The End of Emo!

[xmm_jubilee]

3/2/2007
Logfile from Jubilee.

=XS= Hallway - Lv 1 - Xavier's School

The cherry panel walls and solid oak floors sweep in from the Great Hall with a continuation of the long runner carpets in plush motifs and thick padding that give a faint bit of color to the dark interior hallway. Mahogany side tables tables and fine, sturdy brass lamps give light and decoration, and a few hanging mirrors grant an illusion of a wider space. Doors lead into various rooms, and an open pass-through between the living room and the rec room gives a glimpse of natural light.

Sneaky-sneaky, Jubilee! The prank-master is back in the house. Is it fair of her to be pranking when there is a prank war going on? Well, if not, in her defense, she knows nothing of it. A few of the precious magnetic pictures in her hands have already been placed. In the rec room, in the computer lab, on the elevator panel, and in the dining room. Now there is one left for the refrigerator, and Jubilee sneaks along the hallway toward her destination.

At two meters tall and substantially built, Piotr is not a master of the sneak. This does not mean, however, that his steps are loud as he makes his way from the garrage into the house proper to head for the kitchen for a drink, although they might not give away precisely who he is at a distance, especially as they falter slightly as he sees Jubilee up ahead of him.

Jubilee scurries into the kitchen and scqueaks her way across the floor to slap the final picture (Xavier with hair and his arm around a very stylish Moira in shiny, clinging disco pants and Farrah Fawcett hair) on the refrigerator. Task done, she yanks the door open and sticks her head inside to scope out the contents.

His pace marshalled to even steps once more, Piotr continues tensely on, reching the door of the kitchen before stopping again to look over at Jubilee to attempt a wan, strained smile at her back before allowing his expression to shift back to muted regret and stepping out of the doorway and into the kitchen, clearing Jubilee's escape should she choose to run. "Hallo, Jubilee," he says quietly and levelly.

"It wasn- OW!" Jubilee backs out of the cooler while rubbing the back of her head ruefully with one hand. In the other is a carton of juice. "Warn a p-- er." The generic, friendly Jubilee greeting dies on her lips as she straightens and Piotr comes into view over the edge of the door. "Oh. You."

The tiny glimmer of hope that lit in Piotr's eyes at Jubilee's intial response wanes and dies as she looks over towards him, and he drops his attention quickly to the floor, away from his one-time friend. He cannot keep it there, though, and he glances fleetingly up towards her again as he mumbles, "I am sorry, I did not mean to startle you."

Jubilee turns to drop the carton on the island counter behind her with a sodden thump. "Sure you didn't." She looks down and away from him, avoiding seeing and hearing the earnestness in his address.

"I did not," Piotr protests, though his voice is quiet and without particular force, resigned. "I--" he mumbles, then cuts himself off, heading to the far side of the kitchen to rest his hands back against the edge of the counter as he leans against it, looking for support as he continues haltingly, "I have been hoping to talk to you."

Jubilee half-steps back from the counter at his first step, positioning the door between them and lifting her face to watch his movements with hard, closed off eyes. It has been a long time since her face held such distrust. "What about?"

A slow, thin indrawing of breath parts Piotr's lips, and his tongue edges out to lick them nervously before he manages to speak. "About-- about what I did," he finally says with only a single choke in the words.

"Un-uhn. No way. I don't /want/ to!" Jubilee says, stepping back up to the counter and kicking the door shut behind her. She grips the carton of juice.

"Please, Jubilee..." Piotr whispers, one hand dropping forward from its grip on the countertop to bunch into an agitated curl. "I am sorry, and I-- I want you to understand what happened, to-- to know--" His brows crease in pained frustration at his growing inability to communicate.

"I understand /enough/. I might not have any /experience/ but I know enough to-- to know what-- Just. Just... /no/." Jubilee gathers the carton and hugs it to her chest like some sort of talisman as she starts to edge around the perimeter of the kitchen.

