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xp_logs2004-09-30 06:57 am
x-vega.livejournal.com) wrote in xp_logs2004-09-30 06:57 am
[Paul, Nathan] You're going to be the death of me Dayspring
Training session between Nate and Paul on Thursday morning; time to start brushing up the skils and breaking some bad habits. Like not telling your teammates about your weaknesses before a mission.
Paul fastened the collar of his uniform and stepped into the silent, dark Danger Room with Nathan beside him. He gave his friend a grin in the last of the light before the door snapped shut behind them.
"Ready for some fun?" he asked. He'd fed as many of his own urban and suburban encounters as he could remember into the computer and set the factors, then allowed for randomization. "Computer, run Urban Mayhem program with variables Northstar and Cable, authorization Northstar." There was a moment's silence and then the voice came.
"Disturbance in Manhattan, New York, at Hudson and West 13th Streets," the computer reported. A map hung in the air briefly with the area highlighted. "Reports of electrical surges thought to be caused by mutant activity." The map disappeared and suddenly they were standing down in the west side of Manhattan, at a crowded intersection, in the middle of a workday.
"Electrical surges?" Nathan muttered, looking around. Luck of the draw and they get an electrokinetic? Charming. "Ordinarily I'd try scanning," he said to Paul, "but the Danger Room doesn't seem to mimick psi-patterns very well."
"All the better to test you with, my dear," Paul said lightly. They were getting some odd looks from the crowd and Paul leapt up onto the base of a lamp post to better see down the street. The swirl of activity down there was definitely hysterical in tone. The lights were out at the intersection and a meat truck had collided with a cabbage truck and it looked like some kind of German party planning gone bad all over the street. "Traffic lights are electric," he said cheerfully. "Let's go."
Nathan followed Paul, absorbing detail as he went. The Danger Room really never ceased to amaze him, he thought dimly, then focused all of his attention on this particular scenario. #How resistant are you to electricity?#
#Quite,# Paul replied. It surprised him sometimes how little it bothered him to have Nathan's mind touch his but, he mused, it wasn't like he felt he had anything to hide from Nathan anyway. #It can leave me dizzy but it doesn't have the same effect as other people. Enough will give me a good burn, though.# They got to the corner just in time to see a fountain of sparks burst from a streetlamp.
Nathan instinctively flung a shield around the group of people right there, backed up against a storefront. He grimaced a little at the feel of the sparks impacting the shield, but shook it off. #Me, not so much.#
#Well, I'll be bait,# Paul suggested. #We could be dealing with a new manifest here. Let's see if all we need is to calm it down.# His gaze drifted down the street to where some larger buildings rose. #Let's see if we can't identify our friend before he gets down there. Newer buildings in New York can have some impressive transformer units. How about we go up?# He tapped Nathan's shoulder and stepped into a narrow alley between buildings.
Nathan followed him, giving the roof four stories up a measuring look before he leapt, propelling himself telekinetically up to the edge. Paul landed beside him, and Nathan glanced at him, then looked out over the area, his eyes narrowing. There was definitely more activity off to the west.
The sound of sirens was faint. "I wish the cops would hurry up," Paul muttered. "I miss being on their channels. Let's get over there." From above came the thrum of a helicopter's approach. "Of course the press are on time."
"Of course," Nathan muttered and leapt to the next rooftop, wondering why he wasn't just flying. Habit, he supposed. Hovering was conspicuous. He let Paul stay a little ways ahead of him, given what he'd said about playing bait.
From ahead of them, a larger explosion, a shower of sparks shooting skyward as though lightning were running up from the ground and the sound of shattering glass filled the air. "Merde." Paul took off from a rooftop, abandoning the premise of running, and was picking up speed when a man shot upward from the source of the sparks, still apparently oblivious to their approach.
A flier. Oh, fantastic. Nathan lept from the rooftop down to the ground, sizing up the situation. People trapped in cars, a couple of them overturned - by the explosion? He looked skyward at the electrokinetic, seeing Paul moving to intercept him.
#Looks like someone tapped into something good; underground transformer, maybe.# Paul hoped Nate was listening. #Catch up with me when you can.#
Nathan wrapped another shield around the hole in the ground that was still spitting sparks, tying it off in the way the Askani had been teaching him. He shifted the cars closest to the hole away, then cleared a path very carefully for the emergency vehicles. As soon as he saw the fire vehicles closing in and had assured himself that none of the holographic civilians were in imminent danger of death, he darted back into the alley and took to the rooftops again, looking for Paul and the target.
