Horror Zone (Yellow)

[Josh Dalton Worthington]

The Horror Zone is centered on an abandoned mansion and its outbuildings, including a graveyard. Visibility may be poor, since the setting includes what was programmed in as a ‘dark and stormy night’. (Ororo wasn’t amused.) Undead zombies roam the graveyard and buildings freely. Players might run into simulated stereotypical horror-movie victims. They have been programmed realistically, including coding for investigating dark rooms and splitting up from the safety of groups.

In this area, the flag is being ‘carried’ by one of the victims. You must escort the victim safely to your base to succeed. In the event the character is eliminated, he or she respawns back in the Horror area.

[Laurie Collins]

Laurie winces slightly at the expression she catches on Matthew’s face before he disappears and the quick slumping of the shoulders. Maybe he actually wanted to be on my team after all…or any team at least. That really didn’t work out well, Matthew probably won’t enjoy this at all and neither will Danny while people who would- John gets a sidelong glance at that point- got picked for teams.

“Yellow Team Captain is our own wondrous Wallflower, leading the lamentably uncodenamed Dr. Storm and the redoubtable Rogue!”

she giggles a little nervously at the alliteration- while she knows most Institute residents find Dr. McCoy mildly exasperating he does have his moments. Or maybe it’s just that I’m sort of teetering on the brink of hysteria… what was I thinking? I should have volunteered to switch places with John since he was supposed to be a captain anyway or maybe Matthew, I could have just wandered around being nervous to do that job…

Whirrrrrrrr Laurie jumps, jerked out of her thoughts and then barely stops herself from yelping as she realizes the scene around them has completely changed- she, Dr. Storm, and Rogue are now standing on the front lawn of a ramshackle house that looks like it was pulled straight from a Stephen King book with lightning crackling overhead and zombies (zombies?!) milling about in the distance. But that doesn’t explain that…whirrrrr… noise does it? It sounded sort of like- and then she really does yelp as a man in a ski mask jumps between them, brandishing a chainsaw covered in dried blood (the source of the whirr) and laughing maniacally. She makes a motion as if to skitter away before pulling up abruptly as she remembers that nothing in her own section is actually going to go after her. Okay, good captaining tactic number one. Pay attention to what’s going on around you and refrain from senseless and contagious panic, she thinks ruefully, looking over apologetically at her teammates as she gets her pheromones under control for the moment.

“Umm…okay…well.” she says quietly, talking more to her shoes than the other two mutants. “Um, obviously there wasn’t much time to develop a strategy but I guess…well Dr. Storm maybe you should stay here and guard the flag? I don’t know how many of those invisible barrier-things you can maintain at once but do you think you could throw one up around the civilian with the flag? After you find him of course…um…oh and, if you can maintain more, just throw some random ones up around the area, in front of doorways and such. That’ll be unsettling I think? And you can be invisible too obviously…and um… Rogue and I will go after the flags.” she turns to look at the other student, “Any ideas as to how you’d like to go about that?”

[Rogue]

[OOC: Hopefully this isn't sucky - lost the start of a post I'd been working on in PA, and can't remember what it said... but yeah, whoo! Let the games begin!]

Rogue isn't quite sure she likes that she and John are on seperate teams - makes it really hard to make sure he doesn't get himself hurt or killed that way - but she makes a point of not thinking on it (or worrying on it) too long, because surely he'll be fine - it's just a Danger Room simmulation...

Of course, when the surrounding shape themselves, she's a lot less inclined to brush it off as just a simmulation... She's sort of looking around in a daze, eyes flicking over the zombies, the graveyard sort of in the distance, but not too far off, the mansion and the stormy sky and the --

The sound of a chainsaw startles her, and her head jerks around to where Laurie and the newly-arrived chainsaw-weildling psycho is, and there's a burst of panic for a second (irrational? Because weren't they safe from the things in their own 'worlds'?), before it fades out, and she remembers Laurie's powers (and feels a little bad that she'd not remembered in the first place) and tries to calm down the rest of the way...

“Umm…okay…well. Um, obviously there wasn’t much time to develop a strategy but I guess…well Dr. Storm maybe you should stay here and guard the flag? I don’t know how many of those invisible barrier-things you can maintain at once but do you think you could throw one up around the civilian with the flag? After you find him of course…um…oh and, if you can maintain more, just throw some random ones up around the area, in front of doorways and such. That’ll be unsettling I think? And you can be invisible too obviously…and um… Rogue and I will go after the flags.”[/color]

For someone shy, she seems to talk a lot, but Rogue doesn't actually mind too much. She flashes a small smile and a slight nod of agreement to the plan. She's a lot more suited for offensive play than defensive, at least power-wise.

