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xp_logs2004-10-05 10:07 am
x-dazzler.livejournal.com) wrote in xp_logs2004-10-05 10:07 am
Alison & Nathan ~ Training Session...
Alison and Nathan train a wee bit in the morning, although it's team training and not sparring - of course, that just had to go sideways too.
Besides, your fiancée will have my liver for lunch if I don't get you there as soon as possible and I kinda like my liver where it is.
Training was training and Alison had upped her schedule on that a bit higher lately. Which meant that she was down here more often of course and not only in the gym or on the jogging paths and she was careful to keep her visits to the medlab on schedule accordingly. It would be stupid to hurt herself from overtraining and she'd seen too many dancers suffer from stress fractures and the like to even take the smallest risk this could happen to her as well. She snapped the last strap of her gloves into place and entered the Danger Room. This wouldn't be the sparring session she'd talked about with Scott, but she was planning to ask Nathan for one after the training session was over.
Nathan, waiting there for her, smiled at how cheerful she looked. "This is ominous," he said. "You're looking like you're ready to enjoy yourself. What precisely did you whip up for us scenario-wise this time?"
This wasn't exactly what she called fun, but Alison smiled at him nonetheless. "Well, you're reserve team for now but I get the feeling you'll be aiming for full team as soon as possible. Correct me if I'm wrong," she smiled a bit, feeling oddly put on the spot - Nathan had far more experience than she did, no matter which way you looked at it. "I just figured something to start working on teamwork - it's as much for me as you, since we've never had the chance to train together on that." She stopped explaining the whys and wherefores in case she just started repeating herself and instead move on.
"It's a gauntlet run mainly. Aim isn't so much taking out the drones as it is just making sure the other isn't tagged until we're through."
"Sounds fairly straightforward," Nathan said simply. Another trust exercise, in a way. They seemed determined to throw as many of them as possible at him, oddly enough. "I'm ready when you are."
With a simple nod Alison thumbed the control pad - she'd already preset everything from the control booth and preferred to avoid using the vocal commands whenever she could. Despite a fondness for the sci-fi shows, it still felt weird to call out orders to the empty room every time. "Fifteen seconds," was all she said as she trotted to join him, having already warmed up beforehand.
Nathan wasn't surprised when a roofless maze took shape around them. "Drones coming from above?" he asked Alison, who nodded. "Nice touch." Then the first popped up into view, its little gun swinging to target on Alison, and Nathan swatted it telekinetically, hearing it crash to the ground elsewhere in the maze.
Taking a few steps but no more, keeping close to Nathan at all times, Alison scanned the area - the maze was shifting already, and it wouldn't be long - there it was. A laser speared through the drone suddenly revealed by a dropping wall, sending it sprawling to the ground with an electronic bleep of protest. Fighting these was so much easier than the more intense simulations. She spotted the glint of reflection generated by her light, but firmly kept herself form reacting to the one coming up through the floor. That wasn't hers to deal with.
Nathan smashed the drone back into the floor, ignoring the small shower of sparks. He had already switched on the telekinetic 'sonar' field he'd been practicing with, so he could feel the maze shifting, in a predictably unpredictable pattern. Two more drones soared upwards over the top edge of the wall in front of them, targeting, and Nathan forced them to collide.
Line of sight and hearing was what Alison was working with as they progressed through the maze, the sudden changes in pattern in their surroundings notwithstanding. She ignored the rhythms the program tried to settle them into, instead looking for the breaks in patterns to anchor herself as she lasered drones neatly through. The program kicked up a sub-routine however, one she'd asked Scott to add as a variable that she wouldn't be ready for, and it was only by bouncing one droid off a wall and into another that she was able to keep Nathan still untagged for the time being.
Okay, now things were getting a little random. Nathan gritted his teeth, forcing three drones to target each other. The resulting explosion sprayed them with shrapnel, and he threw up a shield over him and Alison as they continued through the maze.
She didn't flinch as the shrapnel skittered about them in midair, instead firing repeatedly, not bothering to keep count at all as the drones started to come up with increasing speed. The one falling from the ceiling was pushed back into another with a variation of light density before both were neatly pinned through to a wall and left to smolder in a corner as they moved across the maze at a fairly steady pace.
Several at a time, now, coming from all different directions and completely unpredictable. He was losing track of which he should take out himself and which he should leave to her, and although he was, or should able to manage more than this in terms of randomly-moving variables, these ones were shooting at him, too.
