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May. 7th, 2007 10:48 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsWhen boredom strikes Angel, and she Forge blow things up for science.
"Forge? Foooorge?" Angel poked her head around the corner of the door to the lab and whined at the older mutant, "I wanna blow something up. Can we blow something up, please?" Science was one of the studies that she had to work hard at to keep up her good grades, though she rather liked Chemistry. Mainly because there were frequently explosions of some sort or color changes. It was, in her opinion, the awesome science of blowing up crap.
Forge blinked, looking over at Angel. "You come see me... for things to blow up?" While he often got requests along the line of "Hey Forge,how fast can I fly?" or "Yo, Forge, just how strong AM I?" or "Fooooorge, does my butt look big in this uniform?" - an actual request to go blow something up was a new one.
Then again, Angel's power was a rather unique one. Microwave emission was different enough from the plasma throwers like Shiro and Alex, and a world away from Scott's force blasts. Giving Angel a quick nod, he set his soldering iron down.
"Just let me grab a few things. Go on down the hall and meet me in the mechanics lab. It's the one with the big metal-lined door and the concrete blast chamber," he said with a smile.
"Yay! You're the best staff member ever!" Leaving Forge to gather whatever he needed, Angel quickly made her way down to the room he'd indicated. Yep, that was one metal looking door alright. Pushing it open, she peeked around at stuff, hands firmly shoved into pockets in case she touched something that she wasn't supposed to. Eventually she found herself at the blast chamber and eyed it with curiosity. "I get to blow stuff uuuuuup," she sang under her breath.
Forge shuffled in after her, a box full of mismatched metal and plastic parts in his arms. "Okay, you want to blow stuff up, you're going to have to wear some protection. I know you're fireproof, but stuff going boom tends to make shrapnel. Trust me on this." He set a few random pieces of junk on a table, then unfolded a dark grey hooded coat from the bottom of the box. "Prototype for the suit I designed for Shiro, before I cut down a lot of the ablative armor. This should keep you safe if anything goes, well, too much boom." He motioned to the large concrete-and-ceramic chamber.
Angel nodded and reached for the suit, arguing the last thing in her mind. One, if she did, there'd be no blowing up stuff. Or, well, authorized blowing up stuff. And two, they still hadn't tested the limits of her fire shield yet and she was not willing to try that now.
It took her a few minutes of hopping back and forth before she finally got the suit on. "I was expecting it to be really big on me," she said, grinning. "But. Shiro's so little! Makes me want to squish him!"
"Yes, he's just an adorable little ball of bushido-y fluff," Forge deadpanned, setting up a few items in the chamber. "Okay, these are one-kilogram masses of different compositions. Wood, two types of plastic, and some varying metals. You want boom, those last ones'll do it. When I get over to the control console, you'll see me through this window here, and you'll hear me through the speaker up there. I'll be taking readings, and if at any time you see that red light flash, you power down and hit the floor, got it?"
"I assume that'll mean a really big boom?" She bounced on her toes a little as she got used to the feeling of the suit and waited for Forge to get ready. "You all sitamacated?" Angel asked as she spotted him through the window. She giggled and hummed Hot Stuff under her breath.
Forge practically bounced around to the control console, sealing the blast chamber and watching the scanning software boot. "Okay, what I want you to do is try and direct your energy at one object at a time. Start with the wood block when you see the green light come on, stop when the light goes out."
He checked the readings, looked again to make sure Angel was protected in the suit, then keyed in the commands to begin recording. "And we're live, Angel. Green light, go."
"Wood block, you're totally going down." It was obvious he didn't want her to just throw a fire ball at it, so instead Angel concentrated on the microwave energy instead. Pushing it towards the object was a little bit tougher than just lighting up herself but the going was faster than it had been months ago.
It didn't take much for the block to start smoldering and go up in blue flames. Angel whooped and did a victory dance as a little bit of smoke went up into the air. "Combustible objects, nada. Me, one."
Forge watched the temperature sensors, arching an eyebrow as the ambient temperature barely raised by a degree. Switching the cameras over to a thermal imaging view, though, he saw the block radiating heat as it began to smolder. Continuing to cycle through various sensor views, he could see the microwave beam, invisible to the naked eye, projecting from Angel's hand to the wood.
"Okay, ready?" he said into the microphone, giving Angel the thumbs-up sign, "Now REALLY burn it."
"Coolest power ever," she said gleefully, shoving all of her energy forward as hard and as fast as she could. The little block of wood never knew what hit it as it suddenly burst into complete flames with a whoosh, the new flames feeding off of the ones she'd started before.