“Any ideas as to how you’d like to go about that?”[/color]

Rogue half-shrugs slightly. "I could give y'a lift along with me? Would go fast'r tha' way. Not in the Neutral Zone maybe, but evr'where else. Pro'lly safer, too..." She glances around again, "Which way's out, though?"

[Laurie Collins]

"I could give y'a lift along with me? Would go fast'r tha' way. Not in the Neutral Zone maybe, but evr'where else. Pro'lly safer, too..."

“Right, right that makes sense, good plan.” Laurie mutters in what she hopes is a thoughtful and non-panicky voice, feeling a sort of giddy relief that Rogue and Dr. Storm, who is nodding and starting off in search of the civilian-victim-flag-holder with a not unkind mocking salute in parting, haven’t just laughed in her face and stalked off in their own directions in response to her nervous and probably incompetent sounding babbling. Then again it’s not so good that neither of them have dismissed me and just started saying what to do… I thought for sure one of them would get exasperated and take over but Rogue seems about as quiet as me and Dr. Storm is just sticking with the rules. “Okay, so, we should go-“

"Which way's out, though?"

That brings her up short with a blush at this obvious oversight and she spins in a slow circle twisting her fingers together nervously as visions of getting lost in her own section until the Danger Room takes her out of her misery dance through her imagination. Just as she’s about to abandon whatever shred of captain-y confidence she may have retained and admit to the older girl that she has no idea which way out is a shrill voice rings out from behind their group.

“Ohmigod!”

Laurie whirls to face the owner of the cry and blinks rapidly at the blonde teen standing before them dressed in what could have been a practical jeans and tank-top ensemble before someone took a pair of scissors to it and removed about ninety percent of it then added a pair of spiked heels.

“Uhm hel-“ Laurie starts but the tentative greeting is cut off by the simulated girl’s continued chatter.

“Are you guys here for the party? Of course you are! You know about it right? Jimmy’s brother found this old ritual somewhere so we’re all going to go to different dark rooms of the house and chant it! That’ll be lots of fun even though nothing will happen because there’s no such thing as ghosts and zombies and demons and people mutated by radioactive waste and the vengeful spirits of mass murdering chainsaw and axe maniacs! Are you coming?”

Well that was rather…expository Laurie thinks, more than a bit bowled over, before gathering herself to respond. “Ah, no, we were, um, leaving actually could you tell me which way…?” the girl, looking rather disappointed in them points towards the woods.

“Straight through on the path go through the old cellar door, if you really[u/] want to miss this.” she says before sashaying off towards the dark wooden double doors of the mansion, pausing a couple times to giggle and yank the heel of her shoe out of the muddy ground as she goes.

“Okay… here we go then I guess…” Laurie mutters, giving Rogue a wan smile, “Um, I guess your boyfriend is on the Red team so you might not want to start there and my pheromones probably won’t work on cartoons so I guess the, um,” she casts about before obviously picking at random, “…Fantasy Zone might be fun? So we could make for the blue section once we get out?” Probably no need to ask the zombies and ghosts and whatnot to guard the area since they'll pretty much attack anything but us anyway...

[Rogue]

She almost feels bad for bringing up the issue of direction at the look on Laurie’s face – she hadn’t meant to push her already seemingly-fragile confidence down any, it’d just sort of come to mind that it wasn’t like there was a sign pointing the way out, and it being horror-themed she was hardly expecting it to be obvious…

“Ohmigod!”

Rogue spins again to face this new voice. And who else but the stereotypical female-victim – scantily clad and blond, no less…

“Uhm hel-“

“Are you guys here for the party? Of course you are! You know about it right? Jimmy’s brother found this old ritual somewhere so we’re all going to go to different dark rooms of the house and chant it! That’ll be lots of fun even though nothing will happen because there’s no such thing as ghosts and zombies and demons and people mutated by radioactive waste and the vengeful spirits of mass murdering chainsaw and axe maniacs! Are you coming?”

She arches an eyebrow and does her best to stifle a giggle, shooting a glance over towards Laurie as if asking if she really just said all that (and in one breath no less!), before glancing back towards said girl and trying to maintain something of a serious and unamused look that’s still passably friendly.

“Ah, no, we were, um, leaving actually could you tell me which way…?”[/color]

“Straight through on the path go through the old cellar door, if you really want to miss this.”

Rogue would have rathered stick around and watch, simply for the sheer amusement of watching the world of horror movies collide... Though, actually, thinking about it, she doesn’t know if it would be something she’d like to watch after all, seeing as horror movies themselves can be a little …disturbing… and in person it would be many times worse… So, no, never mind that, she decides, and turns to look back at Laurie, waiting for orders or direction of some kind.

“Okay… here we go then I guess… Um, I guess your boyfriend is on the Red team so you might not want to start there and my pheromones probably won’t work on cartoons so I guess the, um …Fantasy Zone might be fun? So we could make for the blue section once we get out?”

