Danger! High Voltage!

[Carlos Calaveras]

With classes finished for the day, most of the students at Cullen's Institute were trooping out into the school grounds to enjoy what was left of a bright summers day. They lounged in the grass, chatting, their notebooks and homework receiving only a hint of attention now and then.

There were some, however, who found themselves stuck in doors. After a thrilling lecture from Professor Betrand, Carlos Calaveras and Jacinda Blake were wandering their way along one of the seldom used corridors in the school. Anyone watching them, as they tickled and toyed with one another, would have thought they were just looking for a quiet place for some privacy and although that was true, it wasn't for the same reasons as might have been expected...

[Jacinda Blake]

Peeking over her shoulder, Jacinda pulled Carlos into the teacher's lounge, grateful to find it empty. It was harder to sneak into the sub-basment during the day with students running around, but none of them should be in here, so she figured they were safe. Most of them were outside anyways..

Exiting the door on the opposite side of the longue, they made their way to the 'broken' service elevator, again Jacinda peeked around suspiciously. When no one appeared, she punched her code into the keypad, pressed her palm to the white glowing screen, and awaited the elevator doors to open. As soon as they did, she entered the cab, followed closely by Carlos. Afforded the time it took the elevator to reach the basement, they made good use of the privacy..

[Carlos Calaveras]

The elevator doors slid open, revealing sleek metallic corridors. For Carlos, the novelty of the sub-basement had yet to wear off. Everything about it was incredibly cool. He grinned as they made their way down the hall to the locker room, where the many outfits of the X-Men were kept. He lingered in front of Professor Yamada's for a second, snickering to himself, before he entered the code to remove his own gear and began to strip.

“Oh, this never gets old...”

[Jacinda Blake]

"Mmmmm, agreed.", she'd parked herself on a bench to untie her shoes, but was quite distracted with Carlos making such a blatant display of disrobing.

When he looked over at her she gave him a completely suggestive grin, but continued her own transformation from Jacinda: Cullen's student to Tempest. She had to admit, she loved her uniform. The soft blue and gold clung to her, but not in an abrasive way, it was like second skin and perfect for flying..

Feeling playful, she waited until Carlos' back was turned, then flew up to the ceiling out of sight, gradually she lowered herself so that she was right above him and then...

"Aha! I've got you, Mr. Calaveras...", she covered his eyes with her hands.

"You will tell us what you know or be raspberried upon!", she threatened him, swinging around to his front to accost his stomach..

[Carlos Calaveras]

With a defiant cry, he wriggled away.

“You'll have to catch me first!” he proclaimed, cackling fiendishly.

Then, with the last of his uniform secured in place, he took off at a sprint, each step in his biker boots sounding a clang! on the floor.

[Jacinda Blake]

"Egads man... They'll hear you coming from a mile away!", she exclaimed flying up behind him and tucking her arms under his to lift him off his feet.

"Subtle, Carlos... Very subtle.", she teased, plunking him back down and flying past him.

"First one in gets to pick the location!"

[Carlos Calaveras]

“Oh, that's fair!”

Jacinda had the lead and she wouldn't lose it any time soon. If something needed setting on fire, Carlos was the go to guy – but when it came to speed, he couldn't match the effortless flight of Tempest.

The inside of the Danger Room, when deactivated, looked like the belly of some immense alien spaceship. Carlos still wasn't sure exactly how they had managed to fit it underneath the school, unless it was bigger on the inside than out.

Catching his breath, he started to work through a couple of stretches which John had shown them both, to limber up.

“So, what's it gonna be? Alien invasion? Giant robots? Underwater caper?”

[Jacinda Blake]

"I don't think either of us would be quite so impressive in the water.. sadly.", she lamented.

She sat on the floor and stretched out her legs, touching her toes, then pulling her knees up as far as they would go, one at a time. When finished, she popped up and smiled.

"I'm good with the giant robots, though! That sounds very retro. Goes with the quasi-futuristic surroundings we find ourselves in.", she struck a Felicity Shagwell-worthy pose.

[Carlos Calaveras]

Not missing a beat, Carlos grinned: “Oh, behave.”

There were still a number of scenario's that they had yet to run through, but the War of the Worlds styled robot rampage was nothing new. Although they'd yet to defeat the program, they were getting better and even in their time apart Carlos had continued to load up the simulation, to try and get some idea of where they were going wrong. Whoever had come up with the scenarios had made sure that it wasn't quite as simple as lining up a target and filling them full of fire-ball shaped holes.

