I hate running. I always thought it was the most worthless exercise. It only comes up when you're running for your life. Other than that, it's nice to have, but who gives a damn about how fast you are? If you don't run track or play football, whatever.
At the moment, I also hated myself, so I spent the night on the treadmill in the gym. The more I ran, the angrier I got. The angrier I got, the more I thought about the stupid Danger Room.
"Speed up," I barked at the voice-activated system. My eyes looked down at the display to see the pace of the machine increase. It read 150 mph.
I was fast. Faster than I thought I was. I didn't know I could go so fast. When I tried to speed up my body, I'd never felt like I'd topped out before. Once I got up to a certain speed, I was intimidated by the thought that I wouldn't be able to see and react.
Tonight, I didn't care. Also, I was on a treadmill. It wasn't like I needed to see everything all around me in case something would hit me from a blind spot out of nowhere. So I was turning it up to see what I could do. I was mad, and without any other outlets, so I wanted to work myself to try and get some of that stress out.
It wasn't working.
"Speed up."
Who in the world did this bullshit for fun? Anyone who runs for recreational purposes, know that we would not get along, just because of that one thing. It's a fundamental difference that we simply would not be able to overcome.
"Speed up!"
The steps I took were propelled forward by the same energy that powered my muscles with every motion. The more momentum I built and the faster I went, steps were more to guide me and keep me moving in the direction of my choice. I discovered this because even going past 300 miles per hour, my feet weren't moving any faster than they used to when I would run in gym class.
And I didn't care. Being fairly fast for a mutant wasn't going to solve my problem.
Yeah, this wasn't helping.
I brought things to an end by backflipping off of the treadmill. All that time spent busting my ass in the gym, and I didn't feel any better. During my cool down, I walked past the Danger Room and just stared at the closed door. I walked up to it, half expecting it to open, but knowing that it wouldn't. Not this time.
I pressed my head to the metal surface and closed my eyes, "I know you can hear me. Every word that's coming out of my mouth right now," I said.
No response. Now was the time that it wanted to shut the hell up, when there was actual heat on it. Of course it could be patient. It was a machine.
That was fine with me though. If it wasn't going to talk, it was sure going to listen. "I know you probably think it's hilarious that nobody believes me. Do you even have a sense of humor? Anyway, you're not going to say another word, because you don't know who's keeping an eye on you," If the people in charge of this place weren't completely incompetent, they would at least heed my warning enough to do that much, "That's fine. I'm going to prove what you're up to. I'm not going to let you hurt anyone... more than you usually do during regular training."
I couldn't hold that against the Danger Room. That was what it was made for, after all. Everything else though...
"I'm not going to lay down and roll over," I said before I started to walk away.
I left it at that. I had said my piece. It knew, if it hadn't already. It wouldn't surprise me if the thing somehow had eyes and ears all over the Institute.
XxX
For a few days, things went without any sort of noticeable incident. I left well enough alone for the moment, but it never left my mind. However, there was a time and a place for everything. I had faith in myself that I would know it when it saw it.
Funnily enough, it happened in a class.
It was during one of Miss Pryde's technology engineering lectures, so I was paying full attention. If I was slacking off, she would know and bring it up later, which was never a fun conversation.
"-it's an important thing to consider. After all, for those of you with hopes of being an X-Man eventually, you never know when the success or failure of your mission will depend on you understanding the equipment you're using. Even if it's not ours, if you can identify what the other guy has, it'll definitely help improve your chances."
I was listening, but I wasn't taking notes on this. There was a very clear line in that class of what she intended you to maintain. Only the technical stuff ever went on quizzes. When Miss Pryde went on tangents like that, it was just because she was personally interested in something she'd taught us and got sidetracked.
It was amusing a lot of the time how into it she got, she seemed to enjoy it – always willing to share her mind with us, and it gave a lot of weary hands a break from writing. Whenever we could, everyone would try to keep it going for as long as possible.
"The kind of things we'll be going over later this year, and beyond if you feel like taking the advanced courses past this one, will be going over all sorts of complex machinery. We deal with more than our fair share of advanced technology, if you hadn't noticed."
A portion of the class laughed at that. I wasn't one, because she put a thought into my head. Hopefully this would work without being too obvious.
I raised my hand. Miss Pryde caught sight of it and pointed to me, "Yes, Bellamy?"
"Where do we get most of our tech from?" I asked inconspicuously enough. There was a lot of crap around campus that most of us hadn't seen anywhere else before, "Is there someone here who comes up with this stuff and builds it? Someone who programs it? What?"
She looked depressed for a moment. I hadn't been looking to sour her mood bringing up bad times. The X-Men had been through a lot of crap over the years.
"There was. One retired though. The other…" She told me, and credit to her, she perked back up quickly. I always did have her pegged to be one of the tougher staff members, "Honestly, a lot of the things we use are designed by staff from the school, things like Cerebro. But a lot of our equipment and technology we've also gotten from elsewhere, some of it repurposed in some way to fit what we need."
"The Blackbird?" I asked/led her on to explain. I remembered that thing. Fun fact: Despite having never seen it with my own eyes, I had apparently been on it twice, both times while unconscious.
"It's originally something we got from S.H.I.E.L.D., but we've modified it and upgraded it so many times, it might as well be our own design at this point," She said with a shrug.
"Upgraded with what?" One of the other kids in my class chimed in with a query of his own. I was about to ask the same thing.
"That mutant I told you about before? His name is Forge. A tech genius. Whenever something new turned up that we could use, he was asked to find a way to repurpose it for us,"
I didn't even have to say anything else. Other students were continuing my train of thought for me. Anything to keep from getting back to the regularly scheduled lecture and put off the quiz at the end of class, "So you would just find stuff and add it on to what you already had?"
Miss Pryde regarded that question with a frown but did chuckle, "That's a crude way of putting it, but it's not entirely wrong," She said, "There's technology that's extremely advanced. Things from advanced alien civilizations, most notably like the Shi'ar Empire. That's where a lot of our more unbelievable stuff originates from, like the Danger Room's-," She finished her sentence and stopped. It was only for a second, but I saw the look she gave me. I hoped my poker face was as dull and taciturn as it felt, because I really wanted to smile.
Sorry teach. But if you aren't going to tell me something I want to know, I'll find a way to get to it myself. I'm not dumb. Sometimes all I need is a little something to point me in the right direction. And if I know enough about you, I'll get it from you if I need to.