The mention of John gets a slight shift in expression – not too much, though, and it’s more like slipping into unreadable, rather than anything tell-tale. Part of her is tempted towards indignation – she’s perfectly capable of being on opposing teams with John and still encountering him right? – and the other half is in complete agreement because even though they spar in training sessions and things sometimes, it’s never really serious and it’s more playful than anything, and nothing ever actually depended on their fighting (and no, she’s not thinking that she’s glad she never had to fight him while he was in the Brotherhood, because even not in this dating-thing she wouldn’t have been able to …definitely not thinking about that right now. Or ever).

But in the end she just settles for a nod, and a quick half-shrug. ”Soun’s good t’me.” Smile is back to the reassuring-bright it had been before, and she glances around again. ”Alright, off w’go then I guess…” She easily picks up Laurie (and she thinks that even not as strong as she is with these powers, the other girl would have weighed next-to-nothing…), and starts upwards.

”...Y’might not wanna look down, hon.”

[Laurie Collins]

>>”Alright, off w’go then I guess…”

And with that Rogue sweeps her off her feet (ha ha she thinks wryly, having maintained the presence of mind to laugh at verbal puns) and they’re airborne. Mutants definitely have less compunction about just hauling you up without so much as asking, she decides, trying to hold as still as possible. To be fair I agreed to flying earlier but still, I’ve been picked up more at the Institute than since I was two.

>>”...Y’might not wanna look down, hon.”

“Ohh I’m in no hurry to do that.” Laurie mutters in response, squeezing her eyes shut for good measure and keeping them closed until she has solid ground underneath her feet once again. Once reassured that she’s standing independently she looks around and easily spots the cellar door they’re supposed to crawl through to reach the Neutral Zone. What the simulated horror movie victim had forgotten to mention in her description is that the rotting old-fashioned wood cellar doors have been covered with maggots squirming through holes in the boards and spiders with bodies the size of her thumb clustering in a veritable metropolis of cobwebs.

“Wonder if those are real kinds of spiders or if Dr. McCoy just programmed in some generic-looking spider-ish things” she mutters, reaching out to one, then obviously thinking better of it and blushing. “Um, not that it matters… we should get going. Flags to capture and all that.” she adds in a sheepish mutter before opening the cellar door and extending one leg into the dark unknown then pausing for a moment and looking back at Rogue, “So our strategy is, uhm, run reallyreally fast towards the blue-gate-thing.” she reiterates, winces, and then drops out of sight into the Neutral Zone…

((picks up in Neutral Zone unless Miss. Rogue wants to reply here I s'pose ))

[Pyro]

--[Dropping in via Acme Portal from the Red Zone]—-

Travelling by portal is… different. Novel, some might say. John’d probably have a more colourful choice of adjective if he wasn’t wasting all his best options on the floor he’s just been unceremoniously dumped onto after being spat out of the swirling psychedelic spiral. One last 2d-flip wouldn’t have been so bad, because fuck, this hurts…

”Ohmigod! It worked. It totally worked!” … as does the shrill shriek coming from – wouldn’t you just know it? – a scantily clad blonde, in hideously impractical heels, babbling at a million miles an hour over a more general background hum of similarly expressed sentiment, the buzz of Holy shit and How the hell. ”See Jimmy, I knew it’d work”

”Bullshit. “[/i] – that, he guesses, would be Jimmy – ”You said nothing would happen”[/i]

As the argument between the two rolls on, John pulls himself up, trying to get his head around what the hell is going on. One, he’s in… some sort of creepy old shack, lit by a ridiculous number of candles which flicker in the ghosting, whistling breeze. Two, even once his dizziness dies back and he’s stopped seeing two-three-two-many Jimmys and Blondes there are, it seems, quite a few of these impossibly attractive, impractically semi-naked teenagers in wherever this is. And three, when he tries to move over to get some answers out of them, he… can’t. Some sort of invisible and highly unamusing forcefield has him trapped in… a chalk triangle? Seriously, what the fuck?

”Greetings… demon.” Might-Be-Jimmy says, not without tangible nerves, approaching the edge of the triangle. In his hand he has an old book, the classic ‘Ancient Grimoire / Necrommicon / Whatever’, looking uncomfortably like it’s bound in the flesh of something more human than normal leather, so John’s guessing this is the Yellow Zone. But… demon? What? ”You’ve been summoned and…”[/i] – Might-Be-Jimmy flicks through the book, as if consulting the rite within, running his finger beneath the words as he shakily speaks – ”And we b-bind you to stay in p-pleasing form and… n-not to harm any of us, or anyone we know, or anyone we don’t want you to, and…”[/i]

”Fine” John cuts in. He’s seen more than enough crappy horror films over the years to know how this amateur Warlock thing works, and seriously, the thing with Danger Room sims? It’s better to just give up and play along. Not that that helped him much in the Red Zone, because that was just plain fucked, but here at least he’s got some sort of familiar turf advantage. Doesn’t make the words any easier to come out with, but he’s keeping his fingers crossed Hank’s taken player awkwardness into account. ”I’m bound. Whatever...”

