Players:
Summary: Ahmed and Nick use the Danger Room for relaxation.
Date: December 4, 2012
Log Title: Day at the Beach
Rating: PG
Xavier Mansion - Danger Room
A product of Shi'ar technology, the room generates apparently solid, realistic imagery by manipulation high-resolution force fields and holograms. The walls and floor appear as a steel room until a program is turned on. Overhanging the room in the center is a control Room managing the room's mechanisms to oversee the exercise while ensuring the subject's safety.
Just sitting in the medbay all day can be tiresome so Nick booked the danger room for some relaxation time. He let Ahmed know that he booked it if he wanted to join him later since he figures his roommate could use the relaxation time as well. Looking through the various landscapes Nicholas eventually chose a beach setting at sunset. The sky is set on the brilliant reds and oranges, the water laps up against the soft sand and the temperature is perfect with a slight breeze. Since Nick's never seen the ocean he figured this would be relaxing.
Entering a bit later, Ahmed is dressed in a standard training uniform, with an almost corset-like wrap around his chest and midsection to help protect his tender and cracked ribs. Without the hood, the light of the run brings his felinity into full focus as he looks around a moment, and then seeing where you are, he approaches from far away, and says, "Found any buried treasure yet?:
"Hey there Ahmed, and no, I haven't been looking." Nicholas says dressed in a simple pair of Xavier's sweats and t-shirt. He's lying down in the sand just enjoying the atmosphere. "If you hate the beach, we can change the landscape. I've never seen the ocean so this is some private island beach off the coast of North Carolina…Hilton Head I think? In the Atlantic. I don't know if this counts but it's just something different."<OOC> Ahmed says, "Cleaning up something with work… just a minute."
Ahmed nods in reply as he looks around, "This isn't anything like the coasts we have back home, they're a lot… grayer. But Victoria isn't really beach or surf country… heck… we're hardly summer country." he still moves carefully, with his injuries, and comes over to sit down next to his friend, looking down at him a moment, and then says, "Sun feels real enough… I see why you're catnapping."
"I just needed to get out of that room. Just everyone around and stuff, I was getting really grumpy." Nicholas admits. "And just people coming in and out and in and out was just…" He shakes his head. "I want our room back Ahmed. It wasn't a big place but it was our room. I didn't think I'd be bothered by it since anything I owned was stuff I recently rebought but, it does bother me."
"I know how you feel…" Ahmed says with a sigh, "My plushes, my action figures… my posters and prints… all that stuff gone. Everything that I have left is because I forgot to pick up my pack from the locker rooms." And removing said pack from his back, he drops it to the ground, draping it over his knees, "We'll get the room back… and we can make it our room again, promise. Only this time, we can make it better." There's another pause before he adds, "You know… I'm the anti-social one, but you seem to need alone time a lot more than I do."
"Definitely. I managed to rescue four DVDs, my mp3 player and the jacket Shane made me. It's a bit torn and burnt but it still looks good. If I lost that I think I might have cried." Nicholas tries to joke but even though he's smiling his eyes aren't. He lets out a breath and then nods. "Yeah, I do. Ever since getting back it's like….I just get irritated more. Especially when people start talking about the Purifiers and how they want to just go after them and stuff. It's hard to explain but it's like, I just want to yell at them, you have no idea. The nightmares won't go away, they're getting worse and I feel so lost Ahmed."
Ahmed holds up two fingers, "I'm torn on what to do right now… one…" He says as he folds the middle finger down, "I want to tell you it's going to get better, but that's not what you want to hear, actually… I'm not the one you want to hear it from…" The second finger is curled in, "And I don't feel like griping or making jokes because even laughing hurts me right. So I'm not sure what to do for you… so I'm just going to hang here. However." And those paws-like hands go into his laptop, "I -DID- bring my laptop, and I got permission for the bill to be foot for a Netflix account for now. Sooooo… cheesy movie?"
Nicholas frowns for a bit and nods, grabbing a handful of sand and letting it run through his fingers. "So how are you ribs feeling? I'm still on the pain killers but when they wear off, yeesh. And Netflix sounds good. I was gonna go for the free app with the card that Ms. Frost gave us for the PS Vita. I figured that's a good use of it since it's more than just one movie or game."
