Players:
Summary: Some too-close-to-curfew activities are interrupted by the Master of Magnetism
Date: January 27, 2010
Log Title Meet Miss Eep
Rating: G
Xavier Mansion - Front Gates
Large Iron gates standing twelve feet tall in front of you with an elaborate letter X designed on each of the gates. An Iron Gate stretches around both sides of the school. The gates are usually found closed and open to those who know the correct code to enter in the keypad on the left. Beyond the gates a large statue can be seen in a courtyard and a building in the shape of an X.
Time Trials. Mike Drakos has the weirdest trouble with teachers no matter where he goes, and the curse remains unbroken so far at Xavier's… Mutant High.
In this case the problem is that Mike, being a living automotive robot, simply doesn't benefit from endurance or strength training. In fact, over time, it might be a bad thing. Still, he was ordered to provide a set of five time trials at a one mile distance, over the course of a week.
The thing is, he blew them off to hang with students, read, figure out how his body worked and ohyeah, play an obscure Korean MMO with cars in it, with his friend Jerry back home.
So now, he's here, in the near-dark, and he's picked out a one-mile route around the building and grounds, and seeing how close he can get to his top speed.
Magneto has been busy doing… things. Someone might actually find out what, eventually, but not tonight, because he is in the middle of gesturing when… he turns his head and moonlight glints off the edges of the helmet. Another gesture and things… move, in the shadows. Move and morph and fade into the background, as the Mutant Master of Magnetism takes to the air.
He goes looking for something that caught his attention, something relatively large, fast, and metallic. Imagine his interest when he finds a humanoid motorcycle… or is it a motorcycloid human?
At 45 MPH, Mike figures, he can do a quarter-mile in a minute, but this impromptu track, grass, dark, etc… it would be easier to do if he had just merged with his motorcycle, so he's playing with that mental image he got off the web yesterday - the new TRON movie, the light-cycles. His humaniform body stubbornly refuses to comply with the image, or any other than what it is, but that's fine, he can figure out how it could work for real and then maybe he'll be able to do that with the bike.
For Magneto, the lines of force between man and machine are blurred; Mike is halfway to Tron already, as far as he's concerned. How… interesting.
Let's see how interesting it can get.
He lands, dead center in Mike's track, just around a blind corner… with a force field up, of course. Because, you know, Magneto cheats.
There is one spot Mike hates about this course, but it gives him the last precious 30 yards… there's a jog-out in the wall where it extends, near the end of the course, and following that will get Mike back to where he left the timer, his notes, and his uniform, because he's not quite sure he can "feel" around him that well with that smart-cloth on his body. Besides. Red pinstripes. Faster. Orange creamsicle? Slow and melty.
Thus, he isn't QUITE prepared to sense the presence of an obstacle, and he makes a BWOOP BWOOP car alarm noise as he tries to leap over it.
Pure fail. His only hope is to recover and stick the landing…
Lines of force grip metals and near-metals, providing a nigh-frictionless curve that starts several yards in front of Magneto--just at that blind corner, in fact--and lifts over him. It cuts off behind him--more cheating--because a: why bother covering his back that well when his target is coming at his front? and b: let's see what motorcycle boy does with flight…
It's going to be CLOSE, Mike, you might hit that (lights on) OMGPANICWTFMAGNETO IS THIS A JOKE (lights off) very fortunately there is a magnetic ramp, because Mike's forward velocity of 40MPH is translated into something much more vertical. He did NOT make the leap at all well.
However, Mike does have one skill that he's only shown two people. Mike is a bit of an acrobat. Which may save him from becoming a part of the WALL - he recovers from the flailing graceless thrash of the first 1.3 seconds of the encounter and pulls himself into a spinning ball, legs and knees tucked to chest, then throws arms out an stops the rotation, spinning around in a near-perfect 540 degree turn just after the top of his arc. As he's about 50 feet above ground at this point he bleeds off the rotation with a single forward-tuck-spin, and comes down just a LEEETLE too close to the wall for perfect comfort, dealing the death blow with his feet to the petunias and making a fair landing. Little step.
The car-alarm noise, a sound not heard often by the front gates. The garage, this would be another thing entirely, but the gates? Interrupted in her casual stroll back to the Mansion, Rashmi comes pounding toward the gates, long red hair waving much like a pennant in a breeze. "Mike?! Mike are you okay, what's going on!"
Magneto turns as Mike flips over him, tracking him with sight and senses, studying him.
"The problem with allowing yourself to be tossed into the air, young man, is that without flight, you are at the mercy of gravity… and of anyone who can keep you off the ground." And with that, Mike is up, up and away! Again. Dangle.
Then another distraction appears, and Magneto turns to greet her. "Another student, I presume. Who might you be, young lady?"
Allowing… ALLOWING? Wait, has someone forgotten the laws of physics here?
Wait, of course they have. Mike silently prays, "HELP!" in very eloquent fashion, and simultaneously because he's got multiple processors in that multidimensional brain, "OH SHIT" and also "Wow, that was fun," and of course, "In the soup now, Mike."
Unfortunately none of this gets to the surface. And he can't quite think of anything in his small list of snappy radio-quotes and song snippets that would get mercy from the Master of Magnetism.
Rashmi skids to a halt, dark eyes as wide and round as dinner plates, concern rapidly giving way to stark mute terror. Though she'd managed to live most of her life in blissful ignorance of the minutiae of the cape-and-spandex crowds, there remains no single New Yorker that could ever mistake that helmet, that voice, for anything other than that belonging to Magneto. When pressed, ever so politely for her name, all the redhead manages is a remarkable ineloquent "….Eep…."