”Oh.” Might-Be-Jimmy’s taken aback. Seems he wasn’t expecting to summon a co-operative demon. ”Right. Well…””[/i] – he scans further down the instructions, flips a page – ”Name your terms, demon…”

”It’s John”

”… what?”[/i]

”John… Just… fuck, you don’t have to call me demon, okay?”

”John’s not very… demonic”

He ponders that for a moment – she’s right, of course, and he should have taken the time to think of something better but… ”Your stupid human tongues can’t handle my real name…” he smirks darkly.

”Okay” Might-Be-Jimmy cuts in, anxious. ”No angering the… Don’t piss off John. And the terms?”[/i]

In retrospect, he’ll probably come to wish that he’d picked something else. Something simple, like ‘escort me to the exit’. Wasn’t like he ever planned on playing this stupid game anyway. But… well, he’s here now. No sign of the zone’s home team – and wasn’t Laurie eliminated a while back? – so… it seems like a good idea at the time, okay? The smirk deepens, darkens, his eyes shining in the candlelight, the general darkness going some small way towards covering up how stilted the awkward speech sits. Which doesn’t make it any the less a hideously long shot, but he’s praying it works.

”There’s… erm… an ancient prophecy. Once in a generation, special child, dark powers, bla bla. Usual ancient shit. You get the drift… So, which one of you is the one known as the… um… the Flag Bearer?”

[Bobby Drake]

(( OOC: Coming in from Green Zone… keeping things moving along. Hope nobody minds. We can play out the intervening Green and Neutral Zone scenes if we want to. ))

On the one hand, Bobby’s surprised by how well the double-bladed lightsaber-staff thingie works in the Danger Room – more than once, after slicing the barrels off machine-guns or chopping killer robots in half, he’d decided to get one for field use before remembering that they don’t actually work in real life.

On the other hand, he’s still kicking himself mentally for having tried to block flying sawblades with the damned thing... it may be a “real” lightsaber, but he’s far from being a “real” Jedi, as the still-bleeding slice across his shoulder testifies. That might be a cool sim to build someday, though, he considers idly before squashing the idea… Last thing I need is more opportunities to get fantasy confused with reality. Seems like the borderline’s pretty shaky as it is.

So he’s of two minds when Josh leads them through the Yellow Gate – on the one hand the thing could come in handy; on the other hand he doesn’t want to be distracted from using his own powers, which is really the point of this little exercise. He resolves the dilemma by turning the staff off and tossing it to Sheppard before transitioning to ice-form… the guy doesn’t really have physical powers (well, except for that unexpected teleport trick), so that’s probably where it’ll do the most good.

He’s surprised when the gash in his shoulder seals up into nearly flawless ice during his transition, though. There’s a lot of things about this new ice-form ability of his that Bobby doesn’t understand yet, and what happens when he transitions with a significant injury is one of them, but that’s twice now he’s seemed to heal damage by transitioning. He wonders how far that ability extends… not that he’s eager to test its limits.

Anyway… as advertised, Yellow Zone is stitched out of classic B-movie horror tropes. Bobby’s not a huge horror fan, so it’s not a genre he knows much about… he hasn’t even read any Lovecraft. But he gets the general idea – undead, ghosts, demons, innocent possessed virgins, Old Gods, black magic, things jumping out of nowhere, blood and gore. Which is to say, lots of dangerous things it’s OK to shatter into tiny shards, a few that aren’t, innocent bystanders in the middle of it all, and a high mindfuck-to-physical-threat ratio where lots of things aren’t what they seem.

OK, so let’s start by not taking anything for granted. He looks over his teammates carefully, by eye and thermal sense, paying particular attention to recent events… the small tear on Josh’s boot, the way Jake’s hair got messed up, etc. "OK… I think we’re all really us… but maybe you two should check the brainwaves just to be sure, huh? It’d be just like Hank to pull a fast one before we’ve even gotten our bearings. "

Not that there’s much “bearing” to get. They’re standing at the gates of a sprawling decrepit mansion, complete with dark overcast sky and periodic lightning-bolts and over-the-top organ music coming from… um… no, that must be background music, he realizes with a scowl. " Man, I hope there weren’t any important international treaties being signed while Hank was busy designing this thing…"

As if in response, a strong wind starts blowing through the leafless tree branches, dropping the ambient temperature into the low 40s or so… probably not enough to bother Josh or Sheppard too much in their uniforms, and of course Bobby doesn’t feel it at all, but he mutters a quiet "Sorry…" anyway. The wind doesn’t change, though. Visibility sucks, but he can make out the outlines of what is probably a graveyard off to one side of the building, and what might be a carriage-house off to the other.

