ax_main | Alex, Laura, Tommy, and Pam

Teen assassins battle it out while the audience enjoys popcorn - that is, until the dinosaur appears.

"You ready for this?" Fatale smirked at Laura. They were squared off in what the other girl and Tommy called the Danger Room, but which reminded her of that holodeck on the old Star Trek TV show that was on in the really early morning. Pretty weird, but since it was used for training, it was pretty much guaranteed they wouldn't draw the attention of any well-meaning assholes who'd want to shut them down.

After all, it'd totally suck to leave here not knowing which of them would win in a fight.

She wasn't an idiot, though. While she was pretty sure Laura'd survive anything she did to her (fucking healing factor, so unfair), she didn't really want to get to the point where it became a thing to begin with. And the easiest way to avoid that (other than not doing this in the first place, and that wasn't an option) was to invite Alex and Tommy to watch and jump in if anything happened.

She was pretty sure the fuckers had brought popcorn. She just hoped there was some still left when they were done.

Laura shook out her hands and wiggled her toes in preparation, having decided to go barefoot in case she wanted to use the claws in her feet and not ruin the one pair of shoes she had. She wondered if using her claws on Fatale was a bad idea, what if she hurt the girl beyond repair and things went badly for everyone involved. On the other hand, Fatale has knives and would probably use them as much as she could against Laura, so her claws were probably fair.

She nodded to Fatale’s question and let her claws shoot out, raising them in front of her as she clenched her fist. “Let us start.”

Tommy had staked out some space on top of one of the usual obstacles, a high wall that would keep him and Alex well out of the way if and when the blades started slinging around. He sat with his legs dangling down the side, kicking his heels, and offered the bag to Alex. Steam rolled out of it, along with the pungent smell of fake butter, and Tommy popped a handful of kernels into his mouth. "I'm thinking it might end up a pretty even match. How long d'you think they'll go for?"

"Laura regenerates, I think, and Fatale is just plain stubborn," Alex observed, taking a handful of the offered popcorn and drumming his heels lightly against the wall they had taken for a perch. "We might end up spending the night down here. Does your cafeteria deliver?"

Fatale grinned expectantly as the other girl bared her claws, a knife slipping easily into her hand. Instead of attacking directly, though, she instead turned invisible, dove, rolled, and regained her feet behind Laura. She reappeared even as her leg kicked out, aiming at the other girl's legs in attempt to knock her off her feet. She didn't expect it to succeed, but it'd give her an idea of Laura's reflexes, at least.

When she saw Fatale’s body completely disappear from her sight, Laura immediately tried to use her other senses, taking in a large breath through her nose and training her ears to listen. She heard the softest movement to her right and jumped up when she realized what exactly the girl’s plan was. She made sure to move away from Fatale, quickly turning to face her opponent before running at the girl and lashing out with her claws.

"Nah," Tommy replied to Alex's question. "But if it does go that way I can do a food run without missing much." He grinned as Laura kept her feet, and totally did not hold his breath for a second while waiting to see if her claws connectected.

"Good to know," the blond noted, seemingly unperturbed by anything going on below them. Pam had been training for this kind of thing for longer than either of them cared to remember, and, judging by the way she moved, Laura wasn't any slouch in the fighting department, either. He was pretty sure they'd both be fine.

Fatale grinned brightly as Laura evaded her kick. This wasn't going to be easy - well, good. Easy would've been boring as hell. She didn't have much time to consider it, though, before Laura was charging at her. Opening a portal to one side, Fatale disappeared and dove through, closing it behind her and reopening it exactly where the other girl had been standing when she'd vanished, trusting that Laura's momentum would have carried her forward. With a whip of her arm, she sliced at where she anticipated Laura would be, then portalled out agan, exiting (still invisible) a few yards away. And froze, to see whether or not she'd drawn first blood.

Laura ducked when she saw the blade come at her, but not fast enough and watched as Fatale portaled away while a small chunk of Laura’s hair fell to the floor. She could feel the smallest tingle on her cheek which meant something had been cut, then frowned at the now shorter front piece of hair that hung right below her eye. That was going to be distracting.

Laura turned to where Fatale was now, tapped her claws against her leg before she started sprinting towards the other girl. Only this time, just before reaching her she jumped into the air and kicked out, hoping to kick Fatale straight in the side of the head.

"Okay, that's cool," Tommy commented, watching Fatale sling herself around through one portal and out another. "Does she ever meet herself coming back the other way?" he added with a grin.

"She hasn't yet," came Alex's thoughtful reply, his eyes riveted on the action below. "But don't ask that question too loud; she's likely to try it someday and end up inverting the universe, or something."

