ArchivedLogs:Ice and Fire

Ice and Fire
Dramatis Personae Jackson, Logan
In Absentia	2013-04-02 ... catharsis. After teenagechaos and advising.
Location <XS> Danger Room - B2
The room is large and circular, a geodesic hemisphere of hexagonal ceramic panels. It is the Danger Room, and is thus often full of danger, but is presently not in use and is thus remarkably danger-free. Safest room in the school, probably. It's after lunch. Classes for someone, somewhere. Teenaged someones, somewhere. There's been a fair bit of stir throughout the faculty today, between two students ending up in the medbay and a third suspended (and the twins subsequently vanished from campus) but things have since quieted. Mostly quieted. In here things are not quiet, though. In here the world currently seems to be frozen, a dark wintry landscape crusted deep with snow, ice riming the forest of bare dark trees all around. Dark, at least, save for the bright flashes of light coming from deeper within them. Occasionally these flashes illuminate figures -- slow shambling ones with bright blue eyes and black hands, ghostly-pale ones that move with superhuman swiftness and wield slim cold blades. Some of them ride animals although the horses (and giant mammoths, and giant wolves) look like perhaps they might be dead? Zombieanimals. Somewhere within all this, the flashes of light are coming from the /sparkliest/ X-Man, dressed not in uniform but in dark jeans (with hot pink lacing up the side), a pink fishnet shirt underneath a black t-shirt. Not winter weather gear, for sure, though the fierce bright glow that illuminates him radiates its own heat and might be combatting the /snow/. Combatting the undead /things/ swarming the forest, though, is another question. He shoots a bright beam of light towards one. Puts up a shield to ward off the sword-strike of another. Many still /come/, pressing forward even after losing limbs or having holes shot through them. "Why did you have to pick zombies?" Logan asks, coming up behind the colourfully-dressed X-Man with a scowl on his face. Logan's IS in uniform (for a change), and is rubbing the knuckles of each hand in mild irritation. The older man snarls and bounds past Jax toward a giant mammoth. Claws flash in the light of Jax's beams and slash at the fetlocks of the mammoth's legs. The creature trumpets a roar of pain and topples forward - narrowing missing the still-moving Wolverine - crashing into a group of wolf-mounted undead things. Logan rolls and comes to a halt on one knee, nostrils flaring, teeth bared and breath hissing in and out as he scans for another target. "Zombies--" he 'unhorses' one creature. "Have been--" and he stabs a second. "Done to--" The grizzled man ducks under one creature's attack and replies with a stab to its groin followed by an upward slash. "Death! You ok, kid?" "Not zombies," Jackson answers through his teeth, "I'm guessing you don't read much --" Maybe Jax is going to leave the statement there. He is distracted from his sentence, though, by the sharp flash of a sword coming down towards his unshielded side; a quick turn sends a sharp flash of light straight through one of the oncoming creatures. "-- fantasy," he finishes after this. The creatures react oddly to Logan's stabbing. The slow-moving ones fall apart, though the parts keep /moving/, keep coming, independently of being connected to bodies. The fast white ones, though, simply melt and reform, taking the slices with no seeming injury. Their blades slice back, too fast to follow easily -- a hard thrust to Logan's stomach, an upward slash at the groin. "Khh --" Another flash of light, /sizzling/ through one of Logan's attackers, cutting through its frosted armor and smoking where it hits. /This/ wound, at least, seems to stay where the touch of metal leaves no trace. "Fire," Jackson advises; his next blast is not towards a white walker but towards a dying bare tree. Leaving it smouldering, a few branches catching and then sputtering out in the snow, a few branches catching and staying /lit/, for now at least. "I take it you know somethin' I don't, kid--" Logan spits before he has twist around a particularly unpleasant attack - but one blade digs into his side, only partly deterred by the uniform. The older man growls like an animal and retaliates with a frenzy: Five slashes later there are several body parts twitching on the ground and groping for him. "When I said I wanted practice against stuff I can't kill - this isn't what I had in mind, ya know?" He grumbles away and heads back to the burning tree. As his claws slide away into his arms, he rips free two burning branches and turns about just in time to clock another walker across the head with the flame-wreathed makeshift torch. "Whadidja call 'em again? Moon-walkers?