Post by Shadowcat on Aug 11, 2006 18:45:16 GMT -5
"Storm seemed to think that if I did a session in here with you, I might be more inclined to think of someone other than myself." The sarcasm in John's voice was biting. "Don't think she was particularly impressed by my last show."
Kitty sighed, picking at a nonexistant stray thread on the sleeve of her uniform. She still wasn't completely comfortable in it, though she'd been training heavily for months; it was leather, after all. She was even less comfortable facing anyone while wearing it, and to have to be with John was a form of acute torture that could only be punishment for something awful she'd unwittingly done to Storm.
"Well, you can't help it if you lose focus," she said. "That's just a practice thing. I'm sure you think about people other than yourself, anyway, it just gets a little weird trying to protect your team when killer robots are shooting at you... but it's practice, anyway. Ms. Munroe'll get over herself eventually."
"I don't reckon she'll EVER get over herself." John hadn't been given the privilege of a uniform, not yet. It was common knowledge that only the teacher's pets got given leather uniforms, and by inference, John was the equivalent of someone who had barely graduated out of a sack cloth. "She hates me. I can see it in her beady little eyes when she stares – no, GLARES at me."
Ah, John was in one of those faintly paranoid moods. The ones where everyone, even his best friends hated him.
Kitty restrained an eyeroll only by the very barest scrap of self-control. She was very proud of herself afterwards.
Instead of huffing in derision at John's psychotic tendencies, she slipped her arm through his and hugged it. "She doesn't hate you," Kitty said. "She doesn't glare at you all that much, anyway. Only when you sit there with a little fireball and get that weird look. Maybe she doesn't like you, but it's just, like, a personality conflict or something. You're both very, er... take-charge. Maybe she feels threatened by you or something."
It was pretty easy to feel threatened by something, after all, when they could shoot fire at you.
He thawed a little at her hug and put an unexpected arm around her for a quick snuggle. His resistance to physical displays of affection was definitely dropping under Kitty's patience. Three times in the past week he'd caught himself voluntarily holding her hand.
"She said we should run programme Gamma-Epsilon fourteen," he said, reading the note. "Said it would make us have to think 'outside the box'. The woman likes her buzzwords. I could actually see the word 'synergy' racing to her lips."
"Outside the box?" Kitty asked, now sharing John's paranoia. "That sounds... fun."
She unhooked the little latch that dropped the external controls down from the wall, logging in and typing in the name of the program. "Gamma... epsilon... 14," she said slowly as the letters and numbers appeared on the screen, then pressed Enter. From inside the room there was the shift of mechanical gears and then a loud hum as the holographic generators whirred to life, and she snapped the keyboard back into the wall outside the Danger Room.
She keyed the Trainee code into the box beside the door and took a deep breath, focusing on the air between her and the nearest object in her line of sight like her crazy Bohemian dance instructor from when she was 12 had always taught them. "Here goes nothing," she said, and opened the door.
"Encouraging," said John, good-naturedly, following her into the Danger Room.
Thirty seconds later, he stepped back out.
"That woman is now officially taking the PISS," he ranted, his face black with fury.
Kitty followed John out of the room, though with much less stomping, and hovered in the doorway as the simulation was held in stasis, paused by John's tread on the threshold.
"John, come back!" she said. Even after exposure to Aussie/Whatever language for the last several... long times, she still wasn't sure what 'taking the piss' meant, but it probably wasn't good. It had a cuss in it, after all.
To Kitty, though, it looked almost kind of fun. It was like Sleeping Beauty!
"If anything," she said, "this is the perfect assignment for you. Fight fire with fire and stuff."
"It's stupid," he said, sulkily, folding his arms across his chest. "The Danger Room is supposed to provide us with potential real world battle situations to see how we react. Not bloody FAIRY TALES!"
He shouted the last two words up at the screened control box, which was just visible inside the Danger Room, knowing full well that at least Storm if not half the damn teaching staff were in there laughing at him.
"Because you and Bobby's ninja fight was so real-world," Kitty said, though the statement lacked most of the sting anyone else would have given it; it sounded more exasperated than anything. "They're just trying to shake things up. If we expect normal things, we'll stop expecting... un-normal things. I mean, there could be mutants like Mystique who can change shape into dragons, right? What's scarier than a huge freaking dragon?"
She sighed, placing her hands on her hips and decidedly not looking back up at the teachers in the control box. "Either way," she said, "I'm going to finish the simulation. You can come if you want. I don't particularly like the idea of my chances against a fire-breathing dragon."
Privately, Kitty wondered if Ms. Munroe's expectations of John's self-centeredness weren't closer to home than Kitty'd always considered them to be.
Still slightly sulky, John changed his stance slightly. "S'pose you have a point," he said. "About Mystique, I mean." His shoulders straightened and he unfolded his arms. "Alright then," he said. "But if any bloody fairies show up and start trying to seduce me, I'm…"
He paused for a moment.
"Let's do it."
"I will punch any fairies who try," Kitty said, much smilier now that John wasn't being quite so ridiculous. She would, too; simulated fairies couldn't have hurt feelings. Or they could, but they were simulated feelings, and she didn't feel nearly as bad about it.
