ten_fwd_meme | TEST DRIVE #18 - Ten Forward & the Low Grav Gymnasium

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test drives

TEST DRIVE #18 - Ten Forward & the Low Grav Gymnasium

Option 001. Ten Forward: The first thing you see is a bar. A large, lively bar filled with many different faces and many different smells, sights, and sounds. This is Ten Forward, the Enterprise's off-duty lounge; feel free to get acquainted with your fellow travelers and try to find somebody who's in charge: this is your new home now, after all...

Option 002. The Low-Gravity Gymnasium: The gym is a large room with several alcove-like sections housing the aerobics and martial arts areas, a parrises squares area, an anbo-jyutsu court, and a separate fencing room. Most noteworthy is the area dedicated for zero-gravity training.

Zero-gravity can be, well, kind of weird, because it's not like a gradual loss of the pressure holding you to the floor--you may have taken the turbolifts, just expecting to take a leisurely run, or maybe work out with a treadmill to get in some cardio, but the minute you step into the gym you're floating, as is anything you might have been holding or bringing with you.

What now? Panic, flail, and try to swim through the air back to where the gravity is normal? Do you make the best of it and tough it out to get your exercise in? Or, as we recommend, do you start having fun with the sudden game of weightlessness? Pick your personal scenario and have fun with all the other weightless people.

Boy, this is gonna make hitting the showers after your workout awkward...

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Oh. Those people. Well, they were just sort of there. They didn't do anything of any importance. Even their job protecting the President. She'd done that.

He shrugged.

"Their being there didn't really have much effect on my 'stadium stunt', did it? Whoever brought us here probably didn't notice them, either."

It took a lot of energy and/or money to pull of something like this kidnapping. Why waste it on nobodies?

Yeah, because he'd shot her and now she had to be all damage control and propaganda and face of mutant-kind so they weren't used for experiments. You know, the kind she was trying to prevent? Jerk.

"Why did you even need a stadium? For a statement, it was pretty over the top." She slides onto the bar stool next to him, dumping her backpack at her feet. There's a heavy clunk as she does so, but she doesn't seem worried. "You're bleeding, by the way."

Where she shot him. She's still a crack shot. Good to know.

He reaches up and swipes at his neck. So he is. "That's what happens when people shoot each other," he notes mildly. He really can't blame her for that, since he'd started it.

He glanced at her.

"The stadium served two purposes. One was privacy and infrastructure." It was set up with tv cameras. And it stopped more police getting in. "Two was that it was a big enough object that flying it in there scared the everliving fuck out of those assholes. I knew they'd hide in their giant steel box without even thinking about it. Then they were fish in a barrel."

"And what expert marksmanship it is," she points out. He could have been dead. How nice is she? Still, bleeding from the neck isn't necessarily a good thing. It seems sluggish, though. Flesh wound.

The awesome thing about bars is they have bartenders; Raven signals this one, and asks for cold water.

"I just want to point out the oxymoronic use of privacy when the cameras made damn sure the whole world watched your little showdown." Water arrives, and she reaches for a paper napkin from the little metal thingy, dunks it in the glass, and holds it out to him. "Seclusion, I get. Privacy, not so much."

Although it was pretty impressive, all told.

He'd admitted it was a good shot. In his way.

"Seclusion, then," he says in a tone that suggests that if she wants to get semantic, then fine. English is his second language, Raven. "What the cameras didn't capture was me being tackled to the ground by seventy fucking police officers because they couldn't get in."

He slapped the damp napkin to his wound like it irritated him more than anything. Like a mosquito bite.

You're welcome for not killing you, Erik. Also, she thought English was like... his fourth language. If they're being pedantic about semantics.

"Nope, just a blue woman shooting you and saving the President," she replies, half smug and half irritated. "Thanks so much for making me a god-damned hero."

Not that she'd stuck around for it. She'd nicked his helmet, then walked straight out of the stadium... and onto an alleged spaceship. Something about this feels vaguely deja vu.

Her not killing him is a pleasing development because she probably doesn't hate him. Nobody would have blamed her for killing him after his...misapprehension in Paris.

"You had it in you all along," he told her glibly. "I just brought it out."

It's tempting to hate him. But there's no point to it. Hate is a wasteful emotion, and if she's completely honest with herself, she does understand why he did it. It doesn't make him less of an asshole about it, but bullet for bullet? They're even.

"Oh, yeah?" She raises an eyebrow. "So why are you the one in the cape?"

"When you're cursed with having to wear actual clothes, you have to make fashion work for you," he says, his expression suggesting - just faintly - that he might be teasing.

"Erik. That is a costume, and you know it."

Her lips twitch in badly hidden amusement.

"You were putting on a show, don't even try to deny it."

He shrugged a shoulder and leaned on the bar.

"That's the only thing people know how to pay attention to."

That was the plain and, as far as he was concerned, ugly truth. Put on a good enough show, and you could convince people that anything was right. The difference between this time and the last time he saw it was that he intended to put together at least as compelling a show as the enemy. You fight fire with fire.

"So that was the opening number."