--look out!" Logan throws one branch seemingly at Jax (but really at the shape looming behind the other mutant). "What sorta shit do you read, Jax?" Logan makes his way toward the other man, spinning his torch and gnashing his teeth at the undead beings. "Do ya wanna know what these... things smell like???" "-- The dead ones are wights." The fire does what Logan's claws did not; its touch melts flesh from bones, stopping both the slow-dead creatures and, if more slowly, the swift icy ones. Jackson ducks when Logan says look out, letting the branch fly over his head to take a wight in its chest. It catches fire far more readily than flesh /should/. Jax is already turning aside to take on the next creature with his /hands/ -- which are glowing brighter still than the rest of him, and sizzle pale flesh where they touch. His teeth /clench/ as the creature bears its weight down on him, clearly /far/ outmatching him in strength but rapidly losing the advantage as Jax's fierce-hot glow burns through it. "And not -- particularly. I've smelt enough corpse." Jax's words come through his teeth. Behind him a sword clangs down against a shield that was not there a moment before. "White walkers," is evidently the name for the not-dead ones, fast and pale and melting away in Jax's hand. Or riding Logan down on a dead ice-frosted mammoth that is leaking frozen ribbons of black entrails, stabbing slim cold sword towards the man's eye. "Aww, fuck--" Logan's claws flash in the light as they spring from his knuckles, barely catching the sword before it skewers him through the head. A twist of his wrist immediately thereafter, and the sword snaps in half. The animalistic man's other hand is not idle, and sweeps its flaming torch up and along the mammoth's torn belly as it passes, while Logan uses the momentum to spin himself away. "If some crazed villain out there finds out about this program and decides to toss this shit at us - I swear to God I'm gonna--" Well, whatever he was gonna do, it has to wait while he deals with some oncoming wights. Logan bounds toward the burning tree, grabs another torch from it to toss at a wight (hitting it in the face) and continues to throw more branches at them (not that many remain to be thrown). "Hey, Sparkles - wanna bring the light over here a bit more!" and he points toward another nearby dead tree that could use some lighting up. "And look out - ya got some one yer six!" "-- You know villains with an army of ice-monsters?" Jax is being pressed down to his knees, at least until the creature he holds melts /properly/. "Forget what I'm /reading/ who are you hanging /out/ with?" The melting creature frees up one hand just in time to turn around and blast /wide/, a searing flux of energy that scorches the oncoming creatures. Its ripples can be felt searing outwards towards Logan in a wave of heat. "Nngh -- you have like /three/ giant wolves --" Incoming, apparently, but Jax doesn't finish this thought, instead aiming another bright-hot flash of ignition towards the dead tree to prove more AMMO. Burning sizzling ammo. "Three giant w--??!!" Logan disappears underneath a mass of fur, ice, claws and teeth. Three massive lupine creatures converge on top of him, blocking the man from sight. One wolf's head dives into the thick and comes up with red staining its fangs, and from somewhere beneath it comes a bellow of anger and pain-- --a bellow belonging to Logan. Adamantium claws appear for a brief instant, and then slash the lower jaw of one giant wolf clean off. The second wolf spots the claws and lunges toward Logan's arm, only to sink its teeth into the first wolf's neck. The three of them continue to fight over their prize... ...whilst the prize crawls out from under them and around a tree. Logan's uniform is a mess - the back is torn to pieces, and the armour mostly hangs off the man's arms. His exposed skin shows signs of injury, already healing. He reaches for a pair of burning branches and uses them to set the wolves on fire. The only one of the three not brutally mauled already, bolts - its fur all ablaze - straight into some oncoming wights. "Great." Logan grumbles. "Now I smell of burning dog. That the best you got??!!" He looks over toward Jax and heads that way. Jackson is rapidly growing rather surrounded, an oncoming press of pale creatures swarming closer. "-- Holy carp that was like a cartoon --" Apparently he saw the manoeuvre. He might even sound appreciative! But mostly he sounds /grunty/, teeth clenching as metal rings down against another shield. "One sec --" Now it's /Logan/ who gets a shield, not to protect him exactly but to stop him coming nearer. Jackson is glowing -- brighter. Much brighter. The blast of energy that floods out from him a few seconds later leaves not much of the walkers in front of him save scorchmarks against what was once snow and is now hard ground. There's not much left of the /trees/ around there, either, levelled stumps and cinders smouldering in a wide swath in front of Jax. The shield falls as Jax droops, braced with one knee and one hand against the still-warm ground. "-- I like direwolves." Though, admittedly, the ones Logan torched were already dead. "Danger Room, end sim." And then he is just kneeling on cold metal, though the glow he bears remains. A little less bright. A little less painful to the eyes. "-- What kind of can't-be-killed did you want to try your claws on?" He's not looking at Logan, jaw still a little tensed as he just breathes slow and steady through his teeth. "You mean right now?" Logan grunts with no small amount of sarcasm. "None. Right now, the only thing I feel like tackling is a cold beer and a burnin' cigar. How ya holdin' up, kid?" The man, shielding his eyes somewhat, approaches once the simulation ends and the Danger Room returns to its standby mode. He crouches down, now looking uninjured - aside from his uniform, which is now in tatters - and looks long and steadily at the mutant beside him. The frown on his brow might be worry, or empathy, or just...'normal'. "I'd up the safety protocols on this thing - but we both know no one's gonna learn anythin' if there's no danger. Still, this ain't for the younger students. Not bad - not bad at all. Got anymore ideas like this - or not like this - up your sleeve, Jax?" From Jax there is a stretch of silence, save for his slow heavy breathing; that and the tensed muscles, the rather /deliberate/ pulls of breath he is taking, are testament perhaps to how much energy has been drained out of him. But there's a crooked smile he tosses over his shoulder at the older man, when he finally looks up at Logan. "What, you don't want to go another round?" Knuckles braced against the floor, he pushes himself slooowly to his feet. A flux of light is still lingering around him, pale and shivery, and then it fades into nothingness. The pink fishnet shirt he wears under his tee is singed crispy-black and half burned off. "I'm outta sleeves," he says with a lift of one tattered arm. "Did kinda have this idea next though, trying my hand against slake-moths. They hypnotize you if you look at their wings and then suck your mind out. Haven't quite finished working up the scenario, though." His own smile is fading, expression just left blankly tired. "Probably just going to take my advisees on the high seas. Fight some pirates. Everyone likes pirates, right?" Logan shrugs. "Pirates? There're a few pirate scenarios already programmed in - Sword Coast stuff (but don't ask me about those)... Caribbean stuff - the girls are cute - and a few others." He rises to his feet and cracks his neck from side to side. It's loud. "Okay, okay... Fine with me," he agrees a moment or so later. "You figure out what ya want; I gotta get outta these rags. Always hated this uniform anyway..." Then, no sooner having spoken the words, Logan literally rips his uniform off (the top half at least), and stretches his arms out and back - wearing only a singlet. "Just no Captain Hook or Peter Pan shit - I have standards. Bring it." "I was Peter Pan for Halloween two years ago," Jackson says in amused response to /standards/, his pierce lips curling up briefly. Just briefly. He is rocking onto the toes of chunky platform sneakers that are clearly not /intended/ for combat -- though his improper attire admittedly didn't seem to slow him down earlier. "I don't mind the uniform. Just needs some jazzing up." Like the smiley sun he has BEADAZZLED onto his own, wherever his is. His fingers flex, shoulders rolling briefly. "Mmngh. Danger Room. Armada. Grindylow war." There's a pause, a quiet mutter of, "bring it," which is hopefully not a command the Danger Room understands. Then again, this is Xavier's. It just might. A feminine computerised voice chimes in. "'Bring it' authorisation confirmed. Safety protocols disengaged. Additional random adversaries initialised. Have a nice day, Logan." Logan looks at Jax and smirks ruefully. "You had to say it, didn't you?"