Nate and Lorna in the Danger Room

[x-polarisstar.livejournal.com]

If you can carry on a debate over ethics in the middle of a Danger Room scenario, are you being sufficiently challenged? Lorna and Nathan get the answer to that question. They also find out that even versatility has its limits, are reminded yet again that breaking things can be the easy way out and the Danger Room can pose an entirely different set of challenges for them than it does for some of their teammates.



New leathers. They definitely needed some breaking in, Nathan thought, tugging at the jacket as he and Lorna walked into the Danger Room together. Then again, that was the idea, wasn't it?

"Lucky you," he said to his companion. "You get me for my first real scenario back. I'll do my best not to make you look too bad."

Lorna rolled her eyes at him, "Big talk from the guy who broke his back." She rolled her shoulder to test it and was pleased that it seemed back to normal. "Would you stop yanking on your leathers? They're not going to fit any better." Easy for her to say, new leather or old, it always moved easily against the metal lining of her uniform.

"Oh? If the molecules of the leather spontaneously rearrange themselves they just might," Nathan said, summoning up one of those grins Moira always described as 'vaguely irritating, dear'.

"And you're going to accomplish that by yanking it instead of just wiggling your brain in the proper fashion?" The grin didn't seem to faze Lorna at all. Probably because she was busy scanning the Danger Room for a hint at the scenario. She really did need to remember to ask what she was walking into more often.

"I looked," Nathan said, answering the unspoken thought. "This is one of those punitive... pardon me, corrective scenarios. It's supposed to teach us to keep out of the thick of things. I believe Scott's subtitle for it was something along the lines of 'Why people with powers that work well from a distance should stay at a distance'."

She made a face. "Oh goodie. These types of runs always make me want to develop a better hand to hand style." She reached up and tightened her ponytail. "I suppose that we're getting the plastic drones too because I'm here?"

The Danger Room shimmered around them, the holographic systems coming on and mimicking the inside of some sort of industrial complex, from the looks of it. Nathan could feel - and assumed Lorna could do - the Room's modular parts shifting behind the holograms, providing substance to the walls and so forth.

"Wouldn't be too terribly surprised," he said, as red numbers glowed in the air above them, counting down from ten. "No defined target for this one, either. We're just supposed to take down the opposition without letting them get in close and do the same to us."

"Fantastic. I love it when the objective is just survive." She counted down the last few second with the clock and grinned at it hit one. "Let's go, Cable."

"Let's try not to break too many of the drones. Throw it in Scott's face that we do have a little finesse, hmm?" As they started forward, Nathan's head whipped around at the feel of a disruption in his TK 'sonar' field. "First ones, coming up..." Metal, too, from the feel of it.

Definitely metal though she didn't recognize the alloy. Throwing up a light shield, she slipped into the strange second sight that gave her the world in EM fields, "I count ten. Am I missing any?" Wouldn't be the first time they'd sent a mixed group out.

Nathan grinned. "Just ten. Split them down the middle?" he asked, then lashed out at 'his' five before she'd quite managed to vocalize her agreement. What was the point in being a telepath if you couldn't speed things up a little?

She hadn't actually bothered to respond, somewhat lazily picking through her five, fusing a directional system to a fuel cell here, locking up an internal mechanism there. She was still focused on the EM fields and only that disturbance enabled her to dodge the blast from the wall cannons. "Summers, you cheater!" she muttered and hurled a drone at the offending cannon.

"He's in the control booth laughing at us," Nathan advised her, catching the drone she flung and easing it more gently to the ground as he incapacitated his five in various ways. "Would be trickier if these were actually human beings," he said conversationally, sensing another group coming in from the right. "What would you do then?"

"Of course, he's laughing. Sick, twisted little Summers brain." She dismantled a drone while she waited to get a better feel for the incoming. Nothing that couldn't be easily reassembled. Forge would probably out of his mind with glee if they gave him the opportunity. "Start working with environmental elements instead. Through them at each other if they're wearing enough metal. Depends on how much punishment they can take and how persistent they are."