“Alright,” he had keyed in the necessary details. “We're ready. Just say the word.”

[Jacinda Blake]

Bouncing lightly on her toes, Jacinda tilted her neck back and forth loosening up further. "Alright... Go!", she grinned.

Lifting up into the air a bit, she prepared for the room to change around them, like they had just been beamed somewhere by Scotty, and were materializing or something. The disorientation went easier on her if she was in the air.

You never knew what would pop up beneath you...

[Carlos Calaveras]

Without the luxury of being able to hover into the air, Carlos jogged out a little way from the control panel into a more open area of the training room. As he ran, the featureless metallic walls began to narrow, their smooth surface gaining texture and colour. The scene that was rising up around them was a city street like any other, with cafes, shops and apartments above it all. There was one defining factory that separated it from the norm, and that was destruction. The cars which were parked along the road-side were crushed, each roof looking as if some mighty blade had skewered it from above. Brick-rubble littered the pavement, fragments of broken glass twinkling amongst the debris.

Somewhere in the distance, there was a long, sonorous groan. People were screaming, and gunfire blazed – but from their position, they could barely see any of it. Carlos glanced over his shoulder at Jacinda, who was hovering just behind him. If they wanted to get a good view of what was going on, they'd need to gain some height.

“Alright, do your thing!”

[Jacinda Blake]

"Right!"

As they'd already run through a similar situation a few times, she had some pretty good ideas about what to expact to see, none of which were pleasant. They weren't supposed to be. This wasn't kids play. This was advanced training..

Jacinda swooped over, wrapping her hands under Carlos' arms, her chin resting on his shoulder. A strong wind rolled up beneath them, supporting them both, though once they were airborn it was hardly noticable. She gave them some altitude, sailing over the wreckage of the city street below, toward the groan of metal, and the sound of screams.

Once they were close enough, she quit moving forward and flew them straight up, going vertical in place, as if they were just standing there taking in the sights, about fifty feet off the ground..

Before them on the next block, the street was cut off by a pile of overturned cars. People were scrambling in all directions, and at least three of the giant bots were in sight. One was weilding a pick-up truck like a kid with a toy, and possessed of just as much intelligence, it threw it straight at them.

[Carlos Calaveras]

The fire time they had run through this scenario, the truck had almost hit its mark. Many times after, they had struggled to find a damage-effective way of dealing with whatever the robots hurled at them. Shooting fire at them didn't work, since they only ended up exploding and shooting burning hot debris everywhere. Just dodging it wasn't effective either, as then it would undoubtedly crash into something or someone below and – again – explode.

“Try catching it on the wind?” Carlos suggested, hoping that Jacinda would catch on to his idea. There wasn't exactly much time to explain.

[Jacinda Blake]

She understood, as the truck-missile came at them she projected a wall of air directly at it, trying to 'catch it', rather like a safety net. The only problem with her strategy was that when she concentrated her ability on the truck, she and Carlos dropped suddenly.

With a panicked squeal, she tried to slow their descent, the truck hit the wall of air which slowed it, but didn't stop it. There was an unnatural sluggish motion to it, where the truck was still pushed through, from the force it was thrown at and then.. It just plopped to the ground in a heap of crunched metal beneath them.

"That was too close..." But she was learning that dividing her attention between two subjects was far more challenging than just flying around..

[Carlos Calaveras]

Carlos tensed as the truck hit the ground.

“There has got to be something more I can do than dangling here, weighing you down!”

There was another crash, as one of the robots swung its huge arm towards an apartment building.

“Crap, get in there!”

[Jacinda Blake]

With a bit of skill she hadn't known she possessed, Jacinda flew them straight through an open window without incident.

"That thing is going to own this whole city!", she fretted. They'd both been having trouble with this particular simulation for a while and it was begining to get on her nerves!

Jacinda paced as the building shook above them where a massive arm tore through floors above. Pretty soon either the roof would collapse on them, or that arm would find them.

"Ok.. New idea. Think Star Wars...Battle of Hoth, less snow more fire.", she practically grinned as a plan formed in her mind.

"Immobilize it and I'll take it down, yes?", she grinned.

[Carlos Calaveras]

“Battle of Hoth?”

Carlos looked incredulous for a moment, baffled by Jacinda's choice of comparison, but he went with it.

“Alright, I'm gonna need a hand getting up there. Throw me onto its- uh- shoulders?”

The robot wasn't exactly man-shaped but he couldn't think of a better way to describe it.

