trans_9 | Nothing to keep me from the storm [ O P E N ]

Lightning was restless.

It was a relatively normal state for her to be in, especially since she felt almost like she stuck out like a sore thumb among the crew of strangers, not having found her "niche" yet. It didn't help she'd been lucky enough to completely miss out on a big and violent event, whisked off to run mazes instead.

Reasonably, she could go join security, but everything she'd seen of the security team she didn't like. Maybe she was making snap judgements and being overly picky, but at present she was going to run with it. Bad enough that seconds after saving Pulse and Cocoon that she woke up with the news that turns out, all their efforts had been in vain.

So where does a restless ex-soldier go when she has no job to do and no actual direction? The Sensoriums, of course. She'd been wary of the interface, at first, but adjusted easy enough. After all, it was giving her the outlet for her frustration that she needed.

The room she stood in formed around her, not entirely in a linear fashion, but she wasn't exactly planning on fighting in a linear manner. Walls and obstacles jutted out in odd places, there were random drops in the floor, and nothing ever stayed the same for very long. Once the room had taken on an environment Lightning was satisfied with, a group of six PSICOM soldiers appeared from nowhere, and advanced on her.

Lightning stood still, watching them fan out around her, before in one fluid motion she drew her gunblade from its holster across the back of her legs, and spun, taking the first soldier out with one sharp cut to the junction between shoulderblade and neck, down across his chest.

Everything was instinct and motion, after that first hit. As the men fired, Lightning cartwheeled out of the line of fire, hitting the switch on her blade to retract and allow her to return fire. She ducked behind a wall while the men were shouting orders and took the second for them to regroup to snap her fingers at her side, activating her Grav-con unit. The blue field shimmered around her body as she spun and jumped towards the wall she was taking cover behind, kicking off the ground and running up, before hitting the corner, jumping across the gap between her wall and another, continuing her sprint until she was above the heads of the unaware PSICOM, who were still focused on the wall she'd initially disappeared behind. With another snap the unit disengaged, and she dropped down in the middle of the soldiers, blade out, and spun around lightning-quick.

The soldiers exploded as the simulation ended, and Lightning let out a heavy breath, straightening up.

"Set it up again. Increase the number of combatants by ten."

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Having long ago giving up on actually noticing when he had wandered into someone else's simulation before it became awkward, Morgan had simply mentally shrugged and grabbed a seat on one of those random projections to watch.

Still, he judged his moment very carefully to startle her as little as possible, when he said, "I don't think even sixteen of those guys are quite at your level."

If her sudden visitor had surprised her, Lightning didn't show it. She paused the simulation with a word, before turning on her heel and looking at the owner of the voice.

"It got mad at me when I told it to start me off with a hundred," she replied with a slight shrug, sliding her gunblade back into its holster.

"How terrible of --" --wait, what had that sword just done? It practically transformed to be put away!

He looked at it for a moment more, realized he might not look like he was looking at the weapon, and resolutely yanked his eyes back upwards. "Not that it's not a bad training technique, mind, but why quantity over quality?"

"Mostly blowing off excess energy," she replied, shrugging a shoulder and moving forward a few paces. "I've been running mazes, I needed something to hit." As completely calm as she was when she said that, it was obvious that she still had a lot of that 'excess energy' built up, and as many simulated enemies as Stacy could throw at her probably wouldn't completely work it out.

"Fair enough. Let me know if you want a challenge," he said, folding his hands with a smile. "In the meantime, I'm just going to sit here and learn from watching, unless you don't want me to."

"Impressive," Ildraniath didn't bother to introduce herself or otherwise apologize for barging in. If she'd wanted privacy, she should have locked the door. The Eldar swept forward, hands folded into the sleeves of her robe as she surveyed the simulated battlefield.

"For a mon-keigh, in any case. I have learned never to underestimate your kind - you are often tenacious and fierce when cornered."

Lightning turned when she heard the woman speak, frowning a little at the word mon-keigh. She assumed that was some word for "human" but she couldn't be sure. It was still a little strange for her, adjusting to all the different sentient species that could look human without actually being human. After a moment's consideration, she paused the simulation and sheathed her weapon.

"That's probably why the ship kidnapped so many of us. Scrappy fighting can be an advantage."

Oh. Zouichi paused at the doorway of the Sensoriums, trying to decide whether he wanted to stick around or just leave and try to find an empty room (doubtful). In the end, he decided to step in. "Hello."

"Hello," agreed the brightly colored parrot on his shoulder, hopping to the side a little to more closely evaluate Lightning. "Hair of massiveness!"

There were probably a number of different ways that Lightning could respond to that, but the bird caught her a little off-guard. In general she didn't think much about her hair, so when a bird was commenting on it, it gave her pause.

"...Excuse me?"

"Oh, I'm sorry," Zouichi said, looking a little embarrassed. "He's probably just talking about Lash. I was speaking with Starfire earlier, and the subject came up..."

Well, that was partially true. Mostly, Alan just liked playing with people's hair. And look! Lightning has lots of it!

A low whistle was let out from nearby, and once he had caught the end of Lightning's go-through, Snow took his steps forward to let his presence be known. Hands resting on his waist, he took a look around at the obstacle course she had created to spice the difficulty up. "Ten, huh?"

Of course, he didn't sound very impressed and the sarcasm could be detected in his voice. Ten seemed more like an easy warm-up for her.

Lightning caught the sarcasm. She smiled slightly, before straightening her expression out as she turned around, sliding her gunblade away.

"I'm going easy on it. Don't want to overload the computer and blow up the ship."

"I wonder if these things can get overloaded," he wondered outloud with a small shrug of the shoulders. "I've seen some pretty hardcore things going on in here when other people are using'em."

Nothing to keep me from the storm [ O P E N ]

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