Forge and Clint - Post-Op
Aug. 18th, 2022 07:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsForge gets his inaugeral run through the Danger Room. Clint's there to offer support as only a Barton can, plus block access to the fridge.
Forge was, in a word, tired. And his brain was buzzing with new ideas after he'd experienced the Danger Room doing its level best to virtually kill him. Whoever the big blond with the claws was, Forge wanted no part in encountering him again. He took some minor comfort that not even the room with all its processing power could make the machines that were standing in for the bad guys and the civvies feel real.
He was definitely going to need the cane for the rest of the day - he'd pushed hard on the run and his hip was screaming. Hand wasn't too bad but when he had to go hard physically, it was always the leg that complained the loudest.
Still, it felt good to get out in the field again. And Clint - or Hawkeye, to use his callsign - was very good at what he did. Man definitely had some assassin training somewhere along the line - Forge could tell by the way he moved, his target assignments, how he took people down with that still-vaguely-ridiculous bow of his.
Dry-swallowing some painkillers, he finished getting dressed to head out of the locker room to probably be told all the ways he'd screwed the pooch.
Clint, having gone high to observe and assist when necessary, hadn't worked as hard as Forge. He'd still need a shower later, but he felt fine to grab some food and discuss the DR session with Forge. They'd already bid Scott farewell, but the older man had had an evil sort of gleam in his eye, if Clint did say so himself, so he envisioned his own future DR sessions were going to completely wipe the floor with him.
Waiting with his shoulders propped against the wall outside the locker room, Clint ran a quarter through the knuckles of both hands at the same time, barely focused on them as the coins wove back and forth, back and forth. Upon Forge's appearance, Clint pushed himself off the wall and pocketed his quarters. "Food?" He asked simply, eyebrows raised.
Forge nodded as he yarned. "Hell yes." he said, leaning heavily on his cane. "You know the places around here, I'm at your mercy. Again."
Clint grinned. "Hey, you did good for your first time in that thing. I got defenestrated on my first runthrough," he said. "Main kitchen's probably our best bet for food this time of day. There's always either something already made or enough leftovers to make a meal. Also, prime tip - the freezer's suddenly gotten real full of like, single servings of stuff. I dunno which of the people who cooks is doing it, but I like it a lot. Just put the containers in the dishwasher once you're done with them," Clint said, walking alongside Forge as they headed through various hallways toward the upstairs and the main kitchen.
Forge followed along, wincing despite himself and his ingestion of painkillers. "Man I hope so. Gotta be better than MREs." he said in not-fond reminiscence. And maybe the nice Irish girl with the heirloom stand mixer wouldn't be there to cast aspersions on his abilities. That'd be nice. "Been a long time since I've gone into the field like that." he said. Not since his injuries and his mystic self-mutilation. "Hopefully the rust wasn't too bad."
"Nah, man. It's to be expected. And I'm guessing you never did fieldwork with your prosthetics, so given the givens, you're not that rusty at all. You managed to come up with some very cool weapons while in there, too, which I'd like to take a look at some time." Reaching the elevator, Clint pushed the button and then stepped inside to hold the door open before hitting the ground floor indicator. "When I was with SHIELD and then SWORD, overwatch was kind of my main role on missions that weren't infil or exfil. From that standpoint, you didn't do any worse than anybody with prosthetics that I worked with back in the day."
"True enough." he said ruefully. "The incident where I got these pretty much ended my military career. Which, to be fair, was ultimately a good thing for me." he said; "And weapons are a large part of what I do these days, although being here I'm going to be branching out a fair bit. Sensors, holograms - those are always fun - power distribution, all kinds of fun stuff." he said with a grin. "SHIELD I've heard of. SWORD's a new one on me. Sounds like someone got cute with the naming scheme."
