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<> Danger Room - LvB3
When not composed of digital dreaming, whether made to be an alley way or forest, this room is nothing more than a large dome-like structure made of nickel-titanium. Electromechanical security doors as well as localized force fields operate the only doors into and out of the danger room itself, although there are more outside in the Ready Room that lead up to the Observation Deck. Panels lining the walls, floor and ceiling give away to training dangers such as lasers, projectiles, and sophisticated robots built for combat. Centered high in the right corner of the arena rests the control area where spectators can monitor training events and operate the holograms. Automated doors and the intercom system are located directly below this glass-walled bubble, showing the exits to this 'Danger Room'.
[Exits : [C]ommunications [S]ystems [R]oom, and [H]allway ]
[Players : Alyssa ]
"I'm in the /what/?" Alyssa's question is defensive, unfurling before her as she follows hard on Jareth's heels. "/You/," she pants, stopping once to rest her hand against the doors before he opens them -- and nearly falling through once he does. "Know /damn/ well I was laid up in the infirmary yesterday. What the /hell/?"
Given to him some mastery of heat, the point of Jareth's attention on the door would, perhaps, begin to smoke. He possesses no such capacity, and the door remains pristine. It does, however, require no outward contact to open before he continues his grim march inside, some invisible black cloud trailing like a puppy. "In the news. *I* know where you were, but someone went to great lengths to convince everyone *else* otherwise." A hand slashes through the air and the door clamps - more forcefully than usual - shut. Fuming silence boils off Jareth for several moments, before an expanse of water and sky appears ahead. So too appear a baseball bat and a floating, metallic ball. "Bastards."
Conversations click into place, and Alyssa reaches for the bat and the ball before Jareth can. "/No/." She doesn't say anything more for a moment, and then it's a half-sobbed "No," that's choked out. "Was it the Best Buy? Mira said something -- about some mutant kids blowing up a Best Buy."
Jareth's stare, with no other current degree of intensity than vaporization, briefly falls on Alyssa before he turns away to turn the stare and wrath also away. "Best Buy, blown up by someone breathing fire." Another ball appears, and he simply bores the stare into it for a fractional moment before he viciously backhands the ball. It flies into the open sky and plunges into the water some distance away. Several moments later, the same spot detonates in a pillar of water.
"I don't /know/ anyone who can breathe fire!" Alyssa exclaims, heat and unresolved heartache in her voice. She stares at the water detonates, then tosses her ball in the air. As it falls, she swings the bat and sends it careening wildly off course -- but still toward the water. She drops the bat as it explodes, tapping it against the side of her leg. "I don't know anyone who /looks/ like /me/!"
With a fling of hands into the air, Jareth vents a sputtering, frustrated breath. "I don't, either, but those festering pieces of skunk shit have no problem exaggerating." He shakes out an arm where a new ball appears just after, placidly hovering as the others. "Thank God for alkali metals being so good at blowing shit up." He turns a frown on the ball and thumps it with a fist, whereupon the ball flickers. "Screw sodium. I'm upping the firepower." A fling hurls the ball upward, and he spikes it like a volleyball. Several moments after impact, the pillar of water rises perhaps twice the measure of the first.
"/Gimme/," Alyssa demands, the hand free of the bat outstretched toward Jareth. "/Screw/ this shit, screw /everything/. How d'you -- how d'you /know/ --" But she can't quite get anything coherant out, beyond that. "/Who/?" she finally breathes, still waiting for the next ball of metal.
Still fixed on the spot where the tower gradually descends, Jareth remains entirely still. Another ball shimmers into being near Alyssa, floating placidly and in utter ignorance of its pending sacrifice. A twin appears again in front of Jareth, but still he makes no move. It simply hurls outward a moment later, accompanied by a clang of invisible force. As it flies, he finally, slowly shifts his head. "Who what?"
