LOG: [Jennie, Marius, sort-of Scott] Capture the Flag

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Jackpot and Chupacabra involve themselves in a friendly game of capture the flag, now with added attack drones.



Jennie arched her back, pulling on her left leg and feeling the muscle sin her thigh stretch. She counted to ten and then switched to the other one, easily. Another ten count. Two years ago, she'd arrived on the doorstep of Xavier's a skinny girl whose last major physical activity had been hauling bags of coffee at her job. Now, she was in the best condition of her life, and to her surprise, improving upon that every day. Then again, two years ago, she would have never guessed that her life would be leading to this.

"You ready?" she asked her companion, with a sly grin.

Marius grinned, borrowed fangs showing as he wrapped one arm tight across his chest to stretch the muscle. "At your discretion, Jackpot, as I once again offer my thanks to whichever merciful god decided on confirmin' a codename good for months upon months of amusement . . ."

"Pfft, you can't even pronounce yours," Jennie said. "It's given your suitemate a permanent eye twitch. I think I shall just go with Goat Sucker. It has such a lovely ring to it. Push the start button, Goat Sucker."

Marius smirked as he sauntered over to the console, cracking his knuckles as he went. "Work, work, work . . ."

"That's a good boy," Jennie cooed. The machinery clanked and hummed to life, and the lights lowered. A spotlight flicked on, pointing the duo to a large steel wall. The objective, as had been explained to them before they went in, was to get the flag on the other side, and his the stop button while getting through the obstacles. Jennie's job was to get through the walls, but she had to make them open and nothing else. That was the tricky part.

She extended a hand and ran it over the smooth metallic surface as she did so. She was concentrating on the lines, trying to find the right one to follow, so she wasn't paying particularly close attention what was going on around her. It was Marius's job to catch that, anyway.

Soft shuffling was happening around them. Muscles in Marius' jaw flexed, shifting his ears back beneath his hair. "Here, drones," he said as Jennie inspected the barrier. Yellow eyes flickered across the automatons as they gathered around the fringes of the spotlight, hard to discern in the darkness. They milled aimlessly, strangely serene. Marius began to turn. "Don't look hostile--"

There was a clanging noise as one drone brought its fist down onto another.

"Ah," Marius said, "nevermind then."

Jennie tensed, hearing the clanging behind her. "Keep them off me and from killing one another. I need to concentrate." Pesky stupid tricky line. Where was it? One false move and she'd kill the scenario and cause them both to fail. Again.

"Always the orders," Marius said, flexing his claws as he began to gather into a crouch. "'Push the button, Marius. Hold the drones, Marius. Help me stretch my quadriceps, Marius' . . . right, so it's not all bad -- oi!" The drone closest to him had almost taken his head off. Marius spilled the drone with a kick to the side of its knee, then proceeded to stomp down on its head. "I cannot help but feel that was meant to be some sort of lesson on the dangers of the in-fight soliloquy," he remarked.

Jennie ignored him, she'd found the right line. She brushed the wall with her fingertips and closed her eyes. Then she grabbed the line and yanked. There was a series of clicks and the wall shuddered open, revealing another wall several hundred feet away from the first one. Jennie put her hands on her hips and nodded at the job well done. She was about to turn to call to Marius when a drone that had broken away from him slammed into her from the side.

Seconds later it jerked off her, spinning around before collapsing into a pile of machinery. Jennie lowered her outstretched hand, crimson light fading from her fingers.

"Damn it," she hissed. "That's going to bruise."

"Sorry," Marius grunted as he wrested one drone off another, "bit many--" he locked the offensive drone's head in the crook of his elbow. His breath came sharp as he began to pound it with his other fist, his knuckles going cold as they split on metal. As the droid grew slack he spun around, whipping its legs against one that had been trying to catch him from behind. Tossing it aside, Marius dropped into a crouch as another came at him. "Though there is a certain charm in the necessity of improv," he conceded.

The newest drone seemed to concur, for it progressed to a different form of assault: sonic. The high-pitched shriek brought Marius yelping to his knees, hands clenched over his ears.