Piotr's arms both rise from the counter now to cross over his stomach, each hand clutching at the elbow opposite as he makes no move to stop Jubilee. "I am sorry," he whispers, his voice shaking, but sets his jaw and carries on with more determination than before, though his voice is a tiny bit higher than usual and cracking. "But I-- I want you to know that that-- was not all of me, that-- our friendship before-- it was not a lie. Please--"

"Not /all/ of you?! But enough! It was enough of you, wasn't it?!" Jubilee shoots back as she stumbles on a few more steps. A half-forgotten dream scratches at the back of her mind.

"No!" Piotr insists quietly but urgently, one hand starting forward for half a second before reaching back to wrap once again around himself. "Please. Please..." He drags his gaze up from the floor where it had sunk with regret, looking at Jubilee. "I would never, /ever/ give in to that part of myself if I had any control left to me, and I am so, so sorry that when it failed I hurt you like I did."

The juice carton gripped closely to her chest slips a little in suddenly nerveless arms. Darkness floods across her sight, and ordinary kitchen utensils and appliances take on sinister edges and angles. Even Piotr's face takes on grotesque characteristics. "/NO!/" she screeches, and hurls the flimsy carton across the room at him before spinning to escape.

Piotr's reflexes have improved a good deal since that night long ago when he was pelted with waterballoons in this very same kitchen, but his shock at the intensity of Jubilee's reaction is enough that all he can do is raise a hand to attempt to keep the carton from hitting his face, and the force as it impacts with the side of his hand is enough to split the container to belch orange liquid at him, drenching his hair and face and soaking into his shirt.

The door, alas, is cut off, blocked by just over six feet of irritable Canadian mutant, drawn perhaps by the sound of conflict. Hazel eyes narrow, sweeping from Jubilee to Piotr, taking in the scene in fragments: fleeing girl, sprayed juice, battered carton. "What the /fuck/ is going on in here?" Logan asks, voice a low growl verging on threatening.

Jubilee turns around and slams into the six foot irritable Canadian fall. "Umph!" Down she goes, flat on her backside. Unfortunately, tall is /bad/ at the moment. She kicks blindly at his knee.

Though it is hidden initially by the cascade of orange from his hair, Piotr flinches back slightly at Logan's arrival, his hands dropping to rest uneasily on the counter behind him, bringing his shoulders up uneasily. "Professor," he attempts, "I--" But that is all he manages.

Well, that was unexpected. Also, painful. There is the sick 'pop' of bone parting from anchoring cartilage, accompanied by a vehement, "/Fuck/!" Logan's knee buckles under him, and he ends up in a crouch, much of his weight placed instinctively forward over one hand resting on the floor. A string of less intelligible, and likely far more scarring, expletives follow.

Jubilee scrambles backwards, right into the stools collected around the island, knocking one over before she manages to get her feet under her again. Her hands start to emit a glow, and she shakes her head slowly. "Logan?"

An expression of mild horror on his face, Piotr looks from Jubilee to Logan and back, anguish beginning to crease his raised eyebrows at the sight as he presses himself back against the side of the counter, trying and largely failing to make himself seem as small as possible.

"Yes," Logan grates out through clenched teeth. He pushes himself slowly back, enough to straighten his leg in preparation for resetting the kneecap. Alas, healing factors do not come with that handy feature in place. His gaze rests on Jubilee for a moment before sliding up to lock on Piotr, not nearly small enough to escape notice. "Explain. Now."

"What do /you/ think?" Jubilee snaps, jerking her head in Piotr's direction with a sullen glare.

Head shrinking back towards his shoulders slightly in a further cringe at Logan's orders, Piotr takes a deep, hitching breath and attempts to line his words up before he speaks them in the hope that they will make sense when they come out. "I--" He jolts again at Jubilee's angry words, looking down to his feet to avoid meeting anyone's eyes as he forces himself to continue. "I came into the kitchen when Jubilee was here. I tried to apologise, to explain, but-- I upset her. I am sorry."

"Fucking Christ," Logan growls. There is another sick popping sound, this one guided b the press of his hands. He hisses sharply, a swift, indrawn breath. When he continues, favouring them both with a fierce (and perhaps a touch disappointed) glare, there is an edge of rough strain to his voice. "This shit has gone far enough."

