Logs:Magnet School

Magnet School
Dramatis Personae Erik, Polaris	2023-07-10 "Show me how to ask her."
Location <XAV> Forest Clearing - XS Grounds
On the other side of the Xavier family cemetery, hidden from view from the mansion and most of the grounds by the height of the promontory, is a quiet, flat clearing. There is some privacy here from wandering student eyes, though the telepathic presence nudging most people away from this spot is guarantee enough they will not be disturbed. Erik has been here since before dawn, well before the team training in the basement of the school had begun to gather, putting together his classroom -- perhaps this is his teacher's uniform, in dark work boots, sensible (but clearly tailored) dark jeans, rich purple workshirt open over white undershirt, silver knife holstered at his belt, gold ring on his right hand and steel one on a chain under his shirt. What has Magneto brought with him? His helmet, currently set upon some steel sheets to one side; a truck with an Ohio license plate, red paint and underbody in poor repair, visible given the heavy vehicle is resting on its side; a steel box open to reveal the twin handguns inside of it; swords, not new but imprinted with his magnetic signature all the same; a bag of steel links like those that cuff his wrists; bars of metals in gold, silver, bronze, brass; two buckets of bullets, lead in one, copper and bismuth in the other. Seated on the top wheel of the truck, Erik is loading the magazines with bullets -- slow, methodical, and entirely by hand -- occasionally looking up at the rustle of breeze through the scattered trees, expectantly. Making her quiet way up the hillside through the woods, Polaris is guided by the almost entirely overgrown trail and Erik's bright electromagnetic signature. Well, those and the faint warmth of a telepathic presence from afar, but then she's used to that sort of thing. No makeup today, her hair braided tight and coiled up out of her way, she's wearing a lightweight black tactical jacket over a green performance tank top, black cargo pants, and black combat boots, a patch-covered backpack looking distinctly unmilitary against this outfit. She wears no jewelry today save for the two wide link bracelets that had been one (1) of Erik's, but there is plenty of steel about her person all the same: the shanks and toes of her boots, the spools of wire in her pockets, belt pouches full of ball bearings, the belt itself an intricate chainmaile affair. That's not counting the knives. She comes to a stop at the edge of the clearing and blinks at Erik. Or, more probably, at the upturned truck. "Holy crap," she says. "Did you haul all this up here by yourself?" Some steps before she is actually in view of her father, there is a shimmer-hum of greeting running up the weaponry strapped to Polaris -- at the knife strapped to her back, the ones at her hips, her boots, the four on her pack. Atop the truck, Erik smiles, broad and pleased. "Good morning, Polaris!" He sets the firearm back in its casing before standing up and then off of his tire perch, floating to the ground easily in the power of his bioelectric field. "Are these all your weapons? A fine selection." He's not even looking at the knives, just claps Polaris heartily on one shoulder and adds, "We can find you a better firearm." Only now does he look across at the vast collection of assorted metals he's deposited here. "It was not so heavy," Erik says lightly, "and I could fit most everything else in the vehicle itself when I carry it here. Now!" He's not excited, exactly, but there is a brightness in his booming voice as he looks over his assembled weaponry. "There are so many places we could begin -- have you learnt yet to stop bullets? Redirecting them is easier, but stopping them is safer for your comrades. I think we should end today with throwing the truck --" At the top of it, the guncase is snapping shut and floating down to Erik's side, "-- and lead with the finer focus work this morning." Polaris lights at the praise, or maybe the jocular gesture of affection. "Wow, you can identify the gun from like, the three metal parts in it?" The corner of her mouth quirks. "I guess they're very distinctive parts. It's light, and I was a bit scrawny at the time." She shrugs out of the backpack, which lowers itself gently to the ground. "Well, I'm not scrawny anymore, but uh..." She looks at the truck, then looks at Erik, then looks back at the truck. "Okay we can circle back to throwing the truck, but I want to be able to fly like you do. The boots-belt-and-cuffs business is awkward and slow, not great for moving around in a fight." She starts stretching, and eyes the buckets of bullets. "I have a hard enough