xp_logs | Lorna and Nathan, Friday morning

Lorna and Nathan meet for a very early first session in the Danger Room together. It turns out to be one extended coin trick.

"You don't look awake at all, Lorna," Nathan said cheerfully, levitating the box of toy coins behind him as they walked out into the center of the Danger Room. "Insufficient amounts of coffee this morning?"

"Insufficient amounts of sleep last night," Lorna shot back. It wasn't that she wasn't used to getting up early, breakfast didn't make itself even if some of the kids thought it did, but when the few hours of sleep she did get were interrupted she became very cranky very quickly. Three cups of coffee later, she still felt like a slug.

Nathan raised an eyebrow, but didn't stop smiling. "You bark at me, I may either have to rethink our arrangement or come up with a training exercise that involves me kicking your ass." He floated the box of coins down to the floor, pulling off the lid. "And here I was going to start with something really easy," he went on dryly. "To be nice, and all."

Lorna dredged up a cheerful smile that managed to look mostly convincing and only a tiny bit bitter. "I'm sorry, Nathan. It won't happen again," she sing-songed at him, clasping her hands behind her back for maximum effect. She skipped a pace or two closer and lost the grin. "So what is it we're doing?"

"Small, metallic objects," Nathan said, crouching down and picking up a handful of the coins, letting them trickle through his fingers. "Regular size and weight, more or less identical, as a matter of fact." He stood, concentrating. "I may have lied about the 'easy' bit," he said, and the coins cascaded into the air like a tinkling metal comet with a long tail, streaming over their heads and around in a graceful curve.

"Pretty," she remarked while she studied the coin trail. She thought she could do this follow the leader game fairly easily. Just give the metal an EM wave to ride. "Can I take it?" She held out her hand though she didn't touch the fields just yet.

"Not just yet," Nathan said with a smile, and started to separate the coins into groups. Thirty-seven groups of twenty-five apiece, and ten left over. He started to shape them into interlocking, spinning circles. Links in a chain. "Now you can take them," he said. "Or as many as you can take and keep them in the pattern and moving."

That didn't look nearly as easy. "Hmm." She dropped her hand and concentrated on the fields instead. The strange eddies in the waves revealed where his power intersected with what she could use. After a few moments, she decided that the circles could be spun as a single element, meaning that it was a matter of how many circles she could hold. Lorna began to wish she'd had more a little more sleep and a lot more coffee. "Right then." She lifted her hands again, though she rather used gestures to focus anymore and delicately wound the EM fields around the first circle to get a better feel for it. Once she was sure she could duplicate the pattern, she nodded again and began to gather in more.

Nathan smiled again, starting from the opposite end of the chain and varying the direction of the spinning, as well as setting the coins themselves to spin. "Shall we meet in the middle?" he asked, his mind gliding easily over the circles. Oh, it was so good to have a fully functional brain again.

"Yeah." Lorna felt him changing thing down at his end and frowned, letting her vision shift until she saw everything as swirling patterns of grey-green. Here is was easier to set up fields but harder to tell which objects she was moving with them. Quickly she marked out the fields that were Nathan and made a mental note not to touch them. She didn't want to throw him around when she was supposed to be playing with coins. She gave her first few fields another spin and started picking up more. It was a little like spinning plates.

He'd suspected she had more fine control than she was giving herself credit for, Nathan reflected. She had almost ten of the circles now, and he wasn't sensing any real strain in her. He rapidly altered the rest of the circles to the more complex pattern and then waited. When she reached twelve, he decided that it was time to stop making it this easy on her. He split off the circles that were still his, sending them into a wider, spinning pattern of their own where they intersected, then floated off towards the far ends of the room.

The disruption of the nice orderly pattern caused Lorna to falter and shook her concentration enough to make the calming flow of energy disappear. She stared in dismay at her twelve circles, though they felt fine, and then looked around for Nathan. "What now?"

"Why did you stop?" he inquired lightly. "The coins are still here. They're just not where they were."

"But that's far." She didn't whine. She wanted to but she didn't. "I can't do that."

Nathan snorted and turned the circles that he still had control of into stylized birds, little more than large Vs, each coin rotating in a direction opposite to its neighbor as they swooped around the Danger Room. "I didn't feel you trying," he pointed out. "How do you know that you can't?"

"These are stable. Those aren't." Lorna gestured at his birds. Her circles wavered as she concentrated on his work instead.

"And? Are the things you're going to have to grab out on missions generally stable?"

"Actually, yes." She paused to steady her circles again then with an irritated hiss set up a field around them to keep them spinning without individual attention. "I can't do things that complex."