The light about her hands fades, and Jubilee folds her arms in front of her and adopts an 'attitude' in stance and face. Her weight shifts to one leg and she retorts, "Oh? An' jus' what do you suggest? Am I supposed ta just never come around again since /he's/ here?"

"I am sorry, Jubilee," Piotr mumbles again, but so quiet as to be intelligible to the woman it is directed to. "I--" he attempts aloud, but falters and presses his eyes closed instead, shaking his head and retreating to silence.

This time, the growl is more than just a verbal quirk, a subvocal rumble no longer held in check by Logan's fraying control on his temper. "Enough! I am sick of the both of you sulking and fucking around. Danger Room, /now/."

"/I'm/ not the on who was f--" The rest of the sentence is bitten off in the face of Logan's anger. She hunches her shoulders up defensively, then drops her arms with a huff and stomps past him and through the doorway.

Piotr is slower to follow, reluctance slowing his movements as he pushes himself away from the counter and towards the door, though duty and a sense of self-preservation ensure he moves at all. He hangs back, though, as he reaches Logan, watching Jubilee walking down the hallway and trying not to follow her too closely.

=XS= Danger Room - Lv B3 - Xavier's School

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'.

It is not with the best of tempers that Logan ushers Jubilee and Piotr into the Danger Room, regarding them both through narrowed eyes. "I don't give a rat's ass if you kiss and make up or /kill/ each other. But you're gonna do it /now/, and you're gonna do it without destroying the rest of the fucking school." One finger stabs in the direction of the ComSys room. "I'll be up there, so don't even think of trying to bolt."

"What? You're gonna pull POW on us? No food, no water? You got bamboo sticks up there?" Jubilee asks sarcastically as she ambles into the Danger Room, and glances around it defiantly. One of her tennis shoes is untied.

Piotr's progress into the room, closer behind Jubilee now thanks to being forced into the confines of the elevator, is far quieter, silent apart from the echoing of his own large shoes around the cavernous room. He stops as soon as he is in the door, allowing Jubilee to put distance between them again, should she want to.

Logan just lifts an eyebrow, as though challenging Jubilee to protest further. "When you get out of here's up to you. You can bitch all you want, but that ain't gonna help you." And with that, he departs for the ComSys room.

Jubilee is to the middle of the room before she realizes that Logan does indeed intend to leave the two of them alone. "Logan!" she calls out as she stumbles a few steps after him, her voice rising in a combination of anger, fear, and pleading.

"I will not hurt you, Jubilee," Piotr says quietly, watching Jubilee make her way into the centre of the room as he stays on the edge, reaching a hand behind him to locate the wall of the Danger Room before sliding his back down the curved surface to bring himself to a sitting position on the floor, his legs folded up in front of him, feet flat on the floor.

There is no response from Logan - he roughly as outwardly sympathetic as the doors, whooshing closed behind him. And then there were two.

Jubilee turns around to face Piotr with a petulant stomp of her foot. "Gragh! Why couldn't you just leave me /alone/!"

"Because you were my friend," the tall man says in a small, strained voice with a tiny shake of his head, settling his hands on the floor beside him, palms down against the cold floor. "Because for one terrible, terrible event that I could not stop, I have seen someone I care about hurt so badly, and I wish I could do something to make it right."

The quiet click-hiss of an intercom connection opening is the easiest evidence that they are indeed still being monitored, if remotely.

"Well, I can't help ya there, Petes. I don't know how ta stop bein' mad as hell at you." She stomps to a point against the wall and claims it for herself too. She pulls her knees up to her chest and wraps her arms around them, tugging the edges of her sleeves down into her palms. Her chin rests on her kneecaps. Nope. No talkin' gonna go on here.

A gentle motion bows Piotr's head, his eyes momentarily pressing closed before opening again to look blankly at his knees. "I know," he says. "I know. But no more do I know how to stop caring about you, about what happens to you, even if it is-- a warped version of myself that has done it."