Knowing that each drone had only one specific target was one thing - putting this in actual practice, Alison realized, was another. So she took one half step, and then another away from Nathan. This wasn't close combat and both were using long distance methods to remove the drones, which meant that only taking a few steps would be useful to differentiate the drone's targets. With satisfaction, Alison took out three drones in quick succession - it had helped, although she had to be careful to still keep pace with Nathan at the same time. And she hadn't had to duck once yet.
The Danger Room compensated almost immediately for Alison's choice to put some distance between them by doubling the number of drones in about ten seconds flat. Nathan growled under his breath, trying to rein in his frustration, and lashed out at the leading edge of the small horde heading for Alison, visualizing without thinking the internal circuitry of the drones, imagining it being torn apart.
And every drone in the Danger Room exploded.
Alison blinked and stared as the room resonated with the sounds of the multiple explosions, straightening up as pieces of metal rained to the floor, one of the drones which had dropped through the ceiling tumbling down in shower of smoke and metallic components. And in the midst of all the explosions, her power kicked in automatically from the sound charge and her body began to glow brightly, streamers of light floating about her lazily.
Nathan shielded both of them, instinctively, but flinched as some of her streamers intersected his shield - then swore, blinking rapidly as his vision kicked into that altered state spontaneously. And looking at Alison hurt - she was incandescent on that level, the outline of her body barely identifiable. The pain was like twin dagger stabbing through his eyes and into his brain, and Nathan stumbled, something very close to a whimper escaping him as he squeezed his eyes shut and clutched at his skull.
With a gasp of dismay Alison moved, fast. Catching him before he stumbled any further, bracing him up and steadying him as best she could. She glanced down at herself - it was hard sometimes to compare what was bright for others or not, since she had no baseline for it herself anymore - everything was acceptable to her eyesight, after all. "What's wrong? I don't think I'm glowing that much Nathan, I'm just sound charged a bit."
He tried to open his eyes, to look at her, and got a dizzying impression of her face amid that amorphous blazing light, piercing crystalline blue eyes fixed on him. Then it all shifted into a kaleidoscopic jumble and he reeled, his balance going again as pain swelled behind his eyes.
"Gah!" It was the only reaction she could have at the look on his face as he looked at her. And the light and shadow effect around them she could judge somewhat now and she wasn't glowing at a blinding level of radiance, mayby just enough so that people wouldn't want to not look directly at her for too long. "Keep your eyes closed, I'm going to try and get rid of the sound charge and that means random light burst. Should be over soon. And then we're going to the medlab, mister."
Breathing raggedly, Nathan held tight to her supporting arms, squeezing his eyes shut. Happening spontaneously again. Not a good thing. And if it turned out he wasn't able to shield against energy-discharge anymore... that would be bad.
She wriggled a bit, freeing up one hand to remove a glove and held it over his eyes firmly before setting a strobing light burst. It took only two brief flashes in all to bring her to a barely visible glow, one she knew would be fading soon enough from experience - there had been a reason she did lightshows at all her concerts. She had to, plain and simple, or else she'd overcharge anyway from the constant volume of the music. "There. Keep your eyes closed anyway, I'm still glowing just a bit. It'll be out of the sight spectrum soon." She paused, wincing. "The normally visible one anyway. C'mon. Medlab. I'll guide you there."
He stiffened as she started to pull him gently in - that was the problem, he didn't know what direction they were even facing, and he couldn't help a flash of panic. "It'll--it'll go away," he said unsteadily. "In a minute. Then we can go to medlab..." He tilted his head away from her, cracking his eyes open just a little and then shutting them immediately as all he saw were swimming, fragmented colors.
"Nathan, listen to me." He wasn't looking good and waiting longer wasn't anywhere near Alison's list of things to do. "You look like death warmed over. You need to see someone at the medlab now." She kept her voice low and steady, mind flashing back to when she'd first found Miles for some reason, and had talked him into coming out of the cavern with her. "Besides, your fiancée will have my liver for lunch if I don't get you there as soon as possible and I kinda like my liver where it is." She shifted her body, aligning herself so that he'd be able to tell exactly where she was, and leaned against him a bit more. "Please walk with me?"
He could already feel the stirrings of alarm from Moira's end of the link, and that was what decided it, in the end. Sending back a feeble reassurance - and a promise that he was on his way - Nathan let Alison draw him forward. "Happened accidentally," he said shakily. "Again. Like flipping a switch."
