Alkali Revisited

[Josh Dalton Worthington]

The two of them finally made their way downstairs to the sub-basement. Unfortunately, they had been stopped by Dr. McCoy in the entry hall - and had listened to another Thermodynamics lecture. Josh finally telekinetically tips a vase over to escape his clutches.

"Gosh, Professor! How could that have happened?" Josh exclaims loudly as the blue-haired man turns in suprise.
"Stars and garters! The Ming vase!" Hank dives acrobatically to catch it, flinging lab notebooks across the room. When he looks back up, the entry hall is curiously devoid of teenage boys.
"Hmm." He scratches his head.

After suiting up, the two of them had arrive at the Danger Room itself. Storm and Wolverine are there, clearly expecting him.

"Bobby's going to join me today. Is that alright?" Josh looks over at the pair.

Storm glances at Logan - somehow that glance carries way too much information. Josh wishes he could hear what they were saying, but their not-conversation takes place far too quickly for him to pick up any stray thoughts.

"That's fine. We'll just have to set the scenario for two." She waves a hand at the doors, the light above them green. "We'll give you a minute to warm up before we start the program. I have a feeling you're going to know what to do." Her eyes stray to Bobby momentarily, but then she slips over to the door and keys it open.

The pair are in the room - it echoes emptily. Red numerals appear in midair, counting down from 2 minutes.

Josh looks to Bobby. "Ready? Let's show them what we can do."

[Bobby Drake]

Bobby somehow manages to resist the urge to laugh at Josh's stunt with the vase until they're safely out of earshot, then dissolves into a fit of the giggles in the locker room. Invisible powers sure do come in handy sometimes!

He grows more serious as they enter the Danger Room. He's grown accustomed to Storm's meaningful glances when it comes to him, but they still sting... he tries to remind himself that she just wants to make sure nobody gets hurt. It doesn't help much, though, it's still way too much like those little 'conferences' Mom and Dad used to have when he or Ronnie'd done something particularly stupid.

He lets Josh do the talking. There's really nothing he can say to her he hasn't said before, at least nothing that will make anything better. He does chuckle silently at the notion of "warming up," though.

> "Ready? Let's show them what we can do."

"Damn right!" Bobby nods and turns so they are back to back as he ices up. Sometimes they have a few seconds to check out the situation, sometimes they start out in the middle of a fistfight, it pays to be alert.

[Josh Dalton Worthington]

Josh takes a deep breath and exhales. He feels a bit of a chill as Bobby turns into Iceman.

<Bobby…. I really need to decide on a codename one of these days, especially if I want to get picked for the field team. We need to brainstorm tonight when we go out.> He jumps a little to work out a kink, then presses his back to Bobby’s.

The red numerals finally reach zero, and disappear in a flash of light, replacing themselves with a holoarena of whatever his exercise is.

The corridor they appear in is very dark. Pipes overhead drip water into pools on the floor. Well, at least Bobby will have water to work with. Josh looks around. This place is a dump.

A voice echoes down the hallway from around the bend. “Josh, Bobby!” It sounds worried - and extremely familiar.

Josh rounds the corner, and stops dead, eyes widening. "No way," he breathes.

Storm, Logan, if Bobby doesn’t destroy the Danger Room this time, I will, he thinks furiously.

The scene unfolds out around him: several students are clustered at the end of a long, wide hallway. Jean - Jean - has an arm over Scott’s shoulders and is appears to be favoring a leg. Scott is trying to support her and fire at a contingent of troopers bearing down on them from around a corner, which doesn’t seem to be working very well.

Why would they do this to me? It’s not like they don’t have enough angsty teens on their hands. He shakes his head in anger, and his hands ball into fists. Josh, pull yourself together. None of this is real. It's just a simulation. Somehow the mental pep-talk doesn't seem to be helping.

“Josh! Bobby! Can you hear me? We need help!” Jean’s voice cuts in over the melee.

Josh looks over at Bobby helplessly. His mouth opens, then shuts without a word.

