xp_logs | log: [Forge and Julio] -Saturday Morning

Saturday Morning, Forge takes a break from the medlab to check up on a security issue. He finds Julio, dilegently practicing. Both boys consider their lives had they not been mutants, and the answers are surprising.

Forge checked his PDA again, pulling up the security logs. Even re-reading them a fifth time, they didn't make sense. Regular pinging of the security beacons, but from on the grounds? It was almost as if someone was either digging underground or...

The ground. Duh.

Connecting to the school's communication network remotely, Forge called up the list of all the school-issued cell phones. "Warlock, where's Julio Richter right now?"

#Pinging com-signal for Richter, Julio... waiting... waiting...#

#Richter, Julio is located 25 meters south of beacon 32-A.#

With a wry grin, Forge pulled up a map of the grounds. Beacon 32-A was... ah, out by the quarry. Short walk, but all uphill. Forge's grin vanished as he began trudging up the gravel path.

Minutes later, he crested the top and bent over, breathing hard, hands on knees. He could see Julio down by the entrance to the lower end of the large rock pit, and waved as he slowly shuffled down to him, too weak to call out until he was close enough to stop and slump down on a nearby rock.

"Been... practicing...?" Forge panted out, wishing he'd brought a water bottle.

Julio stood with his hands on his hips as the obviously out-of-breath Forge made his way down to him. He had to stomp on the small bubble or irritation at being interrupted. His control was still not what he wanted, after almost breaking several shelves in the library, he'd asked for and received permission to do some training sessions by himself. Using his early morning run, he'd gone to the quarry, where he'd been practicing since around dawn.

"Just a little," Julio said, pausing to take a drink from his own water bottle. He wiped his mouth with a sleeve and continued. "Power level. . .variations? Breaking big rocks." He shrugged and wiggled his bare toes in the gravel of the quarry. "Did you feel like the hike?"

Forge shook his head, catching his breath. "Nah, this is nothing. The security systems were going weird for some reason, figure it's probably the high silicate content in the bedrock here. You see, it vibrates at a different rate than the looser earth around it, and..." He glanced over at Julio, then just waved a hand. "Ah, Lorna can explain the geological stuff. Anyway, I can calibrate the sensors for it, but I'll need to take a few baseline readings. Just... go back to doing what you were doing. Forget I'm here."

With that, he unhooked a probe from his belt, sticking it into the ground and tamping it down slightly with his heel. Glancing down at his PDA, Forge tapped in a few commands, watching as the lines of code scrolled by, then looking over at Julio. "No, really," he insisted. "Go ahead."

The younger boy shrugged again. He asked for it. The air to Forge's left rippled and there was a nearly deafening crack as part of the quarry wall sheared off and hit the ground with a smash. When Forge turned around, Julio waved with one hand and pointed to his earplugs with the other.

Forge nodded, wincing slightly as his ears rang with the resounding noise of the small avalanche. Thinking for a moment, he put his headphones on and flipped the noise-cancellation switch, drowning out the echoes of the falling rock with a counter-frequency of white noise.

"So," he asked Julio, standing close enough to hear through the din, "pretty impressive, huh?"

"Somedays, yes," Julio admitted, tilting his head slightly. Too much for that one, he'd only wanted a third of the rock face, not the whole freaking thing. Big damage he could do, he knew that. It was the little damage that was tricky.

"At this rate, perhaps I shall be able to visit home without destroying it before I am twenty-five," he added wryly.

"How's your power work?" Forge asked earnestly, leaning down to check the readings from the probe. "I mean, is it like you send energy into the ground, or you manipulate what's there, or what? I'm just curious."

Julio paused, and then removed his earplugs, wincing a bit as they popped out. "You know that what my power is with seismic waves, yes? I cannot make them myself, I can only use what is there. I feel and. . .absorb? them." He tapped a bare foot on the ground for emphasis. "And I can push them out," he pointed to the quarry wall he had just shattered. "Or I can do this. . ." He closed his eyes for moment and the ground trembled slightly.