"That thing where you see all funny?" Alison asked calmly, if only because keeping him talking seemed like a good thing. "When did it happen, exactly?" She walked slowly and in as straight a line as she could manage, the room having returned to normal with the destruction of all the drones, as it was meant to.
"When those... light-streamers of yours hit my shield. Like my brain was recognizing that I needed to change the composition of the shield because there was energy hitting it, not just solid objects, and letting me see what I needed to see to do that." Nathan swallowed. "Except you were so bright..."
She nodded, remembering what it had been like staring at the sun for even a few seconds, before her power manifested. "Looks like you're going to have a nasty migraine," she murmured sympathetically. She remembered those only too clearly, as well. "Wasn't solid light though. The magnetic or electrical field of the light? But both would have been really weak..."
"It's gotten harder," Nathan said, his voice still unsteady as she led him onwards. "Seeing like that... things get all unfocused, stuck that way. Hasn't hurt like this... not since the first time it happened, anyway..."
She shook her head a bit, calling out a command to the door as they neared it, her dislike for that particular bit of technological possibilities utterly absent at the moment. "Door soon, then we turn the corner," she informed him, so that he knew where they were in a general way at least. "That sounds unfun." And the problem with his telekinetic shielding sounded like a real issue. One which would keep him off full team status until it was resolved.
"I can shield against energy," Nathan said raggedly. "Some types. I've always been able to... and the shield held. Just the change in my vision... threw me off..."
"Wonder if you could shield against my lasers though?" she asked, before shaking her head. "We're not finding that out anytime soon. Don't even think about it." Oh yes, the paleness and the way eh was wincing and talking lower than usual heralded the arrival of the mother of all migraines. "And now we're going straight for a bit. Won't be long till the medlab."
"Didn't mean to do that," Nathan muttered, clinging to her arm. "She's not allowed to kill me..." He tried to open his eyes again, and it was the same. Like being inside a spinning kaleidoscope, and he swayed, something close to pure terror flickering into life within him.
"Keep your eyes closed or I'm gluing them shut," he was told in an amiable enough tone. "And of course you didn't mean to do that. No one goes chasing after migraines," she murmured, steadying him a bit and chattering on, keeping him as distracted as possible. "I think I'm going to start a new line of work. Dragging off men to the medlab. First Haroun, now you..."
Besides, your fiancée will have my liver for lunch if I don't get you there as soon as possible and I kinda like my liver where it is.
Training was training and Alison had upped her schedule on that a bit higher lately. Which meant that she was down here more often of course and not only in the gym or on the jogging paths and she was careful to keep her visits to the medlab on schedule accordingly. It would be stupid to hurt herself from overtraining and she'd seen too many dancers suffer from stress fractures and the like to even take the smallest risk this could happen to her as well. She snapped the last strap of her gloves into place and entered the Danger Room. This wouldn't be the sparring session she'd talked about with Scott, but she was planning to ask Nathan for one after the training session was over.
Nathan, waiting there for her, smiled at how cheerful she looked. "This is ominous," he said. "You're looking like you're ready to enjoy yourself. What precisely did you whip up for us scenario-wise this time?"
This wasn't exactly what she called fun, but Alison smiled at him nonetheless. "Well, you're reserve team for now but I get the feeling you'll be aiming for full team as soon as possible. Correct me if I'm wrong," she smiled a bit, feeling oddly put on the spot - Nathan had far more experience than she did, no matter which way you looked at it. "I just figured something to start working on teamwork - it's as much for me as you, since we've never had the chance to train together on that." She stopped explaining the whys and wherefores in case she just started repeating herself and instead move on.
"It's a gauntlet run mainly. Aim isn't so much taking out the drones as it is just making sure the other isn't tagged until we're through."
"Sounds fairly straightforward," Nathan said simply. Another trust exercise, in a way. They seemed determined to throw as many of them as possible at him, oddly enough. "I'm ready when you are."
With a simple nod Alison thumbed the control pad - she'd already preset everything from the control booth and preferred to avoid using the vocal commands whenever she could. Despite a fondness for the sci-fi shows, it still felt weird to call out orders to the empty room every time. "Fifteen seconds," was all she said as she trotted to join him, having already warmed up beforehand.
