xp_logs | Thursday evening: Forge, Moira, and Marius

After the argument with Doug, Forge has decided to sequester himself from the journal system and devote his time to working in his lab. Unfortunately, this means he's been completely ignorant of Marius' emergency. Moira decides it's time to make sure the boy's informed to avoid shock later. She mostly succeeds.

Forge stretched his legs back, laying prone with his chest on his workbench and his knees resting on his stool. The position made fine detail work on his latest project easier, as he swung a set of magnifying lenses down over his eyes and continued the process of micro-welding hair-thin wafers of metal into a seemingly random pattern on the circuit board before him.

The sound of the silicon board against the insulated pad, the buzz and whiff of the soldering iron, the clacking of the workbench against his metal knuckles - the repeated sounds soothed him and helped keep his mind calm. Bump-buzz-clack, bump-buzz-clack, bump-buzz-clack-WHIFF...

Whiff?

He blinked and looked up, the lab indefinably blurry before he came to his senses and swung the lenses away from his eyes. Quickly, a red-haired shape came into focus. "Oh, hey, Doc," he called, recognizing Moira standing in the doorway. "What can I do for you?"

Moira was exhausted and it showed in her posture and expression. Waiting until the door closed behind her--though it wasn't like everyone else in the mansion didn't know and that was the reason she was here--she turned to face Forge.

"Forge, Marius is in th' Medlab in critical, but stable condition," she said softly, rubbing her forehead. "We realized when ye were quiet tha' ye've been down 'ere for a while."

"Oh," Forge stated after a few seconds of thought. The concept was taking a while to sink in. "He's stable. Well, that's good. What happened and- why's he in the medlab? Did he- was there a problem? Did something happen- what's going on? What do you mean by critical, is he going to recover? What's happened to him, Doc?" The questions started to come rapid-fire as Forge gripped the edge of his workbench.

As soothingly as she could, even though it was obvious that she was worried, she responded with, "We dinnae know all th' details jus' yet. Marius went out ta a club without a group an' teleported back ta 'is room later tha' night. He was fairly badly 'urt due ta tha' though Kyle an' Jay forced 'im ta feed on them so he could 'eal.

"It saved his life."

"Dual-mainlining strong healing factors like that, and he's only stabilized?" Forge was incredulous, pacing around. "He needs to be improving, you need to be doing something for him - what can I do? Is there anything you need - equipment, tests run, hell, if you need laundry done, let me help. What can I do?"

Reaching over, Moira clasped him gently on the shoulder. "Th' first thin' ye can do is take care o' yerself while he's 'ealin'," she said, firmly. "Th' other thin' is ta go an' spend time wit' Jay an' Kyle. We're lettin' a small group o' students, them an' Jennie, crash in th' waitin' room an' ye all will need each other." She stopped and then continued, "'Tis was bad but we're thinkin' 'e'll pull through an' as soon as we know anythin', ye bunch will be th' first ta know."

"All right, I can - he teleported?" Forge suddenly blurted out. He shambled across the lab to a whiteboard, making quick notations. "Wait, no. I've been keeping track of who he's been feeding off of -and I remember Mr. Wagner donated right before prom, because I was teasing Marius about looking slightly blue a couple days before. That's... he doesn't keep powers that long, Doc. That can't be right."

"I know, I'm goin' over all o' th' tests an' all o' his medical records right now. He shouldnae 'ave been able ta do this...but 'e did." Moira thought for a second and then turned a little to face him some more. "Paige an' I could use a 'and if ye 'ave the free time," she said, knowing that Forge wouldn't rest unless he was doing something and figured that she and Paige could keep him occupied enough to keep him from going insane. Or driving everyone else insane.

Forge looked at the numbers on the board, dates and distances and... nothing made sense. He furrowed his brow, looking over at Moira. "Where are his things? I need to see them."

"I'll show ye where we put them." Making sure he was following her, she sighed. At least this way they could make him eat.

Shortly after, Forge tries to play detective with Marius' belongings, hoping something will spark his brain into action. Instead, it turns out to be Marius who fades into consciousness and has a quick conversation that reasserts Forge's complete lack of bedside manner of any sort.

Forge moved as quietly in the infirmary room as he could, hearing the buzz of the machines that were plugged into his suitemate. IV drip, cardiac monitors, an EEG... wait - Forge paused.

Electroencephalograph meant they had to monitor brain activity. Moira hadn't said anything about a coma, and Marius' injuries didn't indicate one, just burn trauma and --

Forge peered through the clear plastic around the bed and froze. His friend's body looked like an open wound, what parts weren't covered by gauze that was soaked through with plasma and other fluids. The healing factors were obviously working - Forge could see clean skin growing back along Marius' face, recognizable despite the gauze packs along both cheeks and over one eye.

"Chemical burns," Forge murmured to himself, "rapid oxidizing of surface tissue without carbonization, but with high enough thermal intensity to superheat adipose tissues and... holy crap, you didn't just burn. You almost boiled alive..." He placed a hand against the plastic, brushing it gently. "What in the hell did you do?" he whispered.

Opening his eyes didn't make much difference. The world around him was nothing but light and shadow, blurry and nebulous; the optic damage was still severe, though improving. It wasn't so bad. Sleep was the only thing he could really manage right now. With a thick cough, Marius turned his face toward the familiar voice anyway. Manners.

"Nice to see you, too, mate."