Fatale fell backwards intentionally, hoping that Laura's foot would go over her - but not quite fast enough. The impact was enough to make her wince and land far harder than she'd planned to.

It was not, she was pretty sure, hard enough to make the room's walls start to blur out. "What the fuck?" she demanded of no one in particular.

The walls shimmered in that tell-tale sign of the Danger Room's hologram things kicking into gear. No-one should have been able to load a program while they were still in there, not unless there was a teacher in the control room, but Tommy couldn't see through the window from where he was seated. The plain wall under his butt shifted and turned into a concrete wall, a barbed-wire fence reaching up toward a ceiling that had turned into a darkening evening sky. The room walls were gone, just trees and more fences, a paved road-

I've seen this movie.

Tommy had just about enough time to recognize the setting and curse out Bobby mentally - when the shape of a giant T-Rex crashed through the brush and headed in Laura and Fatale's direction.

Shifting down off the wall before it could carry him too far into the air, Alex studied the new environment--and the giant carnivorous theropod now menacing the girls--with wary caution, but no visible alarm, as such. "I guess this isn't part of the show, then?"

Knives, teleportation and even invisibility were things that Laura could adapt to. Giant carnivores that had been extinct since the Cretaceous period were not on that long list and she grit her teeth as she sprinted over towards Fatale. She watched as it turned its head to track her best it could, the over sized thing a bit of a design flaw in her opinion. She reached Fatale as it started to lumber towards them and she grabbed the girl’s hand. “Move us higher.”

Fatale pulled her hand out of Laura's instinctively, then nodded and without speaking, opened a portal. She didn't have any clue what had happened, but she'd figure that out later, when there wan't a fucking dinosaur looking to have them for dinner. "Be ready to grab on," she instructed as she stepped through - and emerged mid-air, just above the dinosaur's neck. She landed awkwardly, crouched, and immediately began throwing knives - not seeking weak spots, but making a sort of ladder up its neck for Laura.

Tommy shook his head in answer to Alex's question, already trying to figure out a plan of attack. "Not that they told me. I'm gonna guess that either someone's in the control room and fucking with us, or it was on pause from the last guy and restarted somehow." Who the fuck would be running a Jurassic Park simulation? ... No, he had a decent idea. Bobby was gonna get an earful if this went wrong.

On the plus side, dinosaurs were cool. On the minus side, exploding a T-Rex would be hella messy. And not practical now that the girls were actively climbing it. Okay, new plan. Find a weapon he could actually use without blowing up the others.

Setting himself to dodge out of the way in the event the ... dinosaur elected to give up on the girls and turn on them, Alex's hands began to burn with brilliant plasma, though he didn't make any particular move just yet to release it. How could he? Hitting the thing directly was impossible, now that Pam was halfway up the thing's face. Blasting at the ground or terrain anywhere near it was equally unfeasible, with her hanging on and Laura trying to climb the damn thing. Fuck. "This is way, way outside my usual comfort zone," he grumbled to Tommy, mostly for a lack of anything more constructive to contribute.

When Fatale teleport them higher, but higher onto the creature Laura frowned deeply and reached out to take hold of one of the knives lodged into the dinosaur’s neck.

“I meant a tree!” She yelled down at the girl, but started climbing quickly up the knives provided. When they ran out she let her claws out and dig them into the creature’s neck, continuing to climb and stab.

"Well, you didn't say that!" Fatale shouted back. And what the fuck would teleporting into a tree have done, anyway? Granted, she could've thrown her knives from there, but Laura's were attached. She reached for another knife, realized she was out, and gritted her teeth and tugged the nearest out of the dinosaur's neck. Needless to say, it didn't appreciate it any more than it had being stabbed to begin with (maybe less) and turned its head, trying to snap back at her. "What the fuck is this place?" she shouted down at Tommy as she slid a ways down the neck to avoid the massively oversized teeth.

"Welcome to Jurassic Park?" Tommy hazarded a guess, zipping tidily out of the way of the T. Rex's big pointy feet. He couldn't blow it up, he couldn't do anything useful by running away from it, punching the damn thing -- even forty times a second -- wasn't going to make the dinosaur blink. Okay, next tactic. "Can you melt the road in front of it?" he yelled at Alex. Superhot plasma was superhot plasma, right? And asphalt was melty. "Make it soft or some shit?"

"Ask me for something hard next time, why don'tcha?" Alex muttered, mostly to himself. Exploding the road would have been easier; applying the sort of even heat necessary to make the asphalt sticky and semi-liquid again was a lot trickier. But there was a reason he worked out with the Brotherhood. And it wasn't as if the Right had never asked for anything similar. Biting his lower lip in concentration, Alex stretched out his arms and focused. The plasma he directed in front of the dinosaur's path was dispersed enough not to detonate anything, and the road quickly began to steam and bubble faintly.