Jubilee twitches visibly at that statement and curls harder into herself, turning to lean sideways against the wall, head and shoulder and knee touching its smooth, cool surface.

The silence at the other end of the intercom is displeased with Jubilee's huddling. The scenery shifts, snowy mountaintop replacing sterile familiarity, borrowed from someone's adventure simulations. Holographic clouds shift overhead, dark and ominous. The temperature begins to steadily plummet as the powerful air-conditioning kicks in.

Step one in forcing cooperation: put them out of their depth.

The shift in the air that heralds the Danger Room coming to life is something that, despite his best efforts to quell the reaction, stirs something akin to remembered fear in Piotr, but he continues to try and keep it down and for a moment he resists the urge to armour up. Then he recalls who is in the comsys room, and quickly pulls his shirt up over his head, skin becoming steel as his size increases considerably and he looks around, making sure Jubilee is still within sight.

A tickle snips at the edges of the assembled minds, skipping like a stone across Jubilee and Piotr before landing (splosh) on Logan's. Power knocks -- sharp, tight -- before cranking and grouching its way into the forebrain. Xavier's touch. << /Logan/. What on earth are you about? >>

Jubilee falls over sideways as the apparent support of the wall gives way. "Wha-" Her breath comes out in a puff of air and she scrambles to her feet and faces the way she /knows/ the comsys room is. "Logan! What in the name of bulbous blueberries do ya think yer doin'?" she hollers angrily, jumping up and down in place a few times. "Come /on/. This /isn't/ funny!"

"Something I shoulda done months ago," speaks a particularly grouchy looking thunderhead in Logan's voice. The temperature continues to drop, false wind picking up in an eerie, howling chorus. << Just givin' 'em incentive to pry their heads out of their asses, >> he adds to the invisible inquisitor.

Bringing himself to a stand as well, Piotr looks around himself at their surroundings, taking in the snow and the long drop as the wind glances off steel skin, making it ice to the touch but failing to penetrate even the slightest amount. "I do not think he will listen to you," he calls to Jubilee above its gusts, then looks down at the shirt curled in his hands and bunches it up to throw over to her.

There is a small silence in Logan's mind as Charles considers, reading the bright beads of intent and purpose strung on their line. A sense of ruffled feathers subsides, making way for grudging approval. << Carry on, then, >> the Professor says. << Don't break anything. It is appalling how much it costs to repair the Danger Room. >> And the telepath retreats, leaving behind him the wholly unnecessary information regarding the price of supplies in the Medical lab. Iodine, $210. Gauze, $300. Antibiotics, $1216.32.

Pepto-Bismol, $8.16.

Jubilee shoots a disdainful glare over her shoulder and lets the shirt flop in the snow near her. "'course he will. He's just tryin' ta prove a point or somethin'. But you know I'm just as stubborn as you are!" she yells, turning back to presumably face the comsys room. "WOLVIE! Let me outta here! I'm a Cali-chick! I get frost bite jus' /lookin'/ at a picture of snow!"

From its slow, steady decline, the temperature suddenly plummets. "Better deal before ya start losin' bits, then," is the utterly unsympathetic reply from the Logan-cloud. The wind continues to howl, blowing gusts of crystallized snow around the pair. Somewhere below, the mountain rumbles ominously.

"Jubilee, please," Piotr says quietly, beginning to trudge through the snow towards his unwilling companion, pushing it out of the way as he approaches her as slowly and unthreateningly as seven and a half feet of steel can.

Jubilee really is starting to look cold now with her arms wrapped tightly around her as she turns to assess the situation. Piotr's shirt lays forlornly in the snow, while Piotr himself is eyed sourly. She stomps towards some trees, adding distance between her and Piotr, and drops her hand, warming it with a paff nestled in her palm.

From beside the copse of trees, eyes watch her. Roughly the size of a football, and baleful orange. They blink, reptilian fashion. The apparent boulder they are attached to shudders and then rears up on a long neck, covered with scales the shade of tarnishing silver and ridged with spikes along the spine. Chunks of snow and ice shower down as the creature shakes off its camouflage, large wings beating at the air. It bears a striking resemblance to Lockheed in that it is reptilian and has wings, but other than that looks nothing at all like the smaller and far more benign dragon. There is a shriek like rending metal, carried on a gust of fetid breath as the beast glares down at the two human interlopers. Hi.