"C'mon," Clint said, laughing as the elevator dinged open and he gestured for Forge to precede him. "Somebody got cute naming both of those organizations. The Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division and the Supernatural Watch Observation and Response Department?" He shook his head. "But SWORD is newer, from my understanding. It's... basically it just 'keeps an eye on' mutants and metahumans who might be doing very not so great things. Which really only became an issue worth tracking and dealing with in the last couple decades."
"Great. How concerned do we have to be that SWORD's going to come down on us like a ton of bricks?" he asked as he limped towards the kitchen. Great. Triple minority and here's this government org that's designed to keep them all down. Man, the more things change, the more they stay the same. "Sounds like the mutant version of the Bureau of Indian Affairs." he said with something of a sneer.
Clint raised his eyebrows a bit as he headed for the freezer, but he did at least offer an honest answer. "Not very, to be honest. I've got good relations with SHIELD's upper management, I guess, and Kane - he's one of the other guys who works the DR, you'll probably meet him later - is FBI with something weird going on with the Director of SWORD. He's also a legit Mountie from Canada, so that's pretty cool. But the biggest thing, honestly, is that the mansion... I guess we sort of have an understanding with SHIELD and SWORD... in that they don't really know who's doing what with which team. They think they have dossiers, and some of the older ones might be accurate, but things here are actually like..."
Pausing as he dug out several containers of soup and a few that looked like portioned out side items, Clint exited the freezer before he continued, "Originally, this was a school. So that was the cover, right? Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters or whatever. After M-Day, that... wasn't exactly a thing they needed to worry about, so instead they shifted gears and now it's the Xavier Institute. It's all hoity-toity and shit, but protections are layered on the mansion itself security-wise for protection and then you've got the layers of subterfuge that protect the people here from the outside world in general. Sorry, I'm rambling, but this is like the steadiest place I've been in a real long time. And the safest."
Forge patiently waited his turn for Clint to finish scrounging before he set to with a vengeance. "Man, I hope you're right. I really do. But as someone whose ancestors have been fucked hard with no lube by the US Government for a century or two now, I'm gonna keep a close eye on them. But I hope you're right and that we're able to do some good for mutants, spellcasters, weirdos of all stripes and suggestions. But when they come for us, I don't expect us to go quietly either."
"We wouldn't," Clint said, sticking his soups in the microwave on defrost. "I'm not saying there wouldn't be angst and shit, but a) I trust my SHIELD contacts to give me a heads up and b) we've got enough people here to make whatever alphabet agency tries to surprise us regret every decision in their history that led them to that moment. We've got at least two super strong, invulnerable people, a couple teleporters, actual assassins, a whole team of badasses who traipse around in black leather trying to do good things for the world, and that's not even getting to the magic users or people who don't typically use their powers offensively but who could, in theory. Plus, there's the jet. And I legitimately don't actually know what physical security is so far as kill traps and things are out there... and the magical protections.
"Like. They might know some of what we're capable of, but not all of it. And they'd have to find us first. Like Scott, who was in the control room for us, he could blast artillery out of the sky before it even got to us. My best friend, Tasha, she could just sneak behind their lines with whoever else of the spies wants to go and all of a sudden guys are dropping like flies from knives and poisons. Have you ever seen a very small woman in a funny hat crush a car with her bare hands? I'll have to introduce you to Molly, she's awesome. And there's a woman on my team who can literally sprinkle faery dust on people, gets people high as a fucking kite, my friend. Like. Overall, we're like an anthill. It's best to just leave us alone. Cause if you kick over the top of our hill, we're gonna make you go into anaphylactic shock."
Forge blinked. "Yeah." he said. Privately he had his doubts but he could see where Clint was coming from. "We're not the only ones with assassins and big nasty guns." he pointed out. "But I see your point. Works pretty well when we're the choice for mutants."
