Gar and Teddy - Backdated to 9/17
Sep. 17th, 2017 08:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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ax_mainGar meets Teddy before trying the Danger Room for the first time. The two decided to team up and tackle a simulation or two.
Stretches. Gar didn't know how important stretching his human muscles were in relation to the muscles of the animals he turned into, but loosening up before an exercise couldn't hurt, right? Besides, he needed to think about what kind of exercises he could actually benefit from.
He'd dressed in gray sweatpants and a purple tank top (hey, it was his favorite color) even though he didn't plan on doing most exercises as a human. He figured he should at least have a presentation of being serious about exercising, because he was.
He'd do some stretches, and then see about starting up a beginner level simulation. Something easy, to get eased into things.
Teddy had brought his gym clothes down with him rather than stay in the room to change. Considering how things had gone with Billy, it had to be better to get out and let him deal with his hangover - and everything else - on his own terms. He'd left his bag by the door. The grey tank top and black sweats he wore were loose on him now, but if he could find a program that would run with one person, and give him the chance to blow off the steam that he really needed, then he'd need the room to move.
He was frowning at the simulation menus, none of the single-player options even remotely appealing, when he heard someone behind him.
"Oh, hey." Gar had come up to the control room to choose a scenario, and someone was already there. Someone he didn't know. "Are you new?" he asked. "I'm Gar," he said.
Teddy turned, a smile appearing automatically on his face even though he really wasn't feeling it. At least not until he saw the green boy joining him, and managed to put two and two together. "Oh, hi! Everyone keeps telling me that we need to meet. I'm Teddy, the new shapeshifter in town. Sorry for copying your bit," he added, extending a friendly hand.
"Because you totally had a choice in what power you got from the genetic lottery," Gar joked, grinning a little as he shook Teddy's hand. "I'm Gar, but I guess you knew that already."
"Yeah," Teddy nodded. "Jeanne-Marie and Shen were telling me about you last night at the party. Your powers are animal-based, right?"
He grinned a bit bashfully. "They're both great," Gar remarked, though his fondness was mostly for Shen. "And yeah, I turn into animals. Just... don't expect them to be anything but green. What about you, same deal?" he asked.
"Not exactly? But there are some similarities, I think. I can probably do animals, but I haven't tried anything fully non-human yet," Teddy confessed. "This is going to sound stupid, but I keep having this thing about getting stuck, or getting something wrong with the biology, and not being able to tell anyone or ask for help. But I can do a lot and still stay humanoid.
"Though - and maybe you'll know why, 'cause I don't - my skin definitely likes to be green. When I shift, if I don't concentrate on color, it really likes to default to green." He shrugged a bit helplessly, because the whole thing was funny so what else could you do? "Maybe it's an easy color?"
Gar thought about it, wondering why. "Honestly, I know that part of the reason I'm green is because right before I manifested, I got sick," he said. "My dad gave me an experimental cure for the sickness I got. The Professor thinks it kinda... broke my X-gene a little," he explained. "N-Not that I think yours is broken! I just... I dunno. Green has ... some evolutionary advantages?" he offered weakly. "But mutations are a crapshoot. It's just... they're nature's way of experimenting. Not everything works."
"I don't mind the green," Teddy reassured him cheerfully. "It startled me at first but I've gotten used to it, for the most part, and it looks good on you." He glanced at the control screen, then back at Gar. "I was going to run a program, but I haven't chosen one yet. Did you want to do something? If you weren't planning on some alone time, anyway. I'd love to see your shifting in action."
"Honestly, I was coming down to use this for the first time. I was kinda lazy when I first got here, but this girl I like, she wants to do stuff together here. But I didn't wanna look like an idiot, so I figured I'd come down here and get acquainted with the systems and stuff. So, I mean, yeah, it'd be awesome to tackle something together. I have no idea what we have down here, so... yeah."
