xp_logs | LOG: Nathan and Forge, Tuesday morning (Reply)

Forge meets with Nathan before classes, and manages to unload an entire load of stress all at once, touching on fear, overconfidence, insecurity, idealism - and finally settling on a bit of mutual powers geekery and a project.

Forge rapped briefly on Mr. Dayspring's office door and stuck his head
in. This early in the morning, he figured, few of the other students
were actually up and mobile, much less interested in anything but
breakfast. He'd spent most of the night in the lab running another
interminably long series of computer simulations on Haroun's
cybernetics, only to hit the wall again and again when the
biochemistry issue kept popping up.

"Mr. Dayspring? You, uh, you got a minute or two?"

"Several, actually," Nathan said without looking up from his computer.
He was beginning to regret that he'd given Alison his report already,
and handed it to her of all things, so that he couldn't just go
into the database and make a few quick revisions. He'd included a
couple of details he hadn't actually intended. "Come on in and sit
down," he invited, saving and closing the file and then reaching for
his coffee.

"Awesome," Forge answered, swinging one of the chairs around to drop
into it bonelessly. "Can't say how good it is to have Dr. MacTaggart
back working in the lab. I swear, if I had to try and have Paige
explain endocrinology to me another time, I'd go utterly mad." He
leaned his head back, rubbing at his temples. "The sooner we can get
this problem solved, the sooner I can get a full sixteen hours of
sleep and not have to worry about integrating systems that just don't
seem to want to integrate cleanly. So how was your vacation?"

Nathan blinked and laughed, unable to help himself, then waved a hand
at Forge. "No, I'm not laughing at you. Just boggling a bit at the
idea of this last week as a vacation. Not that the scenery wasn't
great, but..." He stopped, shrugging a little. "The lion's den is
still the lion's den," he said obliquely, taking another sip of his
coffee.

"Oh," Forge said with a slight degree of awe, "one of those. Well,
you're not bandaged up that I see, and I haven't heard Doctor
MacTaggart cursing your name in multiple languages, so I'll guess it
went well." He stopped, suddenly going from lively and borderline
hyperactive to sullen and moody in a fingersnap. "You, uh, you've
heard about Doctor McCoy by now, I guess."

Well, that had been quite the mood swing. Nathan nodded. "Moira told
me when I got to Muir on Sunday," he said, thinning out his shields a
little, quite deliberately. He wasn't about to scan the kid, but if
Forge let anything slip... well, that was fair game, wasn't it? "But
she and Madelyn will figure out what's wrong and fix it," he went on,
utter, calm conviction in his voice.

"I know that," Forge answered, tapping his head, "up here. They're
already throwing everything they've got at it. But if they can't, he's
going to... well, it's going to be bad. And it's not contagious and
they say it's not going to happen to anyone else but it's about the
worst thing I could ever imagine happening and I'm absolutely scared
out of my mind." Forge was babbling, speaking rapidly and harshly as
quickly as the words could come. "Because if what's happening to him
can happen to anyone else then it can happen to me and that terrifies
me, sir, because what would that leave me with? Nothing. Everything
I've got, everything I'm proud of, everything I can accomplish ever
could be gone just like that and there's not a damn thing I can do to
help. I'm... fuck it, I'm scared, sir."

"Forge," Nathan said calmly. "Take a breath." This time he did reach
out telepathically, projecting a very low-level suggestion to Forge to
breathe deeply and relax his death-grip on the arms of the chair. "I'm
not going to pat you on the head and tell you not to worry," he went
on, once the young man had visibly calmed down a little. "You have to
make the effort to keep listening to your head, and keep believing
that they're not just going to help Hank but figure out what's causing
this so that it doesn't happen to anyone else. What-ifs are the
fastest way to drive yourself insane."

