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xp_logsJack and Nate try their first telekinetic training session.
Life went on, or so they said. Work certainly did - meetings, proposals, project oversight, grading Russian quizzes. Nathan had thrown himself back into training a little too hard this past week, a truth to which his various aches and and pains testified, but he'd always found physical exertion a fine antidote to thoughts he'd prefer not to be thinking.
He'd been a little startled, however, to be asked to do this particular training session. He had been under the impression that the general rule of thumb was to keep him and Jack from interacting a whole lot. For everyone's peace of mind. But here they were, and Nathan shrugged irritably as he let the crate full of plastic coins sink to the floor of the Danger Room.
"So we're supposed to be investigating the beauties of multitasking."
Jack regarded Nathan from where he was leaning against the wall, arms crossed and face impassive.
"Yeah, seems like after three months I'm allowed to graduate to the option of multiple teachers. That, or you're the sacrificial lamb that's been offered to assess my ability to play nice." Jack flashed the older man a narrow smile. "But that would be calculating, wouldn't it."
Nathan just raised an eyebrow. "Multitasking," he repeated, and the lid of the crate lifted itself off. "Any idiot with sufficient power can throw a car." Plastic coins streamed upwards, each spinning even as they formed part of larger patterns, Askani interlocking spirals emerging out of what at first appeared to be chaos. The patterns stabilized - and then fractals started to develop. There had to be close to five hundred coins in the air before Nathan spoke again, nothing even resembling effort reflecting in his voice. "You have to develop your ability to do more."
Jack made no overt expression of interest, though his grey eyes stayed fixed on the patterns as he shoved away from the wall to roll his neck. "Be as the ever-unfolding chrysanthemum. Point made. What do I do?"
"Don't look at the coins. Look at the force behind the pattern." It was strange, that he could be standing in a room with a man who'd attacked him, and yet feel so utterly at peace in the center of the spiraling patterns. Outside reflected inside, however. He remembered Askani, telling him just that.
The coins continued their oscillations, yet Jack did nothing -- or nothing that was noticeable. Basic as his manipulation was, motion and force were the two factors he'd never had a problem following. The alter just stood there, waiting.
"Can you take ten of them from me?" Nathan asked. "Without dropping them, or disrupting the rest of the pattern?"
Nathan's mind was only around them loosely; he didn't have to challenge for grip. That, however, did nothing for the fact that he had to fixate on the specific coins enough to extract them.
After a moment of study, Jack raised his hand and reached for the pattern.
A group of coins shot out of the air towards him like they'd been batted with an invisible tennis racket. There were about fifty. They pelted the wall. They also pelted Jack.
As the plastic disks bounced and spun to rest around his feet the telekinetic lowered his hand and spread his fingers to inspect the contents.
"Six," he declared, and casually put his foot out to stomp a coin as it rolled past. He reached up with his free hand and fished another out of David's stiff black hair. "Wait. Seven."
"Well. Needs a little work, I'd say." The spirals of coins coiled around each other, streaming through the air and stacking themselves neatly back into the crate. All but Jack's seven. "Jean warned me that you were stubborn," Nathan said, starting to walk in a slow half-circle around Jack. "Not willing to admit when you aren't able to do something. I've had other students with more pride than is actually good for them."
"I make do. Can't all have the extensive training of a brainwashed super-soldier." One coin flipped into the air; Jack caught it. Then, with a brief glance downward, he tossed up all seven. At the apex of their arc they seemed to float, hanging in the air.
This poetic image hung for an entire half an instant before the disks changed trajectory by 45 degrees and shot towards Nathan in a downwards diagonal like bullets exiting a gatling gun.
CRACK! The coins shattered simultaneously into four perfectly equal pieces each, and then coiled around Jack's head in a double spirals. So that he could see. "I'd recommend not trying to show off, Jack," Nathan said, almost pleasantly, coming around to Jack's right side. "I have more tricks than you."