"I've been down here a couple of times to check it out, but I've only really done a couple of the basic programs. So I'm going in blind on the two-person ones as well." Teddy poked at the screen and scrolled by a number of fairly cryptic listings labelled things like 'trainyard' and 'urban #2.' He shrugged. "Any ideas?"
"I don't know, like I said, it's my first time," he said, shrugging. "I figure something... I dunno. Fun?" Was fun an option? "Puzzles, maybe? Or whatever you wanna do. I'm... I'm cool with whatever," Gar said, shrugging.
"Sure, we can find something." Teddy had a thought, and flashed Gar a grin. "What about the girl you want to impress? Do you have any idea what programs she likes to use? It's somewhere to start, if nothing else."
"She flies, so, I dunno if we'll be any good at those," Gar admitted, grinning just a little. "I mean, I can turn into things that fly, obviously, but it's not like I'll have hands and stuff, if I do that."
"Fair enough. I can do wings but I'm still crap at using them, so maybe it's not the best plan," Teddy conceded. "I wonder if it can do things like the holodeck? Or run a Final Fantasy game? That counts as combat training, right?" he laughed.
"I don't know," Gar confessed. "I mean, probably? I've heard it can do all sorts of things, but... nothing terribly specific," he said.
"All right -- the heck with it," Teddy grinned. "I have no idea what I'm doing here, but we're here to do something, so here goes." He poked the 'urban street' line at random, waited for what seemed like an interminable minute, and the doors slid open. A lot of messages about 'failsafes engaged' and 'low-intensity program' blinked at him, and he accepted all the easy options without thinking about it too hard.
The room on the other side had just been an empty room when Teddy had first seen it on the welcome tour; now the doors slid open onto what looked like any random corner in New York. A pizza shop storefront, apartment buildings - yeah, it was like a whole little city in there.
"Shall we?"
"Sure," Gar said, nodding and following Teddy in. He cast a look around, looking impressed. "Wow. It's... really lifelike," he said, blinking at their surroundings. "You'd think we were in the city for real."
"It is like the holodeck," Teddy said with a certain amount of reverence. He'd done a couple of obstacle courses in the room before, but nothing that had needed hologram projectors. "That's really cool." For certain values of cool, he supposed, but he didn't get the sense that Gar was the kind of person to make fun of him for being enthusiastic. He took a few tentative steps into the simulation, the door sliding closed behind them.
"So now what happens?" Teddy turned around, looking for any indication of what they were supposed to be doing next.
An alarm went off down the "street," three guys making a break for it out of the door of a bank, gym bags in hand.
"Bank robbery?" Teddy guessed. "I guess that's our cue."
"Just like comic books," Gar said, a bit excitedly, grinning. "C'mon, let's go stop the bad guys."
Gar's form melted into that of a green cheetah, and he broke into a full-tilt sprint toward the robbers. Teddy would keep up, he figured, if he could shapeshift too.
Oh, that was cool. One day Teddy was going to get up the guts to try a full-animal shift too. For the moment, though -- since Gar was going fast-and-low, Teddy would go big-and-high.
He started running, gaining height and shoulder-span as he did. He slammed up armour plates, pauldrons for his shoulders and gauntlets for his hands. His skin slid towards green, like he knew it would, but he didn't spend focus pulling it back to pink-and-steel. Here we go, it's the lean, green ninja team... And when one of the bank robbers saw Gar and started running the other way, Teddy was there to cut him off.
Gar could run down the one guy, but he glanced to the side, and saw, well, wow was basically the best word he could think of for it. Okay, Teddy's shapeshifting was apparently super awesome. He looked like he was going for the one guy, and that was fine. He'd go after the other two, who were heading for a car.
By the time that one was opening the door to the car, Gar was on top of it, and his form was changing as he hopped to the hood, his form changing into that of a towering tyrannosaurus, its massive foot where the cheetah had been sitting moments before.
And then the hood was just a mash of crumpled metal beneath the tyrannosaurus' foot, and the bank robbers got out to flee on foot. Which was silly, Gar was thinking, because a normal t-rex would have them for supper. Fortunately for them, Gar was against the eating of all meat, people included.
