Danger Room Training.

[x-wildchild.livejournal.com]

Kyle's first -real- Danger Room training as an honest-to-God X-Men. Despite a lack of codename. Who is his partner? The other newest X-Man, of course.



Danger Room, 2015 hrs, first X-Men partner training session

Forge kept glancing at the text on his phone, sitting on the top shelf of his locker. Every time he was reminded of his new spot on the team, he couldn't help but smile. For all those times when he'd swore he wasn't cut out for this kind of life, or wouldn't be able to do the kind of things the X-Men were constantly getting into - here he was donning the leathers.

He'd already made a number of modifications to the basic outfit - removing a leg of the trousers and one sleeve of the jacket to free his cybernetic limbs was an immediate change. But he'd added a number of utility pockets and other, less obvious, alterations to the uniform that hopefully would get a testing out tonight.

Partner testing, of course, was liable to be weird. While he'd done the mentoring programs with several of the X-Men, including his continuing hand-to-hand training with Garrison, this would be his first time walking into the Danger Room as an equal partner instead of a trainee. What'll it be?he wondered. Obstacle course with Nightcrawler? Capture the Flag with Siryn? Straight-up combat training with Juggernaut? God, I hope not.

Glancing quickly in the mirror and adjusting the insignia on his collar, Forge slammed the locker shut and jogged around the corner to the doors.

Kyle had gotten the page on his own phone and had wasted no time getting to the locker room, changing, and then found himself waiting in the hallway, trying to find ways to kill what in reality was no more then ten minutes but what felt like ten years. He paced, he stretched, he even sat down cross-legged on the floor and tried to relax. None of which were working, and so he fell back to the default - pacing, cleaning under his claws, and trying to adjust his new black pants. He'd gotten them fitted, but there was always a period of adjustment where they threatened to result in Uncomfortableness if he wasn't careful.

At the sound of a locker slam, and then the doors, he perked, and turned to see whoever his partner was. The sound of metal-on-floor came only a second before he saw the shorter man emerge from the locker rooms. "Dude. DUDE. -Dude-." He said, stunned into repetition and pointing at Forge's also new black uniform.

Blinking in surprise, Forge pointed back at Kyle, eyes wide at the sight of his former roommate in X-Men leathers. "Dude!" he repeated, taken aback by the whole sight. "I mean, you, and the... with the... and I'm... dude!" Spontaneously, he stepped forward and threw one arm around Kyle's shoulders, pounding the taller mutant on the back. "Oh man, how awesome is this, huh?"

"It's totally freaking awesome!" Kyle agreed. "Dude, when? I mean, Mr. Summers.. Cyclops.. Gah, this whole stupid name thing is confusing me didn't say anything when I got mine? And you didn't like, announce or anything. I mean, dude." Somewhere in the extended ramble, Kyle extended his fist, bumping it against Forge's metal one.

"Last week, after the whole zombie thing," Forge answered. "And I opted out of the code name thing. Not my style, you know? And after Jennie's big fancy 'lookie me, I'm an X-Man, neener neener' show, I kind of felt like a little subtlety." He bumped fists with Kyle again and faced the circular door to the Danger Room, watching the red numbers counting down above it. "So," he intoned, "any idea what they're going to throw at us?"

"I dunno. I mean, it can't be that bad, right? We're brand new. If you were Cyclops, what would.. you.. oh, God, we're doomed." Kyle trailed off, shaking his head. "Squished before we even have real codenames. Dude, I can't even think of a code name that'd work for you." Not that he'd come up with one of his own yet. "I mean, you're... Forge." Kyle explained, shrugging. "I was gonna and then I got distracted by Clarice and pants and trying to prevent atomic wedgie. It took me weeks with the grey ones. What the hell?" As he spoke, he adjusted the legs of his pants again. "Stupid leg muscles."

"Hell with codenames, yo," Forge said gleefully, bouncing up and down on his toes. "We're going in there, and we're going to kick ass and take names. This is going to rock."