Angel grinned up at where Forge sat. "How was that?"
"Super," Forge said, watching the meters slowly return to their normal levels. "Okay, next one. It's a heat-resistant plastic polymer. Again, start from low intensity and work your way up. When you see it start to affect the target, try to hold at that level, okay? Go."
Heat-resistant? Well, that could be difficult. Taking a deep breath to steady herself, Angel moved onto the next target. She started out at the same level with the wood but, true to it's name, nothing happened. Melting wise because she knew if someone were pick that up, it certainly wouldn't be pleasant to hold.
Frowning, she kicked it up a couple of notches, really pressing the microwave energy onto the thing. "Burn, I command you to burn, my pretties!" Angel muttered. "Or something like that."
Looking at the scanners, Forge watched the internal temperature of the plastic cylinder climb, but the integrity held. "Tighten your focus, Angel," he spoke into the microphone as he watched the intensified microwaves scatter around the chamber. "As narrow a beam as you can manage, try that."
She frowned but then nodded. Visualization was the key here and that was something she was good at. Pretending there were walls on either side of where she wanted the beam to go, Angel tried again and found that concentrating like that meant the beam was much more powerful. Tongue sticking out a little bit, she 'closed' the wall in even more, focusing the beam just a little bit.
That did it. The focused beam bounced the microwaves back and forth along its length, effectively turning Angel's power into a high-intensity maser. Forge pumped his fist as he saw a small red spot form on the back of the cylinder before it erupted, hot plastic showering the back wall of the chamber.
"Congratulations, Angel," he said proudly, "you just focused your first maser. It's, well, a laser but with microwaves instead of light. How do you feel?"
"A bit like I've got the reverse of an ice cream headache from the concentrating part but that was so cool! I got my first exploding thing and yay a maser! Dude, I just made heat proof plastic explode. Tupperware never met me before." Angel rubbed her suit covered hands in glee. "Next?"
"Next comes metal. Um... this could get a little spectacular." He slid a pair of welder's goggles over his eyes and leaned forward into the microphone again. "Okay, the first one's pure copper, thanks to Tommy No-Relation Jones. Try a wide dispersal, then narrow it down on the cylinder."
"Shiiiiny." Despite the shiny distraction, Angel did as she was am a instructed. First, the wide dispersal which was a cinch. Just concentrate and push with nothing else needed. "I maser, a maser is me!" she sang as she closed in the invisible walls around the energy and focused it into the beam.
And then...fireworks. Sparks suddenly exploded off of the copper in a shower as the beam really started to affect it. Even with the warning, she couldn't help the slight shriek and jump back reflex. Though she was proud...she was still controlling the beam.
Forge was instantly poised with his hand above the alarm button, when he noticed that Angel was levitating in midair, still keeping the beam focused. The sparks were arcing off the cylinder anywhere there was an edge, the metal acting like an antenna and creating an electrical discharge from the power Angel was putting out. "Doing good, Angel. Try upping the intensity a bit."
Watching the monitors, Forge could see the microwaves causing electrical arcs to jump between the other metal cylinders, forming a sort of Jacob's Ladder along the testing surface. If she raised the intensity...
There was a seconds pause as Angel landed on her feet again. The hovering bit had been a surprise but it was good to see her instincts were growing. "More?" she asked and then grinned at Forge's go ahead. Now for an even narrower beam, hitting the already sparking and hot metal even more intensity and energy.
A sudden -whoosh-, and the chamber was filled with a bright light. Squinting even through his goggles, Forge watched as the light subsided, revealing Angel lit with a halo of St. Elmo's Fire, a faint blue outline surrounding her as the metal fragments on the table began to pulse, giving off a bright incandescent light.
"Okay, you can back it down now, Angel."
As she did so, the light slowly faded, and the melted chunks of metal looked for all intents and purposes like the filaments of burned-out light bulbs. Which was precisely what they'd become.
"Welcome to your first exposure to microwave physics, the hands-on way," Forge quipped, waiting until the chamber's temperature equalized before bringing the safeties offline and cycling the door open. "The metal was acting like an antenna, just like how cell phone towers receive and transmit signals. Only you're broadcasting with a LOT more power, across a broad frequency range. Hence the crackly boom."
"Oh wow..." She waited until the door was completely open before she stepped out and then started to peel off the suit. "That was the coolest thing ever. Science should always be hands on! Unless, you know, it's like atomic in nature. We can skip the hands on part for that, thanks." Angel shimmied to get the suit completely off before standing up and beamed at Forge. "I like crackly boom!"