"Tricky, tricky," Jennie muttered. The shriek wasn't as painful for her, but she also wasn't borrowing a feral's mutation. She spun and tossed a disk at the offending bot, which shorted out and paused, before jerking upright and starting to attack the attacker drones, buying them both some time.

"How unlucky, some things weren't soldered together properly," she tsked. She helped her friend to his feet, but when they stood they saw that a large number of civilian drones were backed against the second wall with the attacker drones advancing. And more attacker drones coming towards them. Some of them opened their mouths to scream.

"Shit," Jennie said.

Marius, shaking his head from side-to-side like a dog to clear the ringing in his ears, looked up in time to see the encroaching problem. "Jen!" he yelled, hair whipping around his face as he spun towards her, "Lend!"

It didn't take more than the barest brushing of fingertips, and a bright crimson flare before Jennie's power transferred to Marius.

Focused and familiar, Marius felt the rush as Jennie's power filled him. Everything around him went slippery with red and white light. A snarl of red pulsed around an approaching drone; without a moment's hesitation Marius launched himself at it and slammed it in the chest. The drone's head cracked against the floor, splitting its jaw open to reveal the speaker it had been about to utilize. He grunted as another caught him in the gut with its foot. Marius grabbed the leg and twisted to the side, flinging it to the ground and nearly dislocating its hipjoint.

"Got this lot," he called, pegging what the strings told him was another sonic droid, "if you can luck-up that lot over there!"

Two fists, one red and one white, held to her chest before Jennie flung them out, disks in two distinct colors slamming into the bots in front of the. The white ones struck the civilian drones, who were suddenly able to dodge their attackers at the last moment. The crimson disks caused another two of the attacker bots to collapse. One crumbled into parts, the other oxidized and was covered quickly in rust. Jennie jumped over the pile of drone-parts and raced for the second wall. In the corner of her eye, the world flashed red.

"Marius!" she yelled over her shoulder.

The red told him what was coming, and his borrowed mutation told him where it was coming from. Footsteps, coming up behind him fast. With a quick step to the side he pivoted sharply, using the momentum from the turn to drive his elbow into the drone's solar plexus.

"I am not precisely a novice at bein' jumped, you know," he called, kicking the drone out of his path. "I will remind you I've borne the unfortunate appellation of Marius Sammar Cartier Laverne a good eighteen years an' not once succumbed to the inevitable attacks." He bunched his legs and threw himself towards Jennie just in time to intercept a droid that had ventured a little too close. Boy and droid took a spill, but Marius was the only one with a healing factor. He rose, staggering slightly as his knee began to combat a forming haematoma. "Just because I've not been on a mission yet, unlike some . . ."

"Give it time," Jennie grunted as she got to her feet and knocked over another approaching droid with a well-aimed red disk, "besides, all I did was wait in a car and oh, you know, rob a casino again. Not exactly thrilling heroics there."

And not that Jennie was entirely eager for another big mission. That usually meant the world was in Peril. The less Peril there was, the better. But try telling that to Marius.

"Right. An' in the past few months the most good I've done is to hurl Forge out've harm's way durin' the impromptu brawl that transpired of his well-intentioned yet poorly-conceived attempt at a social life." Marius huffed as metallic knuckles grazed his cheekbone whilst he attempted to pull an attacker off a bystander. "I joined to have done with this waiting about to be abducted, ambushed or otherwise victimised. I should appreciate a chance to do so."

The look that Jennie gave Marius while ducking under a droid's wild swing was both incredulous and annoyed. "I'm sorry, I thought I was in a training session with Marius Laverne, not Whiney McMopeypants," she grabbed the droid's arm and using it's momentum swung it into the droid trying to creep up on Marius. "How about next briefing session with fearless leader, you threaten to hold your breath until he decides to send you into danger?"

Marius scowled. "Not that I don't find your belittling of my frustrations a delightful point of conversation, but unless you've developed a heretofor undiscovered secondary mutation of spontaneous scenario completion I believe you've a wall to break."

"Shit," Jennie hissed. She threw her friend a look, and said, "You've got my back, right? Because I'm about to do something stupid."