There wasn't any obvious way to stop the robber coming at him short of punching the guy, and he was a hologram, so it wasn't like he was going to do real damage. So Teddy went for it, unleashing an uppercut that caught him on the chin and - woah! - sent him flying, skidding across the pavement a good few feet to land against the side of the building.
Point taken. Teddy turned to chase down the other two, planning to pull his next punch (or at least not go quite so hard against what were apparently models of non-powered humans.)
Gar saw Teddy go after the other one, so he decided to go after the one Teddy wasn't bearing down on. The T-Rex's strides took him to the one that he was after, and, somewhat comically, Gar planted his dino-snout into the man's back, pinning him to the pavement.
Instead of punching, this time, Teddy aimed his shoulder and tackled the third guy, football-style. He still hit hard, and they skidded across the pavement, but it was mostly Teddy's momentum carrying them along. He set his knee on the guy's chest and glanced up at Gar, grinning from the adrenaline rush and the ease of the takedown. Right. Easy Mode.. "So can you do a spider? We need something to tie these guys up with."
T-Rex Gar gave Teddy the best look he could give, and his form wilted down to his normal self, standing on the bad guy's chest. "One? Can't weave that fast. Two? Can't weave that strong," he pointed out. But he looked at the two of them, and then the unconscious guy. Simulated sirens were ringing. "Cops are just about here. They can probably take care of it," Gar offered.
"But imagine the big green spider," Teddy replied, jokingly mournful at the lost opportunity. He stood up and the holo-robber tried to pop up with him, but Teddy poked a finger at his chest and pushed him lightly back down. "Do you figure the cop-bots have been programmed to assist, or go after the weirdos?"
"I guess we'll find out," Gar said, ignoring the fact that giant spiders were fiction and therefore he couldn't turn into one. "I mean, if it's easy mode, they're probably going to apprehend them. Right?" Were cop-bots programmed with prejudice? He wasn't sure.
"Yeah," Teddy replied, less convinced. "Still, I don't really feel like spending training time explaining pretend citizens' arrests to pretend police." He grabbed the scruff of his guy's neck and a minute later had him back to back with his buddy, arms behind the nearest lamppost and tied with the robber's own shirtsleeves. It would do until the simulation ended, anyway. "Come on," Teddy gestured, ready to head into the alleyway.
"Right," Gar said, making a mental note on how to restrain someone like that. It didn't look... terrible. He fell into step next to Teddy, and he shapeshifted into the form of a house cat; more inconspicuous that way, even if he was still green.
Teddy skinnied back down to his baseline form, his skin tinting back to pink and his workout gear looser on his shoulders and waist. He ducked out of the way and into the alley, and he grinned at Gar. "Want to try the next level up?"
"Sure," Gar said, shrugging into his human form now that he was more or less out of sight from the alleyway opening. After all, it was just simulations. "The way you bulk up is amazing, by the way. Guess you never have to work out," he chuckled.
"Not for that," Teddy confessed a little sheepishly. "I cheat. But it plays havoc with my hand-eye coordination, so sports help. The first few months I was messing around with my powers I was always walking into door frames and stuff because I'd forget where I actually ended."
Gar snickered a bit at the mental image, but he nodded. "No, I get it. I don't have that issue as much when I change, for some reason." Probably some sort of innate adjustment to his kinetic senses or something. He didn't know. It was just how it was. "Anyway. Level up time? Allocate skillpoints and stuff?" he asked, grinning just a bit.
Teddy flashed him a bright and warm smile. "You bet. Let's see what this thing can do."
"More importantly, let's see what we can do," Gar said, grinning brightly. "Green Shapeshifting Squad!"
"Lean, mean, green, fighting machine!' Teddy held his knuckles out for a fistbump. "Well, maybe not 'mean.' But the rest of the lyrics work." And he was definitely going to have TMNT stuck in his head for the rest of the day.