She pushed the door further open for John to come in and when her boots touched the floor, the simulation unpaused; sunshine spilled over a pink-and-white castle about a quarter of a mile away, but close up, craggy rocks gave off an almost tangible heat, still warm from where the dragon had breathed on them. She couldn't see the dragon anymore, but she could hear it breathing - it sounded like a set of metal bellows going full tilt from behind a large rise on the bare earth.
"I think we should probably surprise it," Kitty whispered.
"Good plan, Kit Kat. You go first. Then, when I've swept up your ashes, I'll use you as an egg timer. We took it by surprise when we first stepped in here and you saw what happened. I'd say we need to weigh it up first. We already have a good idea of its range – what we don't know yet is how long it needs between bursts."
His eyes narrowed.
"It makes flame naturally, not artificially like I do. I can get fire at any time. It has to go through a process. So I actually suggest we do the waiting game and wave at it until it fires at us."
Kitty tried very hard not to bristle. She succeeded. (Mostly.)
"Okay," she said. "So then, when it fires at us with a longer range because we've been making it angry, we'll still both be in ashes."
Maybe her plan hadn't been the best, but somehow 'wave at the monster until it gets mad and attacks us' didn't seem like the best idea.
"Are we even supposed to attack it?" Kitty asked. "What else kills a dragon? Other than St. George. Could we figure out a way to poison it or something?"
"What else do you want to do? Negotiate?"
He grinned at her, a wickedly infectious grin. "Stay here a minute. Get down low and do what I say when I say it." Without waiting for her acknowledgement, he bounded up to the outcropping of rock and stood there, a fireball bouncing in his hand. "HEY!" he yelled at the top of his voice. "Sparky!"
The huge simulated dragon turned at the sound and narrowed its reptilian eyes at the sight of the young man on the rock. Two jets of steam issued from its nostrils, but no fire was forthcoming.
John watched it as intently as it watched him.
Three full minutes passed, and the dragon lowered its head. "Kitty, get down," yelled John at the exact same moment the creature let blast with another rush of intensive flames. John concentrated his energies on his own fireball and sent it forwards to meet the oncoming attack. It took a lot of effort, but he then expanded the fireball out over a fair area to create a sort of fire-from-fire shield.
To his surprise it worked.
"I don't know, I just - "
John cut her off before she could finish, though she knew from the smile that grew on his face that he wasn't listening anyway. Kitty threw him a displeased look as he bounded away and she knelt behind a convenient boulder, but it slowly faded to be replaced by sheer horror.
He was so not teasing a DRAGON. Kitty could only stare as he sat there and stared the dragon down, unaware that she was even breathing, though she must be to have lasted three minutes. Obediently, she ducked as she saw the creature rear back and prepare to blast, but not without an extremely high-pitched noise that might have translated, through much slowing-down and deepening, to John's name.
She peeked out from one side of her cover, feeling her hair curl under the heat and her cheeks turn pink. Apparently you could, after all, fight fire with fire.
"Great!" she shouted, actually sincere. "What now?"
"We have a four minute advantage," he shouted back, gleefully. "Now we need to find out just what it is that the point of this mission is – and that means getting closer. Is that dragon guarding something, maybe?"
He was actually ENJOYING this, she could see it in his eyes, hear it in his tone. He had come alive.
Something about John when he got excited like this was more than a little terrifying to Kitty. In some ways, she'd almost rather have the dragon.
Rising a little from behind her boulder, she pointed at the castle in the distance, which obligingly glittered in a sudden extra-bright shaft of sunlight. "Maybe there's treasure," she said. "Or a princess or something."
Kitty bit her lip, eyeing the dragon over John's shoulder. "Maybe we've got a four-minute advantage, but I bet that thing has teeth, too," she said.
"I'll worry about the dragon," he said. "You worry about getting past it to the castle. We have comms. I'll keep it busy. That's what I'm here for. A distraction."
A moment later, he turned his head to her.
"Still here?"
"Um," Kitty said. "Okay. Don't die."
She really didn't want to leave John alone with a dragon. He'd probably try to ride it or something. She definitely wouldn't put something like that past him.
She held back for a moment, glancing over her shoulder at John.
"Still here?"
"Oh," Kitty said. "Um, yeah. Bye."
She phased herself down through the soil, blushing. Kitty forced herself through as much of the rock as she could handle - about 45 seconds - before resurfacing, now a bit past the dragon, which was still occupied with staring at John.
Hoping he wouldn't do anything dumb, she started jogging towards the castle, which now seemed much closer than a quarter mile. Funny how the Danger Room did that. She pressed the button on her comm as she hit the sweeping lawns, trudging up towards the yawning castle mouth. "Is it doing anything yet?" she asked John.
"Just a sec," was his reply and she heard the roar of flame and, looking behind her saw the orange glow of the same. A torrent of swearing came into her ear from her mission companion and then there was a moment's silence.
"All good here."
Kitty tensed and slowed down as John started cursing a blue streak, pressing the comm tightly to her and trying to remember that you couldn't die in the Danger Room.
"All good here."
Kitty breathed a sigh of relief. "Okay," she said, starting to jog again. "I'm seeing... gates and a drawbridge. Do you think there'll be guards?"
Tentatively, she slowed up again as she reached the wooden bridge, stepping gingerly on it as if expecting motion sensors, but of course that would be ridiculous - it was a medieval castle, after all.