As the scenery around Jubilee begins to rear up, Piotr's steady tramp towards her becomes a run as he shouts out to her, "Jubilee, get back, get behind me!" His voice rings a low contrast to the dragon's dissonant screech, whipped up and mutilated by the wind to something less coherent.

"/NO/. I'm not playin' this game! DO YOU HERE ME, LOGAN?!" Jubilee holds her ground. Indeed, she even gathers a larger portion of energy in her hands, the plasma bubbling and sparky and arcing between them in flashes of color.

Logan makes no reply. The dragon's neck arches, reminiscent of a snake about to strike - and it does, large, toothy mouth hurtling towards the yelling Jubilee more swiftly than something its size has any right at all to move.

Apparently, the dragon /is/ playing this game, and playing for keeps no less.

Piotr's shout of warning is transmuted to a wordless roar of exertion as he pushes himself into a barrelling charge in an attempt to take himself past her and collide with the dragon head on and distract its attention from Jubilee.

Jubilee doesn't /want/ it's attention to be distracted, dammit! Tough, uh. Neither does she really /want/ to be lunch either. It all happens too quickly for actual thought, but she dives aside as she see the head incoming.

The dragon is heavy and solid, and little warmer than the surrounding mountaintop. It shrieks again as Piotr collides with it, rearing back and angling to chomp on the large, shiny metal man. Perhaps it thinks he is a paladin? Regardless, it is certainly distracted from the smaller and less obviously aggressive Jubilee.

A dragon chomping Piotr is a dragon that will, very shortly, have toothache, but it is easily fast enough to catch the large man before it could realise this, especially with Piotr hampered as he is by snow. That doesn't, however, mean that being gnawed on by a dragon is a comfortable or appealing prospect, and with another shout Piotr pulls his hand back and launches it into the creature's gum above a pointed canine as hard as he can.

Jubilee rolls up to her knees and exhales a hard, irritated huff before sitting back and lifting her hands to aim at the soft underbelly of the creature. Emotion nibbles at the edges of her control, making the stream wide and less conssitent throughout, but also stronger than she intends.

The dragon goes ow. And then ow again as the colourful burst of energy hits the less tempered scales of its belly, several of the plate-sized things chipping away. Its wings beat frantically, generating large gusts of wind, as it pulls itself up to its full, towering height. The chest expands, almost comical even though it lies well within the realm of 'threat'. The tail, tipped with a barbed club, lashes, tearing down a small and spindly sapling tree.

It does not take a genius to work out what a dragon is about to do when it takes a deep breath, especially when one's girlfriend has one in miniature. Whether Jubilee wants it or not, Piotr takes a jumping step back to regain his balance and then heads towards her, to position himself a huge steel meatshield between her and the dragon.

Meatshield. Riiiiiight. Jubilee see him running. She sees the dragon rearing. Frankly, she doesn't know which one is worse. She crawls sideways a few desperate feet before stopping and pulling energy from secret glucose stores in her body (See! There is a reason for the candy.) and flings out a widespread charge that rushes to the walls of the Danger Room and rattles them, making the holographic images flicker. And, unfortunately, burns out a few necessary circuits.

The dragon flickers, stuttering like old, stressed film. Unfortunately, it doesn't fade away. A gust of frigid wind follows on the heels of the bellows-like inhalation, carrying with it shards of jagged, stinging ice. It shrieks again, and this, too stutters, looping briefly. Adding to the cacophony is the shriek of alarm klaxons, warning the inhabitants of the mansion that someone has blown something up. Badly.

From above, "/Shit/."

The blast that damages the Danger Room succeeds in battering Colossus too, throwing him back off his feet as he runs towards Jubilee and eliciting a grunt of surprise as he hits the ground and pulls a hand woozily up to his head. The cold of the icy wind, though, does a little to stir him, and he presses the other hand against the ground in an unsteady attempt to get himself back on his feet.