In a single smooth motion, too fast for Jack to react, the tranq gun that had been holstered at his back was in his hand and pointed at Jack's head. It was set to spray smaller darts, almost like buckshot, and as Nathan pulled the trigger, six tiny sedative-filled projectiles were launched outwards at Jack.
Jack's mind snapped out to intercept the path of the projectiles, instinctive and immediate, not even eliciting a blink of his grey eyes. Slowly the alter turned to look at the needles glittering two feet away from his right temple. The darts held there for a moment, wavering slightly in the air as the fragmented coins continued their calm spirals around him, then clattered to the floor. Jack's eyes followed them down, then raised to the barrel of the tranq gun still extended in Nathan's hand. His feet shuffled slightly as his stance repositioned to something which was, absurdly, more relaxed.
"That's one way to guarantee action out a victim of gun violence," Jack observed with something like approval.
"I thought so, yes. Although I'm now bizarrely amused by what this establishes," Nathan said, lowering the gun. "You have at least a basic multitasking capability with your telekinesis. It just needs the right stimuli - which means, we're dealing with some sort of mental block. An inhibition, maybe." He smiled thinly, tucking the gun back into its holster. The fragments of coins had kept right on spinning in their patterns, as if they didn't require any of Nathan's attention at all. "I have some personal experience with those."
"The kid's king of mental inhibitions. I don't do anything smaller than the eye can see. Cyndi can't grip anything it does. And telepathy, well, that Haller couldn't even stand to keep for himself. That particular cross went right to the Arab." Jack reached up and picked a fragment of shattered coin out of the pattern with surprising delicacy. "If we're going to talk damage, I could make some observations about you walking into a training session armed with the thing you used to pump a student full of sedatives with the other week."
Jack got a raised eyebrow in response. The pattern of the coin fragments unwound, the fragments piling themselves neatly beside the crate, for later disposal. "Proved its point, didn't it?"
Jack rolled the remaining piece between his thumb and forefinger. "Proved something all right." Forehead rippling with concentration, the man took his hand away and let the fragment dangle in the air. Despite his training with Jean holding something this small was still difficult, so in lieu of true levitation he began to propel it around the room in short, violent jerks of motion.
"Let me guess. This is where I say 'Oh? What's that?' and let you share your insight into... what, that I've become obsessed with tranq guns as a symbol of my enduring angst over our latest mishap?" There was actually something approaching humor in Nathan's voice. "Rather than just thinking that it could make my point and rather liking the image of you not catching the darts and winding up taking an involuntary nap?"
"Wrong part of Haller. I just deride your inability to look even one of those kids in the eye over a week after the heroic rescue." The piece of plastic reached the far edge of the room and turned a 180 to careen back the way it had come. "And the manful avoidance of that trauma specialist seen by everyone and their third cousin these days. Can get decent mileage out of that one too."
"Deride away. I figure you get little enough fun in life - who am I to deprive you of a moment?" And Jim had noticed any of that how? Nathan wondered a bit angrily, behind his neutral expression. He supposed Moira or Angelo might have mentioned something about the latter, but the former? A snake of coins emerged from the crate, twisting over to form a figure eight in the air between them.
"Can't see why people keep stressing the fair fight when the cheap shots are just as satisfying." Jack's piece of plastic whirred over their heads to arc up the far wall like a ballistic fly. "The mountie was right, though. We can crack the whip on our backs all we like. Doesn't change the fact shit's going to happen. Just settle back and get real friendly with the shovel."
"Do I look like I've been doing anything else?" People could say whatever they wanted, think whatever they wanted, but he'd been there, doing his part. He'd helped resolve the situation, and anyone who wanted to quibble with his reaction beyond that could fuck off and die. Seriously. He'd been there, he'd fought, he'd helped bring them home. It was absolutely no fucking business of anyone else what he was thinking now, how he was feeling...
