xp_logs | LOG: [Lorna, Jamie, Haller] (BACKDATED): Danger Room run (Reply)

Lorna plays senior officer to Haller and Jamie on a Danger Room run, which is reasonably successful in spite of the aspect that makes her want to rip their CO's spine out and beat him with it.

There was a trick to this, Jamie thought to himself. Enough dupes to keep a nice even defensible spacing around Haller, Lorna, and their group of "innocent" drones, not so many that Lorna, blindfolded, would get vertigo and fall over when Haller switched her viewpoint around or gave her a panorama. Because confusing the heck out of the magnekinetic while she was swatting drones would be bad.

#Everybody doing okay?# he asked across Haller's switchboard. #Lorna, you holding up?#

#I hate this. So. Much.# She sounded like she was on the verge of a panic attack but that didn't seem to affect her performance at all as she wrapped a coil of metal around of the plastic guard drones and tossed it away from her next group of hostages. #I'm never going to be in this situation. Why are we training for it?#

#Because Scott is secretly evil?# Jim volunteered apologetically from his place at the other end of the scenario. He shifted position a little to allow for the very realistic pile of rubble blocking his view despite the redundancy of using his eyes while already psychically linked to a score of dupes. #I'm sorry. He wanted me to practice the switchboard in action with more than just Jamie, and my powers aren't much use against drones.# He left unspoken the detail that Lorna desperately needed the practice. She had never liked telepaths, and Malice had only made the experience worse. Normal telepathic contact was highly uncomfortable, and prolonged contact, as with the switchboard, was all but out of the question. Lorna needed just as much practice handling the contact as Jim needed maintaining it under stress.

Accommodating Lorna's phobia was an added challenge. Normally Jim took pains to make telepathic input seem as natural as possible, but in this instance he suspected Lorna wouldn't appreciate the blurring between her reactions and a foreign influence's. Much of Jim's effort on her part was to purposely exaggerate the artificial aspect of the communication; instead of plugging her directly into the senses of the dupes he'd arrayed each viewpoint like a series of television monitors, focusing the perspective only when one contained an immediate threat. Otherwise, Lorna herself could choose which 'screen' she wanted to look at. He suspected that aspect of control was important.

#Not that secretly,# Jamie thought back, amused. He batted some flying drone-bits away from a hostage with his staff, then took a deliberately careful look around, making sure Lorna had a good view. #In fact, it's been semi-easy so far, so a batch of cookies says the whole scenario goes to hell in the next two minutes.#

Lorna ducked another drone that had come up from behind her. #Easy for who? You should try this blindfolded and see how well you do!# That drone went flying as well, knocking into a steadily advancing pair of scouts. She took a moment to orient herself, grateful for Haller's light touch on her mind--this was disorienting enough without the level of remove he'd provided. #I see your batch of cookies and raise you a pavlova that the victims turn on us. Let's head straight ahead.#

#Is there usually this degree of smashing things?# Jim asked, wincing slightly at the sound of the impact. He sensed more than saw one of Jamie's dupes turn a confused 'bystander' back towards the main group, which was trying to panic as a well-placed magnetic burst from Lorna sent another aggressor straight into a wall. Without any kind of physical power he felt a little useless. Because you should have one. He pushed the thought away. We have our own job, remember? #I haven't really had the opportunity to use this place for anything intricate so far, so the faceless automatons are a little new for me. Well . . . then again, with a name like 'the Danger Room' . . .#

#We're not supposed to actually break the drones if we can get away with it, I think.# Jamie ducked another drone as, on the other side of the formation, a dupe went after a couple more panicky stragglers. #The lethal-force thing, also it's rude to make the next person wait until the Room's finished fixing them. Or making new ones. But this is about the most complicated scenario I've done yet, yeah--usually I get put through the whole 'Heavily Armed Obstacle Course' rotation.#

#They aren't broken.# Lorna stopped moving temporarily lost and received a heavy blow across her back for her trouble. Her metal reinforced uniform meant that she was just knocked over instead of having a broken rib or two. Blind and disoriented, she struck out instinctively, smiling without joy when her boot connected at the knee joint and the drone crumpled. #They can take more than you think.#

He was going to have to make sure she ate after this, Jim could tell, but he wasn't too worried about it. For one thing, he was reasonably sure Jamie would help. #So I can kick with impunity as long as it does nothing theoretically permanent,# he sent as he shuffled Lorna's perspective to the dupe next to her so she could navigate a tangled mass of exposed electrical wires. The first of the bystanders was approaching his group now. #Okay. That's good to--#

One of the arriving evacuees cold-cocked the nearest dupe out of nowhere.

The Jamie who'd been punched picked himself up off the ground, rubbing his jaw. With a quick mental apology to Haller, all of him duped, doubling his numbers in an instant; he concentrated for a moment and detached each pair to its own separate consciousness, sacrificing a bit of coordination to maximize his flexibility, and the pairs fanned out to separate the hostiles from the "real" evacuees.

The single mind within the net Jim had been maintaining abruptly schismed under his grip, like a web of Christmas tree lights suddenly sliced into sections. The same psiprint was now divided between six distinct consciousnesses. Jamie had cut the dupes loose; twelve bodies, six independent minds. It was an entirely organic fracturing that Jim instinctively realized was meant to allow each autonomous dupe and dependant partner greater freedom of attention and functionality. There was a slight wavering across the switchboard as Jim fumbled a little in adjusting the connection, then stabilization. No, Jim thought, firming up the connection between Jamies to compensate for the separation while keeping the number of 'screens' available to Lorna to something below sensory-overload, It really isn't so unfamiliar at all.

#It's probably a good thing we didn't try that in the field,# Jim sent as he backed away from the approaching drones. Almost absent-mindedly, the telepath knelt down to prize a metal pipe out of the debris next to him.

