xp_logs | Nerdcore Superheroes, [Forge and Doug, Saturday in New York]

On a Saturday outing in New York, two mutants with the least physical powers on the planet manage to discover how applicable they can be when you're in the right place at the right time.

"And so he says, 'next time, break something that'll fix itself', so I decided on using his nose. Yeah, I know, shocked the shit out of me, too. So now he's showing me how to punch things correctly, kind of in return for all the algebra help last year."

Forge took another sip of his coffee as he walked up the steps from the subway, hunching his shoulders against the sudden burst of cold New York wind. He turned to Doug and shook his head. "I mean, not like I ever want to hit someone, but if it comes up, I should know how to do it right, yeah?"

"Well, you obviously wanted to hit Kyle enough that you actually did," Doug joked with a chuckle. Although he had to admit, on the list of people he'd expect to snap and punch their friend in the nose, Forge definitely was fairly low on the list. "And yeah, it's a useful thing to know. At the very least, you won't sprain your wrist working out frustrations on a heavy bag..."

Doug pulled the collar of his fleece up closer to his neck, then looked around. "I just remembered. We need to hit an ATM before we do anything else, I'm kinda low on cash at the moment." Taking a second to get his bearings, he pointed down the street. "That way."

"Ah yes," Forge said mockingly, pulling the thin leather gloves tighter over his hands. "All the filthy lucre that the life of an international superspy... I mean, 'data specialist for a mutant thinktank' generates. How's that working out for you?"

Having forgotten his gloves, Doug was reduced to rubbing his hands together and blowing on them before sticking them deep in his pockets. His shoulders hunched upwards slightly, which easily turned into a neutral shrug. "Pretty well," he replied. "Pete and Remy keep me busy as hell, and Remy's still not my all-time favorite person, but I really feel like I've accomplished some useful things since I've been there. Angie and I helped track down Marius and Jennie..." he said, casting his eyes sideways at Forge to assess the other man's reaction.

"I know," Forge said, nonchalantly looking straight up the street. "You did good. I wouldn't have thought to check the casinos. I mean, Jennie's from Vegas, and I didn't even think to try and make the connection. Part of me was still convinced she was just staying in Europe because it was better than anything she had back here. Kind of nice to be wrong there."

He tossed his coffee into a nearby trash can, then leaned against the wall by the ATM. "So how's Angie taking the whole you-dating-Marie thing?"

Forge's forced nonchalance wasn't lost on Doug, but he wasn't really sure what, if anything, he could say to reassure him about Jennie. "We just happened to make the connection and got lucky spotting them on camera," he demurred. Thinking about Forge's change of subject, his face turned somewhat falsely casual in turn. "Well, aside from the fact that one, I'm not dating Marie anymore, and two, it's hardly a subject to come up in casual conversation with my ex-girlfriend...I have absolutely no idea."

Forge smiled to himself. "She been seeing anyone? Angie, I mean?"

Doug's eyes narrowed slightly at the corners, but he carefully didn't double-take at Forge's question. "Not that I know of," he answered. "Why do you ask?" he questioned in a neutral tone.

"Just curious," Forge said, turning to the ATM before doing a double-take of his own. "Great," he grumbled. "Out of service."

The interesting aspect of his pronouncement was that the teller machine was showing no such message, simply blinking its usual "Insert Card" message.

Doug blinked. "Huh?" he asked confusedly, pointing at the "Insert Card" screen. "It says right..." he trailed off, then looked at Forge a bit more closely, seeing the calculating, assessing look in his eye. "Wait...is this a Wacky Mutant Power Thing?" he asked slowly, the capitals obvious in his speech.

"Observe," Forge said, producing his ATM card. He inserted it into the slot, silently counted to three, then held out his hand as the machine spat his card out, displaying a "Unable to read card" error. "Misaligned magnetic reader, means some moron likely tried to shove a homemade shim into the card slot to access the maintenance subroutines. Idiots don't know that it's all done remotely now."