"Hey there, I warned you about going outside without sunscreen, but do you listen to me?" Forge joked, turning away from his cursory inspection of Marius to look at the plastic tub that held his clothes and belongings from the incident, each separated into a plastic bag. Paige and Moira were already analyzing fabric samples, trying to determine what caused the damage and such. Holding up a bag with Marius' watch in it, Forge frowned. "So what in the hell happened, man?"

"Aside from me usin' a power I technically should not have an' apparently burnin' off one hundred percent of my skin, you mean?" Marius asked with as much dryness as he could muster. The words were slow and slurred; he couldn't feel any of the muscles of his mouth work. "Wish I knew. Ta for the 'boiled alive' comment, by the by. Not mind-numbingly traumatic at all, that."

"Actually, it looks like it's closer to seventy-four percent," Forge said flatly, peering at the watch. "Looks like your clothing actually protected your body for a bit - hey, this is the watch I made you for Christmas, isn't it?" he asked.

Marius snorted weakly. The effort made his chest ache, but really, even in critical condition there was no other appropriate response to Forge. "Sort of have to take your word for it, mate. But probably. Was wearin' it." The boy shifted slightly, more out of effort to elicit some kind of sensation than any need for comfort. The electroparalytic treatment they were using to deaden the pain center of his brain kept him from feeling his injuries, but it also had the side-effect of making his entire body numb. It was unnerving not to be able to feel anything but the slightest sense of weight -- which was distributed somewhat oddly against his back as Jay's healing factor was trying to grow him wings.

"You know, this doesn't half suck," Marius said as he heard Forge rustling among the plastic wrappings of his personal effects. "Good one that Jay and Kyle's powers should see me out of here in a week or so. How long was it for you? Back in the stupid days an' that."

"Six months," Forge answered absentmindedly, opening the bag and holding the watch up to the light. "Granted, that was being shuffled from hospital to hospital, multiple surgeries, recovery time, getting my spleen taken out because the first doctors never noticed it went septic, you know how it is. No one wants to treat the kid who comes up x-factor positive on the blood tests." He tapped the watch face solidly, then looked at his own. "That shouldn't be possible," Forge said suddenly. "I designed these watches to get updates from the atomic clock in Colorado, they shouldn't lose more than a second every month. Yours is fifteen seconds off."

"Is it? Apologies. I'll get right on resetting it once I've got fingertips again." His tone belied a new, private respect for his suitemate. Marius made another feeble attempt at shifting his weight. Three months was enough for me. No more hospital, thank you. First sign I can wipe my face without removing bits that shouldn't be seeing daylight and I am bloody gone.

"You can't reset it," Forge said in an annoyed tone. "The only way this could be off by this much is if you were in frickin' outer space or another dimension for fifteen seconds..." He paused, rushing to the foot of Marius' bed and looking at the report on the clipboard.

Marius rasped a strangled laugh. "Funny you should mention that. I think I might've left my skin the same place." Hell, he thought, choking back the acid wash of bile against his scoured throat. In Hell.

"Of course, unprotected exposure to a hostile environment would probably have those effects," Forge said, as casually as if he was explaining a math problem to Kyle. "Thermal and chemical burns indicate a low-oxygen environment, not enough to combust but hot and caustic enough to cause all this tissue damage, I'm thinking vaporized sulfuric acid. Awesome."

"Yeah. That was just loads of awesome. Everything about my mutation is one big wacky adventure." He just wanted to sleep. Sleep, and not have to think about this. Not where he was, or how he got there, or the mindless horror of trying to claw his way out of darkness and stench and inescapable agony or -- No. Marius' fingers curled against his palms, like dead wood against dead wood, but it wouldn't last, he would recover, he would heal. Bury it, bury it. I'll sleep and wake up and it will be better. Right. She'll be right. And then I can be out of here. Back to normal. Back to life.

"Well hey," Forge said apologetically. "Welcome to the suite's neverending game of one-upmanship. Jay gets beat up, so I have to go get kidnapped. I get kidnapped, so Kyle has to get beat up AND kidnapped. Now you throw yourself into an alternate dimension with an atmosphere of sulfuric acid vapor. I'm not looking forward to beating that one, you know."

"Don't flatter yourself, mate. I'm in a whole other league. You'd only embarrass yourself in the tryin'." Marius eased his fists loose, closing his eyes to the amorphous, distorted shadows beyond the plastic curtain. He should tell Forge, he knew. He should. Forge would understand. Everyone would.

That was the problem.

"Look, mate," Marius said at last, not opening his eyes, "much as I appreciate havin' the ways in which I nearly died described to me in meticulous detail, I'm gettin' a bit run down here. Healing factor takes it out of you, you know? Need my beauty sleep. Or at least enough of it that the beautiful bits have a chance to grow back."

"You need a chemically-induced coma, in that case. I'll go talk to Paige and Moira, share what I figured out. You sleep and heal. When your eyes are working again, I'll bring you something to read, maybe." Forge offered, tucking the watch back into its bag and replacing it.

"Cheers. Drug-induced comas are always a favourite. Also a radio." Marius exhaled slowly, allowing himself to settle back deeper into the bed he could barely feel. Sleep. Just sleep. "Too quiet down here. Drivin' me mental."

"Will do, man," Forge placed a hand against the plastic, looking down at Marius. "We'll fix you up, trust me. We can fix this."