Jubilee eeps as the energy wave conects with the wall and she rolls over onto her face, covering her head with her arms and waiting for whatever trouble she'd just caused.

The elevator is distressingly silent and smooth in its operation. It gives no hint of anyone's approach, until the doors roll open on sublevel B3, and frantic feet patter down the corridor. Into the Comsys Room bursts Jean, still dressed for the outdoors. She rounds on Logan, and the light in her eyes isn't precisely one of tenderest love and affection. "What in the name of God are you -doing-?!?!" is the greeting given in lieu of 'Hi, honey, I'm home.'

The mountain grumbles and groans, large chunks of frozen snow sheering away. Below, a holographic mountain goat meets a grizzly end. The dragon stutter-shrieks again, rearing up and swinging its viciously spiked tail in Piotr's direction as he tries to rise, aim sloppy - it is half-blinded by dazzling after-images. Or by the fact that there is more than one burnt out optical array.

"Tryin' to force the kids to work together," Logan replies sharply, not looking up from where he bends over the control panel, trying frantically to bring some sort of overrides online. Screens flash angry red, warning that the safety protocols are not so much in effect right now. "Seems like they'd rather blow the entire fucking place down."

It is inevitable, probably. Like a thunderous knock on the door, Xavier's presence pops into Logan's head. << /What did I say about breaking--/ >> it begins, and then cuts out as suddenly as it started.

The Professor is cranky. Abruptly, everyone in the Danger Room is acutely aware of the price tag on every single component in the metal walls. Circuit board, $1982.35. Light projection unit, $3972.35. Reflective grating, $4827.15.

Charles Xavier's peace of mind: Priceless.

That tail connects, and though again the dragon fails to damage Piotr, it catches the staggering man just as he brings himself upright, before he is able to duck or roll or counter the blow in any way. Heavy though he is, it sweeps him up and off the floor and sends him flying towards Jubilee, and in his dazed state with the wind rushing deafeningly past his ears he can think of no way to prevent a collision. He only has time to bellow a wordless, gutteral warning ahead of him and shift forms back to flesh to keep the impact from being potentially lethal.

One minute, she is more or less on /top/ of the snow. The next, she is /in/ it, buried deep under the blow of arms and legs, with snow shoved into her eyes and nose and mouth and up and down her shirt and pants and... you get the idea. She lays still, stunned, until she can regather her strength and breath and scream as she pushes up, trying to roll him off her with now aching muscles.

"Some -warning- would have been nice." Jean snipes at Logan, slipping into a second chair and joining in the dance of the system repair. Clackity-clack. "Goddamnit," she swears, jerking suddenly as Xavier's irritable fiscal tallying batters against her shields. "Not helping, Charles!" is directed somewhere aloft, spoken aloud rather than mentally projected. A ceaseless pinging noise comes from one of the monitors, where approximately twenty error messages have appeared and cascaded themselves to vie for attention. "I'm going to have the medical bay staff on standby."

"Hindsight," Logan growls in reply, head jerking up at the litany of costs, the gesture reminiscent of a large animal startled by a kamikaze bird. Gaze raised now, he chances a look through the window, and swears viciously.

The dragon does not cackle, or even shriek a victory cry. It does rear up again, and then plunges chipped teeth first towards the tasty-looking Paladin Piotr, now with markedly fewer hard metal bits. Its maw gapes open, affording a clear look towards the back of its mottled, reeking throat.

From the moment of unarmoured impact that stuns Piotr even worse than before, it is several seconds before the pushing beneath him registers and he manages to press one hand down to aid Jubilee's efforts, shoving himself to the side and rolling to lie down on his back in the snow with a distorted, "Sorry," for Jubilee. He barely has time to register the cold in an enormous shiver that tears through his bare upper half before the dragon catches him and does very much the same thing.