[The Brotherhood]

On a good day, you didn't venture into Tron's bedroom without a good helmet, a flashlight, twenty yards of rope, and a prayer to the appropriate deities.

The teenaged mutant took clutter to whole new dimensions. None of the apartment's other three inhabitants had any idea what color the carpet once had been, or even if there was any carpet at all under the strata of old electronics, laundry, cardboard boxes, empty air cans, tools, silverware, and scratch paper.

There was enough room on the bed for him to crash at night. The only place in the whole room that could be considered clean - and it was sterilized - was his desk in the corner. He sat there in a raised task chair across from a pair of blinking desktop towers. He leaned back with his feet on the desk and his arm coiled in exposed copper wire.

There was a cautious knock, and then the door scraped up against the knee-deep debris. Geryon filled up the gap to the hallway.

"I'm runnin' out for food," he said. "You want anything?"

Tron blinked. "Huh? Oh. Yeah, get me some turkey pastrami. Not the Oscar Meyer stuff, go to the deli. I'm gonna need some protein tonight."

The huge Samoan mutant wrinkled his nose. "What're you up to?"

"Just checking out a new hunting ground," Tron replied. "Go ahead and get the good stuff. I'll pay you back."

Geryon tried to push the door further, and something metallic shrieked on the other side. "Where?"

Tron shrugged. "Just... tryin' out my new Trojan."

"Dude, no way!" Geryon took a step and grimaced as something crunched underneath - organic, silicon, he couldn't tell. "You don't know what kinda security they got there! Man, what if you get caught?"

"It's just a test run. Stop bein' such an old lady."

"Saladin said to wait," Geryon insisted. "Said he didn't want to waste the opportunity."

"And I'm not gonna waste it," Tron said petulantly. "Look, if we're doin' some sort of insertion later on, I'm gonna need to know the architecture. This is the best way to do it."

Geryon fidgeted uncomfortably, then took a cursory look into the living room. "Boomer and Cirque are out," he said. "Don't you need a spotter or something?"

Tron laughed. "It doesn't work that way. Trust me, I'm fine. You want to help me, go get my pastrami."

The big Samoan vasillated, and he narrowed his eyes suspiciously, but he finally stepped back out of the room and closed the door.

"About time," Tron grumbled, and he settled back into his chair, closed his eyes, and felt himself speeding through the data stream and into the ether.

[Jacinda Blake]

Hey, at least it wasn't something they had tried and failed at! It was a new strategy entirely, to melt the sucker's joints and knock it down. Simple, right? Jacinda felt a boost of confidence and flew into the air once more, picking up Carlos on the way. She wouldn't be able to stay right with him if he wanted to get on the thing, but maybe she could keep it's attention on her while he did his thing..

It was worth a shot.

"Ok... here goes...", she said.

They burst out of the building right in front of the thing, fast and Jacinda passed over the middle of it, dropping Carlos, but keeping him aloft on a cushion of air until he landed.

While he scrambled to hold on, she circled back around between the robot and the building, just hovering for a minute, scowling at the thing that was giving them such a headache..

[Carlos Calaveras]

Carlos discovered, almost immediately, that the idea to launch himself onto the robot was not one of his best to date. The metallic surface of its body armour was sleek and smooth, and he found himself scrambling to get a good grip on anything. Luckily, Jacinda was on hand to help, and with the sweep of one arm he was lifted onto the behemoths shoulders.

It seemed not to have noticed him at first, but there was no telling how long that would last. He clapped his hands together, hard, and fire exploded from within his palms, burst over his hands and forearms. His face twisting into a grimace of concentration, he slammed his palms against the joint between the robots arm and its body, scorching heat pulsing out from the point of impact.

[Jacinda Blake]

The only thing Jacinda really could do at this point was keep an eye on Carlos, to keep him from slipping. The robot had taken notice of her. The glowing red of it's eye swung upward tracking her movements, which luckliy for the moment, were faster than it could swing it's arm.

"That's it big boy... come get me.", she taunted it, whooshing right before it's face.

The thing made a mechanical groan of protest as it finally took notice of the fact that somthing was burning through it's armor plating at the gears beneath. Things might get a little more challenging now..

"Hang on!", she warned..

[The Brotherhood]

Tron slid from one pathway to another with not even a stray glitch to betray his presence. The network was an open book to him - every directory, every database. At a metaphorical glance he could see grades, class rosters, disciplinary records, medical reports. Things like finances and security were buried a little deeper behind multiple firewalls, but they were nothing he hadn't seen before. He could crack security like that in his sleep.

