xp_logs | Forge and Scott, the workshop, Thursday evening (Reply)

Scott brings some of the wounded home from San Diego. And one of them down to Forge's lab.

He was exhausted almost to the point of tottering down the hall, and wanted to do nothing more than find his wife and collapse beside her, but Scott walked right past the elevator that would have taken him to the third floor and down the hall instead, having a very specific destination in mind. The sublevels seemed eerily quiet - he wouldn't be surprised if the mansion above was just the same. The events in San Diego might be a day and a few hours in the past now, but it was going to take much longer than that to get out from under their shadow. If we do.

Forge was in his workshop, as Scott had expected. "Hey," he said, managing to keep at least a portion of the fatigue out of his voice. He did however lean on the doorframe. Nice, steady doorframe.

"What can I do for you, Mr. Summ- ... Scott?" Forge snapped bluntly, sighing loudly and running a hand through his already tousled hair. "Sorry, I've been going over this medical report about Marius' condition and I can't make sense of it. And it's driving me crazy and please tell me you've got a problem with something I can fix."

"Well, I'm hoping," Scott said, stepping forward and laying the bundle in his arms down on the table. He'd used one of the emergency blankets from the Blackbird - it had been the easiest thing at hand. "Since you did build it," he said, unwrapping the blanket enough to reveal the broken pieces of the psimitar it held. "Either way," he said more quietly, staring down at it, "I didn't think we wanted to leave something based on technology from two thousand years in the future lying on the beach. Even if it was broken."

Forge just looked at the broken psimitar for a moment before slamming his hands down on the workbench loudly. "Son of a bitch!" he exclaimed, shoving himself away from the bench and pacing around. "I knew something like this was going to happen! As soon as I saw it on TV, what happened to that tsunami, I knew someone was going to come back either with their brain turned into pudding, or... well, that my safeguard worked. Looking at this, I'm almost wishing you'd gone with the pudding."

He picked up a scorched piece of the haft, holding it up to the light. "After the first time Mr. Dayspring burned it out, you know, when he went all supernova and stuff? He had me fix it and so I put in a modification. Past a certain level of charge it wouldn't give any feedback. Sort of like the Blackbird's engines, you see? When you hit Mach 3, the air's compressing too fast to fuel the engines, so you need an alternate fuel source. Or you blow up the engine, which is what happened here."

Scott's eyebrows went up, just briefly. "Ah," he said, then shrugged a little. "From what I understand, all three of them were channeling their power through it - Nate, Jean, and David. I strongly suspect that's the only reason they were able to stop that wave."

"Well, duh," Forge responded sarcastically. "Water weighs one gram per cubic centimeter. Sea water slightly more due to the minerals and whatnot. That wave was about half a mile long, as tall as a ten-story building, and was moving close to sixty miles an hour. Quick comparison? That's a mass about, oh, a hundred times that of the Golden Gate Bridge. Half that, times the square of the velocity..." he wiggled his fingers in silent calculation - "We're talking enough joules of energy they pumped through this thing to hit a baseball to Mars."

If Scott had had two eyes, they would have crossed. He was an engineer and thus a lover of math, generally speaking, but these were numbers he was preferring not to examine too closely. "It was quite the view from the beach, actually," he said, almost managing a deadpan tone. "I'm still a little surprised that we didn't all die. I've never had to order X-Men to catch a tidal wave before."

"I'm surprised no one's died, period," Forge said, examining more of the broken pieces. "You all keep suiting up and heading out on the bird, every time, doing what's got to be done."

He turned to lean on his bench, looking intently at Scott. "You know, whenever you guys leave, I'm scared to count how many of you are getting on the Blackbird. Because I don't want to have to figure out the odds that it won't be the same number coming back. What you guys do, what the X-Men do - it's needed. I know that. And I know that one day an accident's going to happen out there, or Sabretooth's going to be just a hair faster than you expect, or you turn left when you should have turned right and more than an eye gets lost."

"It will," Scott confirmed quietly, tiredly. "We came close this time. We would at the very least have lost all three psis without this." He waved a hand at the psimitar. "So, really, as much of a pain in the ass as it undoubtedly is that Nate's careless with his toys... thank you." He cracked a very faint smile. "And I imagine everyone on San Diego's waterfront would thank you, too, if they knew."

"But they won't..." Forge said quietly, arranging the pieces in a semblance of order. "I can fix broken tools, vehicles, things," he hissed bitterly. "Broken people? Not so much. I figure between my arm and leg and Mr. al-Rashid? I've made nearly an entire person. That's my quota."

He was so tired. But he found the energy, because that was what he did when it was necessary. And this was necessary. "We're not gods," Scott pointed out, his voice just as soft. "We can't fix everything. We do what we can, to the best of our abilities, and we try not to blame ourselves for not being able to do all that we want to do." He noticed he was leaning on the bench a bit heavily. This definitely class as semi-dead on his feet. "It's a hard thing to learn, and if it's any consolation, I'm still working on it myself. And I," he said, gazing back down at the broken psimitar, "can't work miracles. It's harder, I'd think, to run up against your limits when you can very often do the impossible."

"You know what they say about an impossible problem?" Forge said, finally cracking some semblance of a smile. "It just hasn't had sufficient duct tape applied."

"I'll get you a very, very large roll of duct tape for your next birthday, then." Scott's eye was unfocusing, and he rubbed at it. "No rush," he said, reaching out to touch the blanket for a moment. "If you're going to do anything with it, you can put it low on your priority list. Nathan's not going to be in any shape to use it for a while."

Forge nodded. "Noted. I suppose it's better to break his gear than his brain. I haven't built a prosthetic brain yet," he mused. "Yet."

"Now you're frightening me," Scott said, managing to muster the energy to waggle a finger at the young man as he turned. "Don't do that until I've gotten some sleep. My ability to distinguish reality from delusion is not of the sturdy at the moment."

"Go sleep, fleshy one," Forge taunted as he turned back to his research. "World's still going to need saving in the morning."