She did see a glint of steel behind the portcullis, though. Lovely. "What do I do if I can't stay phased long enough?"
"You hide."
John's response was brief, succinct and a little on the snappy side. He must have been aware of the fact, because a few seconds later, his voice came back over the radio. "Sorry, Kits. Just trying to figure out what the hell all this is about."
Kitty leaned against the wall outside the gate and concentrated on not freaking out and not snapping at John. She probably wouldn't be able to think of anything to say, anyway.
"It's fine," she said, though her voice was a little short. She'd just have to figure it out once she got inside, wouldn't she?
Taking a deep breath, Kitty phased through the wall just next to the portcullis - but a few feet in she found not wall, but a stairwell up to a guard tower. A tiny slit of a window showed her guards milling around in the courtyard, who apparently hadn't noticed anyone coming up the drawbridge. Weird. Maybe she had to call out a challenge or something. But she was inside now - that was what mattered.
A narrow hallway, barely wider than Kitty herself and lit by strangely smokeless torches near the top of the walls, led her at a straight shot to the corner of the outside wall that next adjoined the castle; she hadn't gone all the way up to the top of the tower for fear of being sighed. The locked door that led into the castle's interior posed no threat, of course, and Kitty was in another hallway, though grander than the last, if a bit dark - only a few more torches in corners lit the tapestries and grand carpets thrown on the floor.
"So what are we looking for?" she asked John, though she didn't have any reason to think he knew more than she did. "Treasure or a princess or a prisoner or what? What do you think, anyway."
"I try not to thi....FUCK that was close. Hang on."
Radio silence followed for a few moments. The sound of distant flaming and roaring came from the direction of the valley. When the roaring stopped, John's voice came back, a little more shaken than before. "OK," he said. "This isn' t funny any more."
He was stuck. He was trapped. He'd volunteered to keep the damn dragon distracted and thus far, all it had brought him was almost instant barbecue. There was clearly something more to this that he couldn't see.
What Storm hadn't factored into her programming when she came up with the 'fairy tale' idea was that John had never had someone to read fairy tales to him.
"John?"
Radio silence persisted for a nanosecond too long, and Kitty asked again, fear very evident in her tone. "John?"
"OK. This isn' t funny any more."
Kitty breathed a sigh of relief, though it would be registered only as static. It would've been more relieved if John hadn't sounded as scared as he did.
"We're missing something," she muttered into the comm as a sense of wrongness settled firmly over the castle hallway. It twisted and turned, bizarrely without any guards whatsoever - why? it made no sense - until Kitty found stairs and stairs and stairs, all leading up. The tower got thinner and thinner, and the slits of window gave way to stained glass, the architects apparently sure that you couldn't catapult anything this high.
At the top of the castle was an unlocked door. Kitty pushed it open, tentatively. Inside was nothing but a spinning wheel.
Even as she felt the pieces of the puzzle snap into place, she felt herself reaching for the spindle, though light flickered ominously off the sharpened tip and everything. "Crud," she said into the microphone before her hand wrapped around the spindle itself - her thumb coming down, apparently through sheer chance, on the gleaming silver barb.
All that was audible on the other end of the radio was a clatter and a sickeningly human thump.
"Kitty?"
John's voice over the radio held more than a hint of anxiety. "Kitty, what's going on up there?" He tried contacting her several times, but no response was forthcoming. He felt a sliver of fear pierce his very, very thin veneer of calm and glared furiously at the dragon. >
"Right," he said in a tone that broked no argument whatsever. "I am now officially at the end of my tether. Hey, you!" The last was directed at the dragon, up to whom John marched furiously. "YOU are now officially ticking me off. Go on, try it. Just TRY it, you FUCKING overgrown lizard."
Some ten minutes later, the dragon was laying on its side, dazed, its fires well and truly quenched by an undersized, skinny mutant with a temper. John stormed into the cave it had been guarding, fury on his face and opened the chest at the far end.
Inside was the face of Professor Xavier, floating as if in water. Light gleamed genially off a glare point on his bald head.
"Well done, John," he said, looking truly pleased with his student's progress. (Dimly, very dimly, the rest of the control room could be seen in the background, complete with a sour face under a shock of long white hair.) "I take it you're wondering what happened to Kitty, then."
He chuckled, and the light point shifted briefly.
"I assure you, she'll be fine... provided, of course, you find a way to help her. When you exit the cave, you may find the castle in the distance somewhat changed, but I don't think it should pose too much of a threat. Your objective is to find a way to the highest room in the tallest tower - which is, before you ask, yes, where Kitty is. Good luck."
"You've GOT to be kidding me." John stared furiously at the fading image of Professor Xavier. "You DAMN people are just...shit." He rolled his eyes heavenward - or at least control room-ward. He couldn't just walk out the Danger Room and leave Kitty, could he? 'Course he could. It was only a simulation. But then the Professor had said 'she'll be find...if you find a way to help her'. Was that some sort of threat?
Gritting his teeth in barely concealed irritation, John stepped out of the cave again.
Briars had grown to nearly cover the walls of the castle, which was, for reasons not obvious, not pink and white anymore, but a rather forbidding black and gray, under a stormy sky of a sickly greenish-yellow. Lightning cracked forbiddingly every few seconds in the distance, thunder following it once someone remembered to make the ground rumble scarily every once in a while.