What really intrigued him were all these paths that led seemingly to nowhere.

At first blush, he'd thought they were loose ends in the programming, broken links. For the most part they seemed innocuous. But before long he saw a pattern developing among the phantom pathways, how they had backdoors into almost every vital system. There were even control paths for things like electrical power and door and window locks, as if the whole campus could be controlled from some central location.

But every time he tried to pursue one of these connections, he was denied access. Not because he didn't have clearance - he had any clearance he wanted by now - but because, according to the host network, the directory he was requesting didn't exist.

How this network operated without developing a bad case of schizophrenia, Tron didn't know. But whoever'd designed the security had known what they were doing.

He was about to disengage, find his way back to his New York apartment, when he saw one of those pathways light up. Someone, probably a faculty member, was making a connection between the surface network and whatever was beneath. He could squeeze through it if he hurried, but at these clock speeds, he didn't have much linear time to think it over.

And so he didn't think. Damn, it was a tight fit.

[Carlos Calaveras]

Carlos didn't need to be told twice. Though he'd almost managed to lock one arm in place, they weren't done – or safe – by a long shot. The robot lurched to the side in an attempt to throw him off, but Carlos dug his fingertips hard into the metal that made up its body. The heat that surrounded his fingers let them curl into the plate like it was nothing more than warm butter.

Unfortunately for Carlos, it didn't stop melting and he began to slide down the back of the mechanical menace – leaving a long, scorched trail of molten metal in his wake. He hit the waist and, cutting off the heat generation at last, clung on desperately as the robots lumbering steps threatened to shake him free.

"Jas!"

Another step and Carlos was dangling precariously, held up by only one hand.

"A little help!"

[Jacinda Blake]

There was a second where her heart stopped as Carlos slid out of her line of sight, btu as soon as she heard his call for help, Jacinda was in action. She flew under the robot rather then around it, dodging around it's legs until she came up right under Carlos, with him grabbing onto her a second before he would have fallen..

Rather then keeping him beneath her to fly, this time she piggy-backed him more or less, until she realized how hot his hands still were. Even through the custom material that was heat resisitant she could tell how hot they had been to make the metal pour like hot fudge. She thought better of their postioning...

"Ok hang on...", Flying up above the robot, she tossed him in the air a bit switching her position so she wouldn't get in the way of his abilities.

"Obviously that didn't work as well as I thought.. Any suggestions?"

[The Brotherhood]

Tron prided himself on being hard to impress.

And he hated himself for admitting it, but this was way more advanced than anything the Brotherhood had back at Bruderschaft. It was a crying shame Ethan Daniels and his megacorp were on the wrong side of the battle, because dang, they had connections.

Centralized controls for every utility in the school, including security measures he hadn't even know existed. A bank of media servers monitoring live feeds from every major outlet on the planet, sorting and analyzing the content in real time. A research and development lab with projects on file - he'd only glanced at the file headings - that would make modern covert ops look antebellum. A briefing room with friggin' holographic support!

Tron felt like it was Christmas in May. He could have spent hours combing through every database and every subsystem, but he reminded himself that he was only on a scouting run, and a network this advanced was bound to have security to match. He didn't want to find out what happened if virus-killer identified his consciousness as malware and tried to delete it.

Oh, he couldn't wait to see Saladin's face when he brought back this report!

He was about to find his way back out when he ran across a reference to something called the Danger Room. Couldn't hurt to check up on just one more thing, now could it?

[Carlos Calaveras]

Jacinda gained some height, giving them both a moment to breath and think. Carlos looked down on the robot, and the burning scar he had left on its back. Evidently, nothing essential had been damaged inside with that daring descent. Over the sound of the destruction, he called back over his shoulder.

“It must have an... engine or something- a heart, a brain! You think if we take off its head, it'll crash?”

[Jacinda Blake]

Still eyeing the giant robot, Jacinda shrugged. "We can give it a try. Together this time though, ok?"

No more near misses. She could keep Carlos in the air above the things head long enough for him to melt it's 'neck' into a puddle of silver, super-heated goo. That much she could do..

Flexing her gloved fingers, adjusting her grip around his chest, Jacinda watched the motion of the robot's appendages and when there was a clear path between them toward the head, she took it. It required a bit of a roll, and a sudden dive in midair, but they were in the perfect position now...

"Your show now..." She kept them susupended, watching out for any incoming attacks...