Nathan wasn't surprised when a roofless maze took shape around them. "Drones coming from above?" he asked Alison, who nodded. "Nice touch." Then the first popped up into view, its little gun swinging to target on Alison, and Nathan swatted it telekinetically, hearing it crash to the ground elsewhere in the maze.
Taking a few steps but no more, keeping close to Nathan at all times, Alison scanned the area - the maze was shifting already, and it wouldn't be long - there it was. A laser speared through the drone suddenly revealed by a dropping wall, sending it sprawling to the ground with an electronic bleep of protest. Fighting these was so much easier than the more intense simulations. She spotted the glint of reflection generated by her light, but firmly kept herself form reacting to the one coming up through the floor. That wasn't hers to deal with.
Nathan smashed the drone back into the floor, ignoring the small shower of sparks. He had already switched on the telekinetic 'sonar' field he'd been practicing with, so he could feel the maze shifting, in a predictably unpredictable pattern. Two more drones soared upwards over the top edge of the wall in front of them, targeting, and Nathan forced them to collide.
Line of sight and hearing was what Alison was working with as they progressed through the maze, the sudden changes in pattern in their surroundings notwithstanding. She ignored the rhythms the program tried to settle them into, instead looking for the breaks in patterns to anchor herself as she lasered drones neatly through. The program kicked up a sub-routine however, one she'd asked Scott to add as a variable that she wouldn't be ready for, and it was only by bouncing one droid off a wall and into another that she was able to keep Nathan still untagged for the time being.
Okay, now things were getting a little random. Nathan gritted his teeth, forcing three drones to target each other. The resulting explosion sprayed them with shrapnel, and he threw up a shield over him and Alison as they continued through the maze.
She didn't flinch as the shrapnel skittered about them in midair, instead firing repeatedly, not bothering to keep count at all as the drones started to come up with increasing speed. The one falling from the ceiling was pushed back into another with a variation of light density before both were neatly pinned through to a wall and left to smolder in a corner as they moved across the maze at a fairly steady pace.
Several at a time, now, coming from all different directions and completely unpredictable. He was losing track of which he should take out himself and which he should leave to her, and although he was, or should able to manage more than this in terms of randomly-moving variables, these ones were shooting at him, too.
Knowing that each drone had only one specific target was one thing - putting this in actual practice, Alison realized, was another. So she took one half step, and then another away from Nathan. This wasn't close combat and both were using long distance methods to remove the drones, which meant that only taking a few steps would be useful to differentiate the drone's targets. With satisfaction, Alison took out three drones in quick succession - it had helped, although she had to be careful to still keep pace with Nathan at the same time. And she hadn't had to duck once yet.
The Danger Room compensated almost immediately for Alison's choice to put some distance between them by doubling the number of drones in about ten seconds flat. Nathan growled under his breath, trying to rein in his frustration, and lashed out at the leading edge of the small horde heading for Alison, visualizing without thinking the internal circuitry of the drones, imagining it being torn apart.
And every drone in the Danger Room exploded.
Alison blinked and stared as the room resonated with the sounds of the multiple explosions, straightening up as pieces of metal rained to the floor, one of the drones which had dropped through the ceiling tumbling down in shower of smoke and metallic components. And in the midst of all the explosions, her power kicked in automatically from the sound charge and her body began to glow brightly, streamers of light floating about her lazily.
Nathan shielded both of them, instinctively, but flinched as some of her streamers intersected his shield - then swore, blinking rapidly as his vision kicked into that altered state spontaneously. And looking at Alison hurt - she was incandescent on that level, the outline of her body barely identifiable. The pain was like twin dagger stabbing through his eyes and into his brain, and Nathan stumbled, something very close to a whimper escaping him as he squeezed his eyes shut and clutched at his skull.
With a gasp of dismay Alison moved, fast. Catching him before he stumbled any further, bracing him up and steadying him as best she could. She glanced down at herself - it was hard sometimes to compare what was bright for others or not, since she had no baseline for it herself anymore - everything was acceptable to her eyesight, after all. "What's wrong? I don't think I'm glowing that much Nathan, I'm just sound charged a bit."
He tried to open his eyes, to look at her, and got a dizzying impression of her face amid that amorphous blazing light, piercing crystalline blue eyes fixed on him. Then it all shifted into a kaleidoscopic jumble and he reeled, his balance going again as pain swelled behind his eyes.
