Backdated log [Alison, Lorna] - A training we go...

[x-dazzler.livejournal.com]

Set early last week, on the 16th. Alison and Lorna meet up in the Danger Room for not exactly basic powers training. Things don't always turn out the way you expect them to though, do they?



The floor would have been pleasantly cool beneath her if her leathers had allowed the metallic surface's chill to go through quickly. As it was, Alison was staring up at the ceiling, feet crossed and hands linked over her stomach, as though pondering the great mysteries of life while waiting for her training partner to show up. In fact, pondering ways to achieve the perfect manicure were being considered. Which wasn't easy when your power tended to vaporise the varnish off your fingernails more often than not. She pouted up at the ceiling, perfectly content to linger on thoughts inconsequential in nature, as opposed to anything else which had Important or Urgent labeled upon it.

Lorna keyed in her access code and stepped back so the door could scan her retina. Once inside the room, she looked around for Alison and rolled her eyes when she discovered her on the floor. "Lying down on the job, Dazzler?" she teased.

"I'm checking the ceiling for spit balls," Alison dead-panned. "You know. All those new trainees." And then, because it had to be said. "Kids these days. No respect for their elders." She sighed heavily, affecting a very put-upon expression as she let her head slowly turn so that she could look at Lorna.

Lorna refrained from snickering because it would only serve to encourage Alison. "Well, when you're as old as you are, everyone must seem like a kid. Next thing you know you'll be chasing after them with your chair, yelling at them to get off your lawn." She bent and plucked a handful of coins out of the box at her feet. She flicked them one by one in the air and set them to dancing in one of Nate's fractal exercises.

Eyeing the pattern for a moment, Alison remained silent - no, not an Askani pattern, that one. "Wave a cane at them, more like. I'll be spry and quick, even when I'm old and silver-haired, thank you very much." She pushed herself to her feet, stretching for a moment, falling into a series of light warms up as habit. If this was going to be an aim and fire exercise for her, warming up was important all right. Particularly if Lorna got creative.

Lorna continued to add coins to her pattern while she waited for Alison to warm up. She was already warm and ready, even though she was fairly certain her bouncing around would be limited. Only fairly certain because well, Alison liked to play games. "That's what you think now, but just wait, you'll be the spitting image of the Professor in no time at all."

"I like bald men," Alison remarked mildly, taking her time and letting Lorna wonder - freestyle practice was freestyle, after all. Saying that reminded her of Haroun and his present condition though, and she frowned a bit, hiding the expression by simple virtue of ducking down during the rapid warm up. "So. This was no hands, mmm?"

Lorna merely grinned at the first comment, choosing to simply toss a few more coins into her pattern. She nodded, "No hands. You'll lose points for hands. Me too." So saying, she linked her hands loosely in front of her. Most of her attention was focused on the coins which were buzzing around her head sometimes mere fractions of an inch away from her face.

While using her hands as a focus was generally for the par, for Alison, she wasn't obligated to do so, either. "I can just hear the jokes if some of the kids realized I really can project from any part
of my body," she muttered, running through the last of her warm-up. "Mmm. No hands. Work up steadily in terms of distractions, see how the multi-tasking in terms of power use goes." She grinned at that, eyeing the coins with appreciation - she remembered the pins Lorna had used at first. There was a distinct difference in Lorna's range and control now.

Lorna was showing off a little and had no intention of using the whole number of coins for the actual exercise. But the difference between even a few months back when she'd begun working with Nathan was enormous. "I think you should work on aiming with your knee or your elbow. Go for that element of surprise." Without batting an eyelash, she whipped one of the coin out of the pattern and flung it at Alison's head. Game on.

She rarely used this trick - at least at laser intensity, if only because it tended to have the rather annoying side effect of very dry eyes. But no hands meant relying on other means and Alison simply turned her head just a bit to track the coin's movement, before simply blasting it with lasers, directed from her eyes. The lasers were, of all things, tinted red no less - only fair, considering who had helped her develop that particular trick. Nodding, she backed away a bit to
give herself some room, content to simply work defensively for now - which was equally good practice for Lorna, really. "I've focused with other things than my hands before." The slight chill down her back, she told herself sternly, had nothing to do with Lorna. Or the fact that being in a large generally metallic room with a magnekinetic reminded her of things she'd rather not be thinking of.

"That's just being a copycat." Lorna opined and set another couple coins winging Alison's way. About half the pattern wavered and tumbled to the ground as she took her attention away from them. "Be more creative. What if you can't look at what you're trying to hit?" The coins headed toward Alison split in half and shot in four separate directions. Lorna smirked, hands still clasped in front of her.