Gar bumped his knuckles against Teddy's. "Whatever! It works, it's fine."
Stretches. Gar didn't know how important stretching his human muscles were in relation to the muscles of the animals he turned into, but loosening up before an exercise couldn't hurt, right? Besides, he needed to think about what kind of exercises he could actually benefit from.
He'd dressed in gray sweatpants and a purple tank top (hey, it was his favorite color) even though he didn't plan on doing most exercises as a human. He figured he should at least have a presentation of being serious about exercising, because he was.
He'd do some stretches, and then see about starting up a beginner level simulation. Something easy, to get eased into things.
Teddy had brought his gym clothes down with him rather than stay in the room to change. Considering how things had gone with Billy, it had to be better to get out and let him deal with his hangover - and everything else - on his own terms. He'd left his bag by the door. The grey tank top and black sweats he wore were loose on him now, but if he could find a program that would run with one person, and give him the chance to blow off the steam that he really needed, then he'd need the room to move.
He was frowning at the simulation menus, none of the single-player options even remotely appealing, when he heard someone behind him.
"Oh, hey." Gar had come up to the control room to choose a scenario, and someone was already there. Someone he didn't know. "Are you new?" he asked. "I'm Gar," he said.
Teddy turned, a smile appearing automatically on his face even though he really wasn't feeling it. At least not until he saw the green boy joining him, and managed to put two and two together. "Oh, hi! Everyone keeps telling me that we need to meet. I'm Teddy, the new shapeshifter in town. Sorry for copying your bit," he added, extending a friendly hand.
"Because you totally had a choice in what power you got from the genetic lottery," Gar joked, grinning a little as he shook Teddy's hand. "I'm Gar, but I guess you knew that already."
"Yeah," Teddy nodded. "Jeanne-Marie and Shen were telling me about you last night at the party. Your powers are animal-based, right?"
He grinned a bit bashfully. "They're both great," Gar remarked, though his fondness was mostly for Shen. "And yeah, I turn into animals. Just... don't expect them to be anything but green. What about you, same deal?" he asked.
"Not exactly? But there are some similarities, I think. I can probably do animals, but I haven't tried anything fully non-human yet," Teddy confessed. "This is going to sound stupid, but I keep having this thing about getting stuck, or getting something wrong with the biology, and not being able to tell anyone or ask for help. But I can do a lot and still stay humanoid.
"Though - and maybe you'll know why, 'cause I don't - my skin definitely likes to be green. When I shift, if I don't concentrate on color, it really likes to default to green." He shrugged a bit helplessly, because the whole thing was funny so what else could you do? "Maybe it's an easy color?"
Gar thought about it, wondering why. "Honestly, I know that part of the reason I'm green is because right before I manifested, I got sick," he said. "My dad gave me an experimental cure for the sickness I got. The Professor thinks it kinda... broke my X-gene a little," he explained. "N-Not that I think yours is broken! I just... I dunno. Green has ... some evolutionary advantages?" he offered weakly. "But mutations are a crapshoot. It's just... they're nature's way of experimenting. Not everything works."
"I don't mind the green," Teddy reassured him cheerfully. "It startled me at first but I've gotten used to it, for the most part, and it looks good on you." He glanced at the control screen, then back at Gar. "I was going to run a program, but I haven't chosen one yet. Did you want to do something? If you weren't planning on some alone time, anyway. I'd love to see your shifting in action."
"Honestly, I was coming down to use this for the first time. I was kinda lazy when I first got here, but this girl I like, she wants to do stuff together here. But I didn't wanna look like an idiot, so I figured I'd come down here and get acquainted with the systems and stuff. So, I mean, yeah, it'd be awesome to tackle something together. I have no idea what we have down here, so... yeah."
"I've been down here a couple of times to check it out, but I've only really done a couple of the basic programs. So I'm going in blind on the two-person ones as well." Teddy poked at the screen and scrolled by a number of fairly cryptic listings labelled things like 'trainyard' and 'urban #2.' He shrugged. "Any ideas?"
