Forge and Julio, Friday
Aug. 11th, 2006 10:18 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsDuring a rather quiet week, Forge and Julio are beset by the most dangerous enemy to lay siege to the mansion - boredom. However, between the two of them, they come up with a plan to remedy their situation, with rather unexpected (and sticky) results
Forge paced up and down the hall, twirling a basketball absently on one finger. It was a beautiful day - the locals were complaining of the heat, but to Texas-born Forge, this was just a balmy summer day. The perfect kind of day to go throw the ball around - but Kyle was off doing something in the woods, and he'd already discovered that no one else even remotely presented a challenge, not since Wanda left. Or Jay. Or Marius. Or...
Reflexively, he popped his PDA out of his pocket and checked his email. No emails other than the usual "Increase your PEN15!" "Real Estate Investment Opportunity" "Solve This Sudoku Puzzle!" and "My friend, I am a humble Nigerian diplomat" spam. Pocketing the device, he stopped by one of the phones, tapping in his voicemail code.
"You have... no... new messages," the tinny voice chirped. Cursing under his breath, Forge bounced the ball off the hardwood floor, dribbling lazily on his way to the sunroom.
"Bored bored bored..." he groaned as he rounded the corner.
Julio thought he would never see the day where he was actually looking forward to classes starting. He'd explored just about every inch of the mansion and then some, at this point. He'd played the Xbox in the room until he thought his eyes would bleed, tried to make himself read more of "The General and His Labyrinth" in English, and had even run the whole way around the mansion. And he was still bored silly.
In deference to just how bored he was now, he was on his back on the floor in the sunroom, playing Tetris on an old Gameboy. He didn't even bother to mute the sound, the tinny music filled the room and he maliciously hoped he would get the theme stuck in somebody's head.
The dribbling stopped as Forge heard the plinking strains of "Korobeyniki", smiling as he remembered Ms. Blaire walking him through the melody on the old piano in the music room. "Level 20 drops more of the T-pieces than the others," he said as he sidled into the sunroom, falling face-first onto the couch and letting the basketball roll along the floor. "It's a design bug in the algorithms, to keep people from utilizing the same combinations over and over. It's why mathematically you can't keep the game going forever."
Julio stopped the basketball with a bare foot without even looking up from the screen. "Really? Huh. My highest was still somewhere in the forties. I had to stop because my thumbs locked." He paused the game and dropped it on the floor, lying with his arms outstretched. "So, with all the kidnappings, explosions, people-going-evil and demon attacks, how is it possible that I am so bored?"
"Careful what you wish for," Forge said flatly. "Because trust me, this quiet is a good thing. But yeah, totally god-awful boring." Idly he reached for a deck of cards on a nearby end table, expertly stacking them end on end as he spoke.
"Half the fun used to be trying to figure out which couple was going to implode next. Smart money was always on Manuel and Amanda -but occasionally you should hear the screaming Terry does when Bobby screws up. But now they're all happy smiley, and even THAT'S boring as all shit. Can't even enjoy a little schaedenfreude..." he mumbled, flicking one card and watching the tower before him crumble into a disordered pile. "Marius always used to know what to do."
"Marius?" Julio racked his brain. "The boy that used to live in one of the other rooms? The one whose stereo Kyle claimed?" He'd heard a couple of stories about the boy, but those usually involved headshaking and sighing.
Forge nodded, flipping cards over idly with one finger. "Yeah. Had an accident with his powers, and bailed on us before he even gave anyone the chance to fix it." With a scowl, he swept the cards off the table, sitting up. "You know, screw this boredom and melancholy bullshit. You want to do something stupid?"
In the genes of every true male, there was a deep inbred desire to do dumb things. Be it games that usually involved both participants bleeding, random property destruction, and even jail. Julio was no exception. He sat forward on his elbows, a knowing look in his eyes. "What do you have in mind?"
Forge sat forward, pulling out a pen and sketching a diagram on the back of a magazine. "One thing I've learned, is that when things look darkest and the dark clouds of ill omen are upon us, one thing brings a light of hope -and that's making someone else look really, really dumb."
Tapping the pen against his temple in a moment of thought, Forge finally grinned widely. "Hey, how much of that ice cream's left in the fridge...?"
....
Thirty minutes later…
Julio tapped a finger thoughtfully on his chin as Forge finished adjusting the contraption of random pipes, medical tubing and one of Lorna's saucepans. "Should we do a test fire first? No sense in having a 'sundae surprise' if the surprise falls short by several feet." The pair had relocated to the roof of the mansion, and had spent the better part of 10 minutes assembling their catapult. It took so long because medical tubing was a right bitch to get to fit properly.