"No, you're right. We're not. And to be honest, not everybody here is willing to kill. In a 'it's me or them' situation, maybe, but that hampers things in actual combat when you're not sure if the person you just left behind is gonna pop up against at some point and shoot you in the back. There's a lot of factors and every plan's FUBAR'd as soon as first contact's made, so." Clint thought about the Sentinel program, what he'd helped to disrupt and how it was only a matter of time before the guys in charge of that operation popped back up somewhere new with different funding and the same deadly kind of tech. "Everybody has to keep moving forward, improving. And that's one thing we're good at here, at least. All the teams are constantly training, constantly building up strategies and new ways of dealing with whatever threats might come at them in the field as well as here at home."
"No wonder you guys asked me to come onboard when you heard what I could do." he mused. "Not wild about being part of the next big arms race but if we're gonna have it anyway, I want to be on the side with the biggest guns and coolest tech." he said. "And hey, shove over. Some of us are starving here."
"Hey, it's not all about being a resource or a tech monkey, y'know. The spies in X-Force make sure we know what's going on and where and handle a lot of international threats, the X-Men are proactive about handling threats in the US, though they're usually more of a 'mutant is a threat, try to bring in and turn over to the appropriate authorities.' X-Factor Investigations is ground-level, especially in District X, so they've got their ear to the ground for things like corrupt cops and shit. The Institute works to help mutants through other, more... I dunno, charitable ways? And eXcals is dealing with..." Clint paused, puffed his cheeks out, and then said, "Well. An unstable Einstein-Rosen bridge that's partially attached to our dimension and time in the Chapel's basement and seems to be fucking other, alternate realities. Also, Atlantis. And Asgard, when necessary, but we share that with X-Force."
"And that's why you haven't shown the Maker then unstable Einstein-Rosen bridge. I've read Foster, I've done the math.' he said as he scavenged food from the fridge before he died of hunger. Ah, sandwiches. Good ol' sliced lunchmeat, piled high and doused with enough horseradish to light the average Anglo up. "We'll get around to it eventually, once I pass muster, am I right?"
"You've passed muster, man," Clint said, pulling his defrosted soups and sides out of the microwave. "And Jane's great. But it's Darcy you wanna watch out for. She's all 'you jackbooted thugs' and 'have taser, will electrocute you' which... yeah. Jane's got a stable bridge to theorize about, but we're keeping this one on the D/L because of how it came about - Halloween party. Evil book. Destroyed a pocket dimension that was full of ancient artifacts deemed too dangerous to be out amongst the regular mortals by none other than Merlin, that magical bastard."
Clint shook his head, then went about opening all his soups and finding himself a big enough spoon. "Anyway, yeah. I did some work with Jane and Thor, all theoretical, when the wormhole opened. Got enough figured out to help monitor the thing, then Kane, Molly, and Kitty came around with gear from the Danger Room and I smooshed that together with the monitoring equipment I'd already worked out. Which now allows travel to other universes that're being fucked over and then a way back to our reality. I'm interested in seeing what you think... personally, it's basically a hack job, given how little time I had to do it all, but it does what it's meant to. I'd appreciate some input on power consumption, honestly, and also securing the room the portal's in. We had a visitor come through - turned out to be all fine and dandy, but just in case whoever or whatever comes through next isn't as friendly as April..."
"Tell you what." Forge said as he closed the fridge and limped over to some free counter space to start assembling his Sandwich of the Gods. "Let me eat and take some weight off the leg, rest up a bit, and then tomorrow you can show me the hackjob and we'll get a start on how we're going to upgrade it." he said with a smile. "It'll be fun. You know you want to..." he said teasingly.
"Sounds like a plan," Clint said, grinning as he started eating one of his soups. He had no idea what his sides were, but he'd open them in a minute to find out. "If you need something for the hip, you can check medical. Doc Jean's good. There's also Clarice down there sometimes, which is great. Wanna meet out at the Chapel around 11a tomorrow? I've got a shift starting then that'll go to 11p. Obvs you don't have to stay the whole time."