"It's your power, you should learn as much as you can about it," Forge said, pushing the goggles up on his forehead and walking over to a bookshelf. "Which is why..." he ran his finger along the spines of the thick books before removing one. Blowing a bit of dust off the cover, he turned to hand it to Angel. "Non-Ionizing Microwave Radiation, 1980 edition. Older than both of us, but science doesn't change. Learn what effects microwaves have, learn why your power works, and you'll be closer to fully controlling it."
Turning it over in her hands, Angel flipped through a couple of pages. "Um. Got a science dictionary stashed away somewhere as well?" she asked, glancing up once before reading over the page she'd flipped to. "Wait, this says something about disrupting stuff. I can disrupt stuff? And stuff is so a technical term."
"Remember what I said about emitting energy on multiple frequencies?" Forge explained, looking over Angel's shoulder. "Well, certain things operate on specific frequencies. Cell phones, remote controls, electrical equipment. Think of it like hitting a bunch of different notes at once on a piano, makes it almost impossible to pick out the one you want to hear, yeah? Radio frequency interference, chapter twelve."
Even before he was done talking, Angel was already thumbing to chapter twelve. "Well, that explains a whole lot. When I first got here, my dad's cell would totally get all screwy but now it's less so. More control." She looked up at Forge and grinned. "Did you already have all the stuff I could mess up here set up for that or was there a mad scramble when I showed up last summer?"
Forge shook his head. "Where do you think they test the jet engines? Amara got up to almost nine hundred degrees in there. You could set a bomb off in that chamber and it wouldn't even make Lorna's souffle fall."
"I totally need one of those for my bedroom. A couple of throw pillows, a rug, it'd be perfect! And I'm totally not allowed to paint the blast chamber in pretty colors, am I?"
Forge arched an eyebrow. "Painting it would defeat the purpose of meticulously calibrated temperature sensors. Science, my dear Angel, is not pretty."
"Not even the door leading to to the blast chamber?" Angel tried. "...and why did the idea of a meticulously calibrated temperature sensor make me hungry? I crave a meticulously calibrated steak."
"Science may not be pretty, but steak? Steak is tasty. I approve of this message, young padawan. To the kitchen!" Forge exclaimed, pointing dramatically and chiming in with Angel to complete the declaration;
"AND BEYOND!"
"Forge? Foooorge?" Angel poked her head around the corner of the door to the lab and whined at the older mutant, "I wanna blow something up. Can we blow something up, please?" Science was one of the studies that she had to work hard at to keep up her good grades, though she rather liked Chemistry. Mainly because there were frequently explosions of some sort or color changes. It was, in her opinion, the awesome science of blowing up crap.
Forge blinked, looking over at Angel. "You come see me... for things to blow up?" While he often got requests along the line of "Hey Forge,how fast can I fly?" or "Yo, Forge, just how strong AM I?" or "Fooooorge, does my butt look big in this uniform?" - an actual request to go blow something up was a new one.
Then again, Angel's power was a rather unique one. Microwave emission was different enough from the plasma throwers like Shiro and Alex, and a world away from Scott's force blasts. Giving Angel a quick nod, he set his soldering iron down.
"Just let me grab a few things. Go on down the hall and meet me in the mechanics lab. It's the one with the big metal-lined door and the concrete blast chamber," he said with a smile.
"Yay! You're the best staff member ever!" Leaving Forge to gather whatever he needed, Angel quickly made her way down to the room he'd indicated. Yep, that was one metal looking door alright. Pushing it open, she peeked around at stuff, hands firmly shoved into pockets in case she touched something that she wasn't supposed to. Eventually she found herself at the blast chamber and eyed it with curiosity. "I get to blow stuff uuuuuup," she sang under her breath.
Forge shuffled in after her, a box full of mismatched metal and plastic parts in his arms. "Okay, you want to blow stuff up, you're going to have to wear some protection. I know you're fireproof, but stuff going boom tends to make shrapnel. Trust me on this." He set a few random pieces of junk on a table, then unfolded a dark grey hooded coat from the bottom of the box. "Prototype for the suit I designed for Shiro, before I cut down a lot of the ablative armor. This should keep you safe if anything goes, well, too much boom." He motioned to the large concrete-and-ceramic chamber.
Angel nodded and reached for the suit, arguing the last thing in her mind. One, if she did, there'd be no blowing up stuff. Or, well, authorized blowing up stuff. And two, they still hadn't tested the limits of her fire shield yet and she was not willing to try that now.