Taking a breath, some obvious pain goes through Ahmed's eyes as he replies, "It hurts to breath, eat, laugh…everything. But, the pain is a good thing. Means I'm alive. Doctor Reyes says with regular treatments from the tech here, and time inside my shells to cushion me, I should be better in a week or two. She keeps saying that every time I cat out, it mucks up the readings." Bringing up the queue, he starts to flick through the instant selections, "So.. besides the nightmares, and the wicked painkillers… how are you?"
"Same here. I try to pretty much lie still and do nothing." Nicholas then gets really quiet at the question before just shaking his head. "I'm a wreck Ahmed, and I know it. I just don't know." He doesn't think that Ahmed wants to really hear it though. "So what kind of cheesy movies are you talking about? I know Super 8 has been on there and I really liked that movie."
Ahmed continues flipping through, and then stops at the comedy-horror classic Gremlins, "I was thinking something a little more old school. The kind of thing we could turn our brains off to… does this work?" Leaving the trailer up for a moment without the sound on as he looks back at Nick, and replies, "You just don't know… what?" No pressure to speak in his words, but letting that little olive branch hover there just in case.
"I've never heard of Gremlins." Nicholas is just to young to remember certain 80's classics. "Looks interesting enough, weird and certainly cheesy. I wonder if we can program this to be a theatre and hook up the laptop to play the movie on a giant screen with two comfy chairs for us." If he can watch it in comfort, he will. "I just don't know what to do Ahmed. I don't know who to talk to."
Standing back up, Ahmed begins walking towards where the door is supposed to be, "No, Nick… problem is, you know who you want to talk to, but they're not here anymore. At least… that's my read. You'd talk to that Bodie guy, or your parents… or…" Trailing off before bringing up any more pain as he looks over the controls, and adds, "We don't have enough time for a full movie. Queue says someone else has the room in about a hour. But I could turn it into this cool movie Theater I've heard about in Vancouver. Plush seats, full service, no kids…"
"That's why I don't know who to talk to." Nicholas whispers as his voice gets caught in his throat. He turns his head away from Ahmed and presses his fingers to his cheeks to try to stop himself from getting to emotional. "Well we can start the movie now and just reserve a day to finish it up. I'm fine with that, as long as we have seats comfortable enough for our injured ribs. They don't even have to be theatre chairs."
The beach scene is altered using half the Danger Room behind Nicholas so that it turns into a boardwalk open-air theater. With couches instead of chairs. Moving to seat himself, the feline Ahmed waits for his laptopt to synch to the Danger Room, and then with a tap of a finger… the 'screen' appears and begins to play in tandem with his own much smaller screen, "Sounds like a plan. Wow… I feel like I need a lemonade or something…"
"Popcorn and a coke." Nicholas says slowly making his way over to one of the couches and lying down so he's as comfortable as possible. "Going to the movie theatre was a rare treat back home, I loved going. It was the one in a half, two hour drive that made it hard. And with gas being expensive we didn't go out there much."
"Only time I ever went to movies was when the school did a thing… usually for matinees or something for good grades." Ahmed says softly as he moves over closer to his friend while the first scene begins to play, and he then looks up and over the side of the arm of the couch to add, "So I kinda get what you mean… and then you've got those friends who get to see every movie the day it comes out. It's like there's never a middle ground."
Nicholas shakes his head. "No, we didn't have a kid like that because it was so far away. My town, and my school, were really small. My High School, was less than fifty kids. I'm not even joking Ahmed." Nicholas says smiling. "I kinda miss it, because the school was so small, it was hard not to get along with everyone. Also the school was for the county, not the town. Okay I more than kinda miss it. So have you ever seen or heard of this movie before?"
Ahmed shakes his head as he watches the Mogwai first be introduced in it's cage in the dark, and gives a single shoulder shrug, "No… but I figured it was stupid and silly, and something we'd never seen before… so… why not? Worse comes to worse, we pick out something else." Then he closes his eyes a moment and rests his head on the arm of the couch again, "And I'm used to a small school too… maybe three hundred people in my school all told. But it was a private school too… so everyone was there because their parents paid. All boy's school too… so despite the fact that I was the weird kid out, I never really felt left out."