Jubilee flops to her back at his side, now utterly cold and wet and oh, hello dragon. She screams again as his muzzle sweeps in to carry off Piotr, but this time, fear has finally overwhelmed her conviction that the whole thing will end before it goes too far. And somewhere, old ties refuse to allow too far even with Piotr. "Stop! Stop it! Stop it!" she yells, choking on sobs and sliding down the small slope until she gets her feet under her. "No!! DAMN YOU, NO!" The slick soles of her tennis shoes slide out from underneath her and she down again, though it hardly registers as she fights with her own body's response to the cold for energy. She throws a wildly erratic energy ball at the dragon's muzzle. Good thing her control of her powers is better than her softball pitch. "DAMNIT, LOGAN! STOP IT! /PLEASE/!"

"Shit... shitshitshitshitshit." Jean hisses, as her attention is stolen to the view into the Danger Room, just in time to see the dragon do its impression of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park. "Goddamnit," she throws in for good measure, as she clears the twenty error messages, only to have twenty more spring up, like soldiers from, uh, dragon's teeth.

"I CAN'T!" Logan roars back. Small blessing, perhaps, that the intercom link had been jammed open by the malfunction. The sky flickers, the section directly in front of the window fading to nothing - they can now be seen as they look on helplessly, their own battle with the malfunctioning computer system as apparently futile as the one with the more tangible opponent going on below.

The dragon shrieks as the searing energy strikes muzzle, eyes, nostrils, jaw dropping open and releasing Piotr as it rears again, and again sucks in a deep, gusting breath. Dinner is being uncooperative. It will have to settle for freeze-dried dinner instead.

It is not until the dragon's teeth pull apart from Piotr that he manages to respond to the pain he is in, and then it is only with a weak, failing sound as he plummets to the floor, impacting with a cold, wet flump against the frozen white. The shivering begins again, this time from cold coupled with shock, and from out beneath the Russian's wide form, a trickle of red spreads through the snow.

Jubilee slips and slides across the snow to Piotr's side, though the ice and her own shivers nearly manage to take her off her feet twice. She drops in the snow next to Piotr's side and stares in horror at the very real blood seeping from the very real wound. "Oh, god. ohgodohgodohgod, Peter... Petes. Listen." She panics for approximately five seconds, and then stuffs her hands over the worse of the wounds, trying to stop the bleeding. "You gotta shift. You gotta shift, Petes. C'mon," she pleads.

<< Incoming casualty! >> the thought leaps onto the mindspace, drilling into orderlies and residents in the medbay and rousing them from a swiftly-scattered game of throw-cards-into-bedpans. "Dammit, dammit, dammit, come on... God, I wish I was Madrox..." Jean hisses to herself, a low mantra as she stabs at commands with increasing futility, torn between leaping in to assist, and trying to end things more permanently.

Timing is everything, and disconnected at last from the entanglements of Cerebro and his aborted hunt for rogue telepaths, Charles Xavier finally makes his appearance in person: precise, prim, and glacially displeased. The door's hiss open and closed just barely warns of his presence before the chair is rolling across to control panels. The Professor takes up a position at one of the terminals, long fingers graceful and quick across the keyboard. Pale eyes flicker. "Computers," he says in a clipped, grim voice. "/Bloody/ things."

"Work, work," Logan mutters frantically, teeth gritted, white lines of strain hard around the corners of his mouth. "You goddamned monkey-fucking piece of shit, WORK!" It does not. Xavier's appearance is noted in a sharp sideways glance, before the Canadian mutant's attention is recaptured by another run of shrieking klaxons. Oh, hey. Things are going poorly.

The dragon exhales another blast of frigid air, though dazed and half-blind it overshoots. The worst of the ice-laden wind roars past the two young mutants, sending a burst of snow jetting upwards as it hits the frozen ground.

The laboured breaths that swing Piotr's ribs heavily apart stop for a moment as the icy stream roars viciously overhead, and then Jubilee's words finally filter through and he gives a tiny, pained nod, his head marking a trail in the snow that catches in his hair. With a roar of pain as the energy that precipitates his transfomation sears through broken flesh, he turns back to his steel form, the leaking blood becoming a far more sluggishly moving silver liquid that oozes rather than flows from his wounds and, jaw clenched against pain that, whilst still excruciating, no longer marks injuries that restrict his movement, he pushes himself upwards from the ground to try and stand and reorient himself for another attack on the dragon, or a hasty retreat.