A huge white charger stamped impatiently where the dragon had been, a scabbard and sword belted to its saddle. It Did Not look pleased to be there. Taped to its forehead was a green Post-It, with DOESN'T BITE scrawled quickly in a hand similar to Storm's.
John's scowl grew, if possible, even deeper and he snatched the Post-It note off the hapless animal, causing it to shy back in alarm. "Very bloody funny," he said, taking the reins of the horse and inexpertly climbing into the saddle. He almost fell straight off the other side.
He sat on the horse for a while, feeling faintly self-conscious.
"Giddy up?" he hazarded. "Go?"
Nothing. The stupid horse's ears twitched.
"I hate this place," John muttered and then he drew the sword from its scabbard, held it aloft and shouted, loudly, "CHARGE!"
The horse did so. Violently, and with a rear-up just to make its point, before it took off at top speed for the castle, shooting gravel when it skidded to a halt on the non-castle side of the drawbridge, before the thorn forest. It craned its neck around as far as possible, looking expectantly at John out of one enormous brown eye, twitching its head impatiently as if to say 'well, get on with it then.'
The forest itself was not deep, but one couldn't even see the walls of the castle through it; long black thorns and brownish vegetation clustered so thickly as to block out even light, not that there was much to be had.
Thunder rumbled ominously for the billionth time beneath the horse's hooves. Thankfully for its inexperienced rider, it was apparently a very well-trained simulated horse, and held its ground.
A true prince would have begun to hack his way through the undergrowth with the razor-edged sword. Not John Allerdyce.
He sent out wave after wave of flame, burning his way through.
The horse disapproved vaguely, but, of course, it wasn't the horse's choice. But walking slowly through the raised portcullis, all that could be seen around were not rampaging guards, or anyone to call challenge - the courtyard was instead full of sleeping castle-dwellers, everyone from the highest lord to the lowest scullery maid passed out and snoring on the soft grass and well-beaten paths of the yard before the great doors of the fortress itself.
John bellowed Kitty's name at the top of his lungs, sliding down off the horse and charging his way on foot towards the doors. He tried the radio, which earned him nothing. He screamed himself nearly hoarse - which ALSO earned him nothing.
Helpfully, one of the main doors opened slightly, as if by a gust of wind, and the torches in the hallway beyond all lit themselves.
"Crap, this is crazy," he muttered and ran through the door, up a long, winding staircase and out again at the top into a long hallway. By now, John was anything but the handsome prince. His hair stuck out in all directions and his face was furious.
Kitty was still, predictably for those playing at home, crumpled on the floor with the spindle next to her, prevented from rolling away very far by the bumpiness of the stone floor. For someone who'd ever read fairy tales, the answer would be simple; but for someone who hadn't, Kitty might well have looked on the brink of death, were it not for the gentle breathing and slight snore on the inhale that marked her alive.
"John," crackled a voice over his communicator that was most definitely not Kitty's. It was too male, too smug, and too bald. "Have you ever read Sleeping Beauty?"
Had he?
There was a long pause and when John spoke, there was a sad, wistful quality to his voice.
"No."
"Of course," said Professor Xavier, though he seemed much less amused now. "Of course. Well. In the story, a young princess is put into an ageless sleep by pricking her finger on a spindle - thus the presence of the spinning wheel, you see - by an evil fairy who wanted revenge on the princess's father, the King. A friendlier fairy selects a prince, I imagine from a neighboring kingdom, and gives him certain gifts with which to face down the traps set by the evil fairy - a dragon, as you saw, and the forest of thorns. She also alters the magics surrounding the princess so that she may be awakened with a kiss."
There was an uncomfortable pause.
"Do you see what I mean?"
"I see," said John, and his voice was filled with that same wistfulness. "I see, Professor, but I don't understand why this scenario."
"I have been told it was Storm's way of determining whether you'd help a teammate," Professor Xavier said. "The fairy-tale setting, I believe, is a mix of whimsy and necessity. A common story requiring teamwork and sacrifice was needed, and direct challenges left too much room for individuals to split up and find personal solutions. The knowledge that this is a simulation also tends to foster a carelessness in some trainees for which real-life situations leave no room."
Right up until about two minutes ago, John had actually forgotten that it was a simulation. He stared down at Kitty's sleeping form and ran his hands through his hair. "So I gotta kiss her?"
"Yes," the professor said, the amusement back in his voice. "You need to kiss her."
"With you guys WATCHING?"
"I'll tell Storm to close her eyes."
"Funny man." John hunkered down over Kitty and put his fingers to her pulse, which was regular and even. Oh, dear God.
He leaned forward and kissed her, very self-consciously, on the tip of the nose.
Xavier released his hold on Kitty's mind and her eyes opened, though she was, initially, very confused as to why she was on the floor, and why John was in her face.
Pushing herself up to a sitting position, Kitty tried to gauge her surroundings, before she remembered that, oh yes, it was still the Danger Room and whatever bizarre scenario Storm had decided would be a good idea.
She noticed the spindle still lying abandoned on the floor and nudged it farther away from her with her shoe.
"Did we win?" she asked John, who had evidently conquered the dragon.