The door irised open, and the interior of the Danger Room flashed before them in bursts of simulated lightning. Two figures could be seen moving towards the staging hallway, lit through ever-increasing flashes of light. One of them, skin tinged a yellowish-green, was literally bounding back and forth in a zigzag, long tongue lashing at the air. The other, face hidden behind the ominously familiar dark red helmet, hovered in the air, lightning arcing off a magnetic bubble of force.

Forge gulped out loud. "Day one. Toad and Magneto. This is gonna suck."

--

"Ow." Kyle lay on his stomach, arms wrapped over his head. "What the hell? I can beat Toad. I know I can. He's me times eleven. Piss him off, get him distracted, kick him in the knees! I've done this!" He muttered into the simulated dirt. "Why is he kicking my ass? I hate this stupid scenario. Cyclops is evil." The litany of mutterings didn't stop, even when he pulled himself up and unwrapped his arms from his head.

Forge just blinked into the darkness of his EMP-deadened goggles before pushing them up on his forehead with his right hand as his left arm and leg slowly regained sensation. In his mind, he knew that the "Magneto" drone was just a standard humanoid dummy, and that the magnetic fields that were tossing him all around the Danger Room were courtesy of a massive mobile dynamo he'd added to the room to assist with Polaris's exercises. And while he knew that "Toad" was just one of the combat drones programmed to respond as the Brotherhood's most annoying member would, the whole point of the exercise was not to treat it as an exercise, but as legitimate real-world danger.

As the environment around them reset itself, Forge struggled to his feet, shaking sensation back into his artificial fingers. "It's like full-contact chess against an omniscient opponent," he grumbled. "Everything I try and do gets... chess!"

As the buzzer sounded again and the two Brotherhood drones began to move across the floor, Forge stuck a hand out towards Kyle and shouted. "Kyle! Castle on three! Think chess!"

Kyle pulled himself up to his feet with a groan, and shook off the lingering headache from being drop-kicked into the wall. Twice. "Castle.. what?" He dimly recalled someone - maybe Dr. Farouk, maybe the Professor, maybe even Forge himself saying once that castling was where you switched two of your pieces. Besides knowing that the object of chess was to kill the other guy's king, it was the only thing he knew about the game. Chess was for people like Forge, who did math at the breakfast table.

But he got the idea. Forge wanted him to switch places. "You're smoking crack!" He yelled over the thunderclaps created by the Magneto-drone. But nothing else they'd done had worked yet, and what was the worst that could happen? Forge would get the bruises, he'd get the hair sticking up all over the place, and ... Forge had a metal leg and arm. He had a healing factor. Maybe Forge wasn't so much on crack.

He grasped both Forge's forearms, and without more then a shouted "Knees and ankles!" warning, he spun, pulling Forge off the ground, and then letting to, almost throwing the smaller man towards the Toad-drone.

Forge tucked, letting the momentum carry him right into the Toad drone. As expected, he found himself immediately battered by elbow and knee strikes, but using the techniques Garrison had taught him, he turned and leaned to take most of the blows on his prosthetic arm, which was more than capable of weathering the assault.

Sixty-six percent of the time, Toad uses the surprise advantage of his prehensile tongue and adhesive mucous secretions to grapple his target, Forge recalled from the files, ducking back under a kick and reaching a hand back to his collar. With a yank, he pulled the modified collar forward into a hood, a length of matte-black fabric not unlike a fencer's mask dropping down to protect his face.

As expected, the Toad drone jumped away, and as Forge stood upright, the long tongue (thankfully simulated by a metal-and-foam tendril with significantly less ick-factor than the real thing) lashed out, pinning his arms to his sides and hauling him in for a kick.

Time for uniform modification number two, Forge thought, jumping forward instead of resisting the pull, and triggering the microcanisters of CS riot-control gas he had designed after an earlier journal conversation. The two tumbled together in a cloud of tear gas, rolling across the Danger Room floor.