The spinning coins were spinning markedly more quickly than they had been before.
It still wasn't ten, more like thirty, and the pattern bunched and distorted under the clumsy touch, but coins froze in midair. There was a rain of clinks as a quarter of the pattern drove into the immobile coins. Unsustained, the small fragment of coin Jack had been manipulating fell out of the air and bounced against the Danger Room's floor.
"Funny," Jack said, regarding Nathan with calm grey eyes, "the more focus you lose the easier these things get to catch."
"Funny. Yeah." Nathan sliced through the lines of telekinetic energy, regathering his coins - if not quite his composure. "You know, hard as it may be to believe, when you're in a fight? The talking is not usually an effective diversionary tactic."
"Seems to be effective enough in training sessions." Jack let the coins go without a fight, instead moving his attention back to the fallen piece. It was harder to pry from the floor than from the air, as still things always were. A quick jolt of his power set it skipping across the floor and back into easy grip. "If you're going to insist on problems obvious from low-flying spacestations, here's the analysis. You're burying yourself in guilt for what happened to the kids. Well, here's a suggestion. Make a chart of all the people you've ever been close to. Then take a red pen and mark off every one who's suffered for having known you. Then mark off anyone who's ever turned out to be one of the people making the other people pay. There any white space left there?"
The gray eyes that met his were dark, almost storm-colored. "You were right, you shouldn't be trying to be analytical. You suck at it." An octopus made out of spinning coins pulled itself out of the chest. A stylized bird followed, swooping through the air of the Danger Room. Then two stick figures, doing a Scottish dance. Nathan wasn't looking at any of the constructs. "You think I'm going to react to being poked? You're bored. I'm sad for you. Devote some of that attention to practicing, because you suck at anything beyond brute-force tricks." Three more bird-shapes erupted out of the crate of coins, and started circling above Jack, like vultures.
Jack gave Nate a sidelong glance. "Really? I think I'm doing well with conscious control. But I got a question."
The little shard of plastic turned towards the constructs. It attacked the vultures, tik tiking wildly off their plastic chests, harrying them.
"The hell did you survive all those years as a mercenary being this sensitive?"
"I had this handy dodge where I could shut my emotions off. Oh, how I miss it, some days." There was a certain bitter humor in Nathan's voice. "That's actually not bad, by the way. What you're doing with your favorite piece there. Hitting moving targets in the same basic impact zone?"
The piece struck a vulture in the approximate area of its eye with perhaps more force than strictly necessary. "When it's me or the brat motion is Haller's speciality. Who knew? When it's with the Arab it's all serenity, stillness and the other shit. As for your longing for compartmentalization, nevermind the fact you're speaking to the guy with the dissociation defect, go ahead and say that in front of the redhead one of these days. It'll be fun."
"Yes. Because I make a habit of trying to arouse the ire of redheads. Really. I do it deliberately." More constructs were assembling themselves out of the coins, until the Danger Room seemed half-full with birds and flying fish and more stick figures, and the crate was empty. Nathan breathed in and then out, wishing suddenly that he was talking to Jim, not Jack. I can't write a word of poetry, Jim. Not a word.
Jack shrugged loosely. "Just wait. They all lose their minds at some point or another all on their own. Watch your wife. With the track record Haller's past doctors have put in lately I'd say she's about due."
"She won't." He was as sure of that as he was that the sun would rise in the morning. Nathan closed his eyes, the coins moving back to the crate in a stream of clattering plastic. "I think you should start practicing with two of these. Building up your multitasking bit by bit is the only way to do it, really. I mean, it's either that or I practice by whipping these things at you." He opened his eyes and offered Jack a smile that was a little twisted, but had a gleam of real humor behind it. "Oh, how I'd hate that."
"Yeah, I'm sure you'd lose sleep nightly." Jack's chip bounced off the inside edge of the crate and joined the rest of the pile. "And as long as we're giving advice, call your goddamn shrink."