[Bobby Drake]

> <I really need to decide on a codename one of these days>

Bobby thinks back, amused: <How about "Distracted Man"? Focus, dude.> then follows his own advice as the room is replaced by dark and damp. And Scott. And Jean. And he recognizes the complex, suddenly.

And promptly forgets his own advice. What, are they being cute, now? Is this their way of telling me they know about the... thing... at Mimi's? Because --

Bobby's internal rant is cut short by Josh tensing up against his back, and by a wash of guilt as he realizes he's being a self-centered git again. Because, he realizes, this little fantasy isn't about Bobby losing a, a, roommate. It's about Josh, who'd been one of the walking wounded for weeks after Alkali Lake despite not actually having been there. Who'd been so jazzed about working with Jean, before, that Bobby'd begun to worry Scott and Logan would team up just to knock out the competition. Who'd actually taken the code name "Marvel Boy," for crying out loud -- and then dropped it like a snake when she'd died.

Bobby isn't the most perceptive kid on the planet, no question, but on the other hand it's not hard to spot emotional manipulation of somebody else. And he knows there's probably some good pedagogical reason for it, letting Josh get over his guilt about not having been there, or some such psychobabble. But it doesn't matter, because there's no way he's going to let anyone get away with headfucking a friend of his.

Josh looks at him helplessly, obviously speechless, and Bobby frowns, shakes his head, thinks at him hard enough that he suspects even a nontelepath would get the message: <They're just trying to throw you off your game. Don't let 'em.>

Out loud, he doesn't let the emotion show... he's playing for the cameras, after all, and more importantly he's determined not to make Josh look bad. This might be it, after all... the promotion test. Probably isn't, but might be. "Seems the grownups need us to bail 'em out again, partner. Why we ever let them out unsupervised is beyond me. Come on!" He places an ice-cold hand on the small of Josh's back and pushes him in the direction of the firefight, then speedskates after him, catching up almost instantly. "Bet I can take out more troopers than you can!" he calls out over his shoulder.

[Josh Dalton Worthington]

Jean pushes the door to the lab open and ushers Josh in, taking a seat behind one of the counters and pulling a laptop to her. She types on for a few seconds, then says, “Josh? There’s been an update to your file.” She taps a key, then her eyes blink and she grins.

“Marvel Boy? You decided to be Marvel Boy?” Jean’s voice is slightly disbelieving.

“Well - I figured if it was good enough for you, it’s good enough for me.” Josh laughs.

“Marvel Girl was definitely one of my poorer life choices… you’re set on this, aren’t you?” She closes the laptop screen.

Josh’s eyes narrow seriously. “It’s my duty as your protégé to remind you constantly of it in order to improve future behavior.”

She shoves at him over the lab counter. “Oh, shut up, you.”

As he looks at Bobby, this and a hundred other memories fly through his brain.

<They're just trying to throw you off your game. Don't let 'em.>

A mental voice breaks him out of his reverie. <Thanks, Bobby.> He feels Bobby’s cold hand on his back nudging him towards the battle.

This is going to turn out differently. Josh narrows his eyes, and concentrates, striding confidently towards the enemy. A trooper rises into the air with a stretch of each hand, and he sends them crashing into the ground with shattering force. Another spins and takes aim at him. Josh tugs another soldier into the bullets’ path.

He focuses his power onto a section of pipe overhead. It rips free, and he sends it cartwheeling into another. You can’t stop me! Josh continues carving a path to Scott and Jean.

[Bobby Drake]

Bobby regrets the bet almost as soon as it comes out of his mouth, as troopers start flying off in every direction. Sure, he'd intended to prod the guy into action, but he's never seen Josh this determined before... at this rate he'd take out all the troopers himself before Bobby even got into range.

The troopers start targetting more of their fire at Josh and Bobby, but Josh doesn't even slow down... just keeps marching forward as the bullets whine past him, using the soldiers themselves as shields.