"If it lives up to the hype I may just move in and call it a day." he joked, then took a big bite of his sandwich. Ah, bliss.
Forge was, in a word, tired. And his brain was buzzing with new ideas after he'd experienced the Danger Room doing its level best to virtually kill him. Whoever the big blond with the claws was, Forge wanted no part in encountering him again. He took some minor comfort that not even the room with all its processing power could make the machines that were standing in for the bad guys and the civvies feel real.
He was definitely going to need the cane for the rest of the day - he'd pushed hard on the run and his hip was screaming. Hand wasn't too bad but when he had to go hard physically, it was always the leg that complained the loudest.
Still, it felt good to get out in the field again. And Clint - or Hawkeye, to use his callsign - was very good at what he did. Man definitely had some assassin training somewhere along the line - Forge could tell by the way he moved, his target assignments, how he took people down with that still-vaguely-ridiculous bow of his.
Dry-swallowing some painkillers, he finished getting dressed to head out of the locker room to probably be told all the ways he'd screwed the pooch.
Clint, having gone high to observe and assist when necessary, hadn't worked as hard as Forge. He'd still need a shower later, but he felt fine to grab some food and discuss the DR session with Forge. They'd already bid Scott farewell, but the older man had had an evil sort of gleam in his eye, if Clint did say so himself, so he envisioned his own future DR sessions were going to completely wipe the floor with him.
Waiting with his shoulders propped against the wall outside the locker room, Clint ran a quarter through the knuckles of both hands at the same time, barely focused on them as the coins wove back and forth, back and forth. Upon Forge's appearance, Clint pushed himself off the wall and pocketed his quarters. "Food?" He asked simply, eyebrows raised.
Forge nodded as he yarned. "Hell yes." he said, leaning heavily on his cane. "You know the places around here, I'm at your mercy. Again."
Clint grinned. "Hey, you did good for your first time in that thing. I got defenestrated on my first runthrough," he said. "Main kitchen's probably our best bet for food this time of day. There's always either something already made or enough leftovers to make a meal. Also, prime tip - the freezer's suddenly gotten real full of like, single servings of stuff. I dunno which of the people who cooks is doing it, but I like it a lot. Just put the containers in the dishwasher once you're done with them," Clint said, walking alongside Forge as they headed through various hallways toward the upstairs and the main kitchen.
Forge followed along, wincing despite himself and his ingestion of painkillers. "Man I hope so. Gotta be better than MREs." he said in not-fond reminiscence. And maybe the nice Irish girl with the heirloom stand mixer wouldn't be there to cast aspersions on his abilities. That'd be nice. "Been a long time since I've gone into the field like that." he said. Not since his injuries and his mystic self-mutilation. "Hopefully the rust wasn't too bad."
"Nah, man. It's to be expected. And I'm guessing you never did fieldwork with your prosthetics, so given the givens, you're not that rusty at all. You managed to come up with some very cool weapons while in there, too, which I'd like to take a look at some time." Reaching the elevator, Clint pushed the button and then stepped inside to hold the door open before hitting the ground floor indicator. "When I was with SHIELD and then SWORD, overwatch was kind of my main role on missions that weren't infil or exfil. From that standpoint, you didn't do any worse than anybody with prosthetics that I worked with back in the day."
"True enough." he said ruefully. "The incident where I got these pretty much ended my military career. Which, to be fair, was ultimately a good thing for me." he said; "And weapons are a large part of what I do these days, although being here I'm going to be branching out a fair bit. Sensors, holograms - those are always fun - power distribution, all kinds of fun stuff." he said with a grin. "SHIELD I've heard of. SWORD's a new one on me. Sounds like someone got cute with the naming scheme."
"C'mon," Clint said, laughing as the elevator dinged open and he gestured for Forge to precede him. "Somebody got cute naming both of those organizations. The Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division and the Supernatural Watch Observation and Response Department?" He shook his head. "But SWORD is newer, from my understanding. It's... basically it just 'keeps an eye on' mutants and metahumans who might be doing very not so great things. Which really only became an issue worth tracking and dealing with in the last couple decades."
