Any ped can get into Griffith Park without being noticed. And Y.T. figures that despite the barriers across the road, the Falabala camp isn't too well protected, if you've got off-road capability. For a skate ninja on a brand-new plank in a brand-new pair of Knight Visions (hey, you have to spend money to make money) there will be no problem. Just find a high embankment that ramps down into the canyon, skirt the edge until you see those campfires down below. And then lean down that hill. Trust gravity.
She realizes halfway down that her blue-and-orange coverall, fly as it may be, is going to be a real attention getter in the middle of the night in the Falabala zone, so she reaches up to her collar, feels a hard disk sewn into the fabric, presses it between thumb and finger until it clicks. Her coverall darkens, the colors shimmer through the electropigment like an oil slick, and then it's black.
On her first visit she didn't check this place out all that carefully because she hoped she'd never come back. So the embankment turns out to be taller and steeper than Y.T. remembered. Maybe a little more of a cliff, drop-off, or abyss than she thought. Only thing that makes her think so is that she seems to be doing a lot of free-fall work here. Major plummeting. Big time ballistic styling. That's cool, it's all part of the job, she tells herself. The smartwheels are good for it. The tree trunks are bluish black, standing out not so well against a blackish blue background. The only other thing she can see is the red laser light of the digital speedometer down on the front of her plank, which is not showing any real information. The numbers have vibrated themselves into a cloud of gritty red light as the radar speed sensor tries to lock onto something.
She turns the speedometer off. Running totally black now. Precipitating her way toward the sweet 'crete of the creek bottom like a black angel who has just had the shroud lines of her celestial parachute severed by the Almighty. And when the wheels finally meet the pavement, it just about drives her knees up through her jawbone. She finishes the whole gravitational transaction with not much altitude and a nasty head of dark velocity.
Mental note: Next time just jump off a fucking bridge. That way there's no question of getting an invisible cholla shoved up your nose.
She whips around a corner, heeled over so far she could lick the yellow line, and her Knight Visions reveal all in a blaze of multispectral radiation. On infrared, the Falabala encampment is a turbulating aurora of pink fog punctuated by the white-hot bursts of campfires. All of it rests on dim bluish pavement, whi............