"Sounds good to me. One old movie from around this time that I love, Goonies. My Mom loved it." Nicholas says, eyes focused on the movie. "Three hundred sounds large to me." He chuckles before groaning. "Ow, ribs. You think I'd have gotten more tolerant to pain but I think I've become more wussy about it." He tries making fun of himself. "Ahmed…don't let people call you the weird kid, you're not. You're just different."
That snow leopard tail deliberately curls up into view, "Dude… I'm half-cat now. I still have to tail ritalin to not be sleeping twenty hours a day, and my diet is mostly meat… I think it constitute as weird… and I don't mind. Weird is cool after all. Like fezzes and bow ties." Settling it back on the couch, he adds, "Goonies, you mean with the guy who played Samwise? I saw that once… like a loooooong time ago." Another pause comes and he adds, "Oh, and you're weird. So's Shane. But not Q. Q's just Q."
"Fezzes and bowties are cool?" Nicholas must have missed a memo somewhere. "Yeah that one. Like I said, it was one of my Mom's favourite movies so she'd make us sit down and watch it." He does like to hold onto things that remind him of his parents instead of running from them, even if they do make him sad. "Q's weird too. It's hard to believe that him and I are as close as we are with how much we hated each other at first, I think we're too similar at times. He's just angrier."
Ahmed stares back at the movie for a moment, "Not really. Like you said… you're pretty alike. It's not like me… hard to know who gets me sometimes… but when it happens it's nice. I mean, the whole furry thing sorta happened… because I didn't know anyone in my world who really understood me. I got used to the idea I wasn't really ever going to fit in." A beat, "Until I did. And now I do… and sometimes I don't know what to do with it."
"It's not that hard Ahmed, have fun with it." Nicholas says giving him a smile. "Hang out with the people you care about and fit in with. It's just a matter of having that friend you get along with. I used to think it was easier, I never had trouble making friends before I came here but then, I'm not the same person. I wish I was, I liked that Nicholas better."
After a few moments, Ahmed says while smiling back, "I don't know that Nick. You talk about him a lot, but reality is? That's not the Nick I room with, or the Nick I hang with… or the one who kicks me off the bed in cat form, or all the other things. I only know this Nick… who's strong, even if he doesn't always see it, and he's cool, despite the fact that I'm weird and sometimes a jerk. So… much as I can understand what you mean? I'll take carpe diem." And with that, he moves and pauses the film, "Okay, this is lame… I say we plan this kinda thing next time. Ugh… I'd much rather be watching the Muppets."
Nicholas starts to laugh which ends with him grabbing his ribs in pain. "Damnit Ahmed, don't make me laugh." But he doesn't say which part of what he said amused him. "Sure, we'll find a good movie, one we can all get into. Maybe play it on the ceiling so we can just lie here and relax." He pushes himself out of the couch and telekinetically drags his crunches to him so he can stand. "Our time is up isn't it, we gotta head back to the medbay soon."
Ahmed shrugs once and moves to stand, which causes him to clutch at his own ribs a moment, and then walk over towards the door for Nick, "Yeah… time's up… but beach movie theatre's kinda cool… I think we should keep this idea. I kinda liked the waves behind me. But if we do do it… I want flop space to cat out. I'm more comfortable when I'm inside the shell. Easier on the ribs." The controls are touched, and the simulation ends, with that, the smells and the sounds, "Nice vacation. Next time, something warmer, okay? Like Hawaii. Never been. Wanna run on the beach on all fours."
Nicholas nods. "Sounds good, that's why we project the movie in the sky, so we can lie down and and just look up. Also snacks, we need snacks." Nicholas says as he starts to move towards the door. "Thanks again, I needed this."
"You're welcome, Nick… seriously." And as Ahmed looks back at the bare hallway, and the equally bare room, "I'm gonna catch a shower… we got plenty of hot water, and I like the warmth on my fur. Plus, because of Dr. McCoy, they have this really nice fur-dryer. You should try it sometime." Winking once, he then adds, "C'mon… time to face the world, such as it is."