Nathan grabbed three very distinctly plastic drones and brought them into a jarring landing, telekinetically switching off their power supplies. "I've been thinking about using my telepathy more than I do."

Lorna looked startled as she ripped the circuits from the remaining two, with much less finesse than she'd have shown otherwise. "You're going to change their minds?" She hated the idea.

Nathan tried not to grind his teeth at the reaction. "'Go away and smell the roses instead of fighting us' is a much less damaging proposition. For them."

"Forever?" Lorna shifted to dodge another blast from the wall cannons. "Or just until they get home and realize that you've jacked their brains? Or hey, how about 'join our side' 'be our best friends' 'be super heroes and forget about your villain pasts'." She turned, "Four more that way."

Nathan, just to be petty, deflected the blast right back at the wall cannon. As the blast was low-powered, it left a scorch mark on the cannon itself but didn't do any real damage. "If by the time they get home and realize it, we've already done what we came to do and gotten out of there, without having to do any personal damage to the people who would have gotten in the way, isn't that preferable?" He left the four coming at them from the left run right into a TK shield.

"Until they figure out that the best way to stop the telepaths is kill them and then the rest of us." Scott must have decided they had entirely too much time to talk because the next wave of drones was coming from all sides. Oh, joy. "The most powerful telepath on the planet sits out every fight. You think that's a coincidence?"

Nathan could almost feel his concentration shift upwards, as smoothly as it ever had, and it was more than a little reassuring. Fractals, he told himself, and focused on the drones' powers sources. One pattern of movement to shut them off, duplicated en masse.

#See, that's the slippery slope in the other direction,# he shot back at Lorna telepathically as drones started to fall out of the air around them. #Telepathy's dangerous in a fight, but so is magnokinesis. So are Scott's optics blasts, or Storm's weather control, or Wanda's hex bolts. Anyone wanting to kill people who might have an edge in a fight has plenty of potential targets. And only telepaths are the ones who can make them forget what they were planning to do in the first place.# He wondered suddenly if Lorna knew that the telepaths in the house, unlike Manuel, could make permanent changes in someone's mind.

Judging from her expression, she did and didn't like it. "The worst I can do to a person is kill him." Since he had the drones, she concentrated on the wall guns, nudging them to fire on each other or the drones rather than on them. It was a lot of little movements in a hundred different directions. No pattern which made it trickier.

"And making someone forget they want to do unethical things with their powers is worse than killing them, then?" He slammed the few remaining drones to the floor with a little more force than absolutely necessary, then caught a wave of projectiles coming from the wall guns on the other side of the Room.

Her reply was delayed by the sudden overhead assault from a set of drone she didn't recognize and couldn't feel. She increased her shields and threw the metal drones at them. "Are you going to do it to Manuel?" she retorted finally.

"You're hogging the drones. Stop that." And these ones were fast, dodging the drones Lorna threw at them, and had little guns, too. Charming. "And I'm not going to dignify that with an answer. Unless Manuel starts calling himself the Spanish Avenger and running around out there playing mutant supremacist or something like that, there's no equivalency between the two situations."

"You got the last batch." Sadly not little guns with little metal bullets. Damn Cyclops anyway. "Oh, so some unethical ideas are worth raping the brain and others aren't. Good to know there is a line." She pulled metal from her uniform lining and sprayed it at the incoming drones. They were going to get through, there were just too many in this case.

"Nice way to avoid my question, by the way," Nathan said through gritted teeth. The little energy-blasts the drones' guns produced were tiny little things, barely more than bee-stings, but there were rather a lot of them, and he hadn't practiced heavy-duty shielding against energy in a while. "Is it somehow better to beat the crap out of an opponent than it is to make them forget they want to fight you?"

"Yes," was the terse response. She was going to need a new source of metal if this kept up. She extended her shields to cover Nate as well when she noticed he was getting hit. Energy blasts were easily to deflect and she'd be damned if she'd let another partner get hit when she should have been shielding.