He looked over at Doug with an innocent face. "What? It told me. Yes, it's a Mutant Power Thing. So what now, next bank?"

Doug gave Forge his best "bitch, please" look. "Duh, like you're not telling me anything I don't already know. Remind me, which one of us is the hacker god?" he asked with an amusedly raised eyebrow. He waved his hand at the ATM. "And if your wacky power thing has told you what's wrong with the machine, why don't you just, y'know, fix it? You know, paper clip, chewing gum wrapper, bottle cap...c'mon, man, MacGyver it up and we'll be on our merry way. Looks like a big line inside."

"Because that's illegal," Forge explained. "Besides, it's already had the anti-tamper trigger tripped. Going into these things without a command password sets off the alarm. Which I could totally bypass, were it not, oh, broad daylight."

He smiled, nodding towards the door. "So come on, Mr. People Person. Time to go get money like a Neanderthal and rub elbows with the unwashed masses. New York's not going anywhere."

Doug pouted. "Wuss." Though he had to admit, the blast of warm air that came as they opened the door was a welcome relief from the slightly early cold snap. Slowly he unhunched and drew his hands from his pockets. "I hate lines." He paused and amended his statement. "Mostly I hate lines that go slow due to stupid people."

Forge just nodded, stripping off his gloves and unzipping his Xavier's School windbreaker. While the October weather wasn't really rough yet, it took him a while to adjust to the New York cold when autumn and winter rolled around. Looking around, he tried not to pay too much attention to the other customers, all impatient as they filed in three slowly-moving lines up to the tellers.

"So if you're not seeing anyone, and Marie-Ange isn't seeing anyone...?" Forge offered cautiously, trying to keep his tone merely curious. After all, it had been pointedly shoved in his face that he'd been the catalyst for the very public breakup between those two, and despite his initial opinion of the relationship, he'd come to see that it had hurt both Doug and Angie, and was of the mind that he should at least try and make some effort to mend it.

Doug quashed a sigh. Talking about Angie was not exactly his idea of a good time. While yes, they had gotten back to a sort of tentative friendship, it still wasn't the most comfortable topic of conversation for him. "Yes?" he asked quietly, wondering what the hell Forge was driving at.

"I'm not saying anything, I'm just saying, y'know... you work together, you live in the same apartment building..." Forge shrugged and grimaced at the slow-moving lines. "If it'd bother you if she-"

Just then, Forge's sentence was interrupted by a taller man in a thick parka, walking into the bank and bumping past him, pushing his way into line.

"...excuse you..." Forge muttered, brushing his shoulder off.

Doug's attention stayed on the man in the black parka, and he tuned out Forge's resumption of his chatter. There was something...odd about the man's body language. Where most of the other bank patrons looked simply bored and resigned to being in line... Doug's eyes narrowed when he saw how the man's hand stayed hidden inside the parka. "Shit," he muttered under his breath, cutting Forge off in mid-sentence again. "We're about to get caught in the middle of a stickup," he whispered, fishing his cell phone out of his pocket.

"A what? How do you---?" Forge's question was cut off as Doug mouthed "Cover for me". Forge turned around just in time to hear the first scream.

"No one moves, and no one gets hurt!" The man in the parka, exactly as Doug had predicted, had withdrawn a handgun from under his coat, pointing it at the ceiling. A shock of fear stabbed through Forge, and he glanced back at Doug whispering into his phone. Gritting his teeth, Forge made sure to block the gunman's view of Doug as best he could.

"Everything you have in the registers, now!" the gunman yelled harshly, "And no one moves! Everyone on the floor! Come on, move!"

"Dammit," Doug cursed even more feelingly. "I was hoping to get some more lead time. NYPD is on their way," he murmured to Forge in an attempt to be reassuring, seeing the fear in the other man's body language. To be honest, he was just as scared out of his mind at the sight of the handgun. Of its own volition, his hand crept to rub against his sternum, trying to soothe a phantom pain.