It took her a few minutes of hopping back and forth before she finally got the suit on. "I was expecting it to be really big on me," she said, grinning. "But. Shiro's so little! Makes me want to squish him!"
"Yes, he's just an adorable little ball of bushido-y fluff," Forge deadpanned, setting up a few items in the chamber. "Okay, these are one-kilogram masses of different compositions. Wood, two types of plastic, and some varying metals. You want boom, those last ones'll do it. When I get over to the control console, you'll see me through this window here, and you'll hear me through the speaker up there. I'll be taking readings, and if at any time you see that red light flash, you power down and hit the floor, got it?"
"I assume that'll mean a really big boom?" She bounced on her toes a little as she got used to the feeling of the suit and waited for Forge to get ready. "You all sitamacated?" Angel asked as she spotted him through the window. She giggled and hummed Hot Stuff under her breath.
Forge practically bounced around to the control console, sealing the blast chamber and watching the scanning software boot. "Okay, what I want you to do is try and direct your energy at one object at a time. Start with the wood block when you see the green light come on, stop when the light goes out."
He checked the readings, looked again to make sure Angel was protected in the suit, then keyed in the commands to begin recording. "And we're live, Angel. Green light, go."
"Wood block, you're totally going down." It was obvious he didn't want her to just throw a fire ball at it, so instead Angel concentrated on the microwave energy instead. Pushing it towards the object was a little bit tougher than just lighting up herself but the going was faster than it had been months ago.
It didn't take much for the block to start smoldering and go up in blue flames. Angel whooped and did a victory dance as a little bit of smoke went up into the air. "Combustible objects, nada. Me, one."
Forge watched the temperature sensors, arching an eyebrow as the ambient temperature barely raised by a degree. Switching the cameras over to a thermal imaging view, though, he saw the block radiating heat as it began to smolder. Continuing to cycle through various sensor views, he could see the microwave beam, invisible to the naked eye, projecting from Angel's hand to the wood.
"Okay, ready?" he said into the microphone, giving Angel the thumbs-up sign, "Now REALLY burn it."
"Coolest power ever," she said gleefully, shoving all of her energy forward as hard and as fast as she could. The little block of wood never knew what hit it as it suddenly burst into complete flames with a whoosh, the new flames feeding off of the ones she'd started before.
Angel grinned up at where Forge sat. "How was that?"
"Super," Forge said, watching the meters slowly return to their normal levels. "Okay, next one. It's a heat-resistant plastic polymer. Again, start from low intensity and work your way up. When you see it start to affect the target, try to hold at that level, okay? Go."
Heat-resistant? Well, that could be difficult. Taking a deep breath to steady herself, Angel moved onto the next target. She started out at the same level with the wood but, true to it's name, nothing happened. Melting wise because she knew if someone were pick that up, it certainly wouldn't be pleasant to hold.
Frowning, she kicked it up a couple of notches, really pressing the microwave energy onto the thing. "Burn, I command you to burn, my pretties!" Angel muttered. "Or something like that."
Looking at the scanners, Forge watched the internal temperature of the plastic cylinder climb, but the integrity held. "Tighten your focus, Angel," he spoke into the microphone as he watched the intensified microwaves scatter around the chamber. "As narrow a beam as you can manage, try that."
She frowned but then nodded. Visualization was the key here and that was something she was good at. Pretending there were walls on either side of where she wanted the beam to go, Angel tried again and found that concentrating like that meant the beam was much more powerful. Tongue sticking out a little bit, she 'closed' the wall in even more, focusing the beam just a little bit.
That did it. The focused beam bounced the microwaves back and forth along its length, effectively turning Angel's power into a high-intensity maser. Forge pumped his fist as he saw a small red spot form on the back of the cylinder before it erupted, hot plastic showering the back wall of the chamber.
"Congratulations, Angel," he said proudly, "you just focused your first maser. It's, well, a laser but with microwaves instead of light. How do you feel?"
"A bit like I've got the reverse of an ice cream headache from the concentrating part but that was so cool! I got my first exploding thing and yay a maser! Dude, I just made heat proof plastic explode. Tupperware never met me before." Angel rubbed her suit covered hands in glee. "Next?"
"Next comes metal. Um... this could get a little spectacular." He slid a pair of welder's goggles over his eyes and leaned forward into the microphone again. "Okay, the first one's pure copper, thanks to Tommy No-Relation Jones. Try a wide dispersal, then narrow it down on the cylinder."
"Shiiiiny." Despite the shiny distraction, Angel did as she was am a instructed. First, the wide dispersal which was a cinch. Just concentrate and push with nothing else needed. "I maser, a maser is me!" she sang as she closed in the invisible walls around the energy and focused it into the beam.