"I don't get that," Nathan growled, then nearly jumped out of his skin as he felt the Room start to shift around them. "Oh, crap, what's he doing now..."

"They can hit back." She sounded distracted; like him, she was concentrating on the movement of the room. She cursed mentally, she should have known that Scott wasn't going to let them play around forever.

"So it's all about being fair to the bad guys?" Nathan asked, and jerked backwards as the wall beside him slid aside. Two of the larger combat drones came charging at him, within hand-to-hand range almost immediately, and Nathan's curse caught in his throat as panic flooded up inside him, the panic he and Charles had been working on so carefully and that he'd thought had been diminishing. Don't break the drones, a calmer part of him reminded, and he managed not to quite smash them away. Although they both hit the ground hard, and one was minus an arm.

Nathan got big combat drones and Lorna got the smaller wiry drones that had always reminded her of ninjas. The ones she always had trouble with. God damn Scott Summers. She dropped of her own volition and sheathed her hands in metal, punching through the "chest" of the first one and flinging it back toward its compatriot. "It's about not being the bad guys."

His heart was thundering in his chest again, and he clenched his hands into fists to hide how they were shaking - not from Lorna, who was occupied, but from the eagle-eyed Summers in the control booth. "So, using your telepathy to avoid having to hurt someone makes you a bad guy? Or using your telepathy in general for anything other than communication makes you a bad guy?" The wall guns were moving, and he flung up a shield, rather than trying to catch the projectiles - rubber bullets, he thought. The floor up ahead of them open up and another trio of drones appeared out of the pit.

Preoccupied as she was with the still active second drone--she was considering just slamming it away with raw power but that lacked elegance and it was exhausting as all get out--one of the bullets hit Lorna, tagging her shoulder hard enough that the flexible metal couldn't absorb all the sting. So her response to Nathan was something more blistering than she might have done. "There's a fucking inviolate part of people."

Nathan grabbed her drone telekinetically and shut it off. It folded to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut, and the wall guns chose that moment to pick up their rate of fire, even as the new trio of drones - plastic, all three of them - rushed them head-on.

#No, there's not. Functionally, there's not. That's the problem,# he shot back, not stopping to think about the irony of replying to her telepathically, just trying to save his breath. There was energy crackling around one of the drones - and it broke right through his shield, the backlash sending him stumbling backwards. Giving the drone the opportunity to physically tackle him, and a rush of pure terror drove the debate out of his mind as he hit the ground, the drone on top of him. Just like in the hallway, and all at once he was there, the memory overwhelming him.

Lorna was there almost immediately, angry at him and willing to take it out on the drone. One of the first metal drones was quickly repurposed as a battering ram and flung at the irritatingly plastic drone on Nathan. She slipped a shield between him and the energy attacks and god damnit, why had she let that lapse! The little bit of metal in Nate's uniform was enough to get a grip and yank him back enough that she could get between him and the rest of the onslaught adding her own shields to the one she'd put up.

It wasn't being yanked out of the line of fire that snapped him out of it - it was Scott's worried thoughts from the control booth, and a very distinct flash of Scott's hand over the abort button. Hauling himself back to his feet, trying to shake it off, he reached out to the other two drones and shut them down as well, although not as deftly - these ones were going to require some repair after the fact.

#This is turning into that no-win scenario of mine,# he sent shakily, some of the images still chasing each other around his mind bleeding over into the projection. #Scaling upwards.# He wrenched at the wall guns, forcing them to change their angle of fire.

So apparently they weren't playing nice anymore. Right then. Lorna spun her shields until they crackled with electricity. The shock flung back a couple more drones that dared them but she hardly noticed. Gritting her teeth, she narrowed her focus. The power sources had to be giving off some kind of signature and if she could match it… Got it. A dozen flat blades flung themselves off her, sparking with a very specific signature. When they hit their targets, the power cells exploded.

#That was all her, by the way! Not me!# Nathan flung defensively at Scott as he added a TK shield to hers to block the sudden drone-shrapnel coming at them.