Lorna made a high-pitched squeaking noise as Haller adjusted her views. This was going to make her sick sooner or later, she could tell. Thankfully, she'd been through the mass of sparking electric before anything had changed and now she had a team double the size as before. #Yes. Very. Okay, let's work on clearing a path out for these folks and I'll work on keeping the obvious hostiles off us."

Sick and tired of tripping over things because her 'screen' didn't cover that part of the view, she lifted herself off the ground slightly, just a couple feet.

#Sorry.# The thought rippled through the network, echoing from each of the Jamie-pairs. They paused in shock, then one of them said #Right, I'll talk. Yeah, this is gonna take some getting used to . .. might be something we wanna practice, though?#

The Jamies were doing a workmanlike job drawing the hidden enemies out of the crowd of evacuees, but one--possibly cleverer than the rest, or at least programmed with smarter AI--ducked past him and took a swing at Haller.

His reflexes weren't as good as he would have liked them to be, but the automatons had not been programmed for extreme speed -- or, for that matter, common sense. Rule number one: when barehanded, never rush a man with a weapon. His hold on the switchboard never once faltering, Jim calmly sidestepped the blow and brought the pipe hard across the drone's exposed back. He readjusted his grip as it stumbled forward, flailing to correct its overbalance. Bet I could take its head off -- nonfatalnonfatalnonfatal! -- fine. He swung on the drone's outside kneecap, caving in the joint with a solid crack. Another good hit to the shoulder and his opponent was definitely down for the count. Jim stepped back from the twitching heap and smiled up at the nearest Jamie.

#Little league,# the telepath lied. Assured he was out of immediate danger, Jim reoriented his perceptions slightly. #Lorna, how're you doing back there?#

#Well, I'm blind.# In the few distracted seconds that he'd been fighting his drone, Lorna had somehow picked up five of her own. Thankfully this was a lower level training exercise and she was able to take them out without much trouble but there would be bruises to soak out later. She'd started ignoring the input from the dupes. It was too disorienting while fighting.

#Maybe next time we should reverse it,# Jim offered. #You can lead Jamie and I around the room with EM fields in pitch darkness to simulate a night exercise. Or Scott. I think that would be fair.# He could sense the increased dependence on her own awareness of the fields, but made no move to press her. What mattered was that she was tolerating the contact. In deference to her strategy he dampened down a little, making the visual feed slightly less insistent. It was progress, at least.

"Practice would be good," he added to the nearest Jamie, speaking it aloud so as not to subject Lorna to anymore distracting contact than was strictly necessary. "How are you doing? I take it you've never been linked after splitting with your dupes."

Jamie grinned. "Well, I don't have that much experience with telepaths period, and yeah, this was the first time I split off some dupes on a switchboard like this. Just had a little confusion over who got to be in charge, right at first, but now it's . . . actually, not a whole lot different than running them myself."

He took a quick survey of the terrain, each of the dupe-pairs reporting in; what few hostiles remained active were either in the process of being subdued by the dupes or incapacitated by Lorna's power. "Think we're about done here, unless this is one of those sessions with the double-twist ending. Lorna, I owe you a pavlova and a batch of cookies, I think."

"It won't be." Lorna touched down lightly, having completely pulled away from the switchboard by this point. "You're both too new. Double, triple and quadruple twist endings are for later. I get those a lot but that's because I'm old and presumably know better than to fall for a simple double-cross."

Sure enough, as the last 'victim' was escorted into the safe zone, the klaxons sounded and the lights went back up. Lorna pulled the blindfold off. "Good run, guys. Haller, nice with the pipe beating."

"Um, thanks." I don't like that we've had practice. Don't complain, it means you're not completely useless in a fight. Jim shook his head and began disengaging the switchboard -- which, on Jamie's end, was already rapidly diminishing. "Maybe I will talk to Scott about an exercise using dependency on your EM fields. There's not really any normal comparison, so it'd be good practice for me, too. Not that sensory input from twelve redundant minds isn't . . ." He smiled at Jamie. "Did that take you long to get used to? I imagine it must've been confusing for a while."

Jamie laughed, the dupes rapidly shuffling back into a single body. "First six months after I manifested I couldn't even move my dupes separately--I would've been the ultimate synchronized-swim team except for the days when I was sensitive enough a mosquito bite would trigger me. My parents figured out a bunch of exercises to help me desync and get some control, but it was, yeah, 'confusing' is actually a pretty mild way to put it."

Jim laughed, wiping his hands on his jeans. "I had the opposite problem. I spent a couple months back at the beginning almost totally unable to hold a coherent thought because I was trying to have ten at once. Turns out it was good practice for the switchboard. You learn how to divide your attention without losing it." He looked from Jamie to Lorna, one eyebrow raised. "So . . . shower, then lunch? I think we deserve lunch. None of us did anything embarrassing, like fall into a hole or coma ourselves with brainsnap or anything."

The telepath thought for a minute, then added, "But Lorna doesn't get to cook, because she just spent an hour shepherding the rookies around blindfolded. I think that's enough work for one day." The fact that he was perfectly aware of how much she'd hated the latter half of the exercise had nothing to do with that judgement whatsoever.

"I like the part where Lorna does less work," she announced, heading for the door as the DR shifted itself back to the bland, clean, waiting state that it was in most often. She was the only one who knew that her hands were shaking, residual nerves from the experience of having Haller in her head, having to rely on someone else for guidance, having to sacrifice that measure of control. "I'll see you boys upstairs."

Jamie waved after her. "Leave your lunch order with the me in the kitchen, the rest of me'll be up in a minute."

"That went pretty well," Jim observed quietly as their friend left. "All things considered."