"Just let me check some calculations..." Forge tapped more numbers into his PDA, holding up a small fanlike device to calculate airspeed and direction. "Given ambient humidity, and viscosity of this... what is this again?" He dug one metal finger into the mostly-empty tub of ice cream, licking the pastel-colored glob off with a thoughtful look. "Orange-banana-mango, I believe. All variables taken into effect, we should get a good dense spread just past those deck chairs there."
Which, as Forge had figured when they arranged the catapult in position, was right where some of the smokers loved to go to get their fix. This was, as the boys had decided, really a public health service then. But on the off chance no one was feeling the need for lung pollution, they'd left a convenient note on Kyle's door. It was almost too easy to play off the feral's innate curiosity.
The sound of a sliding door below them brought both boys down into a prone position. "Can you see who it is?" Forge whispered. "Oh, tell me it's Kyle, please let it be Kyle..."
"I can't see," Julio whispered back, crawling to the edge of the roof on his belly like an army commando. He caught sight of a tall skinny figure, and he wiggled quickly away from the edge. "He's tall, is that good enough?"
"Kyle's tall," Forge agreed, reaching over for the launch lever, peering up cautiously to get a glimpse of the planned target area. "Okay. Wind speed constant... ice cream semi-solid projectile loaded and prepped, secondary charge of chocolate sprinkles primed..."
Gripping the lever, Forge smiled wickedly over at Julio. "Cry havoc, and let slip the sherbet of war."
With a quick pull, the payload of two and a half gallons of orange-banana-mango ice cream and four cups of chocolate sprinkles launched into a calculated ballistic arc, raining down precisely on the intended target area as Forge and Julio rushed to the edge of the roof to get sight of their victim...
...who was most definitely not Kyle Gibney.
There was nothing particular on Jim's mind at the moment beyond a cigarette. There was nothing complicated about that act, and lately there wasn't much left that wasn't. The telepath had already gotten his cigarettes out when he sensed -- something, moving through the air towards him and fast.
The reaction was automatic: Jack was shoving his way to the fore before Jim could even register what was going on. Unfortunately, the disorientation between switches proved to be a critical delay. The instinctive TK shield came a split-second too late, and instead Jack found he'd whirled around just in time to see the hurtling comet of orange sherbet as it took him full in the face.
"A la verrga." Julio moaned. Hitting Kyle would have been funny. Hitting another of the students and maybe a couple of the teachers would have been hilarious. Instead they hit the angry man who set the hall carpets on fire.
"Oh balls..." Forge whispered, frozen in place. "Please say he's not going to set the house on fire. Again."
"We run now, right?" Julio said, still stuck in place.
"We definitely should run." Forge said, identically poised unmoving on the edge of the roof.
It was cold. Cold, and wet, and at the speed it had hit him not exactly soft. Cursing, Jack staggered backwards, retracing the arc of motion in his mind even as he did even as he scraped viciously at his eyes. When his vision finally cleared his grey eyes were already fixed on the approximate point of origin.
Roof. Two figures, dark-haired, frozen in the act -- recognition flickered. The defensive posture dropped away as the former counselor's body straightened. Jack smiled darkly at the two boys through the mass of sliding orange goo and started finding edges with his mind, like slipping fingernails beneath a sheet of paper.
"Nice shot," the man called, and returned it.
It actually hurt, getting the return fire. Of course, the ice cream was much less condensed, so it was rather like being hit with shotgun pellets. As if either of them knew what getting hit with shotgun pellets felt like.
Julio at least had the intelligence to throw up his arms and shield his face. "Chinga tu madre, that hurt!"
Forge, however, caught a peppering of sherbet shrapnel upside the head, knocking him back onto the roof. "No fair!" he howled, "that's totally not a ballistic possibility. Homing sherbet is NOT COOL!"
The man shrugged and pitched his voice to carry. "Consider it a life-lesson." Jack wiped his eyes again. The main mass of it was gone, but he was still covered in residue that was rapidly becoming even stickier. He turned back to the house, one hand raised in a wave. "Better luck next time, kids. Take a shower."
Julio shook some of the sticky mass off of his arms. "That could have gone better," he said wryly.
Coughing, Forge sat up. "I have ice cream up my NOSE," he griped, glaring at Julio. "You are officially the worst spotter EVER."
"I said he was tall! You said that was good enough!" Julio retorted. Though in retrospect, he probably should have looked for longer than 3.5 nanoseconds. He wiped his face with his t-shirt. "Still got some good air, though."
"Oh yes," Forge said, smiling and walking across the roof to pick up the catapult. "Hey, what say we take this out to the jogging trail and wait for Paige to head by? See if we can go two for two?"
"Oh yes," Julio said mischievously, walking over to join Forge. "Preferably with something much wetter."