She has a mouthful of the water she'd asked for, now that his bleeding seems to have slowed. No sense in wasting it if they really are in space.

"At what point in your book was the kidnapping to space with only two of the players? It seems like a sudden plot twist."

"It is. I don't know what it has to do with anything. How did we even get here?"

"No clue."

She's still mad at him, but there's a solidarity in this, and part of her still trusts him. A little bit. They need to stick together.

"I might have left you to Charles' tender mercies and stepped out of your stadium and into... here."

He frowned. "I was blocks away. I had a motel room I was using. I was stepping through the door, except this was inside."

And that didn't quite line up. They were brought very close together, but not in the same moment.

Well, that doesn't make sense, and her frown echoes his.

"How-- so-- wait. You were still bleeding. Did you not get it seen to?"

Because that's what's most important right now. Health and safety.

"I was going to clean it up," he told her, almost defensively. "But I didn't get into the hotel room."

"So Charles just left you? Bleeding from the neck?"

Ignoring the fact that she'd done the same thing, Raven is quietly indignant.

"For fuck's sake!" One finger is pointed at him. "You're getting that looked at. Somewhere. There's probably a med bay or something, I've seen Star Trekkers or whatever that show was called."

He shrugged a shoulder. "He let me leave. Without being arrested."

Oh.

"That's... something. I guess."

Still.

"Doesn't explain how we both got here from different points at the same time."

"No, it doesn't. But I expect that's about the most I can expect from Charles anymore. He actually believed that I'd killed the President. He thought I deserved to be stuck in that hole. Though not necessarily for that crime. Or not entirely anyway." He looked at Raven. "He said I took you away from him."

The flattest of stares is directed at him, and if Charles were here, he'd recognise it as the one that says 'fuck off'. Anyone with a brain knows Erik wouldn't have been quite so stupid back then, though recent events might contradict that point a little. As for the rest...

"He said that." Her brother has a horse that is far too high, and has forgotten that just because he can't use his legs, doesn't mean she can't use hers. "Do you believe him?"

If he does, he's an idiot, and she's done. She'll find her own damn way out of wherever here is.

"Of course I don't believe him," Erik retorts.

They may be... whatever they are these days, but they had something once. He's relieved at her 'fuck off' stare, to be honest. Once it was out of his mouth, he realized that she had the opportunity to believe it. Or pretend to. He could sort of deal with her resenting him now, but not with her taking that away.

"I told him why you left, since he didn't seem to get it." He shrugs and checks the napkin, then folds it and reapplies it. "His response was to suggest that you left because I got inside your head." He raises his eyes to find her face again. "I reminded him that that wasn't my power."

The worst part was that, as he remembered it, Charles sent them away. The first time the telepath came at him, he resented the accusation. He'd asked him to be with them. Charles told them to go. It wasn't like he couldn't get in touch with them if he'd changed his mind. But he hadn't. And apparently his version is now that Erik somehow manipulated Raven into letting him abduct her. Absurd. How dare he? And try making her do anything.

He glanced down at the bar again. "I didn't defend it to him beyond that, but that time meant something to me. I took offence. I took offence to what he said and to his years of inaction and to the fact that he thinks I'm some kind of monster because I didn't handle Shaw the way he wanted. I told him what I was going to do. I never misled him. Never."

Part of her wants to respond to every little thing he says with the sort of snappy comebacks she's got used to delivering, but after a moment, she realises she really wants to know what he thinks, and why.

So when he lifts his gaze to her face, she meets it openly. There's a soft, huffing sort of snort of derision when he points out getting into peoples' heads isn't his power (really, it's just not his power in the same way that it is Charles', but that's not what they're discussing). Whether or not Erik realises, Raven had used his leadership as a model for her actions once he was incarcerated, taking steps that she thought he'd have taken, trying to think if he'd be proud of her progress... after a while, that conscious thought faded and she became much more her own person. That Charles still thought that person could be so easily manipulated was irritating as fuck, really.

That's the most Erik has said to her in... well, ever. Or possibly anyone; he hasn't been out of prison very long.

"I know." Which is kind of galling, but pretty honest. "I-- thanks. For not-- for sticking to your guns, for whatever that's worth, now."

She half wants to trade her water for something harder, but doesn't, and not just because she doesn't trust space vodka.

"It's worth a lot." Coming from her. He glances at her. "I did miss you." That had been the truth, also.

He pulls the napkin from his neck and crumples it up.

He hasn't been out of prison very long and, while it had nothing on his experiences in Auschwitz, it was still largely an exercise in humiliation and ostracization. They didn't even let him have books. So he lived inside his head a lot. What happened with her in Paris, what happened at the White House... they weren't the products of a well-balanced Erik and he hadn't had the chance to find his feet yet. But as much as he'd taught her in their early days together, just as much, she'd leveled him out. She was sensible. Practical. They worked well together because their strengths had complimented each other.

He wants that again in the worst way. It was a sort of acceptance he'd never experienced. Not even with Charles. Charles wanted him to change. She didn't.

"And I'm proud of what you accomplished while I was gone."

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