"D'you know," said John, who in a sudden, surprising move gathered her up in his arms and stood, carrying her. "I reckon we did."
Kitty sighed, picking at a nonexistant stray thread on the sleeve of her uniform. She still wasn't completely comfortable in it, though she'd been training heavily for months; it was leather, after all. She was even less comfortable facing anyone while wearing it, and to have to be with John was a form of acute torture that could only be punishment for something awful she'd unwittingly done to Storm.
"Well, you can't help it if you lose focus," she said. "That's just a practice thing. I'm sure you think about people other than yourself, anyway, it just gets a little weird trying to protect your team when killer robots are shooting at you... but it's practice, anyway. Ms. Munroe'll get over herself eventually."
"I don't reckon she'll EVER get over herself." John hadn't been given the privilege of a uniform, not yet. It was common knowledge that only the teacher's pets got given leather uniforms, and by inference, John was the equivalent of someone who had barely graduated out of a sack cloth. "She hates me. I can see it in her beady little eyes when she stares – no, GLARES at me."
Ah, John was in one of those faintly paranoid moods. The ones where everyone, even his best friends hated him.
Kitty restrained an eyeroll only by the very barest scrap of self-control. She was very proud of herself afterwards.
Instead of huffing in derision at John's psychotic tendencies, she slipped her arm through his and hugged it. "She doesn't hate you," Kitty said. "She doesn't glare at you all that much, anyway. Only when you sit there with a little fireball and get that weird look. Maybe she doesn't like you, but it's just, like, a personality conflict or something. You're both very, er... take-charge. Maybe she feels threatened by you or something."
It was pretty easy to feel threatened by something, after all, when they could shoot fire at you.
He thawed a little at her hug and put an unexpected arm around her for a quick snuggle. His resistance to physical displays of affection was definitely dropping under Kitty's patience. Three times in the past week he'd caught himself voluntarily holding her hand.
"She said we should run programme Gamma-Epsilon fourteen," he said, reading the note. "Said it would make us have to think 'outside the box'. The woman likes her buzzwords. I could actually see the word 'synergy' racing to her lips."
"Outside the box?" Kitty asked, now sharing John's paranoia. "That sounds... fun."
She unhooked the little latch that dropped the external controls down from the wall, logging in and typing in the name of the program. "Gamma... epsilon... 14," she said slowly as the letters and numbers appeared on the screen, then pressed Enter. From inside the room there was the shift of mechanical gears and then a loud hum as the holographic generators whirred to life, and she snapped the keyboard back into the wall outside the Danger Room.
She keyed the Trainee code into the box beside the door and took a deep breath, focusing on the air between her and the nearest object in her line of sight like her crazy Bohemian dance instructor from when she was 12 had always taught them. "Here goes nothing," she said, and opened the door.
"Encouraging," said John, good-naturedly, following her into the Danger Room.
Thirty seconds later, he stepped back out.
"That woman is now officially taking the PISS," he ranted, his face black with fury.
Kitty followed John out of the room, though with much less stomping, and hovered in the doorway as the simulation was held in stasis, paused by John's tread on the threshold.
"John, come back!" she said. Even after exposure to Aussie/Whatever language for the last several... long times, she still wasn't sure what 'taking the piss' meant, but it probably wasn't good. It had a cuss in it, after all.
To Kitty, though, it looked almost kind of fun. It was like Sleeping Beauty!
"If anything," she said, "this is the perfect assignment for you. Fight fire with fire and stuff."
"It's stupid," he said, sulkily, folding his arms across his chest. "The Danger Room is supposed to provide us with potential real world battle situations to see how we react. Not bloody FAIRY TALES!"
He shouted the last two words up at the screened control box, which was just visible inside the Danger Room, knowing full well that at least Storm if not half the damn teaching staff were in there laughing at him.
"Because you and Bobby's ninja fight was so real-world," Kitty said, though the statement lacked most of the sting anyone else would have given it; it sounded more exasperated than anything. "They're just trying to shake things up. If we expect normal things, we'll stop expecting... un-normal things. I mean, there could be mutants like Mystique who can change shape into dragons, right? What's scarier than a huge freaking dragon?"
She sighed, placing her hands on her hips and decidedly not looking back up at the teachers in the control box. "Either way," she said, "I'm going to finish the simulation. You can come if you want. I don't particularly like the idea of my chances against a fire-breathing dragon."
Privately, Kitty wondered if Ms. Munroe's expectations of John's self-centeredness weren't closer to home than Kitty'd always considered them to be.
Still slightly sulky, John changed his stance slightly. "S'pose you have a point," he said. "About Mystique, I mean." His shoulders straightened and he unfolded his arms. "Alright then," he said. "But if any bloody fairies show up and start trying to seduce me, I'm…"
He paused for a moment.
"Let's do it."
"I will punch any fairies who try," Kitty said, much smilier now that John wasn't being quite so ridiculous. She would, too; simulated fairies couldn't have hurt feelings. Or they could, but they were simulated feelings, and she didn't feel nearly as bad about it.
She pushed the door further open for John to come in and when her boots touched the floor, the simulation unpaused; sunshine spilled over a pink-and-white castle about a quarter of a mile away, but close up, craggy rocks gave off an almost tangible heat, still warm from where the dragon had breathed on them. She couldn't see the dragon anymore, but she could hear it breathing - it sounded like a set of metal bellows going full tilt from behind a large rise on the bare earth.
