Arguable social awkwardness aside, at least during the day there were people to talk to, or the possibility that something interesting would happen because of the sheer amount of people hustling around the school.
At night, it was just a boring time slog. It was lonely. That was about eight hours you had to find a way to fill with something worthwhile every day, all by yourself. There were only so many hours you could waste playing games and re-watching movies night after night before you started to lose it.
There was a curfew for students, but because the adults had to eventually get their own sleep too, it was barely enforced after a certain point after-hours. That gave me the walk of the mansion between 2 and 6 in the morning. Just as long as I was quiet and didn't disturb anyone, I could go and do just about anything. That did limit my options though.
I did a lot of working out. Working out and walking. Riveting stuff, I know. I just said I didn't have a lot of options.
I had to be careful in the subbasements though. A lot of the X-Men were workhorses. That was the heart and guts of the mansion, so you could and would find them down there a lot, working after curfew. It wasn't like they had to adhere to that little rule. If they caught me though, they would bust my ass and send me back to my room, maybe with some disciplinarian actions taken too. Sometimes I had to forego working out that late because I could hear people down there.
On this night though, I was able to get through a whole regimen, without having to stop and hide or cut it short. I was feeling good, walking around the subbasements to cool off before I headed back to my room.
In the middle of a drink of water from a gallon jug, I stopped like a deer caught in the headlights. Voices, from back the way I'd come. Well that wasn't any good at all. Getting caught down there after-hours while I was already on thin ice? I didn't know what punishments consisted of for mutant superheroes in-training, but I had avoided them until now. I wanted to keep it that way.
If I could just sneak past to the lift, I could get out of there and back to the upper levels. Even if they heard it, by the time the door opened, I'd be out of there so fast, they'd never be able to prove that it was me. All I had to do was get past the open doors of the Danger Room, which, if you wanted privacy, there were worse places, especially at that time of the night.
The door was open and the lights were on inside. I couldn't make out the voices or what they were talking about, despite the echo inside. They were keeping their voices down, and it sounded like a heated discussion, which made it all the more imperative that I got the hell out of there. If I was caught eavesdropping, even if it was an accident, that would just make whatever I got for sneaking around after curfew that much worse.
I crept closer to the open door, keeping my shadow from falling into the light of the entrance and waited for my chance to rush past. I don't know how long I stood there as the people inside droned on, but I wasn't as smooth as I thought I was.
"Hold on," Oh, crap. That was Miss Pryde's voice, "Bellamy, we know you're down here. Come out," Maybe if I didn't move, she would think she was mistaken so I could finish sneaking away, "...You're just making it worse on yourself by hiding. Don't make me come get you."
For someone so tiny, Miss Pryde had a hell of a presence. I didn't feel it there for some reason. But when dealing with her, it was better to err on the side of caution.
Hands up, I walked into the Danger Room, trying to do whatever damage control I could before I got too much of a tongue-lashing, "Alright, I didn't mean to be around when you were talk-," I looked around and didn't see anyone inside, "What the hell?"
There wasn't anyone inside. That was queer.
The door had also closed once I'd made it a few steps inside.
...Even queerer.
The environment around me shimmered and turned into a dusty construction site. We were high up in the air on the metal girders of an unfinished skyscraper. As was the usual with the Danger Room, it all felt real. The noise of the city around me, the creaking of the metal structure I was on that wasn't quite secure. The wind trying to push me around in my precarious position. One look down told me just how badly things would go if my footing wasn't adequate.
Alright, so I was stuck in a simulation. Fine. As long as nothing was coming to shoot me in the face, I could sit down and chill out until morning. Someone would notice, and get me out. Sure, I'd get royally chewed out, but whatever.
"You look a little more comfortable than you should be."
I looked up and over and saw Miss Pryde sitting down on a metal beam higher than mine. I had wondered where she'd been since I'd heard her voice before coming in.
"Hey…" I said, trying to stall and think of something to let me to explain my way out of trouble, "You're up pretty late. Something on your mind? I'm a really good listener."
Smooth, Bel. Totally allude to the fact that you heard her talking to now what you could only assume was her damn self.
Instead of responding to that, she dropped down from the beam she was on, landing on mine. Her eyes were locked dead on me as she came closer, "It's time for a test, Bellamy," She said. Every step she took toward me, I took a step away, "Are you ready?"
"Uh... no..." Something didn't feel right. It wasn't just the situation we were in. It was more than that. I didn't feel anything. If I had to compare the feeling, it felt like I was about to play chess with a computer instead of a live person, "It's kind of late for a training sim, isn't it?"