"Great. How concerned do we have to be that SWORD's going to come down on us like a ton of bricks?" he asked as he limped towards the kitchen. Great. Triple minority and here's this government org that's designed to keep them all down. Man, the more things change, the more they stay the same. "Sounds like the mutant version of the Bureau of Indian Affairs." he said with something of a sneer.
Clint raised his eyebrows a bit as he headed for the freezer, but he did at least offer an honest answer. "Not very, to be honest. I've got good relations with SHIELD's upper management, I guess, and Kane - he's one of the other guys who works the DR, you'll probably meet him later - is FBI with something weird going on with the Director of SWORD. He's also a legit Mountie from Canada, so that's pretty cool. But the biggest thing, honestly, is that the mansion... I guess we sort of have an understanding with SHIELD and SWORD... in that they don't really know who's doing what with which team. They think they have dossiers, and some of the older ones might be accurate, but things here are actually like..."
Pausing as he dug out several containers of soup and a few that looked like portioned out side items, Clint exited the freezer before he continued, "Originally, this was a school. So that was the cover, right? Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters or whatever. After M-Day, that... wasn't exactly a thing they needed to worry about, so instead they shifted gears and now it's the Xavier Institute. It's all hoity-toity and shit, but protections are layered on the mansion itself security-wise for protection and then you've got the layers of subterfuge that protect the people here from the outside world in general. Sorry, I'm rambling, but this is like the steadiest place I've been in a real long time. And the safest."
Forge patiently waited his turn for Clint to finish scrounging before he set to with a vengeance. "Man, I hope you're right. I really do. But as someone whose ancestors have been fucked hard with no lube by the US Government for a century or two now, I'm gonna keep a close eye on them. But I hope you're right and that we're able to do some good for mutants, spellcasters, weirdos of all stripes and suggestions. But when they come for us, I don't expect us to go quietly either."
"We wouldn't," Clint said, sticking his soups in the microwave on defrost. "I'm not saying there wouldn't be angst and shit, but a) I trust my SHIELD contacts to give me a heads up and b) we've got enough people here to make whatever alphabet agency tries to surprise us regret every decision in their history that led them to that moment. We've got at least two super strong, invulnerable people, a couple teleporters, actual assassins, a whole team of badasses who traipse around in black leather trying to do good things for the world, and that's not even getting to the magic users or people who don't typically use their powers offensively but who could, in theory. Plus, there's the jet. And I legitimately don't actually know what physical security is so far as kill traps and things are out there... and the magical protections.
"Like. They might know some of what we're capable of, but not all of it. And they'd have to find us first. Like Scott, who was in the control room for us, he could blast artillery out of the sky before it even got to us. My best friend, Tasha, she could just sneak behind their lines with whoever else of the spies wants to go and all of a sudden guys are dropping like flies from knives and poisons. Have you ever seen a very small woman in a funny hat crush a car with her bare hands? I'll have to introduce you to Molly, she's awesome. And there's a woman on my team who can literally sprinkle faery dust on people, gets people high as a fucking kite, my friend. Like. Overall, we're like an anthill. It's best to just leave us alone. Cause if you kick over the top of our hill, we're gonna make you go into anaphylactic shock."
Forge blinked. "Yeah." he said. Privately he had his doubts but he could see where Clint was coming from. "We're not the only ones with assassins and big nasty guns." he pointed out. "But I see your point. Works pretty well when we're the choice for mutants."