Whoa. Sure, they're just sims... and armored, besides, even if they'd been real soldiers... but the look on Josh's face is creepy, and the crashing, crunching sounds the soldiers make as he smashes them aside with those Annakin Skywalker hand-gestures is even more so.

As, he realizes, is the analogy. Josh had been Jean's protege, after all, and she'd gone all Darth Vader in the end... was it possible Josh'd go down the same road? Would Logan end up having to kill him, too? Would Bobby? Bobby's already learned that it's not always easy to tell the difference between friends and enemies... even best friends. He begins to suspect that sometimes there may not be a difference.

Of course, he thinks as a bullet glances off the edge of his armored shoulder, sending ice-fragments in every direction, none of that matters if I don't stop woolgathering in the middle of a firefight. Head in the game, Drake! Worry about 'Dark Josh' some other time.

Bobby concentrates for a second and the ice on his right arm grows into a transparent foot-thick shield-wall about six feet square. Way too heavy to carry, of course, but he doesn't have to... the base of it is as slippery as the soles of his feet as he slides in between Josh and the troopers, and he concentrates on repairing cracks as high-velocity bullets smash into it. TK goes through walls, he figures... bullets don't.

"You keep takin' 'em down, big guy... I'll handle defense."

[Josh Dalton Worthington]

This is just a simulation. Josh shakes his head to clear it. Got a little into that, didn’t I? In the past, he’d found it easier to lift more weight, and faster, when he was angry, but his control went all to hell. Jean had said it had to do with the cortisol and epinephrine in your brain - getting mad increased your raw strength, but makes you unfocused. Dangerous. He tries not to think about Alcatraz.

He takes a breath to calm himself, and hears Bobby shout something as he creates an ice shield and stands in front of Josh.

>"You keep takin' 'em down, big guy... I'll handle defense."

<Ok. I got a little crazy there for a second… sorry.> Josh sends to Bobby as he rips the weapons out of the hands of a pair of troopers.

Scott’s firing on the other end, and Jean is flipping troops upside down with her telekinesis.

<Bobby, we’d better finish this fast.> Josh can see shots beginning to draw close to the students. Idea! He lifts a trooper into the air, and tips him on his side, using him to clothesline an entire group.

Josh mentally thanks Bobby for the cover. Telekinesis could be projected outward in a shield that was pretty effective, but high speed projectiles like bullets were just too fast to slow down in time.

“We’re almost there, you guys! Hold on!” He shouts down the corridor as the two of them advance.

[Bobby Drake]

> <Ok. I got a little crazy there for a second… sorry>

"Don't sweat it... you fit right in that way." For once, Bobby's tact filters kick in before he blurts out any Star Wars references, but the truth is he's glad to see Josh calm down a little, even if it does make him less effective in combat. One crazy telekinetic showdown per lifetime, that's the quota.

> <Bobby, we’d better finish this fast.>

Yeah. Great idea, except the DR must have some kind of armored-trooper clown car installed at the other end of that corridor, because they just keep coming as fast as the four X-Men (Well... three X-Men and Josh, technically, Bobby corrects himself, then OK, one X-Man and two X-Zombies and Josh, technically... and hopes Josh didn't pick any of that up, because ew, but come on is Bobby really supposed to forget that Jean and Scott are dead?...(Dammit, head in the fucking GAME, Drake!)) can take them down, and at this rate they'll just get worn down and careless, unless...

Mm. End of the corridor. Yeah, that'll work, if I can just get there.

As if on cue, Josh takes that moment to clothesline the group of troopers between him and the end of the corridor. "Dude, you rock! Keep these bozos busy for five seconds and I'll plug the reinforcements!"

Without waiting for assent he breaks his arm free from the shield wall and ducks around it, speedskating halfway down the corridor to build up speed and then crouching down into a ball as he slides the rest of the way, knocking two of the still-standing troopers out of the way like tenpins, and skidding mostly to a stop just before bumping up hard against the other end of the corridor.