"I think we should probably surprise it," Kitty whispered.
"Good plan, Kit Kat. You go first. Then, when I've swept up your ashes, I'll use you as an egg timer. We took it by surprise when we first stepped in here and you saw what happened. I'd say we need to weigh it up first. We already have a good idea of its range – what we don't know yet is how long it needs between bursts."
His eyes narrowed.
"It makes flame naturally, not artificially like I do. I can get fire at any time. It has to go through a process. So I actually suggest we do the waiting game and wave at it until it fires at us."
Kitty tried very hard not to bristle. She succeeded. (Mostly.)
"Okay," she said. "So then, when it fires at us with a longer range because we've been making it angry, we'll still both be in ashes."
Maybe her plan hadn't been the best, but somehow 'wave at the monster until it gets mad and attacks us' didn't seem like the best idea.
"Are we even supposed to attack it?" Kitty asked. "What else kills a dragon? Other than St. George. Could we figure out a way to poison it or something?"
"What else do you want to do? Negotiate?"
He grinned at her, a wickedly infectious grin. "Stay here a minute. Get down low and do what I say when I say it." Without waiting for her acknowledgement, he bounded up to the outcropping of rock and stood there, a fireball bouncing in his hand. "HEY!" he yelled at the top of his voice. "Sparky!"
The huge simulated dragon turned at the sound and narrowed its reptilian eyes at the sight of the young man on the rock. Two jets of steam issued from its nostrils, but no fire was forthcoming.
John watched it as intently as it watched him.
Three full minutes passed, and the dragon lowered its head. "Kitty, get down," yelled John at the exact same moment the creature let blast with another rush of intensive flames. John concentrated his energies on his own fireball and sent it forwards to meet the oncoming attack. It took a lot of effort, but he then expanded the fireball out over a fair area to create a sort of fire-from-fire shield.
To his surprise it worked.
"I don't know, I just - "
John cut her off before she could finish, though she knew from the smile that grew on his face that he wasn't listening anyway. Kitty threw him a displeased look as he bounded away and she knelt behind a convenient boulder, but it slowly faded to be replaced by sheer horror.
He was so not teasing a DRAGON. Kitty could only stare as he sat there and stared the dragon down, unaware that she was even breathing, though she must be to have lasted three minutes. Obediently, she ducked as she saw the creature rear back and prepare to blast, but not without an extremely high-pitched noise that might have translated, through much slowing-down and deepening, to John's name.
She peeked out from one side of her cover, feeling her hair curl under the heat and her cheeks turn pink. Apparently you could, after all, fight fire with fire.
"Great!" she shouted, actually sincere. "What now?"
"We have a four minute advantage," he shouted back, gleefully. "Now we need to find out just what it is that the point of this mission is – and that means getting closer. Is that dragon guarding something, maybe?"
He was actually ENJOYING this, she could see it in his eyes, hear it in his tone. He had come alive.
Something about John when he got excited like this was more than a little terrifying to Kitty. In some ways, she'd almost rather have the dragon.
Rising a little from behind her boulder, she pointed at the castle in the distance, which obligingly glittered in a sudden extra-bright shaft of sunlight. "Maybe there's treasure," she said. "Or a princess or something."
Kitty bit her lip, eyeing the dragon over John's shoulder. "Maybe we've got a four-minute advantage, but I bet that thing has teeth, too," she said.
"I'll worry about the dragon," he said. "You worry about getting past it to the castle. We have comms. I'll keep it busy. That's what I'm here for. A distraction."
A moment later, he turned his head to her.
"Still here?"
"Um," Kitty said. "Okay. Don't die."
She really didn't want to leave John alone with a dragon. He'd probably try to ride it or something. She definitely wouldn't put something like that past him.
She held back for a moment, glancing over her shoulder at John.
"Still here?"
"Oh," Kitty said. "Um, yeah. Bye."
She phased herself down through the soil, blushing. Kitty forced herself through as much of the rock as she could handle - about 45 seconds - before resurfacing, now a bit past the dragon, which was still occupied with staring at John.
Hoping he wouldn't do anything dumb, she started jogging towards the castle, which now seemed much closer than a quarter mile. Funny how the Danger Room did that. She pressed the button on her comm as she hit the sweeping lawns, trudging up towards the yawning castle mouth. "Is it doing anything yet?" she asked John.
"Just a sec," was his reply and she heard the roar of flame and, looking behind her saw the orange glow of the same. A torrent of swearing came into her ear from her mission companion and then there was a moment's silence.
"All good here."
Kitty tensed and slowed down as John started cursing a blue streak, pressing the comm tightly to her and trying to remember that you couldn't die in the Danger Room.
"All good here."
Kitty breathed a sigh of relief. "Okay," she said, starting to jog again. "I'm seeing... gates and a drawbridge. Do you think there'll be guards?"
Tentatively, she slowed up again as she reached the wooden bridge, stepping gingerly on it as if expecting motion sensors, but of course that would be ridiculous - it was a medieval castle, after all.
She did see a glint of steel behind the portcullis, though. Lovely. "What do I do if I can't stay phased long enough?"