"Gah!" It was the only reaction she could have at the look on his face as he looked at her. And the light and shadow effect around them she could judge somewhat now and she wasn't glowing at a blinding level of radiance, mayby just enough so that people wouldn't want to not look directly at her for too long. "Keep your eyes closed, I'm going to try and get rid of the sound charge and that means random light burst. Should be over soon. And then we're going to the medlab, mister."
Breathing raggedly, Nathan held tight to her supporting arms, squeezing his eyes shut. Happening spontaneously again. Not a good thing. And if it turned out he wasn't able to shield against energy-discharge anymore... that would be bad.
She wriggled a bit, freeing up one hand to remove a glove and held it over his eyes firmly before setting a strobing light burst. It took only two brief flashes in all to bring her to a barely visible glow, one she knew would be fading soon enough from experience - there had been a reason she did lightshows at all her concerts. She had to, plain and simple, or else she'd overcharge anyway from the constant volume of the music. "There. Keep your eyes closed anyway, I'm still glowing just a bit. It'll be out of the sight spectrum soon." She paused, wincing. "The normally visible one anyway. C'mon. Medlab. I'll guide you there."
He stiffened as she started to pull him gently in - that was the problem, he didn't know what direction they were even facing, and he couldn't help a flash of panic. "It'll--it'll go away," he said unsteadily. "In a minute. Then we can go to medlab..." He tilted his head away from her, cracking his eyes open just a little and then shutting them immediately as all he saw were swimming, fragmented colors.
"Nathan, listen to me." He wasn't looking good and waiting longer wasn't anywhere near Alison's list of things to do. "You look like death warmed over. You need to see someone at the medlab now." She kept her voice low and steady, mind flashing back to when she'd first found Miles for some reason, and had talked him into coming out of the cavern with her. "Besides, your fiancée will have my liver for lunch if I don't get you there as soon as possible and I kinda like my liver where it is." She shifted her body, aligning herself so that he'd be able to tell exactly where she was, and leaned against him a bit more. "Please walk with me?"
He could already feel the stirrings of alarm from Moira's end of the link, and that was what decided it, in the end. Sending back a feeble reassurance - and a promise that he was on his way - Nathan let Alison draw him forward. "Happened accidentally," he said shakily. "Again. Like flipping a switch."
"That thing where you see all funny?" Alison asked calmly, if only because keeping him talking seemed like a good thing. "When did it happen, exactly?" She walked slowly and in as straight a line as she could manage, the room having returned to normal with the destruction of all the drones, as it was meant to.
"When those... light-streamers of yours hit my shield. Like my brain was recognizing that I needed to change the composition of the shield because there was energy hitting it, not just solid objects, and letting me see what I needed to see to do that." Nathan swallowed. "Except you were so bright..."
She nodded, remembering what it had been like staring at the sun for even a few seconds, before her power manifested. "Looks like you're going to have a nasty migraine," she murmured sympathetically. She remembered those only too clearly, as well. "Wasn't solid light though. The magnetic or electrical field of the light? But both would have been really weak..."
"It's gotten harder," Nathan said, his voice still unsteady as she led him onwards. "Seeing like that... things get all unfocused, stuck that way. Hasn't hurt like this... not since the first time it happened, anyway..."
She shook her head a bit, calling out a command to the door as they neared it, her dislike for that particular bit of technological possibilities utterly absent at the moment. "Door soon, then we turn the corner," she informed him, so that he knew where they were in a general way at least. "That sounds unfun." And the problem with his telekinetic shielding sounded like a real issue. One which would keep him off full team status until it was resolved.
"I can shield against energy," Nathan said raggedly. "Some types. I've always been able to... and the shield held. Just the change in my vision... threw me off..."
"Wonder if you could shield against my lasers though?" she asked, before shaking her head. "We're not finding that out anytime soon. Don't even think about it." Oh yes, the paleness and the way eh was wincing and talking lower than usual heralded the arrival of the mother of all migraines. "And now we're going straight for a bit. Won't be long till the medlab."
"Didn't mean to do that," Nathan muttered, clinging to her arm. "She's not allowed to kill me..." He tried to open his eyes again, and it was the same. Like being inside a spinning kaleidoscope, and he swayed, something close to pure terror flickering into life within him.
"Keep your eyes closed or I'm gluing them shut," he was told in an amiable enough tone. "And of course you didn't mean to do that. No one goes chasing after migraines," she murmured, steadying him a bit and chattering on, keeping him as distracted as possible. "I think I'm going to start a new line of work. Dragging off men to the medlab. First Haroun, now you..."