that unsupported weight at the end of his arm.

He was startled and grabbed the pipe harder as he went over. Then he noticed that he'd crushed the end of the pipe. "Oops. Gotta be careful."

He scratched his head trying to figure out why he fell over. Well, ok. It was obvious that the chunk of pipe and concrete weighed more than he did. By a fair bit.

But if that was the case, why hadn't he just pulled himself off the ground when he tried to pull it out of the ground?

He tried to pick it up again. As it came up, he realized he was "bracing" himself somehow.

He let it drop and stood a foot off the ground and tried again. He could feel the bracing and a sort of increase in the pressure that he felt from standing on air.