The first blast was the worst. The mutant caught sight of Paul as he drew near and let loose with a lightning ball that would have consumed most people. Paul got out of the way - mostly - but it licked at his heels and ripped through him from there. It was like being drunk twice over; drunk on power and swallowed up. For a moment, he fell.
Nathan caught him, holding onto until Paul steadied himself, at the same time that he leapt in a soaring arc across two buildings, then another three, and came to rest at the edge of the roof closest to where the electrokinetic was hovering and grabbed him, too, imagining an invisible hand wrapping around him.
The sensation of being caught was more shocking than that of falling. Falling, Paul was most familiar with. He knew exactly when to panic, even. Being caught startled him back to focus and he shot upwards again. The electrokinetic, on the other hand, dropped even as Nate's telekinesis gripped him. He hit the top of a building, grabbing at something there, and suddenly, there were sparks and flares all through the building and down the street. #Instant hostages in every house,# Paul pointed out.
"Damn it," Nathan muttered. How had he lost his grip like that? He tried to grab at the electrokinetic, to pull him away from whatever he'd gotten his hands on.
The man startled as Nathan got a good grip and looked about, wildeyed. Suddenly, the lights went out in the building on which he was standing and the one next to it, just as Nathan was pulling him away. He reached up, fixating on Nathan as the newcomer as the source of his distress, and released whatever power he'd just gathered. #Nate, get...# Paul's warning came late but he shot past Nathan and into the path of the blast. The chain lightning forked, one portion lashing at Paul and the other reaching for Nathan.
It wasn't enough electricity to do serious damage - the Room's safeties made sure of that - but it was subtly different than what the Mistra electrokinetic at Columbia had thrown at him. This time, there was enough of an electromagnetic charge to the lightning that he felt his control over his TK slip.
The impact, at the very least, threw backwards, rather than forwards, but his telekinesis shivered through the air around him and even as he fought to get it back under control again, the roof beneath him fractured and crumbled, dumping him into the apartment just below.
It wasn't as bad as the first time, Paul mused, as he tumbled backwards. Then, midair, he heard and then saw Nathan's telekinesis go haywire as the electricity hit him as well. His lazy loop turned into a hard dive - not toward the apartment, but toward the electrokinetic who had hopefully drained himself with the recent blasts. Paul let the back part of his mind go looking for Nathan while he concentrated on the threat in front of him.
So much for no damage. Nathan blinked up, dazed, at the substantial hole in the roof, then pulled himself back to his feet, swaying a little - it hadn't been that far a drop, but his head was spinning from the blast - and launched himself upwards again, in time to see Paul diving towards the electrokinetic.
Sometimes the direct approach was best. Two more blasts slammed toward Paul and he met one with a light and concussion blast that seemed to diffuse it a little, but they hurt nonetheless. The Danger Room was keeping him from actual damage but that didn't stop it from feeling as bad as if he'd really been hit. In a real scenario, he'd be relying on Nathan to finish the job, no matter what, because wearing this guy down was using him up.
Nathan grimaced at the sight of Paul taking another blast. Okay, that's just about enough of that... He glanced back over his shoulder at the shattered roof. Already damaged, so... He yanked steels beams out of the broken roof and flung them across the gap between buildings, wrapping them around the electrokinetic.
Paul managed a grin as Nathan quickly restrained their opponent. He grabbed the man off the roof with the arm that hadn't taken the brunt of the blasts and took off skyward. In the same moment, the scenario became pixelated and began to fade to black.
"Scenario completed," reported the computer. "Civilian deaths, one. Civilian injuries, twenty-three. Damage estimate, one-point-two million dollars."
"Damn it," Nathan growled, rubbing at the back of his neck. "That was less than successful."
"Hey, that wasn't bad at all." Paul meant to land on his feet but ended up sitting on the floor. He felt like he'd been beaten with a cattleprod. "We'll work on it. No riots, that was good." He gave up on being upright at all and sprawled backwards. "So. What went wrong?"
