Masque: Forge, Lorna (Wednesday afternoon)

[x-forge.livejournal.com]

After speaking with Kyle, Forge finds an unconventional solution to dealing with the pain he's going through. Lorna assists, but not before providing him with better-than-crack tuna salad.



Leaning heavily on the railing of the stairs, Forge hopped up with his right leg. One more up, seven more to go. It went a lot easier if he just didn't try to use his left leg. The muscles that had grown over the motorized prosthetic kept twitching and spasming when he tried to walk, and if the shock of pain didn't send him tumbling to the floor, the uncoordinated jerk of his leg would.

Walking on the flat hallway floor was slightly easier - he only had to keep his left leg locked straight, and affect a rolling limp as he tucked his left arm to his side. The blisters were wrapped in cooling gauze, and the latest application of anaesthetic kept the burns from hurting as much as they could. Even still, trying to do anything remotely coordinated with his left arm was beyond Forge's reach at the moment. So when he stopped in front of Lorna's door, he remembered to use his right hand to knock.

The door actually opened before he made contact, Lorna's voice floating through the small suite from the kitchen. "Come on in, Forge. I'll be just a second." It wasn't that she always kept tabs on the door or that she tended to track on Forge…but that it was a little of both. Lorna frowned, trying to decide what was bothering her about Forge's EM signature. She wiped her hands on a paper towel and tossed it in the trash, walking out to meet her visitor. "Hey, what's up?"

"I assume you heard about Monday night, yeah?" He asked, limping over to lean against the wall. Gritting his teeth, he tugged at the gauze on his left arm, revealing an expanse of skin. Red and raw skin, but flesh nonetheless. "Some kind of bio-manipulator jumped me and Kyle and Jay. They're a lot worse off than I am, but everyone's trying to get to the bottom of it and fix us."

He lifted his left leg, the bare foot sticking out from his pant leg wiggling in the air. "Some crazy mutant decided it'd be better to cover up these nasty unsightly parts, apparently."

Lorna flinched, figuring out what was bothering her. That was just a little creepy. If by little, you meant a lot. "Yeah, I heard," she said simply and crossed to his right side, offering him an arm. "Come sit. Hungry?" It was a standard enough question and in Lorna-speak also meant 'what's wrong, how can I help, tell me everything'.

"Starving," Forge answered, leaning on Lorna as she led him to a seat. "Dr. Voght prescribed me painkillers, but I haven't taken them since I got cleared to leave the infirmary. They were making my brain numb, I couldn't think right. And even though fixing this is beyond my genius... it's how I cope, you know? I mean, I can't do anything for Kyle - he's locked himself in our room. And Jay won't leave his either. Me?" He let out a long sigh. "I'm just waiting until they catch this guy and make him undo what he's done."

She got him settled on the couch and did a quick mental inventory of her kitchen. Like all teenage boys, Forge would eat anything, including the Tupperware. "Any requests or shall I just surprise you?" Lorna eyed the gauze on his arm, her stomach twisting with memory of exactly how painful burns were. Not a flicker of it reached her face. "Personally, I was all about the painkillers, more morphine was like my every waking thought. But I can imagine why you wouldn't be. Plus I'm a giant wuss, I whine over hangnails."

Forge shrugged aimlessly. "Morphine does horrible things when your actual body weight's less than a hundred pounds," he mused, although he realized that probably wasn't as true as it was months ago. "They're talking about surgery if they can't find this guy in a few days. No idea if this is going to last, but Kyle and Jay... they both heal really fast, and they're not changing back." His speech was getting faster, one of the sure signs that he was overly nervous.

"I mean, sure, they might be able to fix me, but the others... and how many other people has this freak done this to? I can't even remember what happened, and - agh!" He cried out as he smacked his left hand into his left thigh, both limbs jerking with the sharp protests of pain.

Lorna resisted the urge to remind him that she knew exactly what morphine did to someone under a hundred pounds. He hadn't been around--likely he didn't even know. No point in fussing about it. She'd started to turn to go back to the kitchen, letting him chatter, when he cried out. She whipped back around fast enough for her long hair to hit her in the face. "Forge?" She dropped to one knee and instinctively reached out to him, stopping inches from the new skin.

He'd closed his eyes, not wanting to look at the altered limbs. Trying to remember the breathing techniques Kylun had shown him, but he couldn't focus - couldn't think.

"I need your help," Forge finally whispered between clenched teeth. "I need you to shut my arm and leg down. I can't do it because any external signal keeps getting corrupted, and all I'm getting from them is pain. Please?"

She could do it. The protections he'd built in against exactly that weren't good enough against something as precise as her powers. Particularly not after all the training Magneto had put Malice through. Lorna bit her lip. "Have you talked to Dr. Voght about this?"

"Wanted to ask you first," Forge replied with a shake of his head. "Actually, I was hoping you could bring it up with her. Every time I open my mouth, she glares at me. She even glares in Russian!" He sat up straight, wiping his eyes with his right hand. "All I need done is to take them offline, I can reboot them the moment I have physical access again. But right now, short of some rather messy surgery..." He looked down at his leg, then up at Lorna. "When I joked about this place taking a bite of me a piece at a time, I didn't really MEAN it..."

Lorna nodded slowly. "Hang out for a sec."

Walking quickly, she went back to the kitchen and placed a quick call to the infirmary, talking quietly for a minute or two before coming back with a plated sandwich and a pear. "Here. We'll head downstairs so that I can get someone to monitor you while I do this. I don't think it'll be a problem but I'd rather have someone with a medical degree to back me up."


Forge looked at the plate, balancing it on his right hand. He attempted to reach over with his left hand, but paused halfway to his chest. Fidgeting for a moment, he managed to brace the plate on his left forearm, picking up the sandwich and taking a bite. "Mm," he mumbled as he swallowed. "You're the only person who could make tuna salad into a banned substance. I swear, you could sell sandwiches on street corners and put half the crack dealers in New York out of business."


She sat on the couch next to him and picked up the pear, slicing it into pieces, shrugging. "Low fat, high energy. The bread was sort of an indulgence but hey, gotta live dangerously, right?" Coping mechanisms came in all shapes and sizes.

"I would rather limit my dangerous living to high-fat foods and the impending cholesterol," Forge answered, scooping a bit of tuna salad off the plate with his finger and accepting a slice of pear. "Much preferable to kidnapping and assault."

"As one of the people tasked with getting back kidnapped and assaulted school members and also as a victim of both? I heartily agree. It's much more fun to inflicted triple chocolate death cake on people." She smiled and took a slice of pear for herself.

"So long as we don't have to share with Commander Voght, ruler of the medical gulag," Forge deadpanned, wincing as he stretched. A serious look came over his face, and he looked at the floor. "She says that it might be possible to fix what was done to me with surgery. It's not even going to be a question for Kyle and Jay. I can't help them, not this time. This sucks."

"You don't have to fix everything, Forge. You aren't the only genius here. We'll all be working on this." She glanced at the now empty plate then lifted it carefully away. "I know what it's like to feel helpless. Now is the time to trust the rest of us to take on our parts and make this right." She stood and offered him her hand, "Ready?"

Letting out a long, slow breath, Forge placed his hand in Lorna's and stood up off the couch. "No. But we go on ahead regardless, right? I trust you."