"Please, Jen. This is me we're speakin' of." Marius paused, then added, "Er, to clarify, the implied answer would be 'yes'."

Jennie nodded at him, and then turned towards the wall. This was something she'd discussed in theory with Wanda, but not something she'd put into practice. She sharpened her vision, and the lines of probability took on a sharper, more complicated pattern. She took off, running towards the wall as more bots began to advance. Then, she began to move with the pattern. Keeping it steady even though there was movement all around her. Ducking and weaving around the attacker droids and hoping that her partner was keeping the civilians safe.

Marius stared after his partner, trying to decide if what appeared to be happening in fact was. . . . Did she just close her eyes?

Whatever speculation may have followed was interrupted by a quiver of red, a droid approaching dangerously close to the other trainee. With a curse Marius sped forward; he wasn't going to make it in time. Not a problem. He stooped to grab the decapitated head of one of Jennie's earlier victims and eyed the droid. The right knee glowed red. Marius grinned and pitched the drone's head right at the light.

"Result!" the boy smirked as the droid went down.

Jennie didn't even flinch at the crunch of metal just off to her left. She kept running, following the pattern. It looked like she was going to smack into the wall face first, but at the last second she slowed and threw her arms out in front of her, crashing into the wall with a soft "Ooof."

She opened her eyes and looked over her shoulder. "Hey! It worked!" she said, delighted.

"Congratulations," Marius called, laying a kick in a location that mattered very little to his nonhuman opponent but, anatomically speaking, was probably discouraged on the field of honorable battle. He turned to wrench an attacker-droid from one of the civilians. "Now what?"

"Now! ...Now, um..." Jennie squinted and felt the smooth surface of the wall. The lines shifted, but Jennie reached out and yanked on the right one, backing up as a series of mechanical clicks told the two trainees that the wall was unlocking and opening up. It revealed a small orange flag on a pole under a spotlight, and the kill button, on a platform behind the pole. Guarded by yet more droids.

"Oh, you gotta be freaking kidding me!" Jennie said.

"You act as though you were under the impression these sessions are intended to be somethin' other than the very height of inconvenience." The last offensive drone clattered to the floor under Marius' shove. He turned his eyes now to the flag. "No worries, one step at a time. Flag first."

There were, mercifully, no droids in the intervening space. Now ignoring the milling droids behind them, Marius plucked the flag from the pole.

"Right then," he said, examining the nylon. He glanced up at the platform and its patrol-droids, each now clearly alert and ready for them. Fighting past them would be doable, but irritating. Marius paused to ponder a more elegant solution. Which came more or less immediately.

Marius stuffed the flag down Jennie's tank top. "Here, hold this," he said, and then grabbed her around the waist to lift her like a rag-doll.

"Hey! What are you--" Jennie broke off when she saw where he was looking, and saw the lines change.

"I so hate you," she sighed.

And with that, she was flung towards the platform and the kill switch, which she quite gracelessly and inelegantly smacked with her elbow as she landed.

Sirens blared, the droids stood down and the lights came on in the danger room. Jennie sat up, rubbing her elbow and plucking the piece of orange nylon out of her sports bra.

There was the unmistakable sound of Scott clearing his throat, recognizable even over the speakers. "That was... a novel conclusion to the scenario," was his very dry comment.

Marius smirked as he shook out his sweaty hair. "You see? Novel. An' you say I have no good plans."

"Can we go through one DR scenario that doesn't involve me being manhandled in some way?" Jennie called down from the platform.

"No," was the blithe response from the control booth. "I like to test the young male impulse to protect the female of the species so that we can train it out if need be. Then again, it doesn't take too long to figure out that the women are the biggest ass-kickers around here. So long as you're at least half-bright."

"In short," Marius said, smirk still firmly in place and now directed upon his teammate, "'no.'"

There was a deep, wounded sigh as Jennie climbed down from the platform and walked towards Marius. "And the sad part is, that was the most action I've gotten all summer," she said, before giving her smirking companion a smack upside the head. "Come on, smelly Goat Sucker," she said as she headed for the door.

Marius rubbed his head. "A life of peril indeed," he muttered. With a final salute to the observation window, he followed her out.