Blinding Lorna would probably work, but that wasn't how Alison wanted to do the exercise. And she didn't like the tension that was trying to settle in either - not one bit. Instead she used a default, as it were, but one that had proven itself to be of considerable use, and shielded herself in solid light, patterning it around her body with far more ease than she'd managed before. The room had been cued to start music soon, and Alison roughly calculated that she would be able
to keep up the shield until then. The shield up and the coins nearly hitting her, Alison concentrated further - and the elbow it was, as silly and awkward as the angle might be, a laser heading for one of the batches of coins, carefully aimed away from Lorna.

Lorna smothered a giggle and the coins bobbed in response. Some of the batch got slagged, but she reformed them quickly enough. It was fairly quiet in the danger room which meant that sooner or later Alison was going to get tired unless she'd arranged for back up. Still, no need to make it any easier on her. Lorna extended her mental reach up and lifted herself delicately off the floor so that she could move if she had to without making any noise. With the shield up, Lorna was less worried about actually hurting Alison and flung another handful of coins at her friend.

Shield up and holding, not too drained yet - Alison allowed herself to start getting fancy, just because she could. And focusing on the coins was a good distraction from the nagging reminders in the back of her mind, which she ignored as best she could by simply losing herself into the act and react pattern of keeping as many coins away as she could. The defensive gestures, each ending in a thin laser beam though sometimes Alison used a wider one for better effect. soon turned into a more linked pattern, not quite a dance but almost. As if on cue, moments later, music surged to life - techno, the deep thrumming beats not too loud for Lorna and more than enough for Alison to recharge and the session to go on.

Heh. Of course, she had a back up plan. Lorna grinned and continued to play with her coins, doing the best she could to keep them out of Alison's lasers. The question of whether thought was faster than light was becoming a very interesting one. At the same time, Lorna released the last her pattern around her and redirected that attention into a loose net around Alison. With a tuneless hum that completely clashed with the music, Lorna set about filtering out the sound waves before they could reach Alison.

The soundscape around her wavered, becoming oddly unsteady - holed was the best analogy Alison's mind could come up with, what with her still being a bit busy with taking out the coins darting in and out at her to actually try and go in depth in the matter. Still, it wasn't too hard to figure out that it was Lorna's doing, though, or that the coins now wavering around her, not joining the others in taking swipes at her might have something to do with it. Nice. But I need that. Which meant taking out coins en masse and distracting Lorna enough that keeping that many up would become a problem.

The body shield around her wavered and then expanded suddenly towards the coins around her - this would take a fair bit of energy to pull off but the music was still feeding her nicely, not entirely scrubbed out from her perceptions, and so the shield went from solid light to something far hungrier.

Well, hell. Lorna thought briefly before jerking her coins back and slamming a shield around herself, just in case. She tightened the sound scrubbing fields as well. Alison was still playing defensively though so Lorna wasn't too worried. When Alison finally decided to get offensive, then Lorna thought she might be in a little trouble.

Still, this was a big metal room and that counted for a great deal. Lorna smirked again and waited for Alison to drop her light barrier. Though she couldn't manipulate it, when she strained she could feel it at the very edge of her perception.

The coins playing about Lorna tightly glittered in the light and Alison paused for a heartbeat, something else surimposing another image entirely over Lorna, over the entire room for a moment. The light around her body wavered and nearly winked out, but at the last moment she pulled it tightly to herself, the solid light still present - though the sound in the room faded to nothingness for a moment, as she drew it all in.

Pinpoint lasers flickered in and out between them purposefully, never from Alison's hands and always aimed away from Lorna - though not from any coin that wasn't directly between them.

Lorna let out a shriek that never made a noise, just vanishing as Alison pulled every last sound wave to her. Flinging one arm up to cover her face, she threw herself down to the cold metal floor, pulling with her the super-heated clouds of metal vapor that used to be coins. As her hand splayed over the floor, she felt it ripple and mentally gave it a shove. The floor twisted and bucked then yanked up into a tidy little shield. She was now running blind. For the moment, at least.

Concentrating hard, she slipped into viewing the EM spectrum and the world was bright as a summer's day again. Still frowning with concentration, she pulled her coins back to her and waited for Alison to make the next move. Time to let the other woman do a little work.

She remembered that smell - another pause, Alison's eyes widening a shade too much, unseen underneath the shield of light still wrapped around her body tightly. It was faint, barely there, Lorna pulling the scent away with her or so it seemed, but it was there nonetheless, another thing to throw her right back to a day in the mall, to a battle that hadn't been benign in nature in the least. A small voice in the back of her head informed her that Scott would not
be happy to see the floor being warped that way, and hoped that the imaging equipment wasn't being affected by all of this - that thought helped Alison to focus back on the task at hand, though she was increasingly aware that stopping this soon would be a good idea.

She wasn't happy with the thought that it would be necessary, too. Surely just a little bit longer though... that couldn't hurt.

Light flooded the room, threading through everything with the low level EM emissions particular to it, and Alison moved closer to the sphere of metal, ignoring the vaguely nauseous feeling that had started up at one point and instead trying to concentrate on the task at hand. The metal gleamed brightly at her, perfectly spherical. Just as it had been on that day, as well.