"OK, so… Laurie’s been eliminated, that leaves Rogue and Dr. Storm, assuming they’re still here. I should be able to sense her heat-patterns, even if she’s invisible, though I don’t really know all her powers. Other than that I guess we just – crap! " The figures seem to come out of nowhere – humanoid, misshapen, shuffling zombies, unbelievably ugly and, Bobby’s guessing, incredibly foul-smelling. "Incoming! We’re surrounded!" He’s not sure why he’s bothering to mention the fact – they’re entirely visible and not terribly sneaky; their surprise was more due to being concealed to start with, and cold-blooded enough not to show on his heat-sense, and presumably mindless enough not to set off Josh or Sheppard’s alarms. Habit, I guess, he thinks as he throws up an ice-wall to cover their backs, trusting his teammates to keep the frontal wave at bay for at least a few seconds.

[Warren Worthington III]

(( Appearing via Acme Portal ))

As Warren is unceremoniously dumped on the floor, he makes a mental note to check the Danger Room code for that “portal trip” – it had been impressively disorienting even for him, and he’s not easy to disorient in mid-flight. Warren suspects Hank is doing something clever with subsonics and optical illusions. Regardless, it takes him a moment to regain his bearings.

Ordinarily, the dozen or so attractive and implausibly underdressed teenagers crammed into this dimly candle-lit space would be the first thing to catch his attention once he recovers, but in this particular instance that’s trumped by the way he’s been uncomfortably stuffed into a an invisible bubble not quite large enough to hold both of its residents… the other, he realizes, being Allerdyce.

"Right. Of course the convenient portal leads into a trap. I should have expected that," he grumbles as he twists around to get his feet on the ground. The process is awkward, uncomfortable, and rather more intimate than he’d ever anticipated becoming with the Institute’s resident pyromaniac, and Warren adds this indignity to his list of things Hank will have to pay for when all this is over.

”Like, omigod! We summoned another one! We’re like, really good at this!”
”Don’t be stupid, Lisa – that’s no demon! Look at his wings! That’s an angel!” [/i]
”I am not stupid, Jimmy! They’re both trapped by that, that demon barrier thing you got from the book, right? So that makes them both demons!”

"Remember your Milton, kids… the difference is more political than genetic." Warren’s didacticism is rewarded by a room full of puzzled expressions, and he can’t help but laugh. "Milton? Paradise Lost? Good Lord, what are they teaching in holographic public school these days?" More quietly, he mumbles into Allerdyce’s ear "I propose we cooperate until we get free of this containment field... the last thing we need is to fight in here until Ororo and Rasputin squeeze in to join us. Agreed?"

[Josh Dalton Worthington]

> "OK… I think we’re all really us… but maybe you two should check the brainwaves just to be sure, huh? It’d be just like Hank to pull a fast one before we’ve even gotten our bearings. "

Josh reaches out briefly with his powers to touch Jake and Bobby’s minds. Immediately, Jake’s strong mental presence - stronger than his own - reverberates back at him through space. Okay, good. No way that’s not Jake. A brief ruffle through Bobby’s surface thoughts confirms that he, too is who he says he is.

“Everything looks good, Bobby… we ought to find that hostage now.” He shivers involuntarily as an icy gust blows through the area. He starts picking his way up the road towards the largest building in the zone. Hank had done a pretty good job - graveyard, carriage-house, spooky mansion… it was almost like playing Resident Evil 4. Maybe that wasn’t the best comparison?

> "OK, so… Laurie’s been eliminated, that leaves Rogue and Dr. Storm, assuming they’re still here. I should be able to sense her heat-patterns, even if she’s invisible, though I don’t really know all her powers. Other than that I guess we just – crap! "

“With any luck, they’re out looking for one of the other flags - - - ” In the darkness, one of what Bobby was apparently yelling about rears up in front of him, from behind a large tombstone. Automatically, Josh flicks out a blast of telekinesis, which lifts the creature up and back, smashing it into another tombstone.

Josh looks around, and discovers their group is surrounded. “Zombies? When are we ever going to encounter zombies in the field?” He takes a few steps in the opposite direction, pressing his back up against Jake’s. As the zombies get closer, Josh lifts them with his powers and catapults them across the arena. Slowly, though, the sheer numbers begin to turn the battle against them.

“We’re getting nowhere! Run for the house as soon as there’s an opening!” He levitates a fallen log and sweeps it like a bat across their intended escape path.