"EM fucks up my TK," Nathan muttered, sitting down as well. More bruises to go along with the collection from his trip down the stairs yesterday. "Doesn't always, and it depends on the intensity as to what sort of explosion results."
"Note to self. No electricity plus Nate," Paul said slowly. "Any idea why?" He tried to focus on Nathan and realized that the lights weren't on. "Lights up," he snapped.
"Psi is on the EM spectrum," Nathan pointed out. "When I get hit with something that overlaps specific frequencies, I lose control." His jaw tightened a little. "They ran various tests back at Mistra trying to establish why. Checking my reaction to various levels and types of electrical shocks and EM discharges. I honestly don't know if they came up with an answer - they didn't give me any advice beside 'avoid situations where you might encounter this'."
"Good for us to know," Paul pointed out. "Not in your file that I could see. Wouldn't have let you get in line of sight with him if I'd known."
Nathan blinked slowly. "Time for me to review my file, I guess," he said. "I'm assuming most of it probably came from Moira's files on me, and there's certainly things she doesn't know..."
"Might be a good idea." Paul propped himself up on his elbows so he could see Nathan clearly. "Would have hated to see what that would have done to you in the field."
"It's hit and miss, really." Nathan rubbed at the back of his neck again. "That electrokinetic at Columbia just about electrocuted me and I didn't slip... of course, my TK got scrambled, too, so I'm not sure what effect that had."
"Either way, we can't afford to have you down if someone else could take the hit and keep moving," Paul pointed out. "You're a resource, Nate, and a valuable one. Anything else I should be adding to the file for now?"
"It's actual energy discharge that does it," Nathan said after a moment more of thought. "I can be around someone manipulating EM fields without any difficulty. Or I certainly wouldn't be training with Lorna."
"Current?" Paul asked, frowning. "We could see... with supervision," he added hastily.
"I'm not... really keen on that idea," Nathan said, a bit more tightly than he'd intended. "Wasn't all that pleasant the first time I went through that particular set of tests." They had hauled him in after a mission had gone spectacularly bad as a result of this very thing happening, and it had been four days before they'd let him out of the lab. "I know it makes me a tactical liability, but--" He stopped, swallowed. "Okay. So I can see the point of it," he conceded, more quietly.
"We don't have to." Paul sat up and put a hand on Nathan's shoulder. "Look, just curiosity. I was just... wanting not to leave you behind if we didn't have to in some cases. That's all."
"I would say I should practice redirecting EM discharge, but that's looking like less and less of an option," Nathan said a bit glumly. "Moira wants to run more tests, but her preliminary conclusion is that I really shouldn't be manipulating energy telekinetically." He smiled a bit tightly. "Shield from it, deflect it, yes, but all the fun stuff I've been doing lately? Apparently not all that good for me."
Paul resisted the urge to beat his head -- or better, Nathan's head -- on the floor. "Okay. So that's going in your file then," he said firmly. "These scenarios are a good idea, definitely. We'll have to keep this up."
"They're definitely worthwhile," Nathan agreed, then gave Paul a quick, almost impish smile. "Much as I might grumble about feeling like I'm fighting in a straitjacket at times."
"That can be arranged," Paul said direly, and then laughed. He got to his feet slowly and held a hand out to Nathan. "You're going to be the death of me Dayspring, while I'm trying to make sure you're not the death of you."
"Well, you did insist on trying to disprove the whole 'can't teach an old dog new tricks' thing..." Nathan drawled, accepting the hand up gratefully.
"And I will continue to do so." Paul pulled Nathan to his feet. "You're not that much older than I am."
"There are mornings I feel about sixty, to be honest." Nathan shook his head. "Anyway. Review the tapes now, or later? I do have a couple more papers to mark for this afternoon's class..."
"If Moira can spare you, come around tonight," Paul suggested. "Or I could bring them over there and we could all go over them."
Nathan grinned suddenly. "I could come over tonight, after she pokes at my head some more in the medlab this evening," he said with a perfectly straight face, "but Moira's liable to be busy. Her uncle and cousin are arriving in town at about dinnertime."
"And you won't be needed while they're around?" Paul looked a bit confused and paused in the process of undoing the collar of his uniform.
"Not for the first hour or so. See, first their accents will get about five times as thick as they already are, then they'll start talking about five times as fast they usually do, and all I can do is sit there and smile and nod. Besides, it gives me the chance to make a few last arrangements for tomorrow." The grin got away from him away and wound up going from ear-to-ear.
