Vagari - Ari for short - had hated the north ever since she'd gotten on that Greyhound bus to it. Sure, Arizona and Nevada had their problems, namely dust and people trying to kick her ass for sleeping on a park bench, but at least there she wasn't frozen to the bone on a clear spring day. On the other hand, this place had trees and lots of them, so she didn't -entirely- hate it.
Ari wasn't paranoid, honest. She just didn't trust people. So instead of getting on the road she paralleled it. She stood on a tree, balancing easily on the huge oak log, and looked up through a winding maze of trees jutting sideways out of the Earth, and wondered if anyone had ever had -that- perspective before. From outside she knew it must look bizarre, a woman standing sideways mostways up a huge oak, but for her it felt completely normal.
Although she admonished herself, not for the first time, that she needed a few things. One, she noted as she noticed she had gripped too tightly and crushed her cigarettes, she needed zippered pockets instead of trying to hold onto this shit mid-fall. Two, she really needed clothes that fit a little more and didn't dangle ridiculously when she wasn't playing nice with Earth's gravity. She shrugged - it was whatever - and leapt for the next tree. As her hands touched it she took her point of gravity - the tree she had just leapt from - and shifted it to the one she now held onto. Ari couldn't have described the sensation or mechanism if she had a hundred years and a chalkboard the size of South Dakota, but it worked fine, and that was what counted. There was that familiar lurch in her gut as gravity suddenly reversed directions, a shudder from her inner ear as her body did something that as far as its basest instincts were concerned couldn't happen, and then she was lying on another tree.
It wasn't the most graceful movement in the world, but it worked, it was fairly quiet, and it avoided attention. And plus, she hadn't had an opportunity to really practice with her powers that often. This was fairly old hat for her, but when you haven't worn that old hat that often even the oldest of old hats still needs to be flexed, and somewhere this metaphor got lost.
She could glimpse the destination in the distance, and decided to stretch her wings a little bit, picking out a large tree a good bit closer to the road for a clearer vantage point. She remembered reading that if you rolled with the impact you could soften it, that seemed simple enough. It wasn't that far anyway. So she'd just shift...and she was falling.
This might have been a mistake, she thought as she dropped towards it. Ten feet doesn't seem very far at all to walk, but when you're falling it suddenly seems like very far indeed. She landed feet first and did her best - and a decent job of it - to roll with the impact. It still hurt like a, "************!" Ari shouted.
That was really stupid. Both parts, actually. And she could only imagine the sight along the ground, of her essentially spinning around the trunk of a tree. She'd seen video of herself in action a few times, and those minor stunts had been surreal enough to look at. As the throbbing in her knees subsided she straightened up, noting that she'd crushed her cigarettes to basically dust with a glance of disgust, and took a look.
"Oh good..." She muttered as she took a look at the mansion. "I was worried I might be overdressed."
Given that she hadn't washed in two weeks, hadn't used shampoo in two months, and had been wearing the same unwashed clothes for three months that was saying something, and it wasn't like a hoodie, a pair of jeans, and tennis shoes that were about six months past their expiration date judging by the wear on the sole and toe. But on the other hand, she only stank like sweat and cheap liquor. Ari may not have had super senses, but she could tell this place smelled like black mold, urine, and regret. Great.
She straightened up and proceeded to walk down the length of the trunk, shifting gravity as she reached the end and stepping onto the side of the road, then beginning her walk up towards this place. What were they going to do, kill her and put her out of her misery? She'd already lost her cigarettes, she didn't have anything left to lose.