Jubilee lifts her hands as the transformation starts to occur, and she hunches her shoulders against the blast of air and snow at her back. Teeth are chattering in jaw-jarring jerks now, and there it little energy left over except in the pits of her determination (not to be underestimated). "Stay still!" she snaps to Piotr before turning back to the computer generated dragon. "I am gettin' kinda SICK O' YOU!" she bellows as she staggers to her feet and drains the dregs of her reserves to form a boiling, bubbling ball of energy hazy in distinction, but quick enough to speed from her hands and down that open maw, diving deeper into the dragon's innards before bursting outwards with explosive force. Again the walls are rattled, but this time as steaming chunks of meat and intestines splatter them.

Jubilee sinks to her knees.

As the dragon blows apart, small, bright-yellow letters appear suspended above Piotr and Jubilee's heads, and a sweetly cheerful feminine voice announces: "You have levelled."

Charles flattens his hands on the counter, brows flattening. "/Jareth/," he exhales. The temperature in the control room drops another 5 degrees.

"...what the... bloody... damn..." Jean, by this point stymied by the unresponsive controls, looks out the observation window in time to see the ex-dragon, and the tally of XP. "-Jareth-." she echoes, before another thought occurs. Up stands Jean. "Breakers!" she says, and lunges for a panel on the opposite wall.

Logan's muttering growl contains the same name. Along with a string of blistering curses and depictions of a bloody, gruesome fate.

Obedient to a fault usually, this time Piotr fails to do as he is told and has made it half way to standing by the time Jubilee falls, giving the words, written in geek as they are, only the most cursory of glances. Dropping with her, though the movement is more controlled through a grimace of pain, he offers a hand out in front of her to take, should she wish it, to steady herself.

Xavier's mind wings down to the two in the chamber proper, a quick, passing sweep to judge their condition before he returns to hasty conflict with the program. "Danger Room override," he snaps aloud, his baritone biting sharp. "Recognize authority. Cha--" A monitor beeps. "/Bollocks/."

She does. Swaying unsteadily on her knees from diabetic shock and approaching hypothermia, she holds on tightly without exactly remembering his injuries. And then she looks over at him and inhales a great lungful of air before collapsing into a hug against him with a sniffled, "Petes."

Jean is more direct in her problem-solving, now that she's given up on fixing the computers. The breaker panel is first tugged at by hand, and then torn loose with a metal screech and some telekinesis. There's a satisfying ka-CHUNK as a very important looking switch is thrown. And then the Danger Room goes dark. (The doors slide open a few moments later. But still.)

Logan's shoulders slump and he exhales heavily in a sigh of relief, hands pressing hard against the now utterly nonfunctioning control panel. His head bows slightly, invisible in the brief pitch black.

Black. Charles sits back. Sans the distraction of the immediate emergency, there is a moment for him to feel the full weight of his own displeasure. It prickles, razor-spined, in the room with the other two: a fourth observer in the comedy of disasters. However. << Hank is on his way back to the school. >>

"Jubilee..." Piotr whispers in response, the sound a strange, breathless resonance of metal that hums down through his chest as he carefully moves his free arm around his smaller companion's shoulders to steady her, though the contact with the cold metal probably does very little to help her hypothermia. "I--" he begins, but freezes as the lights go out, hugging her just a little closer for a moment until the doors open and he pauses a moment to check that that escape route is genuine before looking back to Jubilee. "Thank you, Jubilee. Can you walk out, do you think?"

Walking? Hardly. The light from the door and the hallway beyond is suddenly obscured by a wave of orderlies from the medical bay, left waiting nervously out in the hallway to listen to strange sounds and roaring. In they swarm, without a care for touching moments, with two stretchers along with them. Please sit, don't try to move, we'll have you to the medical bay shortly. Is there any numbness? What are those bite marks from?