Paul laughed and shook his head. "I'll see you tonight then."
Paul fastened the collar of his uniform and stepped into the silent, dark Danger Room with Nathan beside him. He gave his friend a grin in the last of the light before the door snapped shut behind them.
"Ready for some fun?" he asked. He'd fed as many of his own urban and suburban encounters as he could remember into the computer and set the factors, then allowed for randomization. "Computer, run Urban Mayhem program with variables Northstar and Cable, authorization Northstar." There was a moment's silence and then the voice came.
"Disturbance in Manhattan, New York, at Hudson and West 13th Streets," the computer reported. A map hung in the air briefly with the area highlighted. "Reports of electrical surges thought to be caused by mutant activity." The map disappeared and suddenly they were standing down in the west side of Manhattan, at a crowded intersection, in the middle of a workday.
"Electrical surges?" Nathan muttered, looking around. Luck of the draw and they get an electrokinetic? Charming. "Ordinarily I'd try scanning," he said to Paul, "but the Danger Room doesn't seem to mimick psi-patterns very well."
"All the better to test you with, my dear," Paul said lightly. They were getting some odd looks from the crowd and Paul leapt up onto the base of a lamp post to better see down the street. The swirl of activity down there was definitely hysterical in tone. The lights were out at the intersection and a meat truck had collided with a cabbage truck and it looked like some kind of German party planning gone bad all over the street. "Traffic lights are electric," he said cheerfully. "Let's go."
Nathan followed Paul, absorbing detail as he went. The Danger Room really never ceased to amaze him, he thought dimly, then focused all of his attention on this particular scenario. #How resistant are you to electricity?#
#Quite,# Paul replied. It surprised him sometimes how little it bothered him to have Nathan's mind touch his but, he mused, it wasn't like he felt he had anything to hide from Nathan anyway. #It can leave me dizzy but it doesn't have the same effect as other people. Enough will give me a good burn, though.# They got to the corner just in time to see a fountain of sparks burst from a streetlamp.
Nathan instinctively flung a shield around the group of people right there, backed up against a storefront. He grimaced a little at the feel of the sparks impacting the shield, but shook it off. #Me, not so much.#
#Well, I'll be bait,# Paul suggested. #We could be dealing with a new manifest here. Let's see if all we need is to calm it down.# His gaze drifted down the street to where some larger buildings rose. #Let's see if we can't identify our friend before he gets down there. Newer buildings in New York can have some impressive transformer units. How about we go up?# He tapped Nathan's shoulder and stepped into a narrow alley between buildings.
Nathan followed him, giving the roof four stories up a measuring look before he leapt, propelling himself telekinetically up to the edge. Paul landed beside him, and Nathan glanced at him, then looked out over the area, his eyes narrowing. There was definitely more activity off to the west.
The sound of sirens was faint. "I wish the cops would hurry up," Paul muttered. "I miss being on their channels. Let's get over there." From above came the thrum of a helicopter's approach. "Of course the press are on time."
"Of course," Nathan muttered and leapt to the next rooftop, wondering why he wasn't just flying. Habit, he supposed. Hovering was conspicuous. He let Paul stay a little ways ahead of him, given what he'd said about playing bait.
From ahead of them, a larger explosion, a shower of sparks shooting skyward as though lightning were running up from the ground and the sound of shattering glass filled the air. "Merde." Paul took off from a rooftop, abandoning the premise of running, and was picking up speed when a man shot upward from the source of the sparks, still apparently oblivious to their approach.
A flier. Oh, fantastic. Nathan lept from the rooftop down to the ground, sizing up the situation. People trapped in cars, a couple of them overturned - by the explosion? He looked skyward at the electrokinetic, seeing Paul moving to intercept him.
#Looks like someone tapped into something good; underground transformer, maybe.# Paul hoped Nate was listening. #Catch up with me when you can.#
Nathan wrapped another shield around the hole in the ground that was still spitting sparks, tying it off in the way the Askani had been teaching him. He shifted the cars closest to the hole away, then cleared a path very carefully for the emergency vehicles. As soon as he saw the fire vehicles closing in and had assured himself that none of the holographic civilians were in imminent danger of death, he darted back into the alley and took to the rooftops again, looking for Paul and the target.