"You have a horrible, wretched mind for strategy," Forge said, hefting the catapult down to the stairs. "And you're absolutely right. Did I see some Jell-O in the fridge...?"
Forge paced up and down the hall, twirling a basketball absently on one finger. It was a beautiful day - the locals were complaining of the heat, but to Texas-born Forge, this was just a balmy summer day. The perfect kind of day to go throw the ball around - but Kyle was off doing something in the woods, and he'd already discovered that no one else even remotely presented a challenge, not since Wanda left. Or Jay. Or Marius. Or...
Reflexively, he popped his PDA out of his pocket and checked his email. No emails other than the usual "Increase your PEN15!" "Real Estate Investment Opportunity" "Solve This Sudoku Puzzle!" and "My friend, I am a humble Nigerian diplomat" spam. Pocketing the device, he stopped by one of the phones, tapping in his voicemail code.
"You have... no... new messages," the tinny voice chirped. Cursing under his breath, Forge bounced the ball off the hardwood floor, dribbling lazily on his way to the sunroom.
"Bored bored bored..." he groaned as he rounded the corner.
Julio thought he would never see the day where he was actually looking forward to classes starting. He'd explored just about every inch of the mansion and then some, at this point. He'd played the Xbox in the room until he thought his eyes would bleed, tried to make himself read more of "The General and His Labyrinth" in English, and had even run the whole way around the mansion. And he was still bored silly.
In deference to just how bored he was now, he was on his back on the floor in the sunroom, playing Tetris on an old Gameboy. He didn't even bother to mute the sound, the tinny music filled the room and he maliciously hoped he would get the theme stuck in somebody's head.
The dribbling stopped as Forge heard the plinking strains of "Korobeyniki", smiling as he remembered Ms. Blaire walking him through the melody on the old piano in the music room. "Level 20 drops more of the T-pieces than the others," he said as he sidled into the sunroom, falling face-first onto the couch and letting the basketball roll along the floor. "It's a design bug in the algorithms, to keep people from utilizing the same combinations over and over. It's why mathematically you can't keep the game going forever."
Julio stopped the basketball with a bare foot without even looking up from the screen. "Really? Huh. My highest was still somewhere in the forties. I had to stop because my thumbs locked." He paused the game and dropped it on the floor, lying with his arms outstretched. "So, with all the kidnappings, explosions, people-going-evil and demon attacks, how is it possible that I am so bored?"
"Careful what you wish for," Forge said flatly. "Because trust me, this quiet is a good thing. But yeah, totally god-awful boring." Idly he reached for a deck of cards on a nearby end table, expertly stacking them end on end as he spoke.
"Half the fun used to be trying to figure out which couple was going to implode next. Smart money was always on Manuel and Amanda -but occasionally you should hear the screaming Terry does when Bobby screws up. But now they're all happy smiley, and even THAT'S boring as all shit. Can't even enjoy a little schaedenfreude..." he mumbled, flicking one card and watching the tower before him crumble into a disordered pile. "Marius always used to know what to do."
"Marius?" Julio racked his brain. "The boy that used to live in one of the other rooms? The one whose stereo Kyle claimed?" He'd heard a couple of stories about the boy, but those usually involved headshaking and sighing.
Forge nodded, flipping cards over idly with one finger. "Yeah. Had an accident with his powers, and bailed on us before he even gave anyone the chance to fix it." With a scowl, he swept the cards off the table, sitting up. "You know, screw this boredom and melancholy bullshit. You want to do something stupid?"
In the genes of every true male, there was a deep inbred desire to do dumb things. Be it games that usually involved both participants bleeding, random property destruction, and even jail. Julio was no exception. He sat forward on his elbows, a knowing look in his eyes. "What do you have in mind?"
Forge sat forward, pulling out a pen and sketching a diagram on the back of a magazine. "One thing I've learned, is that when things look darkest and the dark clouds of ill omen are upon us, one thing brings a light of hope -and that's making someone else look really, really dumb."
Tapping the pen against his temple in a moment of thought, Forge finally grinned widely. "Hey, how much of that ice cream's left in the fridge...?"
....
Thirty minutes later…
Julio tapped a finger thoughtfully on his chin as Forge finished adjusting the contraption of random pipes, medical tubing and one of Lorna's saucepans. "Should we do a test fire first? No sense in having a 'sundae surprise' if the surprise falls short by several feet." The pair had relocated to the roof of the mansion, and had spent the better part of 10 minutes assembling their catapult. It took so long because medical tubing was a right bitch to get to fit properly.
"Just let me check some calculations..." Forge tapped more numbers into his PDA, holding up a small fanlike device to calculate airspeed and direction. "Given ambient humidity, and viscosity of this... what is this again?" He dug one metal finger into the mostly-empty tub of ice cream, licking the pastel-colored glob off with a thoughtful look. "Orange-banana-mango, I believe. All variables taken into effect, we should get a good dense spread just past those deck chairs there."