"No, you're right. We're not. And to be honest, not everybody here is willing to kill. In a 'it's me or them' situation, maybe, but that hampers things in actual combat when you're not sure if the person you just left behind is gonna pop up against at some point and shoot you in the back. There's a lot of factors and every plan's FUBAR'd as soon as first contact's made, so." Clint thought about the Sentinel program, what he'd helped to disrupt and how it was only a matter of time before the guys in charge of that operation popped back up somewhere new with different funding and the same deadly kind of tech. "Everybody has to keep moving forward, improving. And that's one thing we're good at here, at least. All the teams are constantly training, constantly building up strategies and new ways of dealing with whatever threats might come at them in the field as well as here at home."
"No wonder you guys asked me to come onboard when you heard what I could do." he mused. "Not wild about being part of the next big arms race but if we're gonna have it anyway, I want to be on the side with the biggest guns and coolest tech." he said. "And hey, shove over. Some of us are starving here."
"Hey, it's not all about being a resource or a tech monkey, y'know. The spies in X-Force make sure we know what's going on and where and handle a lot of international threats, the X-Men are proactive about handling threats in the US, though they're usually more of a 'mutant is a threat, try to bring in and turn over to the appropriate authorities.' X-Factor Investigations is ground-level, especially in District X, so they've got their ear to the ground for things like corrupt cops and shit. The Institute works to help mutants through other, more... I dunno, charitable ways? And eXcals is dealing with..." Clint paused, puffed his cheeks out, and then said, "Well. An unstable Einstein-Rosen bridge that's partially attached to our dimension and time in the Chapel's basement and seems to be fucking other, alternate realities. Also, Atlantis. And Asgard, when necessary, but we share that with X-Force."
"And that's why you haven't shown the Maker then unstable Einstein-Rosen bridge. I've read Foster, I've done the math.' he said as he scavenged food from the fridge before he died of hunger. Ah, sandwiches. Good ol' sliced lunchmeat, piled high and doused with enough horseradish to light the average Anglo up. "We'll get around to it eventually, once I pass muster, am I right?"
"You've passed muster, man," Clint said, pulling his defrosted soups and sides out of the microwave. "And Jane's great. But it's Darcy you wanna watch out for. She's all 'you jackbooted thugs' and 'have taser, will electrocute you' which... yeah. Jane's got a stable bridge to theorize about, but we're keeping this one on the D/L because of how it came about - Halloween party. Evil book. Destroyed a pocket dimension that was full of ancient artifacts deemed too dangerous to be out amongst the regular mortals by none other than Merlin, that magical bastard."
Clint shook his head, then went about opening all his soups and finding himself a big enough spoon. "Anyway, yeah. I did some work with Jane and Thor, all theoretical, when the wormhole opened. Got enough figured out to help monitor the thing, then Kane, Molly, and Kitty came around with gear from the Danger Room and I smooshed that together with the monitoring equipment I'd already worked out. Which now allows travel to other universes that're being fucked over and then a way back to our reality. I'm interested in seeing what you think... personally, it's basically a hack job, given how little time I had to do it all, but it does what it's meant to. I'd appreciate some input on power consumption, honestly, and also securing the room the portal's in. We had a visitor come through - turned out to be all fine and dandy, but just in case whoever or whatever comes through next isn't as friendly as April..."
"Tell you what." Forge said as he closed the fridge and limped over to some free counter space to start assembling his Sandwich of the Gods. "Let me eat and take some weight off the leg, rest up a bit, and then tomorrow you can show me the hackjob and we'll get a start on how we're going to upgrade it." he said with a smile. "It'll be fun. You know you want to..." he said teasingly.
"Sounds like a plan," Clint said, grinning as he started eating one of his soups. He had no idea what his sides were, but he'd open them in a minute to find out. "If you need something for the hip, you can check medical. Doc Jean's good. There's also Clarice down there sometimes, which is great. Wanna meet out at the Chapel around 11a tomorrow? I've got a shift starting then that'll go to 11p. Obvs you don't have to stay the whole time."
"If it lives up to the hype I may just move in and call it a day." he joked, then took a big bite of his sandwich. Ah, bliss.