The first blast was the worst. The mutant caught sight of Paul as he drew near and let loose with a lightning ball that would have consumed most people. Paul got out of the way - mostly - but it licked at his heels and ripped through him from there. It was like being drunk twice over; drunk on power and swallowed up. For a moment, he fell.
Nathan caught him, holding onto until Paul steadied himself, at the same time that he leapt in a soaring arc across two buildings, then another three, and came to rest at the edge of the roof closest to where the electrokinetic was hovering and grabbed him, too, imagining an invisible hand wrapping around him.
The sensation of being caught was more shocking than that of falling. Falling, Paul was most familiar with. He knew exactly when to panic, even. Being caught startled him back to focus and he shot upwards again. The electrokinetic, on the other hand, dropped even as Nate's telekinesis gripped him. He hit the top of a building, grabbing at something there, and suddenly, there were sparks and flares all through the building and down the street. #Instant hostages in every house,# Paul pointed out.
"Damn it," Nathan muttered. How had he lost his grip like that? He tried to grab at the electrokinetic, to pull him away from whatever he'd gotten his hands on.
The man startled as Nathan got a good grip and looked about, wildeyed. Suddenly, the lights went out in the building on which he was standing and the one next to it, just as Nathan was pulling him away. He reached up, fixating on Nathan as the newcomer as the source of his distress, and released whatever power he'd just gathered. #Nate, get...# Paul's warning came late but he shot past Nathan and into the path of the blast. The chain lightning forked, one portion lashing at Paul and the other reaching for Nathan.
It wasn't enough electricity to do serious damage - the Room's safeties made sure of that - but it was subtly different than what the Mistra electrokinetic at Columbia had thrown at him. This time, there was enough of an electromagnetic charge to the lightning that he felt his control over his TK slip.
The impact, at the very least, threw backwards, rather than forwards, but his telekinesis shivered through the air around him and even as he fought to get it back under control again, the roof beneath him fractured and crumbled, dumping him into the apartment just below.
It wasn't as bad as the first time, Paul mused, as he tumbled backwards. Then, midair, he heard and then saw Nathan's telekinesis go haywire as the electricity hit him as well. His lazy loop turned into a hard dive - not toward the apartment, but toward the electrokinetic who had hopefully drained himself with the recent blasts. Paul let the back part of his mind go looking for Nathan while he concentrated on the threat in front of him.
So much for no damage. Nathan blinked up, dazed, at the substantial hole in the roof, then pulled himself back to his feet, swaying a little - it hadn't been that far a drop, but his head was spinning from the blast - and launched himself upwards again, in time to see Paul diving towards the electrokinetic.
Sometimes the direct approach was best. Two more blasts slammed toward Paul and he met one with a light and concussion blast that seemed to diffuse it a little, but they hurt nonetheless. The Danger Room was keeping him from actual damage but that didn't stop it from feeling as bad as if he'd really been hit. In a real scenario, he'd be relying on Nathan to finish the job, no matter what, because wearing this guy down was using him up.
Nathan grimaced at the sight of Paul taking another blast. Okay, that's just about enough of that... He glanced back over his shoulder at the shattered roof. Already damaged, so... He yanked steels beams out of the broken roof and flung them across the gap between buildings, wrapping them around the electrokinetic.
Paul managed a grin as Nathan quickly restrained their opponent. He grabbed the man off the roof with the arm that hadn't taken the brunt of the blasts and took off skyward. In the same moment, the scenario became pixelated and began to fade to black.
"Scenario completed," reported the computer. "Civilian deaths, one. Civilian injuries, twenty-three. Damage estimate, one-point-two million dollars."
"Damn it," Nathan growled, rubbing at the back of his neck. "That was less than successful."
"Hey, that wasn't bad at all." Paul meant to land on his feet but ended up sitting on the floor. He felt like he'd been beaten with a cattleprod. "We'll work on it. No riots, that was good." He gave up on being upright at all and sprawled backwards. "So. What went wrong?"
"EM fucks up my TK," Nathan muttered, sitting down as well. More bruises to go along with the collection from his trip down the stairs yesterday. "Doesn't always, and it depends on the intensity as to what sort of explosion results."
