xp_logs | Angel and Forge

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Angel goes looking to volunteer and Forge gleefully takes her to the hangar to play with the plane.

Angel had no idea how to get down into the hanger - or wherever they were rebuilding the plane - and she figured that staring forlornly at the basketball court wasn't going to get her anywhere fast. So she did what most smart people did. She went and tried to find an adult; or she tried to find an adult, anyway. They were proving to be fairly wiley creatures that day and she sighed as she stomped into the kitchen, figuring that if she didn't find an adult, she could find a sandwich.

Which, while not as helpful, was certainly more tasty than an adult.

However, in the kitchen, the fridge was already mostly occupied by a lone individual rummaging deep in the shelves, filling arms and pockets with everything from fresh fruit to leftover calzone wrapped in wax paper. Turning around at the noise of someone approaching, Forge stood up, hugging a six-pack of soda to his chest and tucking a grapefruit under his chin. "Angel! You have hands! Might I avail myself of them?"

"You're totally observant, Forge," Angel responded, jogging over to do as he asked, "I do, indeed, have hands." She decided that the grapefruit was greatest danger of falling (she had this mental image of it falling under Forge's feet and him going down in this giant pile of limbs, fake limbs and food) so she grabbed that and reached for the soda as well. "Are you planning on feeding a small country?"

"A country populated entirely by geniuses, which is to say - me," Forge summarized as he reached for a satchel to shove his scavenged gains into. "Amelia says that I'm at that stage of trauma recovery where the body starts demanding lots of protein and calories to replenish itself after mending damaged tissue, and I'm not altogether clear about the biology, but I have been totally hungry. You know. Like the wolf."

The look she gave him was a blank one. "Are wolves really hungry?" Angel asked, bouncing the fruit in her hand slightly. "So, basically, you've gone and turned yourself into me? Except without the fwoosh and the cute butt, of course."

Forge huffed and turned his nose up in mock indignation. "My superior posterior is highly regarded as a paragon of the subject in some circles, I will have you know. Although speaking of fwoosh, what're you up to?" he asked with a curious gleam in his eye.

"...oh god, if I tell you I was kind of hoping to help with the plane, will I ever see the light of day again?"

Forge just smiled and picked up his satchel. "To Newton was sent an apple. To me, volunteers," he intoned cryptically. "Time to practice Chapter Eight."

***

Angel was one step behind Forge when they entered the hangar and then stopped dead as she looked around her, mouth dropping open. "Whoa," she breathed, nearly but not quite dropping the snack she'd ninjaed out of Forge's bag of goodies. The place was huge and she'd never been in there but what caught her attention was the plane. It obviously wasn't finished but it was still amazing to see.

"...shiny."

"Flying wing design, inline vectored thrust engines, continuously variable flight surfaces, although those aren't quite ready yet," Forge rattled off the technical specifications as he walked around the skeleton of the jet, now taking obvious form. Lacking the stretched-out fuselage of the previous model, the aircraft looked more like an angular boomerang, with boxy engines arranged in the wings rather than on the outside of the craft.

"The key factor, of course," Forge continued to explain, "is going to be the passive radar diffusion capability of the lifting body. The, um, stealthy-go-bye-bye stuff that keeps us from pinging on every radar drome from here to Bali."

At the last sentence, Angel's eyes unfogged and she grinned at Forge. "Thank you for dropping into Angel-speak," she teased, peering this way and that at the plane. Or what there was at the plane. "So, is that whole stealthy-go-bye-bye stuff why you were cackling like a total loony on the way down?" She frowned, tugging on a lock of stray hair. "Don't know what I can do though, thought you might have wanted me for welding or melting or something..."

She hadn't touched trying to figure out the scope of her new powers but she was willing to bet she hadn't been brought down here to do something like that. Hopefully.

Forge shook his head, instead walking over to a rack where what looked like black metallic cloth was stretched over it, running his fingers over the material gently. "Diffusive-absorptive EM-suppressing polymer, heat-tested to well over... well, anything short of re-entry or Shiro going all nuclear on it. And if my calculations are correct - and my calculations are nearly always correct - it should absorb and scatter any form of electromagnetic radiation above the visible spectrum."