How was I supposed to fight Kitty Pryde anyway? I couldn't even touch her! So I figured that was the answer. Some opponents you couldn't fight on your own. If this was really a teaching thing, and not just a punishment for being awake and being in the wrong place at the wrong time, I couldn't see how running from a fight I didn't need to have wasn't the right answer.
"You think you can escape, don't you?"
My eyes focused right back onto hers at that comment. I had looked away for just long enough to come up with some way to run. I had still been looking in her general direction.
Something was definitely wrong here.
I worked my jaw around, trying to get psyched up for a conflict that I definitely didn't want any part of. It was the only warning she had before I outright charged her, "Well, I guess I'm going through you!"
There wasn't any kind of expression on her face as she prepared for me. Instead of running at her for a fist fight, I fired a blast at her. She went intangible to stay safe and stayed that way. It let me run right through her to the edge of the structure where I jumped to a nearby crane.
I started swinging my way down monkey bar - style until the metal feeling underneath my fingers vanished. I started to fall as the Danger Room changed in front of my eyes.
Turning to the ground, I saw myself falling to the pavement of a busy highway. I aimed one of my hands down and fired a blast to slow my descent.
So instead of going 'splat', I just went 'smack'. It still hurt though. I quite literally bounced when I hit and landed on my feet. It would have been impressive if I hadn't been stumbling around right afterwards.
"Pffft!" I spat from my mouth as I got my bearings and saw Miss Pryde walking my way again. Did she not have to deal with what I just did? Granted, she had her own way of dealing with stuff like that, but I wasn't aware of that at the time, "Okay, so you don't want me to run."
"There is nowhere to run. Don't you get it?" She said before vanishing altogether. Before my eyes, she reformed into a figure encased in a red and yellow suit of metallic armor. Iron Man, with the voice to match, "There is no place you can run. Nothing you can do. You cannot defeat me in a fight."
Well... seeing as how I didn't have a choice in the matter...
I charged up twin blasts in my hands and fired. Iron Man shot back with his own. We dueled for a moment, but he seemed offended that I was even trying to fight back and upped his power output. I could feel my side of the struggle slipping even when I tried to use more of my own energy. I could see the writing on the wall, and kept it up just long enough to dodge. Where I once stood, the blast carved a chunk out of the holographic ground.
While I was trying to get a better position, he flew to another side and shot me in the back. I turned and took most of it on the shoulder, but it sent me head-over-heels into the metal rail at the edge of the road. I heard the while of his beams turning up and moved before he could hit me with a blast that cut right through the barrier I was against.
By now, vehicles were flying past me on the road, and they weren't stopping or swerving. It was all up to me to stay away from them. Meanwhile, Iron Man was nice and safe in the air taking potshots at me. It took everything I had to avoid both him and the cars and trucks that didn't care if they turned me into street pizza.
It was then that it occurred to me – why was I fighting like this was a practice session I was going to be scored on after it was over? There was a way to do this and make it way easier on me. All I had to do was treat this like a video game.
Like Grand Theft Auto, but with superpowers. Basically, everything except for me was expendable. NPCs beware.
I turned in the direction that the cars were coming from and spotted a motorcycle driving my way. I took a shot at the road in front of it and sent it flying my way, the rider flipping through the air, but who cared? He was a Danger Room construct.
I funneled power to fortify my muscles and caught the 700 pound bike out of the air. The blast caused a chain reaction accident that sent cars and trucks crashing into each other, spilling all over the highway. I spun around for extra momentum and hurled the motorcycle at Iron Man. He flew out of the way, but not far enough to avoid an explosion after I fired a quick blast right at it. He fell from the air but started to recover without touching the ground.
It was low enough though.
I started weaving through the piled-up traffic, jumping over cars, running on the tops of them, streaking around their noses and rears, until I got close enough to jump at Iron Man and tackle him out of the air. We smashed into the side of a flatbed truck's transport where I stuck my hand to his face and started channeling light energy to my hand. I could slowly feel his helmet start to melt underneath my super-heated palm.
I was doing it. I was beating up Iron Man. Wait until dad heard about this one.
And then, just like that, boom. I got shot by his stupid chest-beam thing. That hurt. That hurt like a motherfucker.
...And it should have killed me, shouldn't it have?