"You hide."
John's response was brief, succinct and a little on the snappy side. He must have been aware of the fact, because a few seconds later, his voice came back over the radio. "Sorry, Kits. Just trying to figure out what the hell all this is about."
Kitty leaned against the wall outside the gate and concentrated on not freaking out and not snapping at John. She probably wouldn't be able to think of anything to say, anyway.
"It's fine," she said, though her voice was a little short. She'd just have to figure it out once she got inside, wouldn't she?
Taking a deep breath, Kitty phased through the wall just next to the portcullis - but a few feet in she found not wall, but a stairwell up to a guard tower. A tiny slit of a window showed her guards milling around in the courtyard, who apparently hadn't noticed anyone coming up the drawbridge. Weird. Maybe she had to call out a challenge or something. But she was inside now - that was what mattered.
A narrow hallway, barely wider than Kitty herself and lit by strangely smokeless torches near the top of the walls, led her at a straight shot to the corner of the outside wall that next adjoined the castle; she hadn't gone all the way up to the top of the tower for fear of being sighed. The locked door that led into the castle's interior posed no threat, of course, and Kitty was in another hallway, though grander than the last, if a bit dark - only a few more torches in corners lit the tapestries and grand carpets thrown on the floor.
"So what are we looking for?" she asked John, though she didn't have any reason to think he knew more than she did. "Treasure or a princess or a prisoner or what? What do you think, anyway."
"I try not to thi....FUCK that was close. Hang on."
Radio silence followed for a few moments. The sound of distant flaming and roaring came from the direction of the valley. When the roaring stopped, John's voice came back, a little more shaken than before. "OK," he said. "This isn' t funny any more."
He was stuck. He was trapped. He'd volunteered to keep the damn dragon distracted and thus far, all it had brought him was almost instant barbecue. There was clearly something more to this that he couldn't see.
What Storm hadn't factored into her programming when she came up with the 'fairy tale' idea was that John had never had someone to read fairy tales to him.
"John?"
Radio silence persisted for a nanosecond too long, and Kitty asked again, fear very evident in her tone. "John?"
"OK. This isn' t funny any more."
Kitty breathed a sigh of relief, though it would be registered only as static. It would've been more relieved if John hadn't sounded as scared as he did.
"We're missing something," she muttered into the comm as a sense of wrongness settled firmly over the castle hallway. It twisted and turned, bizarrely without any guards whatsoever - why? it made no sense - until Kitty found stairs and stairs and stairs, all leading up. The tower got thinner and thinner, and the slits of window gave way to stained glass, the architects apparently sure that you couldn't catapult anything this high.
At the top of the castle was an unlocked door. Kitty pushed it open, tentatively. Inside was nothing but a spinning wheel.
Even as she felt the pieces of the puzzle snap into place, she felt herself reaching for the spindle, though light flickered ominously off the sharpened tip and everything. "Crud," she said into the microphone before her hand wrapped around the spindle itself - her thumb coming down, apparently through sheer chance, on the gleaming silver barb.
All that was audible on the other end of the radio was a clatter and a sickeningly human thump.
"Kitty?"
John's voice over the radio held more than a hint of anxiety. "Kitty, what's going on up there?" He tried contacting her several times, but no response was forthcoming. He felt a sliver of fear pierce his very, very thin veneer of calm and glared furiously at the dragon. >
"Right," he said in a tone that broked no argument whatsever. "I am now officially at the end of my tether. Hey, you!" The last was directed at the dragon, up to whom John marched furiously. "YOU are now officially ticking me off. Go on, try it. Just TRY it, you FUCKING overgrown lizard."
Some ten minutes later, the dragon was laying on its side, dazed, its fires well and truly quenched by an undersized, skinny mutant with a temper. John stormed into the cave it had been guarding, fury on his face and opened the chest at the far end.
Inside was the face of Professor Xavier, floating as if in water. Light gleamed genially off a glare point on his bald head.
"Well done, John," he said, looking truly pleased with his student's progress. (Dimly, very dimly, the rest of the control room could be seen in the background, complete with a sour face under a shock of long white hair.) "I take it you're wondering what happened to Kitty, then."
He chuckled, and the light point shifted briefly.
"I assure you, she'll be fine... provided, of course, you find a way to help her. When you exit the cave, you may find the castle in the distance somewhat changed, but I don't think it should pose too much of a threat. Your objective is to find a way to the highest room in the tallest tower - which is, before you ask, yes, where Kitty is. Good luck."
"You've GOT to be kidding me." John stared furiously at the fading image of Professor Xavier. "You DAMN people are just...shit." He rolled his eyes heavenward - or at least control room-ward. He couldn't just walk out the Danger Room and leave Kitty, could he? 'Course he could. It was only a simulation. But then the Professor had said 'she'll be find...if you find a way to help her'. Was that some sort of threat?
Gritting his teeth in barely concealed irritation, John stepped out of the cave again.
Briars had grown to nearly cover the walls of the castle, which was, for reasons not obvious, not pink and white anymore, but a rather forbidding black and gray, under a stormy sky of a sickly greenish-yellow. Lightning cracked forbiddingly every few seconds in the distance, thunder following it once someone remembered to make the ground rumble scarily every once in a while.