[Bobby Drake]

> " Zombies? When are we ever going to encounter zombies in the field? "

Bobby can’t quite stifle his laugh at the outrage in Josh’s voice. "Yeah! Because, you know, (sporfle) evil Jedi are a constant – " he’s interrupted by a pair of zombies coming around the corner of the ice-wall behind him, and backs a step away from them as he freezes their bodies solid " – menace, but zombies are just --." he almost shrieks when a clammy hand grabs his shoulder, but reflex breaks the grip (and, rather disgustingly, the arm) and sends his would-be brain-eater shattering to the ground as another pair pop up right next to him and are sent flying off by Josh’s powers" – silly. And, thanks. Fuck, how many of these things are there?"

> " We’re getting nowhere! Run for the house as soon as there’s an opening!"

Watching Josh spin textbooks and juggle coffee mugs with his mind, Bobby sometimes forgets the sheer power the guy controls. And then come moments like this one, with some invisible giant batting the zombies out of their way, when he remembers exactly why his ex-roommate gets listed with the heavy hitters. "Nice! Remind me not to piss you off, OK?"

As soon as the path to the house is cleared, Bobby takes off speed-skating for the front door, raising ice-walls on either side of the path as he does so. That won’t stop them, but it’ll slow them down. He doesn’t slow down as he approaches the front door, just crouches down into a more compact position and throws up an ice-shield in front of him as he smashes into it.

Or intends to, anyway. Behind his ice-shield, Bobby doesn’t actually see the front door mysteriously swing open in front of him, or close behind him, and he doesn’t see the mantelpiece on the far side of the parlor spin around him as he cannonballs through it. All he knows is that, instead of the crash he was bracing for, he just coasts for about twenty feet and finds himself in a pitch-black space, completely alone.

"Ah… lovely… frozen treats! " comes a hissing voice, echoing off the walls so that Bobby can’t tell where it’s coming from. Not completely alone, then. And no body heat, just like the zombies. I’m beginning to hate the undead…

[Josh Dalton Worthington]

Josh overturns a farm wagon with his powers, and crouches next to it. We’ve gotta get out of here!

> "Nice! Remind me not to piss you off, OK?"

He looks over at Bobby, grinning. “You won’t do that more than once…” He blinks innocently. “Just kiddin - - - yaaaa!” Josh yelps as one of the zombies swings a pitchfork in his direction. It catches him in the shoulder, and rips through his suit with a sharp dig. Josh throws a hand out, and the offending zombie hurtles across the yard, smashing into the rock bluffs that border it. "Ouch."

“Bob, we should…” He looks over, and Bobby’s already skating towards the house. Jake, where are you? His mentor is lost somewhere in the chaotic melee - but he hasn’t felt any overt mental distress from Jake, so presumably he’s made it to a safe spot. With a final glance, Josh charges up the path and onto the porch, just in time to see Bobby slide into the building.

“Hey, wait up!” Josh rushes into the foyer, and the double doors close with a clack. The sounds of the battle suddenly vanish, leaving silence. The room is large, complete with a double staircase leading to balcony overlooking the entire room. Bobby is nowhere to be found.

“Ah, more young blood…” A sinister voice, sounding amused, echoes through the hall.

Josh around, rattled. It’s just a simulation… Unfortunately (or not?) the voice doesn’t present itself, and he begins to hunt through the nearby rooms for Bobby.

[Bobby Drake]

(( kinda-sorta content advisory thing? ))

When the first tentacle twines itself around Bobby’s ankle he freezes it solid and pulls himself free purely by reflex. Two more around his wrists get the same treatment, and he chops through a slightly thicker one that wraps itself around his waist without much thought before his brain finally catches up. This is ridiculous… I could stand here fighting tentacles all day without making any progress. Time to up the stakes a bit…

He grits his teeth and concentrates, feeling his power draw the heat out of the entire room. "Didn’t your mother teach you not to snack between meals, stinky?" He sighs internally at that, making a mental note (not for the first time) to improve his banter in the field, when his concentration is broken by a sudden flexing of the ground underneath him… which he suddenly realizes isn’t really ground at all, but the same slightly moist muscular tissue he’s been struggling with, which is now pulling itself into a single mass for a final attack.

He refocuses his energy on it, and realizes with some dismay that it has warmed itself in almost no time. On the plus side, that makes it visible to his thermal sense, but it also makes clear that this amorphous muscular creature is somehow pulling heat out of nowhere to keep itself from freezing No fair! He conjures a couple of ice-walls to protect himself from the barrage of tentacles, but they start to crumble almost immediately. Hey, guys? Josh, Sheppard – I could use some help here?

Bobby draws on his last reserves as he launches a full-on offensive against this blob-thing; he doesn’t even flinch when it grabs him around the waist and raises him into the air. It’s moving more slowly now, which is a good sign, but not slowly enough; their battle a race to see whether Bobby can send it into hypothermic shock before it smashes him into icy fragments.