Laura growled as the creature tried to shake both her and Fatale off and she dug her claws into the base of its skull in order to stay on. She watched as Havok started to melt the asphalt in front of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, then waited until the creature noticed the Tommy-blur before she quickly started climbing again. She made it up to the top of its head and dug the claws of one hand into the top of its skull to hold on, then let herself slide down to dangle near its eye.

With a grunt she thrust her claws into its eye and grinned when it stumbled towards Havok’s makeshift tar pit.

"Take that, fucker!" Pam shouted as the dinosaur roared a protest and stumbled - or tried to, except that its feet were gummed up in the road. She opened a portal just below her and dove through - and reappeared on the ground beside Alex. "You need a lift down?" she called out to Laura.

Going fast enough to avoid being stepped -- but also actually slow enough that the massive lizard could see him -- was harder than just going flat-out fast, and Tommy blew past its nose a few times with no response. But once he figured out the right speed, yeah, baby. "Come to Tommy," he taunted, backing up just that bit further, drawing it closer to the pit trap. Then Laura spiked it and that, thank you, was all she wrote.

Or maybe not, because it didn't vanish, roaring as Pam zapped herself around and its feet stuck tight. Now what? It reared its ugly head back and tried to shake Laura off, twisting its head around to try and sink its big, sharp teeth into her body. New distraction, since him just zipping around wasn't cutting it anymore. Tommy grabbed a rock from the ground and flung it at the Tyrannosaur's head. It wouldn't do much on its own, but if he caught it at the right point in its arc- the fist-sized rock exploded about a foot away from the T. Rex's head, and it whipped back around to snap in that direction instead.

"Should I blow a hole in the middle of it?" Alex asked Tommy and Fatale, his tone almost conversationally casual. This was a bit weirder than some of the training scenarios he'd been put through in the past, but he still knew it for what it was. He just needed a directive, was all. Their objective, he assumed, was to kill this thing, and sending a stream of superheated matter through its side would probably accomplish that a lot faster than Laura sticking her claws in it, or Pam stabbing it with knives. Either way, he didn't usually like to act without some kind of instruction beforehand--force of habit--so he stood passively beside the others and watched the dinosaur struggle in the sticky asphalt with Laura hanging from the side of its mutilated face.

Being whipped around by a large creature was not as fun as Laura might have originally thought, dislocating her shoulder once before her healing could kick in. She did her best to stay away from the large teeth when it swung her that way and glanced down at Fatale when it was still for a second.

“Can you do a portal mid air?” She yelled, but did not wait for an answer as she rested a hand on the dianosaur’s face and with a grunt tugged her claws free. She then pushed off its face with her legs and hoped Fatale could catch.

If not, a few broken bones were nothing.

Fatale couldn't help it - she barked out a laugh as Laura leapt off the dinosaur's head. The girl had balls, there was no doubt about it. She let her fall a few feet, because free fall was awesome when you knew you weren't going to splat, then opened a portal beneath her. Fortunately (she'd never figured out how) the portals tended to slow velocity, so when Laura reappeared beside them, she landed hard but not so hard she turned into a pancake. "You're fucking amazing," she told her truthfully, leaving Alex's instructions to Tommy.

"The girls are clear, go for it." Tommy was really, really not used to someone looking to him for direction, but if Alex was going to make him make the call, then they might as well have some fun with it. The Danger Room was supposed to be shielded to hell and back, after all. And purely for shits and giggles - Tommy pushed through the nerves, the this time something's going to go wrong feeling, and started to rev up his own power.

"Okay," Alex replied, the plasma already flickering in his hands. He released a spear of plasma at the dinosaur's side, one it had no chance of avoiding in its current predicament. The stream of boiling matter struck the illusory creature in the flank and just kept going, burning through to the other side in an instant and incinerating flesh, bones, and organs as it went. If this thing worked like an actual living animal worked, it probably wasn't going to be walking that off.

Falling through the portal was different than teleporting with Clarice and Laura landed roughly on her rear, wincing a little as she felt the tingling of her healing fix whatever bruise she might have had. She quickly stood up and watched as Havok compeltely melted through the large dinosaur, amazed by his ability. She turned towards Fatale and nodded.

“Thank you. You are as well.” Gesturing up in the air where Fatale’s portal had caught her.

"Well, yeah." Fatale smirked, then winked to let Laura know she was kidding. She turned back to watch the dinosaur let out a loud roar of pain, and nodded her approval of Alex's strike. "They're not so bad, either."