Life went on, or so they said. Work certainly did - meetings, proposals, project oversight, grading Russian quizzes. Nathan had thrown himself back into training a little too hard this past week, a truth to which his various aches and and pains testified, but he'd always found physical exertion a fine antidote to thoughts he'd prefer not to be thinking.
He'd been a little startled, however, to be asked to do this particular training session. He had been under the impression that the general rule of thumb was to keep him and Jack from interacting a whole lot. For everyone's peace of mind. But here they were, and Nathan shrugged irritably as he let the crate full of plastic coins sink to the floor of the Danger Room.
"So we're supposed to be investigating the beauties of multitasking."
Jack regarded Nathan from where he was leaning against the wall, arms crossed and face impassive.
"Yeah, seems like after three months I'm allowed to graduate to the option of multiple teachers. That, or you're the sacrificial lamb that's been offered to assess my ability to play nice." Jack flashed the older man a narrow smile. "But that would be calculating, wouldn't it."
Nathan just raised an eyebrow. "Multitasking," he repeated, and the lid of the crate lifted itself off. "Any idiot with sufficient power can throw a car." Plastic coins streamed upwards, each spinning even as they formed part of larger patterns, Askani interlocking spirals emerging out of what at first appeared to be chaos. The patterns stabilized - and then fractals started to develop. There had to be close to five hundred coins in the air before Nathan spoke again, nothing even resembling effort reflecting in his voice. "You have to develop your ability to do more."
Jack made no overt expression of interest, though his grey eyes stayed fixed on the patterns as he shoved away from the wall to roll his neck. "Be as the ever-unfolding chrysanthemum. Point made. What do I do?"
"Don't look at the coins. Look at the force behind the pattern." It was strange, that he could be standing in a room with a man who'd attacked him, and yet feel so utterly at peace in the center of the spiraling patterns. Outside reflected inside, however. He remembered Askani, telling him just that.
The coins continued their oscillations, yet Jack did nothing -- or nothing that was noticeable. Basic as his manipulation was, motion and force were the two factors he'd never had a problem following. The alter just stood there, waiting.
"Can you take ten of them from me?" Nathan asked. "Without dropping them, or disrupting the rest of the pattern?"
Nathan's mind was only around them loosely; he didn't have to challenge for grip. That, however, did nothing for the fact that he had to fixate on the specific coins enough to extract them.
After a moment of study, Jack raised his hand and reached for the pattern.
A group of coins shot out of the air towards him like they'd been batted with an invisible tennis racket. There were about fifty. They pelted the wall. They also pelted Jack.
As the plastic disks bounced and spun to rest around his feet the telekinetic lowered his hand and spread his fingers to inspect the contents.
"Six," he declared, and casually put his foot out to stomp a coin as it rolled past. He reached up with his free hand and fished another out of David's stiff black hair. "Wait. Seven."
"Well. Needs a little work, I'd say." The spirals of coins coiled around each other, streaming through the air and stacking themselves neatly back into the crate. All but Jack's seven. "Jean warned me that you were stubborn," Nathan said, starting to walk in a slow half-circle around Jack. "Not willing to admit when you aren't able to do something. I've had other students with more pride than is actually good for them."
"I make do. Can't all have the extensive training of a brainwashed super-soldier." One coin flipped into the air; Jack caught it. Then, with a brief glance downward, he tossed up all seven. At the apex of their arc they seemed to float, hanging in the air.
This poetic image hung for an entire half an instant before the disks changed trajectory by 45 degrees and shot towards Nathan in a downwards diagonal like bullets exiting a gatling gun.
CRACK! The coins shattered simultaneously into four perfectly equal pieces each, and then coiled around Jack's head in a double spirals. So that he could see. "I'd recommend not trying to show off, Jack," Nathan said, almost pleasantly, coming around to Jack's right side. "I have more tricks than you."
