Log: Cable and Tinky Winky

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Earlier this morning was Clarice's intro to the Danger Room. She also gets to finally hallucinate with the rest of the school. And is officially Tinky Winky. Ph33r Magneto. Ph33r.



Waiting for her leathers to come was going to kill her, Clarice was certain. For now, she was doing powers drills and basic training so she didn't eve need leathers, but that didn't mean she didn't want them. She'd been told to be at the Danger Room for a morning session and she had been so excited that she had gotten there with nearly fifteen minutes to spare. There was punctual and then there was borderline neurotic, especially when you were a teleporter.

"You're bouncing," was Nathan's comment as he came down the hall, wearing his leathers. "Don't get too excited - you're not doing much today."

"When don't I bounce?" she replied rhetorically, bending over at the waist in her black unitard, wrapping her arms around her ankles and pulling her head to the floor between her legs. It looked awkward, but it was a great stretch. That was when she saw the large blonde man stalking towards them with a large chain in his hand.

Flipping herself rightside up she recognized him as Sabertooth...in an X-Man uniform. "What the fuck?" she said, standing her ground for the moment. Dr. MacTaggert had said these visions weren't dangerous, just weird. And this was definately weird. "You seeing what I'm seeing?"

Nathan gave the figment a disinterested look. Creed as an X-Man - there had been more unusual sightings. "Logan would be thrilled," he murmured wryly.

"That is Not Right!" she shrieked indignately as Sabertooth walked right into the Danger Room wall, "I Worked too damn hard for some damn figment to go waltzing right through the damn door in leathers!"

Nathan gave her a long, level look. "Knock it off with the dramatics," he said, not quite repressively.

Clarice was one with the dramatic. It came from being, well, herself. Deflating slightly, she gave one last glare where Sabertooth had been and turned back to Nathan. "Sorry. Cable."

"I understand you're excited," Nathan said, hitting the door control for the Danger Room, "but you have to keep a more level head. Even training can be dangerous." His still stiff-back was testament to that.

Eightteen, an X-Man trainee and about to go to college, even though she knew the truth, she thought she was invicible. She forced herself to take several deep breaths and she slowly calmed down to something resembling mature, "That's why we train. To make the dangerous less so. Even if you can't eliminate all the risk, you can minimize it as much as possible."

"No need for a reiteration of the right words, Clarice," he said. The Danger Room lit up as they walked through the door. "Just for putting them into practice. You need to stand over there," he said, indicating the far west corner of the room. "Computer, create a safe zone." Immediately, a border of light created a six-foot-square rectangle. "Stay inside the lights."

The Danger Room, for all of its spoken capitals and ominous innuendo, was rather dull. A large grey metal cube. How disappointing, she thought as she stood where she'd been told to. "Full of sound and fury," she muttered, wondering what would happen.

"Computer, scenario sixteen-thirty-two," Nathan said, and the walls around them started to shift. "We call this 'rat in a maze'," he said. "It's a basic level - it's scaleable. See the target?" he asked, pointing in the direction of the far wall and the patch of light that had suddenly appeared there.

"Yeah..." okay, maybe the Danger Room wasn't quite as dull as it first seemed.

Nathan headed for the target at a jog. He hadn't gone ten feet when a pit opened up beneath him - a practiced flicker of telekinesis sent him airborne for the moment he needed to cross it. Olympic highjumpers haven't got anything on me... Part of a wall folded outwards as he landed, and he had to propel himself straight upwards to avoid a repetition of the other day's 'splat'.

I hope he doesn't expect me to seriously do this, she thought. It would be so easy to just teleport to the other side and avoid the mess in the middle. Becoming a Clarice-puddle was not on her list of things to do. Ever. Avoidance was a wonderful tactic in combat, she'd found. Eventually her opponent would either tire himself out or make a mistake. Then she attacked.

Then the target moved. It flickered across the wall, shifting to the other side, and Nathan abruptly changed course, wondering if he maybe shouldn't have scaled it up a few levels to make a better point to Clarice.

That was unexpected. And uncool. Very uncool. And very much not going to work with teleporting, she couldn't change direction in mid-port, that wasn't how her powers worked. She had to create the portal on both sides before teleporting. "Shit," she muttered as Nathan dealt with the new obstacles in his path.

"Computer," Nathan said when he paused for a moment's breath. "Level three." Drone alcoves slid open and several of the flying drones emerged and started to strafe the maze with blanks. Nathan shifted into shielding-and-running with the ease of long practice as he made his way through the crossfire. The target was, of course, moving again.

Destroying the drones made more sense than avoiding them like Cable seemed to be doing...oh. Right. Collateral damage and innocent people. Wouldn't do to just kill indiscriminately. Despite her initial thoughts on the Danger Room, she was quickly seeing it's importance. She had a feeling she'd be in here a lot.

A couple of gun turrets poked out from their recesses, and Nathan smiled slightly as he leaped from the ground to the upper half of the wall, avoiding their fire completely. And the target was... right... there.

He dropped, smacking a hand against the wall. The end-of-scenario klaxon went and the room immediately started to power down. Nathan landed on the floor, straightening, and headed back over to where Clarice was standing. He wasn't even breathing particularly hard.

"So, there's your introduction to the Danger Room," he said.

"Dude. That was...intense."

"It's also not real," Nathan said. "The key is to not start regarding this as some kind of living videogame. The scenarios are very carefully planned," he went on, "to get you to practice certain skill sets, and to stay within certain boundaries."

"Yeah, but like, I was watching the military channel the other day and they were explaining how they do war games to train for real combat. And this is like that. It's not exact, but it's as close as we can make it for good training," she didn't normally watch the military channel but she'd been bored. And well, not talking to Shiro left her with more time.

"Yes, we can't precisely throw you all out into the deep end in a real-world scenario," Nathan said. "That eventually becomes part of the training, but not for a while."


"There'd be a lot fewer X-Men," she noted, "And then we wouldn't be able to any good. Oh, I meant to ask you earlier, Shiro said I needed a more....menacing codename."

"Regretting our choice, are we, Tink?"

"No way!" she denied it vehemently, "I like it, it suits me. And it was suggested by Jim so it even follows the rules. Shiro's just being a fucktard right now I think. I just wanted to make sure that well, it was really okay."

"Well," Nathan said wryly, "I won't call you Tinky-Winky in the field. It's got nothing to do with it not being menacing enough - it's too damned long."

Laughing, Clarice smiled at him gratefully, "Tink works well too."