xp_logs | Forge, Laurie: The hangar, Monday night

While continuing work on the Blackbird, Laurie learns a little bit about welding and Forge's emotional state - or lack thereof.

Laurie pulled the mask over her face, blinking slightly as the world took on a shadowy edge, and she lit the end of the welding torch. She could feel Forge beside her, and moved her head slightly to see where he was pointing at. That would be her first weld point and she moved the instrument closer to the metal, watching the flame change colour as it hit.

"How long should I hold it for?" she asked over the noise of construction going on around them.

"Move it slowly, just along the seam there," Forge instructed, indicating a line with a laser pointer. "These are just preliminary tack welds, so don't worry if it looks all goobery. We're just holding the basic frame in place."

The two of them stood in the middle of a veritable jungle gym of metal struts and poles, thin metal bars forming a cage that would be the cockpit of the new jet. Forge watched as Laurie began to move the welding torch, peering through his goggles at the welded joint. Sloppy, but that was to be expected. "You're doing good," he said as he patted Laurie lightly on the back.

Laurie nodded, a brief grin moving her mouth upwards, unseen behind her mask. "Is goobery the technical term?" she asked, focussing in at the job at hand, her tongue poking briefly out of the corner of her mouth in concentration as she worked.

"Very technical. Up there with thingamadiddy and whatchamawhosit," Forge intoned seriously as he called up the 3-D schematics on his goggles. Before his eyes, the space between the struts filled in with wiring diagrams and carbon-fiber supports. "Okay, I think you're good there. You've got a pretty good hand with the torch."

"Well, one of the pre-requisites of wanting to be a doctor is learning to have steady hands." Laurie noted, finishing the line of weld before pulling the torch back and lifting the welding mask away from her face. "Speaking of which, how has everything been going lately? You seem pretty steady on the new limbs."

Forge reached over to take the welding torch from Laurie's hands and inspect the valve. He shut the flame off and produced a small wrench, making adjustments to the nozzle. "Arm's at about sixty-five percent. Ironically, all the biologicals are fine, it's the um..." He tapped his forehead with the wrench. "Nervous system stuff. Amelia says that the trauma of losing the arm is why my power's adapting slower to the prosthetic than it should."

He set the torch down, leaning against one of the curved hull supports, feeling the steel between his shoulder blades. "I'm still not supposed to lift anything over twenty pounds by myself, no strenuous exercise that'd get my heart racing, no alcohol, no sudden impacts, and it hurts like hell to try and sleep on my left side," Forge ticked off on his fingers. "The human body is a remarkably elastic thing, but hit it hard enough and stuff snaps."

"You're still getting feedback?" Laurie asked, curious. She'd often been fascinated by the interplay of man and machine that was Forge. Seeing him come back from something that might have killed someone else seemed like a minor miracle to her sometimes. She certainly wouldn't have been handling it so well.

Forge shook his head. "It's like... an odd feeling of lag. Partial phantom limb syndrome, partial neural cyberconductivity resistance. I... well, okay. I've designed artificial limbs for accident victims, burn patients, all based off this design. But no one can adapt to it like I can. The way my power works, it makes the machine part of me. But it's just taking a while because of the damage, the shock, all that."

Laurie reached out and gripped his shoulder for a second, a comforting squeeze before turning to look at the schematics that were scattered about the hangar at easy to read height. "I can't imagine what it must have been like. I've read up on the mission files about Nimrod. He doesn't seem the type to leave someone alive. It must have been hard, to do what you did when you knew that."

Instinctively, Forge twitched his shoulder away from Laurie's hand, withdrawing slightly with a shudder. "Just simple math. Wildchild was down, the other two were defenseless while getting him to shelter, the only acceptable course of action was to buy them time. It made sense."

"Sorry, didn't mean to hurt you." Laurie said when she noticed the twitch. She seemed to make an increasing amount of mistakes lately, not just socially. "Were you scared?"

"Wasn't relevant," Forge insisted. "Action needed to be taken."

"But..." Laurie began, not understanding. How could an emotion not be relevant? Especially when fear seemed to almost incapacitate her at times. "How do you do that? Just, switch off like that?"

"Just because you feel something," Forge explained in a quiet voice, "doesn't mean that it's relevant or important. Especially for people like us, with the power we've got? Things like fear, anger, grief - we can't afford to let it replace reason. That's what separates me from Nimrod. From Erik. From people who are driven by nothing but emotion, without logic. It's the difference between a destructive forest fire and--" He held up the welding torch and lit it, the blue flame sparking out in a controlled jet. "A tool."

With a shrug, he handed the torch back to Laurie carefully, his eyes hidden behind his goggles. "Back to work, then. Let's make sure these align right..."