Lorna watched Alison extend her reach, having to strain to see the change. She adjusted the polarity of the waves up sharply, yanking them as close to her end of the visible spectrum as she could. The tighter she could bunch the waves, the easier they'd be to deflect. Behind her half-sphere, she spilled coins from hand to hand, still crouched and waiting.

The metallic tinkling of the coins reached her as she stopped pulling in sound suddenly, and Alison stiffened at that, then backed away. The original purpose of this had been testing of her aiming and Lorna's ability with small objects. They'd gone beyond the scope of that, by now. "Session end," she called out, the music dying off as abruptly as it had revived, Alison dropping the light shield that had been surrounding her. And then staring down at the floor where she'd been standing in mild consternation. "Damn."

Lorna dropped her shield and blinked rapidly to clear her vision back to normal. She smiled wryly. "We kinda made a mess." It was possibly the understatement of the year. She looked at Alison to
share her amusement and realised her friend was a little too pale. "Hey, you okay?"

Alison thinned her lips a bit at the question and didn't answer right away, walking slowly to where she'd been standing before to look down at the warped floor. There was a definite lack of metal in one place. "Shield went hot on me a bit too much," she finally admitted, seeing the results of it. Being able to turn the body shield into a laser like protective envelope was still very new. And this was Lorna of all people. Taking a deep breath, the faint smell of vaporized metal still there, Alison shuddered and turned around. "I think you and I need to practice regularly. And carefully," she added, hating doing so.

Lorna nodded, "Agreed. Particularly if you're going to be making metal clouds of death." She extended her hands and concentrated. The floor rippled and stretched, smoothing over the scars. "Still a bit thin. I'll tell Scott." She stood and walked over to Alison, "So you wanna tell me what that was about?"

"I burned them out the last time," Alison said after a long silence. She shifted a touch uneasily, before going still once more, ignoring the previously marred floor. "The vapors." She took a shallow breath, keeping her calm. "I remember the smell though."

"You're lucky you didn't hurt yourself." Lorna wrapped her arms around Alison and gave her a hug. "Magneto?" she asked, not really needed the confirmation.

A short nod answered that, Alison tense and unresponsive for far too long before finally leaning, just a bit, against Lorna. "Yeah. That. I know the smell but-" she shook her head, looking at the floor. "Burned it away the last time. Started to now but you pulled it away with you." Her reflex had been to run hot and burn anything in sight. And her body shield had responded, just as it had done when Nash had gotten ahold of her ankle, during the Mistra mission. "Training sessions. Regular." She turned her head just a bit, looking at Lorna almost pleadingly. "I'm not giving him this."

Lorna was silent for a several moments before nodding. "Yeah. No problem. We're going to work on that vaporizing metal thing too because you're just making the air heavy when you do that." She could still feel it, not enough to grab but heavy and palatable. "We'll have to find a better way to deal with it."

Alison relaxed more against Lorna, every passing moment adding another increment to the tension slowly flowing away. "Metal sphere. He did that. Not the same as yours, bigger and stronger and - but something like that. Stuff bleeding from the walls and everything around us to feed the shield because I was eating away at it so fast...." she stopped, taking a slow careful breath. "Seal th'room. Breathing gear. That your magnetics won't affect. Or something." What exactly didn't matter for immediate moment. Not letting it linger, dealing with things did, though. "Thank you."

"Hey, what are friends with mutations like those of our archnemesises... sissies... nemisisi... whatever... for?" Lorna gave Alison another hug, "The better we get at figuring out what the hell I can do, the better shot we have of tracking what he can do. I'd like to know how he set up the metal shield. It's hell to see around."

He hadn't, she remembered, kept it constantly sealed - glimpses of his face, those of the others held in there with him. Of Miles. "Memory's still spotty about some parts of things." Alison shifted to hug Lorna back, briefly. "I could always ask Charles to see if he can work them out, though. It would be good to know - to be able to get something good out of it and help your training. I like that idea."

"I'd love to get into his head," she mused out loud. Even the crazy bits would be useful. She felt sometimes like she was playing catch-up, constantly seeking the whys and howtos of her power while everyone else on the teams were masters. "It's frustrating practically having a blueprint and not being able to dupe it."

"You don't want that," Alison whispered, shaking her head. She remembered the look in his eyes as they'd spoken of Miles 'importance' only too well. "Trust me, you don't. There are better ways to learn about your power. Much better ways." She smiled, though there was a hint of something else far from steady lurking in the back of her eyes. "Hey. You've got someone else to practice with every day now. It's something, right?"

Lorna met Alison's eyes then nodded, sensing it would be easier to just drop it. "Right. But first we have worked hard and now deserve a reward. Large nutritious meals for both of us! To the kitchen!" She linked her arm with Alison's and propelled them towards the door.