Short Story: The Hoverboard

“Now I just apply [Levitation] to put the finishing touches on it, and voila!”

I looked over the completed project with a smile on my face. It was a board around twenty centimeters wide and eighty centimeters long that floated just a little bit off the ground. It was a hoverboard, a floating piece of equipment that appeared in a famous time travel movie. Much like the one in the movie, you could rest on it with one foot and push off the ground.

I took a step forward and pressed my foot down on it. However, it didn’t touch the ground no matter how hard I pressed. I kicked off the ground and it went careening forward, so I quickly hopped onto it with both feet and began to ride.

I tilted my weight to the right a little, and the [Program] I’d enchanted into the board activated, causing it to veer right. Then, I did the same to the left. It was all working perfectly. I applied more pressure to my back foot, and the board bounced up a little. I could weave left and right without having to kick off the ground easily enough.

Just as I was starting to think about what kind of course I could make with Earth magic…

“Wow, dad! What’s that?! What’re you making over there?”

“Wow, Grand Duke! That looks like fun!”

Linne and Allis ran across the courtyard, having caught sight of me experimenting with my new toy.

“I wanna ride too, dad! Lemme try! Please please, pleeease!”

“Oh, me too! Can we? Can we?”

“I’m still testing it out right now…”

Despite my protests, I couldn’t resist the children as they pressed me further and further… Before long, I’d lost my hoverboard entirely. Linne had stolen it.

Since my prototype had been stolen, I decided to just make another one. Luckily, it was easier to make the second time around, since I already knew what to do. And then, just as I finished…Allis snatched it away from me. Pain. Such pain…

I watched the two girls riding the boards around the courtyard. They kicked off at high speeds and even started hovering off the sides of the nearby walls. Just how high were they planning to go? It’d be bad if someone stuck their head out of the window and got a face full of hoverboard…

I quickly walked over and told them to stay on the safer side of things, then constructed a rudimentary half-pipe ramp with Earth magic for them to play on. “Dad, can you make this into a full circle?”

“A circle? Huh?”

Linne directed my Earth magic until I’d constructed a sloped roof for the halfpipe…effectively turning it into one big pipe. I then stared in disbelief as the two girls began hovering on their boards at full speed, doing loop-di-loops on the inside of the tube tunnel I’d created. I knew the feat was possible with enough centrifugal force, but I hadn’t expected them to get right into it…

“This is so cool!”

“Linne, Linne! Do a flip!”

The girls did a bunch of tricks on their hoverboards until I felt a cold chill behind me… Linze was here. She stomped toward us, anger blazing in her eyes. Apparently, Linne and Allis were in the middle of a study session, and they’d skittered away to have fun with me instead. The two were summarily dismounted from their boards and dragged back to the study corner with extreme prejudice.

Once they were gone, I got back on my hoverboard and tried to do a flip. I fell off. Obviously, it was just because I weighed more than the girls, right? Right? Practice makes perfect…