A huge white charger stamped impatiently where the dragon had been, a scabbard and sword belted to its saddle. It Did Not look pleased to be there. Taped to its forehead was a green Post-It, with DOESN'T BITE scrawled quickly in a hand similar to Storm's.
John's scowl grew, if possible, even deeper and he snatched the Post-It note off the hapless animal, causing it to shy back in alarm. "Very bloody funny," he said, taking the reins of the horse and inexpertly climbing into the saddle. He almost fell straight off the other side.
He sat on the horse for a while, feeling faintly self-conscious.
"Giddy up?" he hazarded. "Go?"
Nothing. The stupid horse's ears twitched.
"I hate this place," John muttered and then he drew the sword from its scabbard, held it aloft and shouted, loudly, "CHARGE!"
The horse did so. Violently, and with a rear-up just to make its point, before it took off at top speed for the castle, shooting gravel when it skidded to a halt on the non-castle side of the drawbridge, before the thorn forest. It craned its neck around as far as possible, looking expectantly at John out of one enormous brown eye, twitching its head impatiently as if to say 'well, get on with it then.'
The forest itself was not deep, but one couldn't even see the walls of the castle through it; long black thorns and brownish vegetation clustered so thickly as to block out even light, not that there was much to be had.
Thunder rumbled ominously for the billionth time beneath the horse's hooves. Thankfully for its inexperienced rider, it was apparently a very well-trained simulated horse, and held its ground.
A true prince would have begun to hack his way through the undergrowth with the razor-edged sword. Not John Allerdyce.
He sent out wave after wave of flame, burning his way through.
The horse disapproved vaguely, but, of course, it wasn't the horse's choice. But walking slowly through the raised portcullis, all that could be seen around were not rampaging guards, or anyone to call challenge - the courtyard was instead full of sleeping castle-dwellers, everyone from the highest lord to the lowest scullery maid passed out and snoring on the soft grass and well-beaten paths of the yard before the great doors of the fortress itself.
John bellowed Kitty's name at the top of his lungs, sliding down off the horse and charging his way on foot towards the doors. He tried the radio, which earned him nothing. He screamed himself nearly hoarse - which ALSO earned him nothing.
Helpfully, one of the main doors opened slightly, as if by a gust of wind, and the torches in the hallway beyond all lit themselves.
"Crap, this is crazy," he muttered and ran through the door, up a long, winding staircase and out again at the top into a long hallway. By now, John was anything but the handsome prince. His hair stuck out in all directions and his face was furious.
Kitty was still, predictably for those playing at home, crumpled on the floor with the spindle next to her, prevented from rolling away very far by the bumpiness of the stone floor. For someone who'd ever read fairy tales, the answer would be simple; but for someone who hadn't, Kitty might well have looked on the brink of death, were it not for the gentle breathing and slight snore on the inhale that marked her alive.
"John," crackled a voice over his communicator that was most definitely not Kitty's. It was too male, too smug, and too bald. "Have you ever read Sleeping Beauty?"
Had he?
There was a long pause and when John spoke, there was a sad, wistful quality to his voice.
"No."
"Of course," said Professor Xavier, though he seemed much less amused now. "Of course. Well. In the story, a young princess is put into an ageless sleep by pricking her finger on a spindle - thus the presence of the spinning wheel, you see - by an evil fairy who wanted revenge on the princess's father, the King. A friendlier fairy selects a prince, I imagine from a neighboring kingdom, and gives him certain gifts with which to face down the traps set by the evil fairy - a dragon, as you saw, and the forest of thorns. She also alters the magics surrounding the princess so that she may be awakened with a kiss."
There was an uncomfortable pause.
"Do you see what I mean?"
"I see," said John, and his voice was filled with that same wistfulness. "I see, Professor, but I don't understand why this scenario."
"I have been told it was Storm's way of determining whether you'd help a teammate," Professor Xavier said. "The fairy-tale setting, I believe, is a mix of whimsy and necessity. A common story requiring teamwork and sacrifice was needed, and direct challenges left too much room for individuals to split up and find personal solutions. The knowledge that this is a simulation also tends to foster a carelessness in some trainees for which real-life situations leave no room."
Right up until about two minutes ago, John had actually forgotten that it was a simulation. He stared down at Kitty's sleeping form and ran his hands through his hair. "So I gotta kiss her?"
"Yes," the professor said, the amusement back in his voice. "You need to kiss her."
"With you guys WATCHING?"
"I'll tell Storm to close her eyes."
"Funny man." John hunkered down over Kitty and put his fingers to her pulse, which was regular and even. Oh, dear God.
He leaned forward and kissed her, very self-consciously, on the tip of the nose.
Xavier released his hold on Kitty's mind and her eyes opened, though she was, initially, very confused as to why she was on the floor, and why John was in her face.
Pushing herself up to a sitting position, Kitty tried to gauge her surroundings, before she remembered that, oh yes, it was still the Danger Room and whatever bizarre scenario Storm had decided would be a good idea.
She noticed the spindle still lying abandoned on the floor and nudged it farther away from her with her shoe.
"Did we win?" she asked John, who had evidently conquered the dragon.
"D'you know," said John, who in a sudden, surprising move gathered her up in his arms and stood, carrying her. "I reckon we did."