He's a little disappointed when he gets there... he keeps hoping he'll move fast enough one day to catch the DR simulators setting up a new line-of-sight holoarray, but that day is not today. Oh well... doesn't matter. He ignores the troopers behind him, figuring Josh can handle them, and concentrates on the hallway around the corner.

OK, Drake... FAST! Bobby's been practicing a lot with large-scale high-speed ice formation. It still gives him one hell of a headache, like eating ice-cream too fast, but he's gotten pretty good at it anyway. So a few seconds later what used to be a hallway opening out to soldiers' quarters is filled with approximately six hundred cubic feet of ice, and Bobby feels like he's been kicked in the head by a mule. Fair trade... bullets would hurt more.

[Josh Dalton Worthington]

Josh catches a bit of signal leakage from Bobby - something about an “armored-trooper clown car”. He grins for a second, imagining it, and then sees Bobby begin skating down the hall.

>"Dude, you rock! Keep these bozos busy for five seconds and I'll plug the reinforcements!"

“Be careful, Bobbs.” He hazards a glance over his shoulder. No one is heroically charging from around the corner, so the Danger Room must only be generating sims from that intersection.

The entire hallway shakes. Something isn’t right. Concrete chunks shower the area.

Six troopers stand between him and Jean, Bobby, and Scott. Let’s make this one Storm records for class.

Things seem to happen in slow motion. Two charge him and they’re promptly thrust into the exposed piping in the ceiling. He leaves them to dangle there. Four to go. He ducks behind Bobby’s ice shield and lifts one into the air.

<Mr. Summers!> He sees a fractional tilt of Scott’s head, and the other man lets loose with an optical blast, knocking him clear out of the air. Three left. A sudden thought leads him to lift Bobby’s ice shield into the air, tossing it towards one of the soldiers. Bobby, what do you put into this thing? It’s damn heavy! The effort leaves him with a headache, but utterly crushes the troop. Two. The farther troop takes a potshot at him, but he tugs the man’s comrade into the line of fire, dropping him out of the fight.

One more to go. He shoots again - dammit! - and the bullets are flying at him. Josh extends his telekinetic reach, hammering at them with jabs to knock them off course. It’s much, much easier to make gunshots go wide with TK than stop them. One grazes his shoulder, causing him to hiss in pain. He rips the trooper’s weapon out of his hands and clubs him in the back of the head with it. Done.

He runs over to Bobby.

“Nice job, man. Bobby Drake, superhuman ice machine.” He smiles, clapping Bobby on the shoulder.

Jean looks over at them. This is really, really weird. He hadn’t seen Jean since Alkali. Her stay at the mansion had been too brief for him to see her when she had returned as Phoenix - which was fine with him. He preferred to keep her memory intact within him as something other than a raging victim of multiple personality disorder.

“Good job, guys. Storm and Nightcrawler are inside Cerebro, and are trying to free the Professor. Once we get him out, we’ve got to leave for the Blackbird as soon as possible. The base is crumbling.” She exchanges a look with Scott. “Collateral damage. We’re almost through this.”

Josh looks over at Bobby. <Some more permanently than others, though.> He’s a little surprised that he can joke at it. Maybe being able to “live” through this himself wasn’t such a bad idea.

[Bobby Drake]

> "Nice job, man. Bobby Drake, superhuman ice machine."

Bobby grins. "Yup. Kicks bad-guy ass and is handy at summer barbecues, too. How anybody gets by without me, I'll never understand."

He nods more seriously in response to "Jean's" summary of the next phase of the sim, then startles a bit at Josh's mental comment... not at the comment itself, really, so much as the tone with which he delivers it. Josh had just made a joke about Jean's death. Not a funny joke, granted, but still, wow. Maybe this crazy sim wasn't such a dumb idea, after all.

Bobby counts heads quickly, blinking a little when he sees himself in the group of bewildered-looking students. Funny. Guess they forgot to eliminate me from the sim when I joined Josh.

Of course he doesn't see John. Nobody but John and Magneto know what really happened between them that day, but the X-Men had made a fairly plausible reconstruction afterwards from investigating the evidence. He wonders, if he took off now and headed towards that helicopter, if he could talk John out of going.