"I don't know, like I said, it's my first time," he said, shrugging. "I figure something... I dunno. Fun?" Was fun an option? "Puzzles, maybe? Or whatever you wanna do. I'm... I'm cool with whatever," Gar said, shrugging.
"Sure, we can find something." Teddy had a thought, and flashed Gar a grin. "What about the girl you want to impress? Do you have any idea what programs she likes to use? It's somewhere to start, if nothing else."
"She flies, so, I dunno if we'll be any good at those," Gar admitted, grinning just a little. "I mean, I can turn into things that fly, obviously, but it's not like I'll have hands and stuff, if I do that."
"Fair enough. I can do wings but I'm still crap at using them, so maybe it's not the best plan," Teddy conceded. "I wonder if it can do things like the holodeck? Or run a Final Fantasy game? That counts as combat training, right?" he laughed.
"I don't know," Gar confessed. "I mean, probably? I've heard it can do all sorts of things, but... nothing terribly specific," he said.
"All right -- the heck with it," Teddy grinned. "I have no idea what I'm doing here, but we're here to do something, so here goes." He poked the 'urban street' line at random, waited for what seemed like an interminable minute, and the doors slid open. A lot of messages about 'failsafes engaged' and 'low-intensity program' blinked at him, and he accepted all the easy options without thinking about it too hard.
The room on the other side had just been an empty room when Teddy had first seen it on the welcome tour; now the doors slid open onto what looked like any random corner in New York. A pizza shop storefront, apartment buildings - yeah, it was like a whole little city in there.
"Shall we?"
"Sure," Gar said, nodding and following Teddy in. He cast a look around, looking impressed. "Wow. It's... really lifelike," he said, blinking at their surroundings. "You'd think we were in the city for real."
"It is like the holodeck," Teddy said with a certain amount of reverence. He'd done a couple of obstacle courses in the room before, but nothing that had needed hologram projectors. "That's really cool." For certain values of cool, he supposed, but he didn't get the sense that Gar was the kind of person to make fun of him for being enthusiastic. He took a few tentative steps into the simulation, the door sliding closed behind them.
"So now what happens?" Teddy turned around, looking for any indication of what they were supposed to be doing next.
An alarm went off down the "street," three guys making a break for it out of the door of a bank, gym bags in hand.
"Bank robbery?" Teddy guessed. "I guess that's our cue."
"Just like comic books," Gar said, a bit excitedly, grinning. "C'mon, let's go stop the bad guys."
Gar's form melted into that of a green cheetah, and he broke into a full-tilt sprint toward the robbers. Teddy would keep up, he figured, if he could shapeshift too.
Oh, that was cool. One day Teddy was going to get up the guts to try a full-animal shift too. For the moment, though -- since Gar was going fast-and-low, Teddy would go big-and-high.
He started running, gaining height and shoulder-span as he did. He slammed up armour plates, pauldrons for his shoulders and gauntlets for his hands. His skin slid towards green, like he knew it would, but he didn't spend focus pulling it back to pink-and-steel. Here we go, it's the lean, green ninja team... And when one of the bank robbers saw Gar and started running the other way, Teddy was there to cut him off.
Gar could run down the one guy, but he glanced to the side, and saw, well, wow was basically the best word he could think of for it. Okay, Teddy's shapeshifting was apparently super awesome. He looked like he was going for the one guy, and that was fine. He'd go after the other two, who were heading for a car.
By the time that one was opening the door to the car, Gar was on top of it, and his form was changing as he hopped to the hood, his form changing into that of a towering tyrannosaurus, its massive foot where the cheetah had been sitting moments before.
And then the hood was just a mash of crumpled metal beneath the tyrannosaurus' foot, and the bank robbers got out to flee on foot. Which was silly, Gar was thinking, because a normal t-rex would have them for supper. Fortunately for them, Gar was against the eating of all meat, people included.