Nathan raised an eyebrow. "You can," he said with perfect conviction. "You've just never pushed yourself that hard before." He brought his birds swooping together, colliding, and then flung the coins outwards in one of his less complicated fractal patterns, keeping up the individual rotations as they did. "It's important to have the pattern in your head," he said, "clearly visualized. That's the first step."

The results of that made her head spin. Irritated, Lorna gritted her teeth and refocused until she could see what the EM fields were doing. There was a pattern but her head hurt just trying to see it let alone duplicate it. How on earth could he expect her to do this when she couldn't even see it? She shook her head, completely frustrated.

Too much, maybe, Nathan thought, and pushed the coins out into multiple, intersecting elliptical orbits. Harder for him, because they weren't perfect circles, but they gave wider spacing to the coins. Maybe she'd have more luck seeing the EM fields if the coins weren't so tightly packed.

That was better. Only one problem, "There are too many." The circles had been units, once they were set up she didn't have to worry about each individual coin. This new pattern couldn't just be set and ignored the same way.

Nathan gave her a mildly incredulous look, then wrenched control of her twelve circles away from her and added the coins back to the larger pattern. "Again with the not even trying," he scoffed at her. "I don't expect you to be able to do this, Lorna. But I didn't expect you to stand there and tell me you can't, either."

That snapped the field she'd set up. The backlash stung. "Ow," she muttered, rubbing at her forehead. Because his words stung worse, she crossed her arms stubbornly and began to pull coins out of the pattern, spinning them off by reversing the polarity so they threw themselves away from where he'd arranged them then yanking them back to herself. It was a great deal harder than the circles had been.

Nathan took a deep breath and pulled them back, holding onto them more tightly. More of a strain. Still not anything approaching headache-level. He rearranged them into another fractal pattern, one of the more complex ones this time, with internal rotation in several different directions, and stared across the Danger Room at her. "Or, we could play tug of war," he said, his voice even, conversational.

He'd locked them in place so Lorna stole different ones, focusing on the weak places. It made her grin. "You're stronger than I am, so that would be silly."

"I wouldn't say that," Nathan said, stealing them back and locking all of the coins in place, stopping their rotation. "I do have a point at which I have to stop, or I fall over coughing up blood. Admittedly, I don't know what my actual limit would be, but you certainly don't know yours - yet."

Well, now, if he was going to just hold them, that was a different story. "Well, I fell flat on my face after moving steel girders for 14 hours. That was a year ago." She slowly gripped the fields around the coins, an easy enough if time consuming task now that they weren't moving. "Of course, before I get there I start turning green."

"Green? Funky." Nathan let his perception slide down to the molecular level, shifting his TK grip so that it was on the individual molecules rather than the coins themselves. And yeah... there was the tension behind his eyes. Just a little, though. Still, no real strain. "I once went through a TK endurance test at Mistra. Pre-virus, obviously. I went just under forty hours before I stopped breathing."

"Lips and fingernails. It'll bleach my hair back to green too if I have it dyed. I have no idea why. Takes a while to fade." She could tell he'd changed something but it didn't seem to affect her grip on the fields so she ignored it and kept gathering them in. It was a bit like holding slippery, vibrating cords. "Why in god's name would you hold something until you couldn't breathe?"

"They were curious. If we quit voluntarily and wrecked the experiment, we were punished." Nathan, very delicately, started to pick apart the internal structure of the coins. "This was back when Mistra was still in New Mexico. One of my friends quit, and they left him in restraints out in the desert for five days to serve as an example."

"Crazy." Lorna shook her head and captured the last stray field. She could tell he was doing something but it wasn't changing the EM waves enough to worry her. As an after thought, she wrapped herself in a shield though she didn't actually think any of the coins would hit her. She gave them all a sharp shake and reversed the polarity on about half, neatly breaking the hold.

And the coins came apart, sparkling metal flecks falling to the ground like snow. "I think you broke them," Nathan said innocently, reaching a hand up to brush glitter out of his hair.

She hissed. "Stop that. Metal shards are sharp. Stand still." Cleaning up was easy. Strengthen the field and voila. The powder that used to be a little more than two hundred dollars of play money flung itself toward her and plastered itself around her hands.

Nathan reinforced the internal structure of the ones still up in the air and then let them cascade back down into the box. "Not bad. Pity I cheated. You going to fix those, or shall I?" he asked, inclining his head at the powder around her hands.

She skinned it off her hands, giving herself a pair of metal gloves. "I may have over done it." She tugged at one of the fingers experimentally.

Nathan raised a hand and the gloves floated out of her grasp and over to him, disintegrating as they went, the flecks collecting into a spinning ball hovering just over his open hand. "Your reactions are good," he said lightly, and started to rebuild the coins, one at a time, then a handful at a time. Once they were solid he levitated them in a steady stream back to the box where they fell, tinkling. "And trust me, I am not one to talk about being judicious about one's resources."