I AM EMPOWERED, pt.5: The Twitter-based YEAR ONE prose dealie continues! (Patreon)

<Note: You can check out I Am Empowered's previous installment here.>

And now, back to Emp's first-person narration in (old) Twitter-based 140-character format, taking place roughly around the beginning of Empowered vol.1: >

I AM EMPOWERED

Chapter 3:  ABOMINABLEMENT DIFFICILE (pt.1 of many)

One thing about capework that civilians rarely realize: The easiest-seeming skills involved in superheroing can be the hardest to master.

A case in point, with painful personal experience: Superstrength-enabled leaps are maddeningly, frustratingly, ridonkulously hard to master.

Oh, you normal humans might think rooftop-to-rooftop superjumping is a basic, instinctively grasped, “no biggeh” kind of hero skill, right?

Well, you would be wrong in that assumption, sadly ignorant normal human, so wrong that your wrongness positively wrongs me. Also: WRONG.

(Noted: Type it enough times, and the word “WRONG” starts to look, um, wrong. Whassup with that silent W? Why is it there? Why, WRONG, why?)

Anyhoo, I shall now proceed to rectify, in numbing detail, the civilian public’s wrongness re: superjumping’s manifold little-known challenges. 

(Best settle in for this one, nonexistent readers. A long barrage of rants, pigeons, SuperHard Lemonade, et un peu de Français awaits you.)

I seriously wish that I'd gone out for track and field in high school, which might well have given me some helpful jump-related experience. 

Then again, superheroic long jumps are far more complicated and difficult than anything that normal-human track 'n' fielding has to offer.

Plus, if you're jumping UP to a rooftop, say, you're effectively performing a mutant hybrid of track and field's long jump AND high jump. 

In a conventional long jump, athletes strive to leap as far as possible every time, without having to worry that they'll miss the sand pit. 

Wellp, as a jumpy, superstrong cape, you're always striving to leap a very, VERY specific distance, such as from one rooftop to another.

Every tiny, micro-scale variation made at takeoff—initial running speed, precise foot planting, exactly how much muscle's put into the jump—

—is magnified into huge, macro-scale, roof-missing differences in distance on the resulting leap, as in dozens or even hundreds of feet.

Also, track athletes enjoy the luxury of practicing and competing on the essentially identical, unvarying settings of runways and sand pits.

As a superhero, you face a completely different environment—and, yay, a completely different challenge—with every single jump you attempt. 

No two rooftops are quite the same. Some buildings' roofs provide nice, clear, unobstructed paths for a track-and-field-worthy approach run—

—while other, suckier buildings confront you with a bewildering, blunder-guaranteeing maze of vents and housings and machinery upon landing.

I can't even count how often I've tripped over pipes, put a foot through ductwork, or bodyslammed air-conditioning mounts while rooftopping.

Okay, I prolly COULD count how many times I've committed such gaffes—I'm not wholly innumerate, y'know. (I just wouldn't WANT to count 'em.)

Just for the record, rooftop-to-rooftop leaping is usually referred to as "R2R" in oh-so-trendy, painfully superhip cape-culture circles. 

Even minor architectural details pose major problems for R2R jumping. Example: Does the rooftop you're taking off from have a raised edge? 

Believe you me, the takeoff technique from a roof with a parapet wall is night-and-day-different than the one used for a parapet-free roof. 

Just for the record, I'm nursing a serious hate-on for parapets, as the hopstep up onto 'em always throws off my all-important approach run.

The word "parapet": Doesn't it sound fun, like some cute—if not kawaii—virtual animal you'd nurture in a goofy little Facebook game?

Sadly, a "parapet" isn't a fun, cute virtual animal, but rather a highly unfun, uncute architectural flaw seemingly built solely to bug me. 

Attention, clueless architects: Why don't you ever consider the poor capes who'll be platforming off your rooftop designs? (Frowny face.)

This city is considered the West Coast Mecca for cape culture, but nobody bothered to inform its doofy architects about that li'l factoid. 

(Okay, so most of the troublesome-iest buildings were constructed well before the advent of superheroes. "Meh" to you, inconvenient facts.)

Ah, but factors even more browknittingly annoying and hairpullingly frustrating than architectural design complicate the act of rooftopping.

Mo' problematic: The distance between superjump-suitable rooftops varies wildly, as does the ever-changing height differential between 'em.

Even an architecturally ideal set of rooftops can stymie the wannabe superjumper if the gaps and elevations involved are divergent enough.

All too darn often, I'm forced to take a meandering, indirect R2R path across the city, due to that route's less stringent difficulty level.

The straight-line rooftop path to a given supercrime scene might well be absurdly tricky, to the point that it's not even worth attempting.

Example: I've pulled off the eastbound crosstown R2R route between 1st and 3rd Avenue a grand total of ONCE. All other tries? Debacle-ish. 

The last time I even considered going that way in a hurry—cue the lasers and fireballs in the distance—I'm ashamed to admit I chickened out.

Even with adrenaline a-pumping, I still found myself too intimidated to envision trying that route, painfully aware of its mishap potential.

My merest glance along that skyscraper obstacle course autotriggered humiliating flashes of every blundering failure it had inflicted on me.

FLASH I'm crashing through a skylight FLASH screaming shrilly before a forty-story faceplant FLASH slip-sliding on solar panels in the dark 

FLASH panicking and missing a rooftop entirely FLASH stumbling over another g-d parapet FLASH ragdolling into the void FLASH FLASH FLASH 

I very clearly felt that the Hirsch-Rockwell Building—with its slanty roof, up high at the very limit of my jumpability—was laughing at me. 

Same deal with the blatantly scornful gargoyles on the snooty Gothic façade of 25 Hanover Place, glaring down at me with sneering contempt. 

I dithered handwringily, gazed hopelessly up at the Scariest R2R Route in the City, then finally abandoned the idea. (Cue yet another SIGH.)

Blushing with secret shame, I dolefully hopped along the winding, roundabout—and, notably, less mishappish—"scenic" R2R route across town.

I arrived at the Kilowatt Khan battle a little late, true, but not as late as I would've been if I'd botched the black-diamond-ish R2R run. 

<Next week: Emp's discussion of "R2R" rolls on, this time with a surprising amount of French terminology.>

TOMORROW: We interrupt our regularly scheduled installment of COMICS RIFF I LOVE for a sketch dump of $5-tier art requests, open to the $3+ tiers!