Scott and Sharon - Danger Room Session

[x-catseye.livejournal.com]

Scott puts Sharon through a rigourous King of the Hill course.

"Hello!" Catseye called out excitedly, leaning against the door to the Danger Room as she waited for Scott to approach from the other end of the hall. "Are you ready to rock the Danger Room with our amazing
training session?!" She made rock symbols with her hands. Damn, she
shouldn't be allowed three espressos within a half-hour time period,
ever. "What are you gonna program? Search and rescue? Capture the
flag? Combat combat and more combat?"

Scott couldn't help but grin at Cateye's enthusiasm, "Well I thought
we'd build on your agility training with Kurt" he responded. "How does
starting off with a nice game of king of the hill sound to you?" he
asked while opening the door. If only Casteye could have seen the evil
twinkle in his eye as he replied to her.

"Is that the game where one of us stands on top of the hill and the
other one has to try to get them knocked off the top of the hill and
stand on top themselves?" Catseye inquired, sounding suspicious as she
bounded into the room and did some warm-up stretching.

"That's the one," Scott agreed striding over to the control panel to
activate the program.

The walls of the danger room remodeled themselves into a cylinder
filled with blocks of a smooth material all floating at different
heights. The blocks orbited around the danger room bumping into one
another as they changed both their position and height. Floating just
above the floor of the danger room was a transparent round platform
ringed in lights which Scott walked onto.

"The name of the game is simple, try to knock me off the platform
while I try to stop you", as Scott spoke the platform started rising
up through the centre of the room to hover steadily roughly 20 feet
off the ground.

Catseye shifted into her housecat form, since the blocks wouldn't fit
BigCat (she would save that for when she got up to Scott's platform!)
and jumped onto a moving block. The surface was very smooth but the
pads on her paws kept her from slipping. But the block started to
wobble! Caught off guard, she was dumped off and back onto the ground.
With a disgruntled yowl she tried again, this time careful to balance
her feet so she wouldn't tip the block. Thus perched on the block, she
tried to plan her next move but a blast from Scott's eyebeams came at
her and she had to flee quickly. Damn, this was a lot harder than it
looked!

Scott grinned as he watched Catseye try to leap up the blocks to reach
him, impressed by her perseverance, "You have to try to keep track of
where everything is" he called. To prove his point he aimed a bank
shot off a series of blocks to approach Catseye from behind trying to
catch her off guard. He mentally made a note to himself to try this
scenario out with other athletically inclined X-men.

Creeping closer to the edge of the platform her tried to keep an eye
on Catseye to identify weaknesses in her attack and areas which needed
improvement. I can't let her beat me first time out, he thought, I'd
never live it down.

The purple housecat stayed on the ground, moving around the perimeter
of the room, taking stock of the movement of the blocks so she could,
as he'd advised, keep track of where everything was. She tried to
discern patterns in the movements as she dodged eyebeams, and looked
for spots that would provide blinds against Scott's attacks. There
were times when the blocks could, as their name implied, block her
from from being shot at.

After a run around the edges of the cylinder, Catseye returned to the
blocks with a formulated plan of attack. It seemed to be all about
timing. Jump. Jump. Jump. Pause. Pause. Jump. Shit! She'd
mistimed the pause she'd calculated for a parallel block to shield her
from a banked eyebeam attack and missed the next damn block! The fall
was jarring from the height she'd reached, but the cat landed on her
feet and with an exasperated yowl set out to try again.

Scott nodded in satisfaction as he realized Catseye noticed the
pattern of the block's orbit, she almost had it now. Scott considered
attempting to bank a shot off multiple blocks before discarding the
idea. At the speed Catseye was moving he's probably miss, and he'd
rather leave a few tricks in the bag for when she got onto the
platform.

Not wanting to embarrass herself by falling again, Catseye devoted all
her concentration to executing the pattern she'd developed in her head
for running the gauntlet, as it were. This time she made it up to a
level of blocks at the same height as Scott's platform, though she
emerged on the other side of the room. Only three blocks to get her
over to where Scott was! Except there was no more cover. And she
couldn't knock him off the platform in her housecat form. If it
wobbled like the blocks it might have been possible but the platform
was stable. She'd have to be in girlform or BigCat form, and to shift
into BigCat she first had to shift into girlform, which meant it would
be easier to just attack Scott in girlform...

Of course the pause while she'd been thinking had allowed Scott to get
a clear shot at her and she had to jump down to a lower block to avoid
being hit. She went back to running her pattern and this time when she
got to the top level, she leapt from the first block to the second to
the third as quickly as she could, trying to stay as small as
possible. On the leap between the third block and the platform, she
shifted in midair into girlform. "Ah hah!" she called out
triumphantly, and then realized that now she actually had to get him
off the platform somehow.

Scott clapped with approval, "Not bad Sharon. Your timings were a
little off getting up here but you got the idea of blocking my shots
pretty quickly". He braced his legs and smiled at her, "That, of
course, was the easy part."

Scott gestured for her to attack while talking, "So how're you fitting
in back here? Not having too many problems are you?" As he spoke Scott
loosed and eye blast at Catsye's right-hand side forcing her to jump
to the left and approach him while remaining visible to his good eye.

Damn! She'd been planning to shift to BigCat when Scott gave her the
opportunity by stopping to clap, but she wanted to talk to him and
answer his questions which meant staying in human form, which was by
far her weakest, tactic-wise. He must have known she couldn't resist
chatting with him! "I'm not having too many problems with the X-Men
part of it, but not being able to stay here to visit with people,
because of the Nick-Slash-John situation, is a little hard," she
admitted, trolling her memory for hand-to-hand combat skills and
trying to dance her way back over to Scott's blind side. She struck
low and fast with a foot, following it up with a high jab of her
elbow, but she couldn't get close enough to him to land a blow before
having to retreat from another eyeblast.

"I'm sorry about the Nick situation, I know that it must hurt" Scott replied sympathetically. In contrast with his words he pressed forward firing an eye blast at Sharon's feet which he followed with a to knock her off balance. He followed up with a series of quick jabs to make the most of his advantage. Despite his reach and experience Sharon's agility allowed her to dodge his attacks and maintain her position on the platform.

Scott stopped, she was obviously agile enough to dance around him till one of them made a mistake; he would have to finish this another way. "You're not bad," he said bending over to catch his breath. "You've obviously been training hard since you got back."

Catseye took the opportunity of Scott catching his breath to shift to BigCat form and lunged at him, throwing roughly one hundred twenty pounds of weight towards him in an attempt to pounce on him and pin him down.

As Catseye slammed into him Scott fell backwards with a hundred and twenty pound cat on top of him. He grinned up at her, "Hi there." As he spoke Scott unleashed an optical blast which lifted Catseye off him and carried her off the platform.

He got up and walked over to the edge, "You beat me and knocked me down Catseye, but this is king of the hill. You got too focused on beating me and lost sight of the big picture." The platform started to sink down to the floor, and he walked over to her. "You picked up on the pattern to get up to the platform much faster than I expected though." He offered his hand to her, "Good training session".

Catseye lay on the ground in her catform for a few moments as her healing factor dealt with the blast and the fall, then shifted back to girlform, ignoring the stomach pains from the transformation. She took Scott's offered hand, frowning. "I'll work more on the big picture for next time," she said with a wry smirk. "I liked this program, I'd really like to try it again sometime."