Forge breathed deeply, then let out a long sigh, hanging his head. "I
know. It's just - with everything else going on, I keep being made all
the more acutely aware that I kind of have all my eggs in one basket
when it comes to what I can do, you know?" He looked around the room
nervously, trying not to make eye contact because that meant giving
away just how utterly terrified he was. "Everyone tells me that even
without my power, I'm really smart. It's true, I work like hell for
it. But without that, I'm really not much, am I? Kitty and Lorna kept
trying to drill it into me that 'no, you are not just what you can do'
- but they don't get it, sir. They've *got* other things they can do.
Cooking, dancing, teaching, relationships - I can't do any of that.
Everything I've got outside of what my power lets me do," he sighed,
"doesn't add up to a very good person, really."

"Have you really explored all your options?" Nathan asked with a brief
smile. "Maybe you just haven't found the non-intellectual avenue you'd
be best suited for yet..." He gave a self-deprecating chuckle. "I
shouldn't really be trying to give you advice. Most of what I do, I do
with my brain in one way or another."

Forge cocked his head, confused. "But you've got, well, you know.
Doctor MacTaggart. Baby and all. Everything you said you've gone
through, all the stuff you still do - you've got a life on top
of it all. Your powers could be gone tomorrow - again - and you'd
still have everything else. That's, I mean... is it wrong to envy the
hell out of that?"

"No. But keep in mind that it took me years to get to this spot,"
Nathan said, then eyed Forge for a moment. "Did I ever tell you I was
married before?" he asked quietly. "My first wife and I were together
for ten years. We had a child, too... a little boy."

"Ten years?" Forge smirked, "Wow. You're old. How come you
don't..." he suddenly realized the tense Nathan had used. "Had.
Ah. I'm sorry."

"I had a life," Nathan said, almost absently, his gaze straying off in
the general direction of the bookshelves. "Lost all of it in.. oh,
about three months. My wife, my son, most of the people I considered
family... I walked away alone, with this damned virus as a memento."
He took a deep breath, looking back at Forge with a faint smile. "But
look at me now, eight years later. So I suppose this is me telling you
that if I can lose everything and yet manage to eventually rebuild a
life beyond what I can do, you should give yourself a little more time
before you give up on changing who you are beyond your power."

"I'm a teenager, remember?" Forge said self-deprecatingly. "You're not
supposed to expect us to be patient or anything. It's hard, you know.
I mean, I don't know what to say around people half the time, and what
I do say just seems to piss them off. Who teaches the class on
that?" he asked only half jokingly.

Nathan grinned wryly. "You think it's just you students who don't know
what to say half the time? It's just that we teachers have a bit more
in the way of learned self-preservation, so we tend to bite back the
things we want to say but maybe shouldn't." He chewed on his lip for a
moment. "One of the teachers who used to be here taught a Speech
course, once, covering that sort of thing... I don't think you're
missing much on that score, though." It was possible to learn how to
relate properly to people without taking lessons from that bitch
Frost, after all. "Trial and error has a lot to recommend it. It's you
making the progress that way, even if you tend to put your foot in it
more often."

"I could make my foot a little smaller," Forge suggested jokingly,
"That would probably help." He fidgeted briefly in the chair, then
looked directly at Nathan. "The stuff I said on the journals the other
day - I meant it, you know. May not have said it the right way, but
it's how I feel. I don't want to be told that what I can do is just
another silly hobby that happens to be genetically encoded. I don't
want to be trivialized like that. What I can do is important to me, I
want it to be part of what defines me." He paused, thinking
over his next words carefully, "But I know that I can't make it the
only part. And it's the rest that's difficult. Does that make
sense?"

"Of course. Although, you're in a rather different position than a lot
of your fellow mutants," Nathan pointed out after a moment. "As
dangerous as your ability can be if it's misused, it's also capable of
doing great good. If you want that good to be part of what defines
you... well, I don't think anyone can disagree with that. But there's
also a difference between what you do and what you can do. Your
motives and specific actions in putting your gift to work are what's
important."

