by Crazy Ivan
Those of you that have been following this blog for a while will know that in the back yard of the House of Skills, we have a slack line wrapped around a tree and a fence post. It's basically a tightrope, but it's about as wide as a seat belt. It's got some bounce to it so it has some elements of a trampoline and some elements of a balance beam.
Anyway, it's one of the many ways that we challenge our skills from day to day and over the year and a month that we've had it, we've actually gotten pretty confident with it. Mav, Monk and I have even practiced freestyling with a Myachi as we traverse it. But interestingly enough, it wasn't until yesterday that we thought of another Myachi-related use for it. Turns out that the thing functions pretty well as a Myachi catapult as well.
We got the idea yesterday afternoon. It was gorgeous and Monk, Mav and I were all off so, of course, we were outside playing Myachi. An errant kick left the Myachi sitting over by the slack line so when I went to fetch it, I decided to do something cooler than simply toss it back.
I placed Monk's Suffolk Downs on the line and then grabbed it with both hands. I pulled it back a little, uttered "this probably won't work..." and let go. Much to my surprise (and bemusement), the sucker shot at Monk like it was coming out of a canon. Anyone but a Myachi Master probably would have jumped out of the way, but Monk stuck it with an MVP catch.
And we all smiled.
See, one thing we all share at the House of Skills is the desire to always go bigger. If somebody comes up with a new trick, we naturally fall into competitions over who can do the more complex version of the trick. If somebody gets a new toy, we're all looking to master it quicker than anyone else. And when you inadvertently discover that you can rocket a Myachi off the slack line, everybody starts seeing all the crazy applications of that at once.
After a bit of fun with that, we realize that if you set the Myachi on the line and then bounce just right as you cross it, you can launch the Myachi fifty feet in the air. So we did that.
It was tough to get a proper launch, so we were taking four or five attempts between every successful launch, and each time we'd get one in the air, we'd stumble about trying to figure out where it was going to land as it pachinkoed its way through the tree branches above. In one extraordinarily unlikely bounce we all missed the catch and it landed right back on the slack line (which is about three inches across).
Anyway, as we're having fun with this, we're also doing the math. Every time the Myachi launches, it skyrockets upward and at an angle into the branches. But we can all see that if it were to somehow navigate the maze of boughs and twigs without hitting any of them, its trajectory would take it out of our yard and way up on top of the neighbor's roof. It's so striking that Mav even brought it up. He mentioned it to Monk because we were using a particularly yummy Suffolk Downs that Monk had gone to great lengths to break in.
"You know, if we keep doing this, you're gonna lose this thing up in the tree or in those gutters eventually," Mav warned.
Monk stopped for a moment and contemplated. There were plenty of Myachis in the house, but nobody else had one on them at the moment. He'd have had to run inside and by the time he came back, the mood might have changed and we might decide to play another game. "Forget it," Monk decided, "this is fun".
And I'm sure you can already guess exactly how this story ends. Within ten minutes of the warning, the Myachi finds a launch window that would have left a NASA scientist scratching their head and somehow manages to fly all the way up to the top of the neighbor's roof... the top of her three floor house. As in, there is no possible way we're getting this Myachi back.
And Monk's response? He shrugged. "I lose Myachis all the time," he admitted, "At least this one has a great story."
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