time redirecting them even when they're ferrous." Her slender eyebrows lift when she looks back at Erik. "So what are you trying to tell me? I can stop bullets?" "You can." Erik frowns, just a moment. "Whether you can yet, I do not know. I do not yet understand where the differences in our gifts may lie, and what of those differences are limits of your ability or simply limits of knowledge and practice. And a moving bullet, with no steel core --" he's looking to the buckets now with a growing frown, "-- takes much effort. I can stop them. I learnt this --" He falls silent a moment, blue eyes staring into the collection of bullets. Claps his hands together, suddenly. "Flight! This I can teach you, I am certain. Show me, again, how you fly now -- you are lifting the steel and not yourself, yes?" Polaris tilts her head. "Hey. You don't ever have to explain how you learned to do what. I know from being forced to learn this stuff, and I know why you might not wanna go there" She shakes her head, less a denial and more to clear it. "Flight! Yeah, it's kinduva a low-rent version of B's hover boots, honestly." Erik can feel her power coil around the steel in her boots to lift them, and around her cuffs and belt to stablize herself as she rises lazily into the air. "I learned how to do this when I was sixteen, with a lot of scuffs and bruises and a couple of broken bones." There's an occasional wobble in her levitation as she struggles to balance what force she is applying to her various points of contact. "I think--it looks like you do this with your whole actual bioelectric field. I just can't seem to figure out how to like. Move mine around?" "Sixteen," Erik repeats, a bit of pride in his voice. "So young! I hadn't even the thought to try at that age." He studies Polaris thoughtfully, eyes narrowing. Below her feet, a much larger electromagnetic field is shifting up, up -- a little higher, maybe, than Erik would habitually drag it to move his own (much larger, much stronger) sphere of power. It catches on the bright field lines surrounding Polaris, pushes them up and away from the ground. "Let go of the steel," he asks after this shifting is complete, with a quieter confidence. "I will catch you if you fall." "I can't take all the credit." Though Polaris sounds quite gleeful for whatever credit he is taking, here. "There's a lot of random metal in oughties punk-industrial fashion--you've seen how I normally dress." She quiets, eyes widening even if she's not perceiving the shift of field lines visually. "Oh my God. That's the--you're moving the..." Her words trail off into a soft gasp of wonder at the abrupt lightness of her body when she lets go of her props. There's no moment of freefall, the unfathomable power of the geomagnetic field line already thrumming through her bioelectric field, so much smaller, yet also unfathomably powerful. "...the Earth." She tugs experimentally on the nearest strands of the immense field line, which sends her body gliding along the gradient this creates. When she lets go, the field unwarps itself and she slides back to where she started. A harder tug, and she lurches up by several feet with a squeak of startled laughter. There she drifts along a different surface of the field, twisting to set herself into a gentle spin, gaining altitude with push here and a pull there. "This feels almost like swimming." Then, immediately, "Wait, no it's not. This isn't like anything this is flying." She looks down at Erik, eyes wide with excitement and something more like joy than he's seen from her in weeks. "You just--you can just move those?" She indicates the sweep of the geomagnetic field line she's riding, then another nearby, arcing through the steep hillside she climbed to get here. Erik's expression is growing soft, his daughter's wonder at the swells of force buoying her up becoming some other joy on his aged features. "You see them, yes? It's nothing like swimming -- except for, perhaps, when you float." When he rises off the ground, this time, Polaris might know to look for the faintest upward tug on the invisible line below him, the slight pull of the Earth's field out of its intended alignment. "I would not say it is simple. It took me long hours and a patient teacher to reliably feel the thrum of the Earth. She does not bend like iron does to our abilities -- moving this way requires more patience, more cooperation with the planet." But yet, for all this, it looks simple when Erik pulls just a little bit more and soars higher, one hand reaching down for Polaris to join him. "If you want to fly into battle, seeing those lines, making them rise and fall, catching them along the edges of your own -- nu, what is it, 'bioelectricity