He’s pretty sure he’s going to win that race when the blob-thing suddenly erupts into flame; faster than seems at all plausible it disintegrates into ash. Huh? What was – his attention is drawn to a remaining heat-source, humanoid and familiar-seeming. When the last few embers of flame fly across the room to rest in his hand, he recognizes both the power and the face.

"Um… hey, John. Thanks for the rescue, but… are you sure you should have done that? I mean, with us being on different teams and… everything? ” There’s something off about the way John moves, but Bobby can’t quite figure out what it is… that fight must have taken more out of me than I thought, I can barely think straight… John’s skin seems unusually pale, perhaps because of the flickering firelight… but the firelight doesn’t explain why there’s so much of it?

"Um… John? Why are you… I mean, why aren’t you wearing your training uniform?"

"Dumb question, Icicle. Better question is why are you still wearing yours?" Bobby stumbles back a couple of steps, bewildered by the hunger in John’s voice, then stops backing up as John presses up against him, teeth nibbling against the icy surface of his neck. "Course, with that outfit it hardly matters. Showing off your new muscles, huh? Trying to drive me crazy… well, it’s working. Just turn off the fucking ice, will you? No fun sucking on a fucking icicle."

A dozen different objections tumble through Bobby’s mind at once – What about Rogue? What about all the cameras and sensors and recording equipment in the Danger Room? And the training scenario – we can’t really take a break in the middle of it to, um, make out like this, can we? Is this some kind of setup? Or… even if it isn’t, what if something attacks us? This is exactly the kind of stupid thing characters in horror movies do, sneaking off somewhere to have sex while they’re being stalked by The Thing What Lurks in the Dark… – but none of them seem to stop his body from responding.

He feels a strange lassitude as John pulls him down to the floor, not so much an inability to control his own body as an unfamiliar willingness to let it do whatever it wants, and when John repeats the command more insistently he obeys with hardly a thought, transmuting to flesh amidst the layer of still-warm ash that covers the pitch-black room.

When the fangs slip into his neck, he manages to fight free of whatever is influencing his mind long enough to pull away… but only for a moment before the lassitude returns redoubled. "Bored so soon?" he hears something that doesn’t quite seem like John’s voice anymore laughing as strong, cold hands – too strong, too cold – trap his own against the ground. "OK, then… plenty of more interesting sites to sample…"

Bobby tries to gather his will to transition back to ice-form, but it’s no use… he can’t even collect his thoughts enough to ask for help, or struggle. He’s not even sure he wants to, actually – he may be about to fail this exercise, but is it such a bad way to go?

[Josh Dalton Worthington]

Josh steps slowly through an ornate sitting room, eyes alert for anything dangerous.

This sucks.

Whereas some of the members on the X-Men were perfectly comfortable working on their own (or in some cases, more comfortable) Josh felt himself to be more of a team player. He was perfectly capable of operating effectively without hand-holding… but he preferred to have a partner, at least. This alone-in-dark-corridors stuff wasn’t exactly his forte.

As Hank well knew. Jackass.

As he feels a brief mental contact, Josh stops dead, hand on the door to the next room. He listens, pressing an ear up to the ancient paneling. Nothing… I think.

Upon opening the next door, he discovers a long hallway with large windows all along one side. Lightning flashes out in the distance. “Ugh, no more horror movies for me… let’s stick with a nice comedy.” Josh shakes his head and continues down the gallery.

Halfway down the gallery, Josh feels a pulse of emotion. Something like… hunger? Uh oh. Immediately, a pair of zombified dogs leaps through the windows with a crash. Crap.

Snarling, they charge down the hallway, and leap at him. Josh takes an involuntary step back and raises a hand, reaching out with his powers. The dogs freeze in midair, jaws snapping just inches from his fingers.

Things like this make you appreciate your own pets, don’t they? An image of their own puppy flashes through Josh’s mind as he rockets them back down the corridor. A thump and a whimper tug at his heart for a second… until he hears a loud howl as he races backwards to the previous room.

Josh throws the bolt, breathing out heavily. That was close.

----

A few minutes later, Josh finds himself near to where he started his search for Bobby. Strangely, a passageway behind the mantelpiece is open, which he definitely doesn’t remember from his first sweep through the foyer. Shrugging, he moves quietly across the room and slips through the gap.

Across the room are two figures, one on top of the other. Josh blushes and takes a step back. Jeez, Hank, some of the students in this sim are like 14! Isn’t that a little risqué? He’s about to turn around until one of them speaks, almost in a moan.

“John…”

What. The. Fuck. That voice is Bobby’s, and there’s no way that they could be doing that, right? In a Danger Room simulation? Ororo would kill them. And wasn’t John still pretending Bobby was dead, anyway?