Forge jumped as the vibration shook his metal leg, a sensation not unlike a charley horse. "Dude. That's like... wow. Heh, I've always had a bit of an envy for active powers like that." He shrugged his headphones off, running a hand through his unruly hair, then tapping his head. "Mine's just always on up here. I always wonder what it'd be like to actively do something with it."

Other than give yourself a migraine foiling a bank robbery, he reminded himself.

"You have a gift," Julio said. "You fix things, help people. Active powers?" He snorted, "Sometimes all they are good for is breaking." He rolled his head from side to side, cracking his neck.

"It is strange," he said after pause, "I sometimes wonder what it is like for people who have had their powers for a long time." He absently cradled a rock with the side of his foot like a soccer ball and then kicked it. "Last year at this time? I could not imagine myself doing any of this," he spread his arms. "Now I am barefoot in November, breaking rocks with my brain."

Forge shook his head, picking up a handful of rocks and absently walking them across his metal knuckles. "I don't really know when my power emerged. I've been tinkering with stuff since... well, as long as I can remember. I can't remember what it was like to look at a machine and not know exactly how it worked. I always thought that was normal, you know? Like everyone saw the world that way."

He sighed, reaching down to pick up the probe without interrupting the path of the rocks walking across the knuckles of his other hand. "Sometimes it feels like I'm the sighted man in the land of the blind."

"Do you ever wonder what it would be like, to not have powers?" Julio asked, after taking another drink from his waterbottle. His sweaty hair was starting to freeze in the cold morning breeze.

Self-consciously, Forge laughed until he noticed Julio looking at him strangely. He waved sheepishly, letting the handful of rocks clatter to the ground. "A year ago, when I got rescued from Magneto. I'd built a device for him that neutralized mutant powers. He wanted to use it to keep the X-Men in check. I used it to help our escape. But it backfired on me - I woke up back here, without my powers for a few weeks."

The other boy shook his head. "I mean, what if it had never happened in the first place?" It was something Julio had obviously thought about quite a lot. He sometimes caught himself marking off days in his head; This is the day that soccer season would have started. I should have been on varsity. or We would have played regionals today... Such thoughts were dangerous, he knew, but he still had them.

"I... I don't know. I mean, I suppose I'd still... but then..." Forge paused, looking down at his prosthetic arm, closing his eyes and seeing it as Masque had made it, looking normal and whole. But what would it be like if he'd never been a mutant?

I couldn't have built the bomb. I'd never have been in the accident. Everything would have changed.

Just as quickly, he opened his eyes and shook his head. "Nothing would have changed. I'd be just some normal loser in suburban Texas, friendless and hopeless. This is what I am, who I am. No use dreaming about what could have been."

"Yes, it is surprising how much I think of myself as being mutant. I was a human until this summer, but then, I never was really." Julio reached down and picked up a rock, tossing it up once in the air before catching it and flinging it against the side of the quarry wall. If I had never been a mutant, Felicia would be alive. He wasn't quite sure he was comfortable with the mixed emotions that brought up.

"It is something to think about, no?"

"No, not really," Forge answered matter-of-factly. "I had to learn a while back that thinking of how things could have been is just a waste of time. And speaking of which," he checked his watch, pondered a moment, then shrugged. "I suppose I ought to go down to the medlab, tell Paige to get some sleep, have her tell me for the fifth time to 'shove off, she'll sleep when Jono's better', and then keep trying to keep the English Dope's head from exploding. Which, given that no one's calling me in a panic, I can guess hasn't happened. Yet."

Shutting down his PDA, Forge stretched down to touch his toes, wincing slightly at the protestations of both his muscles and the gears in his prosthesis. "I'd race you back, but I don't think there's enough of a headstart in the world to make THAT competitive. Still, Lorna's probably got breakfast cooking. Hungry?"

The younger boy shrugged and reached out to retrieve his shoes, slipping them on quickly. After a moment's thought, he thrust his waterbottle at Forge. "Here, you shall need this more than me on the way back."