Alyssa grits her teeth, eyeing the ball as it floats. "Who," she repeats on a whisper that's very nearly mute, "Who could've...?" She turns to him, eyes pleading. "How'm I supposed to go out, to /leave/ if someone with my face?" She reaches up to touch it -- lips, nose, fingers brushing across her eyes as her gaze drops. "On the /news/!" She turns suddenly, and takes a vicious swing at the ball. This time, the crack is more satisfying, and it flies straight and true toward the middle of the lake, and anything else she might ask is lost in the resulting explosion.
It takes little time for a frustrated rigidity to spread through Jareth. "I wish I knew. I can only assume they avoided every camera they could see, and blew up the rest. God knows. Metamorph, illusionist, telepath. Too many possibilities." Through several long moments, he stands in rigid silence. Abruptly, his arms snap upward, encompassing a far larger area where a ball materializes, jerkily and enlarged to that greater size, several feet, with each venomous word. "Impersonating. Slandering. Ruining for no. Good. *Reason*." A fist slams against the ball with this final word, hurling the ball with impossible force across the water. When it detonates, the liquid pillar is truly towering, the roar thunderous.
There isn't time for frustrated tears to do anything but start forming -- and then Alyssa's ducking behind Jareth, interposing her former teacher's body between hers and the plume of water. She drops the back, only /just/ managing not to raise her arms over her head in a desperately protective measure. "/Fuck/," she blurts out, "what if it -- there was that thing, where I thought Scott, where I thought /Percy/--"
No reflexive fear meets the crumbling pillar on behalf of Jareth. His arms fold and seal tight across his chest, and he is once again motionless. The falling water meets unseen force that bars it and turns it away, almost in inanimate anger. As the drops thin, he draws down his brows and angles a look over his shoulder. "What? The... Shadow King, was it?"
The glossy brown head shakes, and there's still an edge of fear in Aly's voice -- in her face, in the lean lines of her body even as the water comes to a crashing halt before them. "No, not -- that was freaky enough, but no, there was this thing where someone made me think it was Scott, and Percy, and they were --" Lips thin into a line of displeasure, and she draws closer, to watch the water from just behind and to the side of Jareth. "They hurt me, but it was all in my head. Never found anyone. Never -- nothing." She shakes her head again, one small, violent motion.
Something crumbles similarly in Jareth much as the pillar, and the tension appears, finally, to vanish. He slowly turns and gathers Alyssa, one arm folding around to pull her against him. "Either an illusionist or a telepath, I would think. I can only think of one metamorph." Suddenly at a loss, he offers only silence, rubbing a hand along her back, for whatever comfort that accomplishes.
Alyssa folds against him, a defeated sob stifled against the front of his shirt, even as she balls her fists into it. "This could ruin /everything/," is muffled but still clear enough to be heard, "if the cops find out I'm a mutant, because someone decided to /fuck/ with my face, with my -- with /me/. There were people who didn't get /out/, Jareth!" Drained, the force of her words is not what it might be and it's a moment before she unballs her fists and snakes her arms around him, instead.
Another arm reaches around Alyssa to close the circle around her, and Jareth stares out over the water. "It's a fake. Fakes get exposed sooner or later. They'll figure out what really happened." Somewhere behind Alyssa, out of sight and silent, a faceless mannequin effigy appears in the air. A representation of Circe bites the effigy in places that preclude reproduction. Both vanish.
"Promise?" It's a question drawn out of childish hope, a spark undiminished even now. Aly falls silent, mute as she relaxes under the patient rhythm of Jareth's hand. Unable to control the technology of the Danger Room, nothing rises in effigy on her whim. Instead she just stands, secure in the cage of fragile human comfort.
Eventually, Jareth angles away enough to allow for eye contact. "And if we figure out who did it, what do you say to one of George Carlin's ideas? Thermonuclear suppository." He smiles, and the black cloud this time is of humor colored to match and envy of tar pits. "Come on. Let's get back upstairs." Still enclosing her shoulders in the coil of his arm, he starts for the door, and the landscape behind flickers back into the nothing whence it came.
Nothing says stress relief like virtual, yet large explosions.