[Lorna and Jennie] - Monday Afternoon

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Jennie has another training session with Lorna. Unfortunately a distracted mind does not for a productive session make.




The session was not going well. Push pull shove change tweak. Lines and chance flickered around Jennie, but her movements were sloppy, unfocused. The small refinements of her power required for this DR session were pissing her off, and she wanted to grab a handful of lines and just drag.

This was really just a standard infiltrate then blow up mission. Lorna could have run it alone blindfolded--not that she needed her eyes terribly much. But for a trainee, it was about the right speed and working with a trainee presented its own challenges. Case in point.

She kept changing the fields. How the hell was Lorna supposed to work when Jennie kept changing the fields? Just a nudge here and there, a weakened support, a surge in a light. But it was enough to be driving Lorna insane. She backhanded one of the security guards in the scenario more out of irritation than necessity before slamming him to a wall. "Jackpot," she said levelly without looking back, "Could you possibly lay off the electrical tweaking before I get a migraine?"

"Sorry," Jennie hissed for the thousandth time that week. The electrical systems were not what she was aiming for. Yet another thing to be going wrong. She sighed in frustration and flung out another wave of white-tinted power.

The guard slid down the wall, quite unconscious and Lorna considered for a moment if he was going to get caught later in the explosion. It probably should have bothered her more that she didn't actually care, she just wanted to know. Deciding he'd be fine, Lorna looked back at Jennie, "Any luck with that so far?"

Jennie had to viciously stomp on the bubble of irritation. "No, no it's not." She said, a little more forcefully than she meant to. She was tired, her fingers and her back ached, and she wanted the mission to be over already. But failure wasn't an option.

It had gone well, up to a certain point. Jennie was sneaky and clever, well suited to part one of the mission. It was part two -- part Boom -- that was causing all the problems. And they were running out of time. "Do you want me to try?" It wasn't a serious suggestion. Lorna couldn't solve this one, not with the time they had left. She thought about tripping the alarms again to give herself something else to do.

"No, I can do it." Jennie said, growling. Subtlety was no longer the key here, and Jennie was finding herself really not caring if she got hit with a snap. She reached out, and tugged, viciously. The balance she'd been carefully building fell down like a deck of cards. The was a sound of shrieking metal, and the device in front of them imploded. Followed by a bright pulse of red light.

Lorna had had her shields readied but there was nothing that could have stopped that light. The room--the one outside the simulation--shuddered with the contact. Because swearing was a bad example, Lorna just frowned, "What happens now?"

The room shivered and the simulation abruptly shut off, leaving both the woman and girl in the empty steel room. Jennie didn't hear Lorna, her ears were ringing from the slap in the face she had just received courtesy of a lucksnap. She finally got her thoughts to congeal and looked up at Lorna, heedless of the blood trickling out of her nose.

"I um," she sniffed. "This, apparently. Fuck, my head hurts."

Lorna listened to the entirely soundless protesting of the room and nodded slowly, trying to assess just how much damage she'd let the trainee do on their first run together. "Cyclops is going to kill me," she predicted. "How are you feeling? Want to make our upcoming deaths worth it?"

Jennie frowned and pinched her nose, tilting her head up. "How?" she said, slightly muffled.

"I think you broke the holographic projectors. But the old drones will still work. Want to smash stuff?" Lorna frown at the nosebleed, not really sure if you really were allowed to keep going when you were bleeding from the head.

"I broke the wha?--- shit." Jennie sniffed again. The bleeding had stopped, mostly. At least it wasn't trying to come out her tear ducts this time. "Can it be fixed? Since Forge is...gone?"

Lorna smiled, just a bit sad at the edges and a little hurt in the eyes, "Yeah, they built this without Forge and most of the designs are from Hank. There are plenty of smart people around here who can make things work again." They'd have to learn even if they couldn't. As Jennie said, Forge was gone."

"Right. Yeah. Sorry, my brain just automatically goes to Forge whenever anything breaks around here. He was always fixing crap, even if it didn't need fixing." Jennie sighed, the sharp painful feeling in her chest had never gone away, but at least she no longer felt like her brain was wrapped in cotton. Thanks to a very long, pointed talk with Dr. Voght. It was the first time Jennie had ever seen anything resembling concern from the woman. Unfortunately it was also in context with the threat of being put in a straightjacket.

"I know what you mean," Lorna replied softly. She had chosen, since coming home, to remain largely silent on the subject of their lost. Mostly because she didn't think that anyone would appreciate what would happen if she started screaming and couldn't stop.

For a little while, all Jennie wanted was the world to just stop spinning, so she could get off. Unfortunately that was beyond anyone's powers. But there was the next best thing. "So, you said we could break some other things, while we're here?"

"You'd better believe it." Lorna extended her hand out toward the keypad at the door, calling up one of her old training scenarios. It was probably a little advanced for Jennie but Lorna really really wanted to hit things.

Jennie cracked her knuckles, and then her neck. She then shifted her stance in preparation for the onslaught. She smiled faintly when the door opened. "Right. Let's kill things."