Bronze · Street Soul
Nadia
A judge has owed her a tenth of a point for ten years; ever since, she’s been squaring up the whole world to make up for it
« A 9.9 isn’t a score, it’s a polite insult. I prefer the honest version: do it again. »
Where she comes from
Nadia grew up in a gym with windows set too high, amid the chalk dust and the vinegar smell of the mats. Twelve years of competition, an unassailable posture, palms like leather -- and a national final lost by a tenth of a point that judge number three never managed to justify. She saluted, smiled, walked off the floor, and never saluted anyone again.
The federation offered her a coaching job in the gym; she chose the city instead, which at least doesn’t pretend to score fairly. She arrived with a leotard, a red ribbon wound around her wrist like a reminder, and that balance-beam walk that makes people step aside on the sidewalk without quite knowing why.
How she works
On the pavement, Nadia trains the way she did in the gym: every gesture repeated to perfection, every route timed, every mistake logged in a graph-paper notebook. She learns faster than anyone because she refuses to move on before the routine is flawless -- which should slow her down and does exactly the opposite. The other girls in the neighborhood watch her redo an entrance twenty times and understand, just from watching, where the missing tenth of a point hides in their own routine: that’s her other gift, spotting the wobble before the fall.
What keeps her standing
The worry never leaves her: she bites her nails, replays every evening in the dark, scores her own days out of ten and rarely gives herself the average. But she’s learned to work fear like a deep muscle -- it’s what holds her posture and locks her movements steady when everything else is shaking. In her downtime, she unspools her ribbon in an empty parking lot and traces perfect spirals for no one. One day she’ll put the House’s new girls through drills, and her stolen tenth of a point will become the one thing she never demands from them: that one, she’ll hand over in advance.
Her school
Street Soul
The school of the street teaches one subject only: people, unvarnished. Hold a circle of bystanders with two cups and a story, read a pocket, feel a scuffle three minutes before it lands. You gain an instinct nothing replaces; you lose the taste for comfort — velvet bores her, she thinks it smells like a trap. You know a Street Soul by this: she counts the room before she enters, knows both exits, and talks to the bouncer like a cousin… who owes her a favor.
Her temperament
The Worrier
She checks the till, the emergency exit and the weather three times; her disasters never happen, simply because she cancelled them all in advance… and she needs to hear you say so.