When I hit the ground and my vision stopped swimming, I scrambled to my feet and felt and heard the rumbling of engines all around me. I was on a plane. A military transport from the looks of everything around me. Not that I had firsthand knowledge, but I had seen enough media to get a rough idea of the differences.
"So what now?" I muttered to myself. I knew that the Danger Room could hear me. It wasn't a dare. I just knew that whatever this was, it wasn't over yet, "I don't suppose saying 'end simulation' would make this stop, would it?"
And then the plane started to shake. My first thought was that the Danger Room was going to make the plane I was on crash. But no. It was so much worse than that.
I ran for the cockpit as if I could actually land the thing safely myself, but the door flew off of its hinges and hit me in the face before I could get there.
As I lay there on the floor with a bit knot swelling on my head, I heard subhuman grunts and the groaning sound of metal giving way. When I sat up, I saw green. Lots of green.
The Incredible Hulk.
We made eye contact. He realized that I wasn't supine, and that by itself seemed to be enough to make him angry. You really wouldn't like him when he's angry.
"HULK SMASH!" He ripped right through the doorway like it was a paper banner at a varsity football game.
I liked to think I didn't scream. I liked to think that the Danger Room had created a random bystander to scream at the top of their lungs in a bloodcurdling fashion to scare me even more. There was no way I would willingly make a sound like that. But after it was over, my throat hurt, so it was definitely me who had screamed.
Fuck you. You stand in front of the Hulk, all alone, and see if you don't shit or piss your pants. I didn't. I just let out an unmanly scream. So yes, I still think I'm tougher than you.
In a complete panic, I shot him. I might as well have dug into my pockets and threw whatever I had in there instead, for all the good it did.
I ran for it when he started to rage. I was smaller, so I could fit through all of the things crammed into the cargo hold. It didn't matter, the Hulk turned everything to scrap and splinters and didn't lose a bit of momentum.
I kept scrambling forward and didn't dare look back until I felt hot breath on my neck. That was when I stopped and wheeled around. He was right in front of me, in the dark cargo hold, the dim lights reflecting the shine of his eyes and making him look that much bigger because of the shadow of his outline.
My eyes felt wet. I actually started to cry at the thought of being crushed like an ant by the Hulk.
How was I going to hurt that thing? There was nothing I had up my sleeve that could do anything to that guy. He lifted his hands over his head and yelled. So did I.
Because I was staring at the Hulk through tears in my eyes, I was focused on my eyes as I tried to channel as much energy as I could to try and brace for impact. The next moment, the Hulk stumbled back holding his eyes.
I didn't bother thinking about what I'd done until later. When I went back and thought about it, then tried it again in front of others it all made sense. I'd given them a straight dose of pure unfiltered light, right to the eye holes.
Apparently, it blinded the hell out of people, or so I was told. I didn't know. The most it did to me was gave me a flash for a moment, like a camera going off in my face. It really didn't affect me, probably because I was the one who was causing it. The problem with using it around people was that it blinded EVERYTHING, and unless you had welder's goggles on, you were going to get a face full of that wonderful incandescence.
I looked around for anything to save my ass while the Hulk rampaged blindly around the cargo plane. I saw how tightly bound some of the large boxes were in a very specific military-style mesh. I jumped onto the side of one and grabbed on tight, then fired a hard explosive blast at the wall of the plane. It tore open like aluminum foil and the air pressure made it much bigger than the original hole I'd punched into it.
It started pulling the Hulk, but he dug his feet in. Fair enough. He wasn't going anywhere he didn't want to, no matter what cockamamie scheme I tried to come up with. I didn't have that option though. So much of the stuff in the cargo hold was sucked out of the plane because of the air pressure. The box I grabbed onto for an anchor was no different.
It went flying, with me attached. One second I was in on the ground, the next I was hurtling through the blue sky, holding onto a wooden cargo box for dear life. But the beautiful thing was, it had a parachute attached.
Oh, either there was some deity out there somewhere looking out for little old me, or the Danger Room was really a stickler for detail when it set up its scenarios. It was something to think about. Either way, I wasn't complaining.
When the crate landed, everything immediately changed again. I fell to the ground, but this time I was ready and landed on my feet. When the hologram reformed, I was in the middle of a demolished city somewhere. It was quite the sight. It looked like the place had been carpet bombed for twelve hours straight.
The Hulk was nowhere in sight, which I took as a positive for the time being, at least until the ground shook. I of course did not take this as a good thing and immediately started running. It felt like the right choice, especially when I saw a shadow the size of a full-sized downtown building drape over me.
