June 6, 2440
First Contact Has an Athletic Side
Tokyo’s youth delegation keeps making fashion and media headlines, but there is another pattern hiding in plain sight.
A lot of these kids are athletes.
MJ Reyes plays first base and has already visited every MLB park plus four in Mexico. Maja Zhang skates and runs cross country. Rita Ashbury-Singh plays tennis and has extensive dance training. Kevin Wood rows for Roxbury Latin, has years of martial-arts training, four years of SCA experience and enough ballroom training to make an inexperienced partner look better rather than expose her mistakes.
Then there is Y’kem T’all, who would like SI readers to know he owns a career .500 batting average with two RBI per game.
He had four at-bats.
We checked.
That athletic background showed throughout Tokyo’s fashion shoot. Wood recognized immediately when the mock swordplay involved people unfamiliar with live steel. Later, paired with Zhang for ballroom photographs, he adjusted his lead to her experience instead of turning the sequence into a demonstration of his own.
At the Tokyo Stars game, Reyes spent much of the night watching Kyoto center fielder Mizuki Hainako, younger sister of Kayumi Hainako, whom Reyes followed last season with the Cubs. Hainako rewarded the attention by saving Kyoto’s eighth-inning lead with the bases loaded, then homering over center in the ninth.
She later credited Wood’s increasingly notorious “husbando energy” with carrying the ball the final meter.
That part probably cannot be coached.
Sports may prove one of the fastest places for human and V’ren culture to meet. T’all has already tried baseball. Human athletes are already comparing training with their V’ren counterparts. And SI has an upcoming feature on fliech, a V’ren sport Earth audiences are only beginning to encounter.
First contact is also arriving elsewhere in the magazine: Next Week brings the new Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, featuring several V’ren models.