"Misused." Forge said the word with a finality. "You mean like what
happened to you, or to Kyle. I know it's all in how I use it, what
for, but... I don't know if I can put it into words how it works. I
get an idea in my head, and it's like this avalanche that comes right
after, and I know how to build it and how to make it happen. It's not
just artificial limbs or remote control or radios or holograms,
either. I mean, it's not like I actually build everything I think of,
it's..." Forge slowly withdrew a folder from behind his back, dropping
it on Nathan's desk. "I've printed out schematics on them, instead of
building them. That way they don't stay in my head, because I don't
want to think about what would be done with them. There's things I
don't want to make, sir. Because you know what I can do, how...
how I've misused what I can do." He took a long gulp, then continued,
"I know there's people out there like those who did that stuff to you
and Kyle. And as scared as I am of losing what I can do, I'm just as
scared that I could turn into... well..." He tapped the folder. "I
want you to take them. I don't want them."

Nathan's eyes widened a little as he stared down at the folder. Part
of him wanted very much to push it back across the desk and tell Forge
to find someone a little more suitable to lay this on. Maybe Charles.
But he reached out and took it, deliberately not opening it. "I'll...
take a look at them," he said quietly. "Photographic memory and all. I
may very well destroy the copies afterwards. I'm getting the sense
that these aren't schematics that we want to have lying around the
next time the mansion gets invaded."

Forge nodded quietly. "You understand, if I don't do something with
it, it stays with me? I have to use my power, sir. I may not
get nosebleeds and migraines like you or Amanda, but if I try and keep
it bottled up... it's weird. I can't sleep, I can't concentrate on
other things. That's why I think I got so defensive about what Dr.
McCoy said, before I talked to him and realized what he was meaning.
I..." He brushed a hand over his face, realizing just how tired he
was. "I don't know who to go to with this but you. I'd talk to Dr.
McCoy but... you know. You understand."

"I understand what it's like to not be able to shut off your power,"
Nathan said. "And both the telepathy and the precognition are a pain
in the ass on that score." He took a deep breath, putting the folder
in a drawer. One with a lock. "Now. I'm thinking you had more you
wanted to talk about, or ask me... given that you asked me for this
conversation not long after what happened in Canada."

"Well, that right there is part of it," Forge explained. "Kyle's...
well, he's told me a bit about what those people did to him, what you
got him out of. And you've told me what they made you do, and how hard
it was for you to get out. And I was down there when you brought all
those kids back - kept them from having that happen to them. It's... I
don't know, it's stupid of me to think, but... if there's any way I
can help, I want to." Forge paused for a few seconds after laying that
out. "That's the kind of stuff, I mean - I can write a paper about
mutant rights and send it to newspapers and magazines, but that's
indirect. I can organize people to lobby for legislation, but that's
slow, it depends on the system. What you do, well... you're
doing something. I want to help, if I can."

"You're doing a lot to help Kyle already," Nathan said. "I hope you
realize that. And that I'm not just saying that to dish out a
platitude..." He sighed, leaning back in his chair. "Mistra itself...
it's not something you can help directly with, Forge. At least, not
that I can see. But then, I'm focused almost entirely on the...
military aspect of it. I'll confess to being pretty myopic in that
sense. Do you have anything in mind?"

"You said that you worked with, trained some of these people, yeah?"
Forge twitched his fingers excitedly. "And it seems like they had a
pretty good plan as to how to take you specifically down, back at
Columbia. Stands to reason, well, it should work the other way,
right?"

Nathan raised an eyebrow. "Well, yes and no," he said candidly. "I
know an awful lot about some of them, and how their powers work... not
the majority, by any means."

Forge shrugged. "I don't know. I don't have a head for this stuff.
Everything I think I know I just get from watching movies. But it was
something you said the first time we talked, about trying to replicate
telekinesis with a machine?" Forge grinned, "I haven't exactly figured
that out yet - but if I could get my hands on the right equipment,
I'll bet you lunch I could find a counter to it."

Nathan jolted forward in his chair. "A TK-blocker?" he asked, alarmed.

"Not so much a blocker," Forge explained, wheeling his chair around to
grab a pencil and paper from Nathan's desk. "More like a breaker. See,
it's about generating kinetic energy where there shouldn't be any," he
scribbled a quick diagram with some equations over the paper, mumbling
to himself. "It's math, really. Kinetic energy, potential energy, and
lines of force. Unless I'm mistaken, you can't move what you can't
sense is there, yeah? So if..." he went back to scrawling and grinned.
"I think I just had another one of those moments. If I can build this
- if there's the means out there - I think I might be on to something
that could really--"

"Stop." Nathan reached out and stopped Forge from writing any more.
"Listen for a minute," he said, as steadily as he could. "Mistra may
or may not have a couple of other minor telekinetics on the roster,
I'm not sure. But the people that would be most effective against are
me and Morgan, Forge."