There was a growl from the throat of some gargantuan creature. I ran faster. The ground kept shaking. I was not turning around to look at it. It didn't matter that I was faster than any baseline human could ever be on their own, it was gaining on me easily.
If I was fighting the Danger Room itself, why didn't it just kill me? God knows the place was enough of a deathtrap to make it happen. All it had to do was turn up the heat to the same temperature as lava and cook me, or increase the gravity so much that it squashed me flat like a pancake. Why was it going through all of the trouble of setting this crap up to try and make me accidentally kill myself?
Unless, the room still had to follow rules. Like, it couldn't just do something without the environment to match. But even so, it still could have just dumped me into the heart of a volcano and let me burn. It could have just put me 10,000 feet in the air instead of giving me a fighting chance to start with by putting me on the plane.
Or better yet, it couldn't kill me. It could put me in situations where I could screw up beyond all belief and off myself, but it couldn't pull the trigger on its own.
Even if this thing was hostile, it still had programming. And the Danger Room's most important failsafe was that it couldn't kill a single one of us. We'd tangled with some nasty individuals inside of simulations, but they never got us with kill-shots, because it couldn't consciously kill us.
So I did the only thing I could think of that really mattered at that point.
I stopped.
I stopped fighting. I stopped running. I stopped humoring it altogether. I stood in place and didn't move. I didn't even bother turning around to face whatever horror had been cooked up for me next.
I waited for the pain to come. To get smashed in the back of the head unceremoniously and put out of my misery, but it didn't come. I started to pay attention to my surroundings and saw that everything had simply frozen.
"What are you doing?" The Danger Room said, having paused everything going on around me. It was like it couldn't believe I was just waiting for the end to come.
"I'm done," I said, not moving from where I stood. It was working so far. I wasn't about to deviate from the plan now – what little there was to be had, "I can't beat you. I don't have a chance, seeing as how you're a goddamn room. It's not like I can turn you off or destroy you from the inside while you have everything going. So fuck it."
"You are giving up?"
This was when I turned and took the opportunity to glare at the space all around me. This time, she'd set some kind of Godzilla-like dragon monster thing the size of a skyscraper on me. Everything had paused when I was fifty feet from its gigantic toenails.
Yes, not fighting was definitely the best thing I could have done here.
I swallowed my apprehension and mustered enough courage to put some bass in my voice, "Giving up implies that there's some solution that I don't have the guts to look for. The second I got locked in here, there was nothing I could do but start fighting until I dropped. But screw that," I wasn't about to humor this thing by struggling back while it beat me to a pulp, "You can kick my ass all you want to. You can make up any sadistic simulation you can dredge up from what's in your memory banks. You. Can't. Kill me."
The Danger Room knew that. It knew it and it hated it. I knew that Saberwolf could feel emotions, or something resembling them at least, but he was designed to think in a manner similar to a human. I didn't know that a training room could feel angry.
The room threw its version of a temper-tantrum and materialized a handful of the most dangerous villains I had and hadn't heard of into existence all around me, ready to turn me to mulch.
I didn't flinch. If that was what was going to happen, I couldn't stop it on my own anyway.
"End simulation."
Just like that, everything returned to the featureless, metallic room that I had originally entered. There was no godforsaken battlefield around me. There was no costumed, ass-kicking machine set to take a chunk out of me. I was alone again.
Well, not quite.
I looked up and saw Cyclops in the control room and sank down to the floor, delirious with relief, "Hehehehehehahahahaha!" I started to cackle. I couldn't control myself. Even when some of the senior X-Men came in, dressed in their sleepwear, with varying pissed off expressions on their faces, I just kept laughing.
Oop, and there went those tears again. If anyone my age actually saw that… well, it would have taken a while to live that down.
"I can't believe you all got here in time," I said, my laughs tapering off. Once they left, they left for good. I didn't even want to smile anymore afterwards.
Miss Pryde was the first to get to me. I tried not to flinch back, and held most of it in, but I know she noticed, "Blindfold told us you were in trouble."
"What, did she see this in a vision? Wish she would have told me."
"No, more like she heard you mentally screaming out for someone to help you."
I laid down on my back and let the blood run down the sides of my face. Mixed with all of the sweat I knew was on my face and neck, it probably looked awful, but it didn't matter. It felt like warm, stinging comfort. Ruthie for the save.
"You are in so much trouble, by the way."
"Don't care," I told her with a big breath of relief. I was done, "...Really don't care."