Watching Angel's eyes glaze over, he chuckled. "Okay, imagine radar like... throwing a tennis ball at a wall and catching it on the bounce. If you know how fast you throw the ball, and how long it takes to bounce back, you can tell how far away the wall is, right? That's what radar does. But this is like... if you make the wall out of squishy nerf. The ball won't bounce back. Wibbly-wobbly stealthy-wealthy stuff."

She couldn't help it, Angel broke out into mad giggles. "Wibbly-wobbly stealthy-wealthy stuff?" she asked, blushing a little bit when she snorted mid-giggle. She thought about what he said, tapping her finger against her chin as she spun around, head back as she stared up at the plane. This would fly. It was going to lift off and fly and a part of her responded strongly to that.

"So, you want me to...give it a whammy to test out and make sure that this stuff is working?" Angel winced. "Did I get that right or did I totally flunk Forgese?"

"You're brilliant. Really. We should put railings around you and let children come look at you for a quarter," Forge teased, walking around the rack. "I want you to hit this with as broad-spectrum a blast of microwaves as you can. Microwaves aren't that different than radar waves, the principle is sound. But don't think hot, think bright. Like... ooh! Like when you twist a flashlight to get a beam that's wider but less intense? Do that. I'll be back here with the meter."

"Dude, I'm totally worth more than a quarter!" Angel called back before hopping around in an attempt to take off her shoes. They weren't a pair of her fire-proof ones and even though she had orders to think "bright" and not "hot", she wasn't going to take any chances. Barefeet on a floor that would have once been cold to her, she took a deep breath to get ready. She hadn't used her powers all that much since being kidnapped and powers ramped up but she turned it up anyway.

It wasn't like she could see the microwaves but she pretended she could, drawing it to her and then forcing it out in a wave as she hovered above the floor. Bright, not hot. Bright, not hot. Bright, bright, bright. A shower of microwaves struck the plane full on and another wave was right behind it.

Forge watched his machines as Angel continued the bombardment. Most notably, sitting where he was, he didn't feel any tingling from his artificial limbs like he often did around Angel. Microwaves plus steel mixed... poorly.

"Very good," he called around the rack, pausing to reach into his satchel and place a cold piece of pizza on a stool and slide it around. "You've gotten better at frequency control, intensity too. No aftereffects from the whole Thermal Gigantinator incident?" he asked before waiting a few seconds, then retrieving his pizza.

"Did you just - never mind. You better put another slice out there." Angel took a deep breath and forced even more, imagining that they were going over, under, even sideways on the plane. Coating it, actually, was a better mental image and she focused on that. "And not really? I mean, there's the whole extra oomf and I've totally not been messing with that much because it kind of, well, scares me. But the hiccups of powers seem to have died down.

Forge nodded as he took a bite of the pizza, then immediately fanned his mouth. "Hohh cheesh, hohh cheesh," he mumbled as he quickly took a drink of soda. "Nothing wrong with a little extra. I mean, after I..." he paused for a moment, trying to recall the feeling of his powers when Cortez had pushed them beyond their limits. "Nothing wrong with testing limits," he said as he checked his meters again. "Okay, everything reads fine. Go ahead and dial it down and have some pizza."

With a happy sigh, Angel touched back ground and trotted over barefoot to where Forge and the pizza were waiting. "Dude, I lost sight of my skin. My skiiiiin. It's a little hard to psych myself to get back to that point, yeah?" She spotted the food and literally pounced on it. "In my mouth, melty cheese!" After a moment, she swallowed. "How'd the testing go? Everything go well? I didn't break anything? But I guess that's the point to see if I could..."

"Nope," Forge chimed in, giddy as he rechecked the machines. "My calculations are correct, the polymer is perfectly EM-absorptive. Not only that, it's self-polarizing. That means to a magnetopath, it'd be like trying to grab soap in the bath."

"...I recognized the words 'soap in the bath'," Angel said, swallowing the last of her pizza. She'd managed to inhale the entire thing by the time he was done talking. Now she was trying to edge his plate closer to her mouth. "Basically, it done went and held up good?"

Forge tried not to roll his eyes. Sometimes it was like talking to a particularly hyperactive puppy. "Yes, it works. You've earned your grease monkey cred for the week."

She froze, Forge's stolen piece of pizza hanging from her teeth as she gave him a look. "Better not involve real monkeys," Angel muttered, but it was obvious she was pleased with the praise. And the job well done. And she hoped he had more pizza in that bag or else she was going to have to leg it really fast.

"Ook."