The Room was still shifting, and the wall-guns were fighting his telekinetic grip, trying to target him and Lorna again. The simple thing, the thing he would have done out in the field, was rip them right out of their emplacements and tie them in pretty knots, but he didn't need to be doing that much damage to the Danger Room.

And... wait a minute. This might be starting to look like one of his no-win scenarios, but nothing in the scenario rules had said anything like that. So why didn't he just...

Shut off the power supply to the entire Room.

When everything when dark, Lorna suspected that Scott was merely setting up a new and sadistic scenario. When she realized what had actually happened, when it sank in that the background hum that kept the room running was gone. Lorna fell over laughing.

Nathan bent over, wheezing a little, and trying not to laugh himself. "Hey, the opposition's not standing anymore..."

"True but the doors won't open with the power gone," she snickered. The emergency lights flickered on, bathing the room in an eerie blue glow. She ran her hands over her uniform, shifting the metal back to its place, noting where she needed to replace it. "You're in so much trouble. Once Scott gets out of the control room that is."

Nathan sat down to catch his breath. "Yeah, I'm a bad, bad man. But I didn't want to see if that was actually going the way of my test scenario." He took a deep breath, then let it out, staring down at his hands. They were trembling noticeably, still, although the adrenalin rush was fading. "You think we were overly cocky there? Debating as we ran through that..."

"I think that's a fair guess. Certainly explains why Scott decided we should take on the sudden death challenge." She rested her chin on her knees. It would be a while before the emergency systems could be convinced to stand down and longer than that before power could be restored. "You okay?"

"I'm paranoid. There were plenty of ways around that," Nathan said, shaking his head suddenly. He hadn't been thinking, that was the problem - hadn't been looking for patterns, but just reacting. "Damn it. I overcompensated." He stared down at his hands. "I panicked," he said more quietly. Not in the eyes-bugging-out, screaming at the top of his lungs sense, but if the Danger Room was meant to reflect various restraints you might face out in the field, what was cutting the power equivalent to? "Damn it," he repeated more softly.

"You shut off the world." It wasn't a viable option outside of here. She knew he knew it. Since they didn't have anywhere else to go, she figured it was a good time to talk it through. "What would you have done if we'd really been in that situation?"

"If those had been human beings coming at us? Tied their guns into knots and knocked them out, I suppose." Nathan sighed, shrugging his shoulders in an attempt to shrug off the tension. "Tried to be delicate about it."

"Not told them all to go home and rethink their lives?" Lorna glanced up toward the cameras, wondering if they were on emergency power too. Probably not.

"You know, I did say I was thinking about using my telepathy more in field situations. Not that I had decided to do it, or that I had a really clear idea of where to draw the line if I did." Nathan sighed, rubbing his hands over his face.

"I just don't like it. The Jedi mind tricks? Only cool because it's a movie. It's not ethical to impose your will on someone else even for the greater good." There were plenty of ethicists that would argue that point. Lorna didn't buy it.

"You impose your will on someone if you knock them out, too, don't you?" Nathan countered a bit wearily. "Knock them out, make them forget they want to fight... either way, you get closer to your goal, whatever that might be."

Lorna sighed, "Yeah, I'm not actually a big fan of hitting people either. Contrary to the evidence. And like I said, they can defend against that. If I try to hit you, you can block it. If you change my mind…I never even have a chance. I'm just whatever you wanted me to be."

"I don't like hitting people." He got a rather odd look at that, and sighed, amending that. "I'm starting to get a little... twitchier about hitting people. About violence in general. One of the things I've learned this past year is that my after-action reactions, my whole working life, are as much about the fact that I'm a telepath as anything else. Even now, with my shields so much better, I still feel it. More than I used to, because my telepathy's sharpened with all this practice."

"So you want to abort before you begin." Lorna nodded, that made perfect sense. "Have you thought about maybe taking a role like the Professor instead? Mentor, trainer. Not a fighter?"