He blinks. That has got to be the stupidest damn idea ever. It's a game, Drake, not a fucking time-machine. He doesn't ask himself whether he'd actually have been able to talk John out of leaving even if he had been there. He doesn't have to... recent events have proven how well that works.

Besides, the whole point of this setup has got to be Jean's sacrificial stunt with the dam and the plane, and Bobby intends to be there when that happens.

He'd never said this out loud, and he never would, but ever since he heard the report he thought Jean had been pretty dumb. Storm could have kept her safely off the ground while she lifted the plane. What happened to that whole teamwork thing they spent so much time talking about?

Well, from the way he'd heard the story, she probably had a lot on her mind then... maybe too much to think about strategy. And maybe so does Josh, now. So maybe it's up to Bobby to keep his head in the game.

And hell, if it's a choice between trying to rescue a simulation of a long-gone friend who doesn't want his help anyway, and helping a real flesh-and-blood friend here and now... well, that's no choice at all.

So he stays right where he is, and tries to ignore the voice in the back of his mind that tells him he's betraying John yet again. Because he's not, and he's tired of beating himself up about it.

"OK, then, Marvel Girl. How long are they gonna take?"

[Josh Dalton Worthington]

Jean appears to arch a brow at Bobby’s use of her ill-conceived codename, then closes her eyes and raises a hand to her temple. Josh shakes his head. She has a sense of humor? She's a hologram. Storm really needs a hobby.

“The Professor’s no longer connected to Cerebro. Hopefully they’ll be out in a second - we need to get ready to move.” Pulverized concrete punctuates her statement with a crash. The quaking becomes worse.

Josh folds his arms across his chest and looks around. I guess I’m gonna see what happened outside, then. He wasn’t too sure he wanted to. Maybe I can save her. If Alkali never happened, that would mean that the Professor and Scott would be alive as well.

Moron. It’s way too easy to get caught up in a Danger Room situation. More than once in his training, he’d failed a critical objective, or a teammate had been “eliminated”, and his emotions had been very, very real - at least until the holoprojectors were turned off.

Suddenly, the Professor, Ororo, and Nightcrawler appear in a puff of blue smoke.

“We have to get out of here!” SimOroro loops one of the Professor’s arms over her shoulder and starts carrying him along with Kurt. “The whole dam is collapsing.”

Jean speaks up. “Josh, you and Bobby go ahead and make sure our path is secure. We’re going to be moving a bit slower.” She indicates her injured leg, then adjusts the arm she has around Scott.

“Ok. Meet you at the Blackbird.” He looks to Bobby, and begins to run down the hallway.

I wonder how all of this is going to turn out. Is this rigged, or can we “win”? Maybe all this is supposed to show me is that I couldn’t have done anything to help her even if I was there. He winces. Bobby said that Jean lifted the Blackbird with her TK because the engines were offline. If I have to do that, it’s going to give me one killer headache. He wasn’t even sure he could lift something that heavy.

Josh looks over at Bobby. “Is any of this kind of creepy to you? It’s bad enough for me, but this has to be giving you one hell of a feeling of déjà vu.” He hesitates. “Do you think we’re going to run into John?”

[Bobby Drake]

Bobby tries not to grin too obviously at the "We're going to be moving a bit slower" comment. Of course the sim is designed so that the players get to do the fun stuff rather than relying on NPCs... what would be the point otherwise?

But Storm gets annoyed whenever he treats her sims as games, so he keeps his mouth shut about it. He annoys her enough as it is, and the last thing he wants is to lose Danger Room access. It may be a game, but it's one of the best games in town.

Anyway. It's time for level 2. Bobby starts skating after Josh, keeping his speed down so they stay together.

> "Is any of this kind of creepy to you? It’s bad enough for me,
> but this has to be giving you one hell of a feeling of déjà vu.
> Do you think we’re going to run into John?"