field', must be as easy as breathing." "Yeah!" Polaris twists in the air to face Erik as he rises, her eyes tracking not him but the faint distortions in the geomagnetic field that push him upward. "When I first manifested, sensing fields was really all I could do. The Earth was the first thing I ever felt, with my powers." She reaches up and takes Erik's hand, smiling wider when the edges of their fields enmesh and find a new equilibrium, pulling her up to his level without either of them needing to do much. "I'm stronger now so all the noise is louder, but it's like--like one of those Magic Eye pictures! If I just shift my focus a little..." A flex of her power sends a very faint electromagnetic pulse through her field (and Erik's), and out like a three-dimensional ripple through the immense field lines that hold them aloft. "...she's always just. Right there. It's very grounding--even now!" She looks down past the toes of her boots. "Ohhh shit this is really high up!" Her hand suddenly tightens on Erik's and she lurches down the gradient of the line they're riding as the sudden tension starts to wrench her field loose from it. There is a soft, pained joy in Erik's face as Polaris explains, brightening at that pulse through their entwined fields -- and falling when she does.Erik's grip tightens, sudden and hard, around Polaris's hand. Doesn't pull her towards him -- at least not physically. He does tug firmly on the long line below them, and where Polaris begins to fall down along its edge there is soon no longer anywhere far to go, the gradient folding until there is a cradle there to catch her. There's a shiver, too, in the steel of her belt and shoes, as Erik's power wraps around those but stops short of pulling her upright. "You won't fall," is a promise, yes, but also a prediction. "Focus on the Earth, not the soil. You've known her for so long -- surely she will catch you." "Cool," Polaris whispers as she reflexively rights herself against the bracing of her steel accessories. Then, a little hesitantly, allows her bioelectric field to sync to the geomagnetic field again. "Who taught you to do this? Did you know another magnetokin...uh. Metalbender?" Erik can distantly feel her power exploring the field line where he had warped it to catch her. "So, you could use this trick to move other things, right? Like, maybe not as naturally as us, but..." She looks down again--carefully, not letting herself tense--at the overturned truck below. "You could use the Earth's field to pick up something pretty heavy." Her eyebrows raise up. "Or even throw it?" Erik shakes his head. "You, sheifaleh, are the only other I have ever found born to this power." He's smoothing out the line as Polaris rights herself, power pulling away save for where their fields are still entwined. There's a faint thrum under Erik's shirt, where a ring has mostly sat inert until now. "My -- Charles showed me. He led you here today, yes?" He taps two fingers to his temple. "When he is in here, he can see what we see, but with new eyes. He also," and this is dry-fond-amused, however brief it is, "read far too many books about magnetism when we were young." He begins to descend, slowly, toward the truck. His voice is harder when he speaks again. "There is something to be said for lifting such obstacles with your own power -- more control, more finesse -- but it will exhaust you far too fast. The planet can toss your enemies aside for you. You should know how to ask her to." Polaris nods, glancing at the ring that she cannot see but can certainly feel. "Yeah, but I would have found you on my own just fine." She is trying not to sound petulant, but perhaps not trying particularly hard. "I've got some experience with..." She blushes. "People seeing what I see with new eyes." Something sobers in her expression as she follows Erik back down the gradient of the geomagnetic field line. "I want to get strong enough to lift that truck myself. Someday." She slows to hover a few inches above the ground before dropping lightly down to the ground, studying the truck speculatively. "For now, I think I need the Earth's help." Her eyes are wide and intense when she looks back at her father. "Show me how to ask her." "Would you have?" The faintest crease forms among the age-lines on Erik's forehead, smoothed away as they return to the ground. "You will have her aid, and mine, and soon all that is metal will bend to your will." The vast field below them begins to pull up, the metal of the truck creaking as it lifts off the ground. "Watch carefully," Erik says to his daughter, his blue eyes no less intense when they turn to meet Polaris's hazel ones, only beginning to twitch up into a smile, "and then we will play catch."