In a single smooth motion, too fast for Jack to react, the tranq gun that had been holstered at his back was in his hand and pointed at Jack's head. It was set to spray smaller darts, almost like buckshot, and as Nathan pulled the trigger, six tiny sedative-filled projectiles were launched outwards at Jack.
Jack's mind snapped out to intercept the path of the projectiles, instinctive and immediate, not even eliciting a blink of his grey eyes. Slowly the alter turned to look at the needles glittering two feet away from his right temple. The darts held there for a moment, wavering slightly in the air as the fragmented coins continued their calm spirals around him, then clattered to the floor. Jack's eyes followed them down, then raised to the barrel of the tranq gun still extended in Nathan's hand. His feet shuffled slightly as his stance repositioned to something which was, absurdly, more relaxed.
"That's one way to guarantee action out a victim of gun violence," Jack observed with something like approval.
"I thought so, yes. Although I'm now bizarrely amused by what this establishes," Nathan said, lowering the gun. "You have at least a basic multitasking capability with your telekinesis. It just needs the right stimuli - which means, we're dealing with some sort of mental block. An inhibition, maybe." He smiled thinly, tucking the gun back into its holster. The fragments of coins had kept right on spinning in their patterns, as if they didn't require any of Nathan's attention at all. "I have some personal experience with those."
"The kid's king of mental inhibitions. I don't do anything smaller than the eye can see. Cyndi can't grip anything it does. And telepathy, well, that Haller couldn't even stand to keep for himself. That particular cross went right to the Arab." Jack reached up and picked a fragment of shattered coin out of the pattern with surprising delicacy. "If we're going to talk damage, I could make some observations about you walking into a training session armed with the thing you used to pump a student full of sedatives with the other week."
Jack got a raised eyebrow in response. The pattern of the coin fragments unwound, the fragments piling themselves neatly beside the crate, for later disposal. "Proved its point, didn't it?"
Jack rolled the remaining piece between his thumb and forefinger. "Proved something all right." Forehead rippling with concentration, the man took his hand away and let the fragment dangle in the air. Despite his training with Jean holding something this small was still difficult, so in lieu of true levitation he began to propel it around the room in short, violent jerks of motion.
"Let me guess. This is where I say 'Oh? What's that?' and let you share your insight into... what, that I've become obsessed with tranq guns as a symbol of my enduring angst over our latest mishap?" There was actually something approaching humor in Nathan's voice. "Rather than just thinking that it could make my point and rather liking the image of you not catching the darts and winding up taking an involuntary nap?"
"Wrong part of Haller. I just deride your inability to look even one of those kids in the eye over a week after the heroic rescue." The piece of plastic reached the far edge of the room and turned a 180 to careen back the way it had come. "And the manful avoidance of that trauma specialist seen by everyone and their third cousin these days. Can get decent mileage out of that one too."
"Deride away. I figure you get little enough fun in life - who am I to deprive you of a moment?" And Jim had noticed any of that how? Nathan wondered a bit angrily, behind his neutral expression. He supposed Moira or Angelo might have mentioned something about the latter, but the former? A snake of coins emerged from the crate, twisting over to form a figure eight in the air between them.
"Can't see why people keep stressing the fair fight when the cheap shots are just as satisfying." Jack's piece of plastic whirred over their heads to arc up the far wall like a ballistic fly. "The mountie was right, though. We can crack the whip on our backs all we like. Doesn't change the fact shit's going to happen. Just settle back and get real friendly with the shovel."
"Do I look like I've been doing anything else?" People could say whatever they wanted, think whatever they wanted, but he'd been there, doing his part. He'd helped resolve the situation, and anyone who wanted to quibble with his reaction beyond that could fuck off and die. Seriously. He'd been there, he'd fought, he'd helped bring them home. It was absolutely no fucking business of anyone else what he was thinking now, how he was feeling...
The spinning coins were spinning markedly more quickly than they had been before.