There wasn't any obvious way to stop the robber coming at him short of punching the guy, and he was a hologram, so it wasn't like he was going to do real damage. So Teddy went for it, unleashing an uppercut that caught him on the chin and - woah! - sent him flying, skidding across the pavement a good few feet to land against the side of the building.
Point taken. Teddy turned to chase down the other two, planning to pull his next punch (or at least not go quite so hard against what were apparently models of non-powered humans.)
Gar saw Teddy go after the other one, so he decided to go after the one Teddy wasn't bearing down on. The T-Rex's strides took him to the one that he was after, and, somewhat comically, Gar planted his dino-snout into the man's back, pinning him to the pavement.
Instead of punching, this time, Teddy aimed his shoulder and tackled the third guy, football-style. He still hit hard, and they skidded across the pavement, but it was mostly Teddy's momentum carrying them along. He set his knee on the guy's chest and glanced up at Gar, grinning from the adrenaline rush and the ease of the takedown. Right. Easy Mode.. "So can you do a spider? We need something to tie these guys up with."
T-Rex Gar gave Teddy the best look he could give, and his form wilted down to his normal self, standing on the bad guy's chest. "One? Can't weave that fast. Two? Can't weave that strong," he pointed out. But he looked at the two of them, and then the unconscious guy. Simulated sirens were ringing. "Cops are just about here. They can probably take care of it," Gar offered.
"But imagine the big green spider," Teddy replied, jokingly mournful at the lost opportunity. He stood up and the holo-robber tried to pop up with him, but Teddy poked a finger at his chest and pushed him lightly back down. "Do you figure the cop-bots have been programmed to assist, or go after the weirdos?"
"I guess we'll find out," Gar said, ignoring the fact that giant spiders were fiction and therefore he couldn't turn into one. "I mean, if it's easy mode, they're probably going to apprehend them. Right?" Were cop-bots programmed with prejudice? He wasn't sure.
"Yeah," Teddy replied, less convinced. "Still, I don't really feel like spending training time explaining pretend citizens' arrests to pretend police." He grabbed the scruff of his guy's neck and a minute later had him back to back with his buddy, arms behind the nearest lamppost and tied with the robber's own shirtsleeves. It would do until the simulation ended, anyway. "Come on," Teddy gestured, ready to head into the alleyway.
"Right," Gar said, making a mental note on how to restrain someone like that. It didn't look... terrible. He fell into step next to Teddy, and he shapeshifted into the form of a house cat; more inconspicuous that way, even if he was still green.
Teddy skinnied back down to his baseline form, his skin tinting back to pink and his workout gear looser on his shoulders and waist. He ducked out of the way and into the alley, and he grinned at Gar. "Want to try the next level up?"
"Sure," Gar said, shrugging into his human form now that he was more or less out of sight from the alleyway opening. After all, it was just simulations. "The way you bulk up is amazing, by the way. Guess you never have to work out," he chuckled.
"Not for that," Teddy confessed a little sheepishly. "I cheat. But it plays havoc with my hand-eye coordination, so sports help. The first few months I was messing around with my powers I was always walking into door frames and stuff because I'd forget where I actually ended."
Gar snickered a bit at the mental image, but he nodded. "No, I get it. I don't have that issue as much when I change, for some reason." Probably some sort of innate adjustment to his kinetic senses or something. He didn't know. It was just how it was. "Anyway. Level up time? Allocate skillpoints and stuff?" he asked, grinning just a bit.
Teddy flashed him a bright and warm smile. "You bet. Let's see what this thing can do."
"More importantly, let's see what we can do," Gar said, grinning brightly. "Green Shapeshifting Squad!"
"Lean, mean, green, fighting machine!' Teddy held his knuckles out for a fistbump. "Well, maybe not 'mean.' But the rest of the lyrics work." And he was definitely going to have TMNT stuck in his head for the rest of the day.
Gar bumped his knuckles against Teddy's. "Whatever! It works, it's fine."