And then...fireworks. Sparks suddenly exploded off of the copper in a shower as the beam really started to affect it. Even with the warning, she couldn't help the slight shriek and jump back reflex. Though she was proud...she was still controlling the beam.
Forge was instantly poised with his hand above the alarm button, when he noticed that Angel was levitating in midair, still keeping the beam focused. The sparks were arcing off the cylinder anywhere there was an edge, the metal acting like an antenna and creating an electrical discharge from the power Angel was putting out. "Doing good, Angel. Try upping the intensity a bit."
Watching the monitors, Forge could see the microwaves causing electrical arcs to jump between the other metal cylinders, forming a sort of Jacob's Ladder along the testing surface. If she raised the intensity...
There was a seconds pause as Angel landed on her feet again. The hovering bit had been a surprise but it was good to see her instincts were growing. "More?" she asked and then grinned at Forge's go ahead. Now for an even narrower beam, hitting the already sparking and hot metal even more intensity and energy.
A sudden -whoosh-, and the chamber was filled with a bright light. Squinting even through his goggles, Forge watched as the light subsided, revealing Angel lit with a halo of St. Elmo's Fire, a faint blue outline surrounding her as the metal fragments on the table began to pulse, giving off a bright incandescent light.
"Okay, you can back it down now, Angel."
As she did so, the light slowly faded, and the melted chunks of metal looked for all intents and purposes like the filaments of burned-out light bulbs. Which was precisely what they'd become.
"Welcome to your first exposure to microwave physics, the hands-on way," Forge quipped, waiting until the chamber's temperature equalized before bringing the safeties offline and cycling the door open. "The metal was acting like an antenna, just like how cell phone towers receive and transmit signals. Only you're broadcasting with a LOT more power, across a broad frequency range. Hence the crackly boom."
"Oh wow..." She waited until the door was completely open before she stepped out and then started to peel off the suit. "That was the coolest thing ever. Science should always be hands on! Unless, you know, it's like atomic in nature. We can skip the hands on part for that, thanks." Angel shimmied to get the suit completely off before standing up and beamed at Forge. "I like crackly boom!"
"It's your power, you should learn as much as you can about it," Forge said, pushing the goggles up on his forehead and walking over to a bookshelf. "Which is why..." he ran his finger along the spines of the thick books before removing one. Blowing a bit of dust off the cover, he turned to hand it to Angel. "Non-Ionizing Microwave Radiation, 1980 edition. Older than both of us, but science doesn't change. Learn what effects microwaves have, learn why your power works, and you'll be closer to fully controlling it."
Turning it over in her hands, Angel flipped through a couple of pages. "Um. Got a science dictionary stashed away somewhere as well?" she asked, glancing up once before reading over the page she'd flipped to. "Wait, this says something about disrupting stuff. I can disrupt stuff? And stuff is so a technical term."
"Remember what I said about emitting energy on multiple frequencies?" Forge explained, looking over Angel's shoulder. "Well, certain things operate on specific frequencies. Cell phones, remote controls, electrical equipment. Think of it like hitting a bunch of different notes at once on a piano, makes it almost impossible to pick out the one you want to hear, yeah? Radio frequency interference, chapter twelve."
Even before he was done talking, Angel was already thumbing to chapter twelve. "Well, that explains a whole lot. When I first got here, my dad's cell would totally get all screwy but now it's less so. More control." She looked up at Forge and grinned. "Did you already have all the stuff I could mess up here set up for that or was there a mad scramble when I showed up last summer?"
Forge shook his head. "Where do you think they test the jet engines? Amara got up to almost nine hundred degrees in there. You could set a bomb off in that chamber and it wouldn't even make Lorna's souffle fall."
"I totally need one of those for my bedroom. A couple of throw pillows, a rug, it'd be perfect! And I'm totally not allowed to paint the blast chamber in pretty colors, am I?"
Forge arched an eyebrow. "Painting it would defeat the purpose of meticulously calibrated temperature sensors. Science, my dear Angel, is not pretty."
"Not even the door leading to to the blast chamber?" Angel tried. "...and why did the idea of a meticulously calibrated temperature sensor make me hungry? I crave a meticulously calibrated steak."
"Science may not be pretty, but steak? Steak is tasty. I approve of this message, young padawan. To the kitchen!" Forge exclaimed, pointing dramatically and chiming in with Angel to complete the declaration;
"AND BEYOND!"
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Date: 2007-05-07 05:39 pm (UTC)