It still wasn't ten, more like thirty, and the pattern bunched and distorted under the clumsy touch, but coins froze in midair. There was a rain of clinks as a quarter of the pattern drove into the immobile coins. Unsustained, the small fragment of coin Jack had been manipulating fell out of the air and bounced against the Danger Room's floor.
"Funny," Jack said, regarding Nathan with calm grey eyes, "the more focus you lose the easier these things get to catch."
"Funny. Yeah." Nathan sliced through the lines of telekinetic energy, regathering his coins - if not quite his composure. "You know, hard as it may be to believe, when you're in a fight? The talking is not usually an effective diversionary tactic."
"Seems to be effective enough in training sessions." Jack let the coins go without a fight, instead moving his attention back to the fallen piece. It was harder to pry from the floor than from the air, as still things always were. A quick jolt of his power set it skipping across the floor and back into easy grip. "If you're going to insist on problems obvious from low-flying spacestations, here's the analysis. You're burying yourself in guilt for what happened to the kids. Well, here's a suggestion. Make a chart of all the people you've ever been close to. Then take a red pen and mark off every one who's suffered for having known you. Then mark off anyone who's ever turned out to be one of the people making the other people pay. There any white space left there?"
The gray eyes that met his were dark, almost storm-colored. "You were right, you shouldn't be trying to be analytical. You suck at it." An octopus made out of spinning coins pulled itself out of the chest. A stylized bird followed, swooping through the air of the Danger Room. Then two stick figures, doing a Scottish dance. Nathan wasn't looking at any of the constructs. "You think I'm going to react to being poked? You're bored. I'm sad for you. Devote some of that attention to practicing, because you suck at anything beyond brute-force tricks." Three more bird-shapes erupted out of the crate of coins, and started circling above Jack, like vultures.
Jack gave Nate a sidelong glance. "Really? I think I'm doing well with conscious control. But I got a question."
The little shard of plastic turned towards the constructs. It attacked the vultures, tik tiking wildly off their plastic chests, harrying them.
"The hell did you survive all those years as a mercenary being this sensitive?"
"I had this handy dodge where I could shut my emotions off. Oh, how I miss it, some days." There was a certain bitter humor in Nathan's voice. "That's actually not bad, by the way. What you're doing with your favorite piece there. Hitting moving targets in the same basic impact zone?"
The piece struck a vulture in the approximate area of its eye with perhaps more force than strictly necessary. "When it's me or the brat motion is Haller's speciality. Who knew? When it's with the Arab it's all serenity, stillness and the other shit. As for your longing for compartmentalization, nevermind the fact you're speaking to the guy with the dissociation defect, go ahead and say that in front of the redhead one of these days. It'll be fun."
"Yes. Because I make a habit of trying to arouse the ire of redheads. Really. I do it deliberately." More constructs were assembling themselves out of the coins, until the Danger Room seemed half-full with birds and flying fish and more stick figures, and the crate was empty. Nathan breathed in and then out, wishing suddenly that he was talking to Jim, not Jack. I can't write a word of poetry, Jim. Not a word.
Jack shrugged loosely. "Just wait. They all lose their minds at some point or another all on their own. Watch your wife. With the track record Haller's past doctors have put in lately I'd say she's about due."
"She won't." He was as sure of that as he was that the sun would rise in the morning. Nathan closed his eyes, the coins moving back to the crate in a stream of clattering plastic. "I think you should start practicing with two of these. Building up your multitasking bit by bit is the only way to do it, really. I mean, it's either that or I practice by whipping these things at you." He opened his eyes and offered Jack a smile that was a little twisted, but had a gleam of real humor behind it. "Oh, how I'd hate that."
"Yeah, I'm sure you'd lose sleep nightly." Jack's chip bounced off the inside edge of the crate and joined the rest of the pile. "And as long as we're giving advice, call your goddamn shrink."
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