Let it not be said that the Master of Magnetism is completely without humor. "Miss Eep, then," he says, without a trace of sarcasm in his tone (really, he might meet a dozen Miss Eeps every day. Come to think of it, he just might.) He looks back up to Mike and lowers him to within easy chat distance. "And who might you be, young man? Perhaps some relative of Warlock's? I was not aware that another of his kind had arrived upon this planet." And if anyone cares--and can sense it--he's putting out further magnetic feelers into the underbrush. Any more students lurking nearby…?
Not dead yet? Oh wow. Good. Well. Bad. A question asked from that guy, you answer as best you can, right?
A sampled song off the radio plays, incongruously providing an emotional flavor that ins't actually part of this reply. "I cannot speak/I lost my voice/I'm speechless" … he's not going to use that nauseatingly chipper "Hi I'm Mike" thing. In fact, that one gets erased NOW.
"U-um…. He, um… Can't say anything…. u-unless… he heard it on the radio… um… …sir…" It takes some amount of nerving up to contribute that much to the conversation, though evidently Rashmi hasn't missed the bit where Mike doesn't give out his name. And for several reasons, doesn't even begin to bother with correcting Magneto's misunderstanding of her own name.
Music?
Magneto pulls Mike down to examine him more closely. Given that he's a mecha, Mike may feel odd for a moment--he's getting an MRI, whether he wants it or not.
This doesn't mean that Magneto is ignoring Rashmi. "He can't speak, can he?" he murmurs, and he frowns at that--Mike is close enough to notice silver brows drawing down, inside the face-slit of the helmet. Then things are happening--metal bits are flitting around, converging near Magneto's head. Rashmi is going to lose all of her paper clips and most of the staples in her bookbag, as well as any metal bits on hair ties. Mike will feel tugs here and there, although he doesn't actually lose pieces--good, yes? Someone dropped a penny near here, and that ends up in the mass whirling by Magneto's head, as do some bottle caps, three or four ball bearings (where did they come from?) and a notched gear (What?) These all meld together and the result--square, box-like, with a front grill--gets magnetically stuck on Mike's chest. "Speak, boy."
And Mike can… if he wants to, and can force himself to (more than Eep, anyway.) And so long as Magneto is within twenty feet or so, because the device works on magnetism. Obviously.
Voice. OK. It sounds like Mike's voice, because something about that metal fluxing field feels very familiar. It's the voice of someone about age 15, light tenor with promise of becoming a baritone for a while, on the way to something deeper, but not any more.
"Yes sir. My name is Mike Drakos. I don't know who Warlock is. This is just because of my mutation."
He hasn't wet himself. Advantage to having no bladder.
Rashmi swallows, sparing a long look at her bookbag as she feels a series of tugs at it, watching the creation of the voice box with something akin to awe. Her mouth falls open slightly as Mike speaks, actual words for the first time in her presence. "Um… I'm, um… Rashmi, sir… … ….Franklin."
Magneto tilts his head in Rashmi's direction. "A much prettier name than Eep, young lady," he says, and half-turns so that he can see both students at once. "You're both out quite late, and on a school night. Explain yourselves."
He *was* headmaster here, once upon a time. He remembers it well.
Mike checks his cronometer … not quite curfew yet, still an hour off… Whew.
"I was doing time-trials, sir. Running one mile for best time." And no way is this one going to be counted. Mike's got his pride here.
He also has his curiousity, and his 'sense of perception" which is (it seems) at least partly electromagnetic and a bit autonomous of his intention, starts feeling around to see whether he can tell what's holding him in the air. It usually only feels surfaces, like radar would.
Rashmi clears her throat. "I… was on my way back to the house…. sir… We were talking in the garage… and we were going to the kitchen… um… because I'd skipped dinner… to study, sir…." There's never any real good excuse for being out after hours on a weekday, but the inclusion of missing meals for academia usually wins at least a cursory poiont or two. Maybe this time?
Mike can reach with that sense of his and touch… the shore of an ocean, vast and deep, carrying him as effortlessly as he might carry a leaf. It shifts and shimmers in his senses, promising experiences beyond his knowledge, his dreams, his imagination…
Magneto crosses his arms. "Skipping a meal for the sake of your studies serves your education poorly and your body not at all, Miss Franklin," he says, turning the helmet toward her until she might see his eyes glinting at her from its shadows. "I advise that you not make a habit of it." Then, to Mike, "Time trials at the end of the day, when you are at your lowest point of energy and alertness, Mr. Drakos? Do tell."
A flick of his fingers and Mike is set on the ground. "Go in, students. Eat and sleep, and try again tomorrow. And Mr. Drakos? When cornering, you bear too hard to the outside, and you lose ground that way. Try leading a corner on your other foot." A nod, and he sweeps upward into the air, disappearing into the dark sky in short order.
Mike looks at Rashmi, and then at the odd device that's clinging to him with the insistence of a limpet.
"That was Magneto," he says intelligently, and blinks once. The device still works, but he can feel that odd echoy oceany thing moving away.
"We should get inside, huh?"
Rashmi's head falls back, tracking Magneto's movement until the darkness swallows his silhouette. "….Yeah…" Magneto's presence, clearly, breeds a special kind of eloquence. "…Before he comes back."
Mike walks the diagonal over to the gate where his uniform and the timer wait. Picking them up, he considers removing the thing, then decides to leave it for now. It's just as he says, with surprised enthusiasm, "That was fu…" that it cuts off.
"…Uh-huh…" Rashmi seems to be in something of a daze; how often, after all, does one have a brush with one of the single most infamous mutants in her lifetime… or her parents'?