Forge paused, looking confused, then realization crept in. "Shit. I...
okay, here's a wild-ass hypothesis. What if I reverse-engineered it?
Figured out how something could block what you do then... I don't
know, channeled it? You know how a magnifying glass works, you hold it
up to the sunlight and can burn paper with it? Something like that."

Nathan opened his mouth - and stared at Forge. "Oh. Oh-ho," he said,
and then reached for the pencil. "Give me that." He flipped the paper
over to the clean side, and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath as
he called out into that interior starry sky and the Askani
weaponsmiths rushed forward. Letting them move to the forefront of his
mind, keeping his eyes closed, he started to sketch.

Forge peered over Nathan's shoulder, acutely interested. "Autologia,"
he deadpanned, "interesting, but that..." he looked at the drawing,
"that doesn't make... but it... oh. OH. I see, but then it
would... mmm-hmm, and the... yes. Yes! Sir, this is brilliant!
It's..." he peered at Nathan until he opened his eyes. In a faintly
accusatory tone, Forge asked, "Did you just pull this out of my head?"

Nathan grinned at him. "No, kid, this is courtesy of my ghosts," he
said, and sketched the outline of the psimitar at the top of the
schematics. "This is a psimitar. There's rather more to it than this,
obviously..." He reached out for another piece of paper, and kept
sketching. "It's the weapon the Askani psis used. And I've actually
been thinking about it a little more lately. You saw the crater I
left, on the news?" And it had been mostly him; he and Tim had figured
that out this past week. "Spillover. Any time I use my telekinesis on
too high a level, there's spillover. I can't ever really cut loose if
there's anyone I don't want to risk killing by accident in my
immediate vicinity."

"Seems they have geniuses in the future, too," Forge conceded, not
bothering to argue the 'ghosts' issue. "Spillover makes sense. Raw
psionic energy converted into kinetic force, that's your TK for you.
But the conversion, like all biological processes, isn't perfect. But
you can't DO psionic energy generation with a machine, you can only
simulate it. It's why you can't duplicate your power..." Forge turned
the paper upside down, looking at it from another angle. "...but you
can channel it. This would do that. Input through aligned waveform,
filter and reverb..." he mumbled some more to himself, reaching out to
sketch a few lines on the drawing. Slowly, he exhaled, placing his
hands flat against the table.

"Two weeks," he said with finality. "Once I get finished with my work
in the medlab, I can have this for you in two weeks."

Nathan stared at him, his eyes perhaps a little wider than they should
be. "That... would be one hell of a way to help," he said slowly,
after a moment. "I've been... training, subconsciously, on how to use
this. For months. I could pick it up and immediately put it to use.
And I've known for a while that..." He stopped, smiled a bit
sheepishly. "When Angie and I had our little precognitive accident, I
saw myself with a psimitar. So I knew... I just didn't know where it
was going to come from."

"Consider it done," Forge said, then yawned loudly. "Shit, sorry. I
really ought to try and get an hour or two of sleep, or I'll end up
taking it in the middle of history this afternoon. And I heard what
you did to the last student who did that." He smiled as he
stood up, almost seeing his teacher in a new light. "Thanks, sir. For,
I don't know, not talking down to me or anything. I know sometimes I
don't have the first clue what I'm talking about but just... thanks
for listening."

"I'm a big proponent of listening," Nathan said quietly, then smiled.
"But you're welcome. And Forge?" he said as the young man started to
turn away. "You will figure out who and what you want to be," he said
steadily, with the same confidence he'd used to assure Forge that
Madelyn and Moira would solve Hank's problem. "Just give it some time.
And some thought. As long as you keep trying to push your own
boundaries, you've got the battle half-won already."