“Aaaah…” A dumbfounded vocalization slips out of his mouth before he’s able to muffle it. John looks up from on top of Bobby, a horrible look on his face. Josh tries to cycle through various excuses, ranging from “Hey, the Danger Room is public territory!” to “Now we’re even, bitch!”…

At least, until a bit of blood - blood!! - drips from John’s mouth. Okay. Totally not John. Unless he’s gone FUCKING INSANE while I wasn’t looking! “What the - - !” Josh throws out a hand, and telekinetically lifts “John” off Bobby, pinning him to the ceiling. The ghoul hisses menacingly down at Bobby.

“What the hell is that thing?” Josh looks across the room at Bobby - who had to be under some kind of mental or hormonal control. Hank… this is getting seriously wacked out.

Josh doesn’t notice the figure from behind who hits him in the side of the head until it’s too late. The impact throws him forward onto the ground, and he clutches the side of his head, gasping. An ornamental staff from above the mantel drops from the figure’s hand.

With Josh’s mental control broken, “John” drops from his pinned position back onto Bobby, stunned from the impact.

[Bobby Drake]

Bobby is half-conscious and utterly distracted when he hears Josh’s voice, and while he vaguely feels like he ought to be embarrassed at being caught in such a compromising position, he really isn’t at all. A fragment of his mind still capable of thinking semi-coherently is suddenly worried about that – It’s like I’m drunk, or stoned, or something? – but is incapable of doing much of anything about it.

When John’s body is pulled away from him and slams into the ceiling, Bobby feels the fog lift from his mind, though not quickly enough to stop himself from reaching out with a pathetic little whimper to try and grab John back before he pulls his arm away, disgusted. With the creature distracted, whatever was messing with Bobby head fades away quickly, and in the trickle of light from the foyer he finally notices the creature’s glowing eyes and inhumanly pale skin.

> "What the hell is that thing?"

"'The hell' is right, I think… some kind of incubus-demon-thing, I guess? He… I mean, it… was trying to… I mean, well, it was…" his mind is clearing as he speaks, the artificially induced suggestiveness and lassitude giving way to an entirely natural sense of overwhelming shame, and Bobby finds he cannot finish the sentence; in fact, the way he feels right now he can’t imagine finishing the CTF scenario… or, for that matter, the semester. Bad enough that Josh saw it, but all of that was recorded… Storm’ll be using it to debrief us on the exercise… everyone… His frustrated arousal wilts in the face of anticipated humiliation; for a moment he thinks he’s going to throw up, and wants nothing so much as a hole he can climb into and close behind him.

"And you were enjoying it, too… been a while since you’ve seen any action, huh Bob?" Bobby can feel the fog returning to his mind as the creature hisses from the ceiling, the snide edge to its leer a disturbingly spot-on replica of John’s. "Just let me down from here and I’ll finish you off… don’t worry, teek-boy, you can get a turn too. Plenty of me to go around… unless you’d rather someone else take care of you?"

Whatever the mental effect is, it’s not as overwhelming as it was… perhaps because the incubus is splitting its attention, perhaps because Josh is telepathically inhibiting it, perhaps simply because Bobby is braced for it now… but even so it dulls the edge of his thinking and his reflexes. He’s about to get up off the floor when everything seems to happen at once: a dimly lit figure strikes Josh down, then suddenly becomes taller and leaner, sprouting a pair of wings before kneeling down next to Josh and murmuring in his ear… meanwhile John falls on top of Bobby, driving the wind out of him and stunning them both.

The creature recovers first, and before Bobby has quite noticed the absence of mental static it’s back again, stronger than before, and John is smiling up at him. "Now… where were we before that rude interruption?"

Perversely, it isn’t the obvious dangerousness of the situation that penetrates Bob’s fog of lust and lassitude, or the inhuman strength with which “John” pins him to the ground, or even the glowing red eyes. It’s the fangs – or more specifically, the blood on them – that galvanizes him as he blurts out in sudden realization "Holy – you were draining my – you son of a BITCH!!!"

A wave of righteous indignation surges through Bobby, and he welcomes it as it burns away shame, lust, and static, leaving his mind relatively clear. His urge to shout “retro me, Satana!” becomes a simple "Get AWAY from me!" as it leaves his lips, but he doesn’t try to push John away; he doesn’t even take the time to transition into ice-form. He simply focuses all of his concentration on that blood-smeared leering face. It takes less than a second for it to turn blue and ice-limned; when the grip on his arm slackens Bobby smashes the frozen head into shards against the ground with a battle-cry worthy of a Braveheart remake.

He doesn’t stop freezing or smashing or screaming until all that’s left of the body is a pile of melting shards… not tactically optimal, maybe, but enormously satisfying. Only after the last intact piece of any significant size shatters into dust does it occur to him to check on his partner. "Thanks for the save, Josh… are you OK?"