Which, as Forge had figured when they arranged the catapult in position, was right where some of the smokers loved to go to get their fix. This was, as the boys had decided, really a public health service then. But on the off chance no one was feeling the need for lung pollution, they'd left a convenient note on Kyle's door. It was almost too easy to play off the feral's innate curiosity.
The sound of a sliding door below them brought both boys down into a prone position. "Can you see who it is?" Forge whispered. "Oh, tell me it's Kyle, please let it be Kyle..."
"I can't see," Julio whispered back, crawling to the edge of the roof on his belly like an army commando. He caught sight of a tall skinny figure, and he wiggled quickly away from the edge. "He's tall, is that good enough?"
"Kyle's tall," Forge agreed, reaching over for the launch lever, peering up cautiously to get a glimpse of the planned target area. "Okay. Wind speed constant... ice cream semi-solid projectile loaded and prepped, secondary charge of chocolate sprinkles primed..."
Gripping the lever, Forge smiled wickedly over at Julio. "Cry havoc, and let slip the sherbet of war."
With a quick pull, the payload of two and a half gallons of orange-banana-mango ice cream and four cups of chocolate sprinkles launched into a calculated ballistic arc, raining down precisely on the intended target area as Forge and Julio rushed to the edge of the roof to get sight of their victim...
...who was most definitely not Kyle Gibney.
There was nothing particular on Jim's mind at the moment beyond a cigarette. There was nothing complicated about that act, and lately there wasn't much left that wasn't. The telepath had already gotten his cigarettes out when he sensed -- something, moving through the air towards him and fast.
The reaction was automatic: Jack was shoving his way to the fore before Jim could even register what was going on. Unfortunately, the disorientation between switches proved to be a critical delay. The instinctive TK shield came a split-second too late, and instead Jack found he'd whirled around just in time to see the hurtling comet of orange sherbet as it took him full in the face.
"A la verrga." Julio moaned. Hitting Kyle would have been funny. Hitting another of the students and maybe a couple of the teachers would have been hilarious. Instead they hit the angry man who set the hall carpets on fire.
"Oh balls..." Forge whispered, frozen in place. "Please say he's not going to set the house on fire. Again."
"We run now, right?" Julio said, still stuck in place.
"We definitely should run." Forge said, identically poised unmoving on the edge of the roof.
It was cold. Cold, and wet, and at the speed it had hit him not exactly soft. Cursing, Jack staggered backwards, retracing the arc of motion in his mind even as he did even as he scraped viciously at his eyes. When his vision finally cleared his grey eyes were already fixed on the approximate point of origin.
Roof. Two figures, dark-haired, frozen in the act -- recognition flickered. The defensive posture dropped away as the former counselor's body straightened. Jack smiled darkly at the two boys through the mass of sliding orange goo and started finding edges with his mind, like slipping fingernails beneath a sheet of paper.
"Nice shot," the man called, and returned it.
It actually hurt, getting the return fire. Of course, the ice cream was much less condensed, so it was rather like being hit with shotgun pellets. As if either of them knew what getting hit with shotgun pellets felt like.
Julio at least had the intelligence to throw up his arms and shield his face. "Chinga tu madre, that hurt!"
Forge, however, caught a peppering of sherbet shrapnel upside the head, knocking him back onto the roof. "No fair!" he howled, "that's totally not a ballistic possibility. Homing sherbet is NOT COOL!"
The man shrugged and pitched his voice to carry. "Consider it a life-lesson." Jack wiped his eyes again. The main mass of it was gone, but he was still covered in residue that was rapidly becoming even stickier. He turned back to the house, one hand raised in a wave. "Better luck next time, kids. Take a shower."
Julio shook some of the sticky mass off of his arms. "That could have gone better," he said wryly.
Coughing, Forge sat up. "I have ice cream up my NOSE," he griped, glaring at Julio. "You are officially the worst spotter EVER."
"I said he was tall! You said that was good enough!" Julio retorted. Though in retrospect, he probably should have looked for longer than 3.5 nanoseconds. He wiped his face with his t-shirt. "Still got some good air, though."
"Oh yes," Forge said, smiling and walking across the roof to pick up the catapult. "Hey, what say we take this out to the jogging trail and wait for Paige to head by? See if we can go two for two?"
"Oh yes," Julio said mischievously, walking over to join Forge. "Preferably with something much wetter."
"You have a horrible, wretched mind for strategy," Forge said, hefting the catapult down to the stairs. "And you're absolutely right. Did I see some Jell-O in the fridge...?"
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