"Note to self. No electricity plus Nate," Paul said slowly. "Any idea why?" He tried to focus on Nathan and realized that the lights weren't on. "Lights up," he snapped.
"Psi is on the EM spectrum," Nathan pointed out. "When I get hit with something that overlaps specific frequencies, I lose control." His jaw tightened a little. "They ran various tests back at Mistra trying to establish why. Checking my reaction to various levels and types of electrical shocks and EM discharges. I honestly don't know if they came up with an answer - they didn't give me any advice beside 'avoid situations where you might encounter this'."
"Good for us to know," Paul pointed out. "Not in your file that I could see. Wouldn't have let you get in line of sight with him if I'd known."
Nathan blinked slowly. "Time for me to review my file, I guess," he said. "I'm assuming most of it probably came from Moira's files on me, and there's certainly things she doesn't know..."
"Might be a good idea." Paul propped himself up on his elbows so he could see Nathan clearly. "Would have hated to see what that would have done to you in the field."
"It's hit and miss, really." Nathan rubbed at the back of his neck again. "That electrokinetic at Columbia just about electrocuted me and I didn't slip... of course, my TK got scrambled, too, so I'm not sure what effect that had."
"Either way, we can't afford to have you down if someone else could take the hit and keep moving," Paul pointed out. "You're a resource, Nate, and a valuable one. Anything else I should be adding to the file for now?"
"It's actual energy discharge that does it," Nathan said after a moment more of thought. "I can be around someone manipulating EM fields without any difficulty. Or I certainly wouldn't be training with Lorna."
"Current?" Paul asked, frowning. "We could see... with supervision," he added hastily.
"I'm not... really keen on that idea," Nathan said, a bit more tightly than he'd intended. "Wasn't all that pleasant the first time I went through that particular set of tests." They had hauled him in after a mission had gone spectacularly bad as a result of this very thing happening, and it had been four days before they'd let him out of the lab. "I know it makes me a tactical liability, but--" He stopped, swallowed. "Okay. So I can see the point of it," he conceded, more quietly.
"We don't have to." Paul sat up and put a hand on Nathan's shoulder. "Look, just curiosity. I was just... wanting not to leave you behind if we didn't have to in some cases. That's all."
"I would say I should practice redirecting EM discharge, but that's looking like less and less of an option," Nathan said a bit glumly. "Moira wants to run more tests, but her preliminary conclusion is that I really shouldn't be manipulating energy telekinetically." He smiled a bit tightly. "Shield from it, deflect it, yes, but all the fun stuff I've been doing lately? Apparently not all that good for me."
Paul resisted the urge to beat his head -- or better, Nathan's head -- on the floor. "Okay. So that's going in your file then," he said firmly. "These scenarios are a good idea, definitely. We'll have to keep this up."
"They're definitely worthwhile," Nathan agreed, then gave Paul a quick, almost impish smile. "Much as I might grumble about feeling like I'm fighting in a straitjacket at times."
"That can be arranged," Paul said direly, and then laughed. He got to his feet slowly and held a hand out to Nathan. "You're going to be the death of me Dayspring, while I'm trying to make sure you're not the death of you."
"Well, you did insist on trying to disprove the whole 'can't teach an old dog new tricks' thing..." Nathan drawled, accepting the hand up gratefully.
"And I will continue to do so." Paul pulled Nathan to his feet. "You're not that much older than I am."
"There are mornings I feel about sixty, to be honest." Nathan shook his head. "Anyway. Review the tapes now, or later? I do have a couple more papers to mark for this afternoon's class..."
"If Moira can spare you, come around tonight," Paul suggested. "Or I could bring them over there and we could all go over them."
Nathan grinned suddenly. "I could come over tonight, after she pokes at my head some more in the medlab this evening," he said with a perfectly straight face, "but Moira's liable to be busy. Her uncle and cousin are arriving in town at about dinnertime."
"And you won't be needed while they're around?" Paul looked a bit confused and paused in the process of undoing the collar of his uniform.
"Not for the first hour or so. See, first their accents will get about five times as thick as they already are, then they'll start talking about five times as fast they usually do, and all I can do is sit there and smile and nod. Besides, it gives me the chance to make a few last arrangements for tomorrow." The grin got away from him away and wound up going from ear-to-ear.
Paul laughed and shook his head. "I'll see you tonight then."