Nathan shook his head, then paused. "I shouldn't say that," he said quietly. "After Youra, I was considering not coming back to the team." He smiled a little, wryly, thinking about his conversations with himself. "But there were reasons to make the decision that I did. Lots of reasons." He shrugged again. "I'm too good at this sort of thing, Lorna - when I'm not struggling with lingering post-traumatic stress, I mean."

"Christ, what's wrong with you former badass types? Remy says the same thing. Just stop, you morons." Lorna tugged her gloves off and tucked them in her belt. Without the power it was getting warm in the room. "Being good at something doesn't make it some kind of sacred calling."

Nathan raised an eyebrow. "Small difference between me and him," he said. "I'm not bent on doing this to redeem myself, or because I don't think I deserve anything more... enjoyable." He fell silent for a long moment, listening to the murmuring at the back of his mind. "I can do... so much more than I have done, with my life. With my powers. And I can see the future. If those of us who can, don't, it could all end pretty badly."

"Do the future dead people in your head hold with telepaths fixing people to their whims?" Lorna had never actually had a conversation with the Askani. The fascination escaped her entirely. "If you want to do more with your powers, then maybe you should try doing something different than what you've done all your life. You used to be a soldier. That's not the only way to fight for the future."

"You're really stuck on that, aren't you," Nathan murmured. "Tell me, do you see any good that a telepath can do with their powers?"

Lorna blinked, "Of course. We couldn’t coordinate without it. The Professor couldn't have helped Jamie or Remy. There would be hundreds of mutants dead or worse if Cerebro didn't exist. Coma victims can be helped. There are plenty of good uses for telepathy that don't violate someone's free will."

"On Youra..." He stopped, part of his mind shying away from the subject, even now. "The Trojan Horse was meant to save the operatives. Give them back their free will. Instead, it..." His throat closed on him, cutting off what else he might have said, and he closed his eyes for a moment, trying to center himself. "You can do horrible things with the best of intentions, with telepathy. You can have questionable aims and still do good with it, too. Just like with any gift."

"They lived." Piers occasionally mentioned them in the two line notes that he tried to pass off as letters. "They had had their minds taken from them and you gave it back as much as you could. It wasn't perfect but it was better than the alternative." Lorna shrugged, "There isn't a black and white side of the line, I agree. But I think that forcing people into different actions is in the black."

"Then why am I considering it as an option?" It was mostly a rhetorical question, and came out more bleakly than he'd expected. "What does that say about me, that I survived just about the blackest version of that imaginable and now I think I can figure out how to walk the slippery slope and not wind up just like them?"

Lorna didn't try to respond directly. There wasn't really anything she could say after all. "There's always a moment before I decide to eat anything. Where I think about the calories, think about what I weigh. I want to walk away at that point. Every time. And sometimes one of the kids…always a girl, asks about it. And I just…I lie. I don't tell them how it happened or what I did. Because I might be helping but it's also like an instruction manual. How to fuck up your life in 1000 calories a day." It wasn't really the same thing and it probably didn't make much sense. She stopped talking and shrugged.

The lights came back on, the normal hum of the Danger Room filling the sudden silence. You two okay down there? Scott's voice came over the external speakers.

"We're fine," Nathan answered for the both of them, then lowered his voice again. "If you fight, you always hurt someone, or at the very least yourself. I don't know whether there's a hierarchy of pain, Lorna, but... I'll think about it more." It was all he could really say to her. They weren't going to reach a meeting of the minds on this, at least not here and now.

Lorna shrugged again. "It's not my call." She raised her voice and called to Scott, "I just want it to be perfectly clear that it was all his fault and I didn't have anything to do with it."

I think you're both on clean-up duty, was the disgusted-sounding response, and Nathan choked on a laugh.

"I think we were bad, Lorna."

"How much you want to bet he'll shield the power supply better from now on though? Think we can spin it as just doing our part to make the mansion a safer place?" She managed to keep a straight face until the doors slid open and they were allowed to leave.