Bobby looks over his shoulder, surprised. Have I been thinking too loudly again? No, I don't think so... his mind is probably just running on the same track. Or, well, parallel tracks, anyway. "Yeah, I dunno... I was wondering about that myself," he replies, trying to sound casual. "But it doesn't matter." <It's just a game>, he thinks hard at Josh, not wanting the recorders to pick that up and forgetting for just a moment how much harder it is to conceal true meanings over telepathic links. <And it's not like I was able to change his mind, anyway.>

Which, he realizes abruptly, gives away more than he'd intended to, and he hastily changes the subject. "You know... you move too damned slow. You think, if I slicked up the floor a bit, you could slide along it faster by pushing with your TK?"

[Josh Dalton Worthington]

><It's just a game. And it's not like I was able to change his mind, anyway.>

Josh is slightly startled at Bobby’s response. He’d known deep down that he wasn’t the only one left heartbroken by others’ actions at Alkali Lake - but John had become somewhat of a taboo topic since then. This implies that Bobby has tried to change John’s mind, though. Recently? The emotion flooding in through their mental link seems to indicate so. Something to file away for later, I guess.

>"You know... you move too damned slow. You think, if I slicked up the floor a bit, you could slide along it faster by pushing with your TK?"

“I can try. Though I’m assuming the bottoms of my boots aren’t as slippery as your feet.” He gives Bobby a grin. “We’re being recorded. If I fall on my ass, I guess that’s just too bad.” He leaps into the air, being careful not to crack his head on the low ceiling. <Here we go!>

Bobby makes it look easy. We’ll see how this goes…

[Bobby Drake]

"Don't sweat the boots. I'll handle the slick, you just keep your balance and push!" He concentrates for a second and the hallway floor around them is covered with extra-slippery ice, just like what he normally coats the bottoms of his feet with. It's trickier than speed-skating, but that's probably just because he's not used to it.

Josh stumbles for a moment as he lands on the ice-slick, but Bobby was expecting that and grabs his arm for a second to help him get his balance.

"OK, then, let's move!"

Ironically, Bobby stumbles a little bit himself as he gets his momentum going... it's not quite the same rhythm as when his feet are slippery instead of the floor, and putting too much weight on his right heel still hurts from that damned splinter, but he catches himself and starts to accelerate down the hall, careful to extend the ice-slick out at the same rate he's moving.

It's neat, though. He wonders whether he could build a ramp under his feet this way, to do jumps and stuff... or even build an ice-bridge under his feet and kinda fly through the air that way! That would be totally cool. Except for how it's probably physically impossible... it'd collapse under its own weight! Bobby's no physicist, but he knows more about the tensile strength of ice than most people, and he dismisses it as a stupid idea.

[Josh Dalton Worthington]

Josh regains his balance fairly well when he makes the transition to ice. It's not like anything he's ever done before, but mostly it's just sustained telekinetic control. Every so often he has to swerve around broken concrete. Not going to lie though - without my TK I would be lying broken on the ground. I haven’t gone ice skating for a long, long time. He makes a mental note to brush up on winter sports in order to stay on his toes around Bobby.

The two of them make good time down the long corridor. We have to be pretty far ahead of Jean and the rest. Quickly, the corridor turns into a room with a small door. Josh begins to squirm a little mentally. They have quite a bit of momentum going - it’s going to be hard to stop in time. On second thought…

“Bobby, jump!” He uses his TK to rip the door off its hinges, dropping it flat onto the ground. Snow blows in from outside. Using what Warren taught him earlier that morning, he propels himself across the room in a jump and sticks the landing solidly on top of the door. Their forward momentum sets the door into motion, and they begin sliding out into a courtyard.

“You may be the king of ice-skating, Drake, but I win the gold at snowboarding!” Josh crows as they skid to a stop outside. He looks around, and sees the dam in the distance, across the valley. The Blackbird is parked a short ways off next to some trees. I wonder if Storm has Johnny skulking away somewhere. He cranes his neck in interest.

(totally OOC - X-Men IV: The Winter Olympics!!)