xp_logs | Forge & Laurie, Wednesday morning.

After an early morning Danger Room run, Laurie runs into Forge before returning to class, and has some questions for the new X-Man

Laurie rubbed at her hair with a towel as she placed her trainee uniform carefully on the hook in her locker and then sat down to put her trainers back on. She'd just finished a Dangerroom training session with Scott and could feel her muscles protesting weakly as she moved about. She still had classes to go to though, and while the exhaustion from the training might be slightly worse then a long distance run, she'd long ago learnt to push past any passing weakness of body.

As Laurie left the locker room, she nearly collided with Forge in the hallway, eliciting a surprised yelp from the inventor, who was walking (as usual) head-down engrossed in reading whatever was scrolling across whichever of the often-multiple devices he was carrying at any given time. Juggling the compact PDA, he finally tucked the distracting item into a pocket and composed himself.

"Rough session?" Forge asked, judging the look on Laurie's face. "Not king-of-the-hill again, was it?"

"How'd you guess?" Laurie asked, grimacing as a particularly unhappy muscle decided to make itself known. "I swear that if I didn't know better, I'd say Mr Summers was trying to make me quit."

"Do you want to?" Forge asked point-blank.

"No, of course not. Why is everyone so on my back lately?" Laurie asked, giving him a half-frustrated, half uncertain look, as if she couldn't quite work out something.

"Forge, do you really think I'd have gotten involved if I was just going to quit? I know I've still got a lot to learn, but I can do it. I just want people to have faith in me."

"I'm saying that not everyone is cut out for it, and there's no shame in helping out in other ways," Forge said, leaning against the wall. "Doug and Angie both left the team to work for Snow Valley. Hank went to go work at Muir. Bobby's housesitting in Ireland..." he stopped, cocking his head slightly. "Ignore that last one. Anyway, I'm just saying. If you think you've got something to prove, you don't. No one looks at Amelia crosswise for not putting on the leathers, for instance."

"I'm not doing it to prove something." Laurie said gently, a brief smile lifting the corners of her mouth. "It's...like me wanting to be a doctor. I guess I've got a 'saving people' thing. I know I'm not going to always be able to, but that doesn't mean I can't try my hardest every day. I've just got to learn who needs saving, and who can take care of themselves, that's all."

"You know that's kind of the point of the training, right?" Forge said with a smile. "Not just to whip you into shape and give you an idea of how to not die when Magneto throws a truck at you. It's to give you an idea of what it can be like, and to figure out if it's the right thing for you."

"I never thought of it like that before," Laurie admitted, rubbing her shoulder for a moment where she'd taken a somewhat nasty blow from one of the drones. "Does it get harder or easier, do you think? To know what's right. I used to think I knew best, that all I had to do was follow the rules and everything would turn out alright. Only now I've got to think about it all, not just follow."

Thinking about that for a moment, Forge sighed. "I never actually wanted to be an X-Man, you know? Join the team, wear the uniform, all that? I just wanted to help. And then... I found out that I was good at it. That I can do this. Harder? Easier? A little of both, I suppose. I know I'm not always going to agree with what Storm and Cyclops ask me to do, but I've got to trust that they know what the right thing is. And sometimes," he shrugged, "I might have to make that call myself. The rules, the training, all it can do is give you an idea of what that's like. You never really know until you're doing it."

"You know, I had to talk pretty fast to get Mom to agree to let me do this." Laurie admitted, thinking back to when she first started training. "I had to want to do this to do it, otherwise she'd never have let me. She's pretty good that way, sometimes. I just wish I knew which part of it, is the part I believe. I don't always know if we can really help anyone, or if we're doing the right thing. But I believe in people like Mr Summers, and Miss Munroe, that they wouldn't ask me to do something that was fundamentally wrong. Is that wrong, do you think? To do something because you believe in the person asking you to do it, even if you can't see how it'll end?"

Forge thought about that for another long moment. "There's loyalty, and then there's blind faith," he finally said. "I'd rather have a teammate at my side with the former rather than the latter."

Laurie crossed her arms, an unconscious defensive gesture as she leant back against the wall near the entrance to the lockerrooms. "What if you don't know which it is? I mean, I wouldn't kill someone if they told me to, or torture someone, but I think I'd do almost anything else."

"Depends on the situation," Forge replied, nodding towards the Danger Room. "That's what you're supposed to be learning in there. If you ask me, I say trust your leaders, think for yourself, and let that be the whole of it. But how much you put into that trust? That's up to you." He thought for a moment, then nodded to himself. "Talk to some people about it. Cable... Nathan, for instance, might have a different outlook."

"I think I will," Laurie murmured, thinking about her powers and just how much 'almost anything else' could cover. There was so much damage that could be done, without ever having to torture or kill anyone. "Thanks, Forge. It's good to talk about it sometimes, without feeling like I have to pass some kind of test."

"Of course," Forge said, reaching out to squeeze Laurie's shoulder lightly. "The only dumb question is the one unasked, right?"

"True dat." Laurie replied with a grin. "So, speaking of questions, you still up for teaching me how to play chess?"

"Meet you in the parlor in, say, two hours?" Forge said with a smile. "I get the feeling after this session, I'm going to need some low-impact strategy."

"You're on!" Laurie replied, before turning and hobbling her way off to her first class.