The gunman turned towards Doug, pointing with the gun, finger resting on the trigger. "I said on the floor! Move!" His eyes met Forge's, and he shifted his aim back and forth between the two mutants. "Do not fuck with me, I swear, I will put a bullet in you!"

Frozen in place, Forge watched the barrel of the gun as it pointed at him. All it would take is a twitch of the finger. Pull of the trigger releases firing spring which releases hammer which impacts the firing pin which impacts...

Wait. Talk to me. Talk to me talk to me talk to me...

Slowly, Forge lowered himself to a knee. "Talk to him, Doug," he mumbled out the side of the mouth. "Just keep him talking."

"Easy, man, easy," Doug said soothingly, holding his hands aloft. He slowly moved to his knees, keeping the man in his field of vision. Suddenly, the words of the police sergeant from the riots in Seattle echoed in his head. I could use about a half a dozen of him, you know? This was his gift. Communication. -Negotiation-. "Nobody here's gonna fuck with you," he continued, mirroring the man's usage, making the words seem non-threatening by his tone of voice. "There's no need to pull that trigger. Nobody wants any trouble." He looked around the room, taking in all the cowering bank patrons. "Nobody wants any trouble," he repeated loudly.

"Nobody wants any trouble?" the gunman spouted, even as he lowered the gun's barrel just a fraction. "What the hell do you know? Kid like you ain't had trouble. Try twenty years of working the same job at the mill yard. You wreck your damn back, and you get out of the hospital and they've taken your house, your wife's gone, your kids are gone -you don't know trouble, boy!" He swung the gun around again, waving it over the heads of all the bank customers, curled on the floor.

Forge just remained in a crouch, his eyes on the gun, mouth barely moving, echoing the same words over and over. "Talk to me... got to be sure..."

Doug bit back a snappy retort about how the other man didn't know his problems His sternum twinged again and it took every ounce of willpower to keep from clutching his chest and gasping for breath. "A bullet to the chest is a whole different kind of trouble," he said seriously, his eyes somewhat distant. "And that's the sort of trouble I meant. None of us wants that," he continued.

"I don't want to hurt anyone!" The gunman took a step towards Doug, pointing the gun with a panicked look on his face. "I don't have a choice, don't you see? I need this! I don't want to hurt anyone!"

"He really doesn't," Forge said suddenly, standing up. The gunman swung the pistol around again to aim at Forge's head.

"I will shoot you dead if you don't get down on the floor, boy!" he insisted. For a tense moment, Forge stared right down the barrel of the gun, wondering if he was wrong. The gunman cocked the hammer back with his thumb, arm extended at Forge's face. "I'll do it!" he rasped.

Forge kept his eyes on the pistol, ignoring everything else. "Not without any bullets in the gun."

Doug's heart was in his throat. Visions of Forge's cooling body spun through his head, and then he remembered the events of just a few minutes earlier. The inventor had seen at a glance what was wrong with a machine that looked in perfect working order. But just because the gun didn't have a bullet in the chamber didn't mean the robber might not have an accomplice in the crowd. Scanning as quickly as he could, Doug searched the crowd of patrons for anyone that looked other than scared out of their mind. Not finding it, he stood as well, moving to stand shoulder to shoulder with Forge. "You didn't come here to hurt anyone," Doug said gently. "You don't need to be hurt either. Put the gun down, and this will all end okay," he pleaded with the man.

Ever so slowly, the pistol lowered from shaking fingers to drop lightly to the carpeted floor. "...I didn't have anywhere else to go..." the would-be bank robber said quietly, flinching as the lobby of the bank was suddenly lit in red and blue. The booming voice of the police chief echoed through the glass doors.

"This is the New York Police Department! We have the building surrounded!"

Forge reached out, lightly turning the man towards the doors. "Come on," he said quietly. "It's over."