Kyle had no idea how the Danger Room worked - all he knew was that the Magneto-drone's simulated magnetic field looked enough like what he knew Lorna could do, what he'd been told the real Magneto could do, that it made him -nervous-. Even as far away as he was, it made the hair on his and neck stand on end, and the tang in the air from the ozone made his nose -itch-.

He heard the whump and grunts of Forge behind him, and paused for a split second, fighting the urge to go help his smaller, less naturally physical teammate. The stillness lasted only as long as it took the drone to throw what looked like a large metal trash can at him. Kyle dodged, diving to the side.

~The point, tard, was to switch places, not double-team on Toad~ he scolded himself mentally. Which, if that was the point, meant he had to take on Magneto. Magneto, who could toss around cars and trains and oil tankers.

None of which Kyle could see anywhere in the simulated setting. And in fact... the thing around with the largest amount of metal was... Forge. Who was occupied with the Toad-drone, and by the acrid smell in the air, was tear gassing it into some kind of submission.

Kyle was on the move, taking a running leap for the drone really before he'd finished consciously thinking the plan through. No big pieces of metal meant that the drone couldn't crush him under a car. Magneto himself wouldn't stop to rescue Toad, which meant the drone wouldn't rescue another drone. Magneto didn't work like that, he didn't have that kind of loyalty to his people. They weren't his people.

The magnetic bubble and lightening hurt - singed the hair off his arms and made the hair on his end stand on end. Kyle bit his cheek keeping his teeth from rattling, and did his best to ignore it, to ignore the taste of blood and to ignore just how angry the idea that Magneto would leave his people to get hurt, arrested, to die, made him.

Sucking air through the filtered cloth, Forge continued to roll with the Toad drone, waiting until the tongue loosened its grip and slipping downwards. Remembering Kyle's advice about "knees and ankles", he flailed about until he caught one of the drone's legs.

Toad can kick with enough force to shatter concrete. His legs are his greatest weapon, the files said.

Disarm him, then, Forge surmised. Scissoring his legs around the drone's knee, he hooked his metal arm around the ankle, gripping at the instep and twisting violently. Metal struts and cables in the drone simulated human bone and tendon as well as they were able, and the one thing that Forge knew about the human body was that it was indeed a complex machine, too complex for his power to work on.

But even complex machines had their breaking points.

With an arch of his back and a vicious twist, the drone's leg snapped, twisting ninety degrees at the knee and ankle joints. Releasing his hold and rolling away, Forge raised himself to his hands and knees, ready to jump on the drone and beat it into submission with its own limbs if it tried to attack. Mercifully, however, the facsimile of Toad just thrashed about harmlessly on the floor, one leg totally useless.

The Magneto-drone rose in the air as Kyle approached, but not quite fast enough to prevent him from grabbing onto it's ankles. The added weight made the drone dip in the air briefly, and Kyle used the momentum to pull himself up, clinging to the drone by it's legs.

The drone raised, and turned, rotating upside-down and then returned to upright, in an attempt to dislodge Kyle. He slipped once, unable to dig his claws into the drone's calves, but kept holding on through another inversion.

Upside down, Kyle was disoriented, but this time, didn't let go, instead, swinging around and letting gravity do the work for him. He swung around, and kicked at the drone's 'head' several times until it landed, waiting until it touched ground to wrap his legs around it's neck and squeeze. The drone attempted once to lift back into the air, but only got a few feet off the ground before it crashed down, landing on top of Kyle, unmoving.

Breathing hard, Forge watched as the Danger Room slowly faded back into the familiar dark walls scored with luminescent gridlines, waiting until the maintenance drones dragged the other two away before shuffling over to Kyle and flopping down on the metal floor, laying opposite from his teammate and looking up at the ceiling.

"You totally know this wasn't even the high-speed scenario, right?" he drawled, a small laugh under his words.

"You can go to hell and die." Kyle muttered, one arm over his eyes, one flopped out on the metal floor. "How do they do this? Nate's ancient, and he does this all the farking time." For all he knew, Nate was up in the observation booth watching, laughing and would put him out of his misery later. "Fuck, and I still haven't come up with a good codename yet."