"Not so bad?" Tommy snorted. "That's all we get?" Spurred on by the need to show off, appreciation for Alex's power - because dude, that kind of power was a lot more visually impressive than stuff just rattling and popping - whatever, he picked up where Alex left off, vibrating the T. Rex apart from the inside out.

Boom

The Danger Room, it turned out, either wasn't programmed to deal with nine tons of inverted dinosaur, or it didn't feel like playing janitor, because the flying particles of blood and guts turned to pixels and evaporated back into nothingness when they struck something solid.

Alex stared at the rapidly disintegrating remains of what was once an enormous predatory lizard with amazement for a moment, before turning a mildly reverent look toward Tommy. "Dude," he breathed, shaking away the residual plasma from one hand and holding out a fist. "That was awesome."

Laura watched as their enemy exploded, glad that any kind of dinosaur organs or blood faded before it could hit her. She had not learned the basics of stain treating yet and she liked this t-shirt. She glanced back up at the booth and frowned. “We should report that. It was a malfunction, unless someone was purposefully trying to murder us.”

She took a deep breath to see if she could smell anyone besides the four of them.

"So? Not exactly a surprise. Pretty sure there are plenty of people here who'd love to get rid of us." Fatale shrugged, then grinned. "Gotta say, they found a fun way to do it. And you guys were fucking amazing, too."

Tommy grinned and turned to face her, and the world tipped around him. The wave of vertigo washed over him, sending the Danger Room spinning. Apparently he had a limit, and that had hit it. "Gotta sit for a sec," he muttered, fighting the dizzy spell with a hand to his forehead.

The cocky grin that had began to settle over Alex's face at Pam's compliment immediately evaporated into obvious worry as Tommy listed and pressed a palm to his face. Though he wasn't a speedster by any means, the blond Summers was quick enough to get an arm around the other teen and help support him, urging him gently in the direction of a patch of holographic terrain that at least looked sort-of comfortable. "You okay? Do you need a 'port back to our room?" Or the medical bay went unspoken; Alex knew how much he would enjoy a return trip, and assumed Tommy felt the same. He looked over at Fatale, brows rising with an unspoken question.

"Sit first, teleport after," Pam recommended. Granted, her portals didn't normally make people dizzy, but she wasn't sure whether or not that applied if someone already was. "Will water help?"

"I'm good," Tommy waved them off as he sat down, the spinning world slowing back to normal speed. He didn't dare slow things down further to give himself recovery time, just in case it triggered another whatever-that-was. They were fussing over him, and... and it felt surprisingly good. A familiar headache settled in behind his eyes -- the same thing that'd happened when he and Inu-Yasha had been blowing shit up in the Danger Room that first time. "Pushed too hard, that's all. I got a backlash the first time I exploded something big in here, too. I think holograms are just weird that way."

Alex gave a skeptical hum, and the concern remained fairly plain on his face, but he didn't pursue the question any further. "Got it. In the future, we'll keep all things to be exploded medium-sized or smaller."

Laura watched the two of them almost fret over Tommy and she tilted her head to the side as she observed their behavior.

“Should we leave before something else happens?” She directed the question at Tommy since he seemed to be the one having trouble.

"Not on my account," Tommy griped, pushing himself to stand up. The world stayed in place, only the ache in his head left to remind himself that holograms really didn't like being blown up. "But if you're worried about another software glitch, then yeah. I don't know what would come after dinosaurs. Maybe aliens."

"Aliens could be fun," Fatale mused. She went over and casually slipped an arm around Tommy's waist, just in case he decided to start tilting again, then looked over at the others and shrugged. "Maybe tomorrow?" Granted, they hadn't found out who'd win in an all out fight, but the dinosaur'd been a decent workout. She and Laura could always reschedule.

“The aliens in the magazines look structurally delicate. Their large heads and thin bodies would not be much of a fight.” Laura nodded at her logic, remembering the pictures from when she had picked up a magazine that had also boasted that they had proof that the Queen was a reptile. “But yes, I am free tomorrow.”

Alex was half-tempted to assert he would most definitely not be free the following day, given the way this session had gone. There were any number of excuses he could offer--homework, plans with Scott, getting his nails done. But he quickly realized that he probably wasn't about to let Pam, or Tommy, come down here again so soon without being around to watch their backs. Obviously, this place wasn't as user-friendly as the brochures advertised. "With our luck, we'd be expecting the pansy aliens from E.T. and get the ones with acid blood from that other movie," he complained. "And anyway, after dinosaurs should come zombies. And then zombie dinosaurs. It's just logic."

"Would hologram acid blood burn skin, d'you think?" Tommy asked conversationally, shoving his hands in his pockets and starting to head toward the door. "Or vaporize like the dino guts? 'Cause that wasn't so bad."