4200/The Biggest X-Fish Story

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The Biggest X-Fish Story
Date of Scene: 22 November 2020
Location: Breakstone Lake
Synopsis: Things always get interesting when a training session happens.
Cast of Characters: Illyana Rasputina, Logan Howlett




Illyana Rasputina has posed:
It may be the denouement of autumn, its dying breaths coating the great back lawn in a frosting of crackling white. Clouds scudding across the sky, driven by a harsh breeze, steal all remnants of the gentle decline of the Northeast into a patchwork of copper and red. Outside of New York City, autumnal harvest still percolates through tiny towns strung along sleepy state highways and the great Hudson River Valley, just as they have for three hundred years. Shorn fields no longer carry wheat, the trees stripped of apples, a few crows flapping around the remains. Squirrels dance over the lawns of Westchester, pilfering another's buried caches, forgetful creatures full of spite and hate. It's a season before the snowflakes go up, students start thinking about Christmas, and those who can plan to go home for a spell. Those who can't have their own traditions.

For Illyana Rasputina, none of these really apply. The home she would go back to doesn't recognize her. The American traditions ring odd, even if Piotr makes it possible. It's merely another night in November when few bother to trek this far to the lake.

Even if they did, the water is far too cold to swim in except for those with the preponderance of immunities or physiological changes to make it worthwhile. Sure, a few teenagers brave the woods to hike or neck, but they might well be given reason to flee when the blonde Russian slips by like a ghost with a naked sword. Not the living horror of a relic she usually wields, but hard steel, tempered to cleave and cut. God help any deer she finds; it won't survive a blow.

Except that the girl ducks and weaves around the trees, striking targets invisible to most eyes. She senses them more by heat signature, striking out to make a distinctive V cut that, with the double slash, rather could be a truncated X. It's the same stylization on the Soulsword's pommel and grip.

Logan Howlett has posed:
Logan doesn't care for the water. After a long life such as his, one of the few things that still truly knots his innards is the feeling of being submerged. The terrible dread of consciousness ebbing away, without that familiar itch of his healing factor kicking in to rescue him from death. In another life, he might have moved to the desert to get as far away from large bodies of water. The lake, he feels, mocks him. An enemy even he can't overcome.

The commotion draws him away from where he stands up to his waist in bulrushes. He's wearing a denim jacket collared in lambswool, despite not really feeling the chill. He sniffs the air, adding scent to his keen hearing. It doesn't take long to zero in not only on the where but also the who and, to a lesser extent, the what.

"Hnh."

Illyana Rasputina has posed:
Water calls to Illyana, but then a girl born within sight of the world's deepest and oldest lake cannot escape its siren song. Even if Limbo tends to be visualized as an arid, scorched hell defined by fire rather than liquid, she's still irrevocably bound to aqueous rhythms. A phantom floats along the wooded shores not far from that infamous tire swing, beloved by a few of the elder students and terribly concerning to everyone else. In another life, she might have eked out a miserable existence on a lakeshore farm or the polluted city of Irkutsk, but here it's a stepping stone for her to round and strike on another of those nearly invisible targets strung on a course.

Not all of them are on strategic sides of trunks but the undersides of branches, requiring upper-hand sweeps or planting a foot on the tree, leaping up and backwards to find the elusive symbolism.

A commotion might be an overstatement, if it wasn't Logan as the observer; if those sharpened senses can detect wraiths, it wouldn't be so much of a surprise. The whisper-quick strike hisses along split wood, a flash of infrared light woven in heat to intercept the honed steel blade. Who, the what, as she darts like a faerie from the deranged Midsummer's Night Dream out to wreak havoc.

Her foot catches a rock, and she steps into the water, frozen for a moment on an icy little disk. This, then, is how she hones her skill? It's better than hunting demons. Unless she's foolish enough to hunt him.

Logan Howlett has posed:
"Surprised you don't collapse under the weight of that thing," Logan calls out, voice gruff and to-the-point as always, "Must weigh a ton."

His own preferences, so far as edged weapons go, run much finer and smaller. His arms cross over his broad chest, shorter even than the young woman engaging in her anti-demonic katas out here on the shore. Nevertheless, he leans against the trunk of a nearby tree with easy swagger, producing the sort of match that lights by striking against any rough surface (do they even make those anymore?) and igniting a cheap, gas station cigar with.

Illyana Rasputina has posed:
The honed steel of the sword is a pretty thing, more longsword with a slight curve that calls to mind scimitars and khopeks. Her style takes a pastiche of whatever works, refinements of a Cossack dance smashed with iaijutsu, the Japanese art of the quick draw. Blonde hair swirls around her shoulders with another of those sudden turns, the blade in her hand lifting to a guarded position, one almost neutrally defensive considering how fast it can be used to lash out. A master of iaijutsu can do it in a second. Having demonically honed reflexes probably pares that down.

Probably doesn't matter much, given who. Unless she wants to pour rage into the impending slash, the relic wouldn't cut him and the steel there wouldn't do much lasting except shave the Canadian. So better still to stand where she is, lifting her chin slightly. Frosty eyes take it all in. "You have met my brother. He throws you, da? I think it equal."

Logan Howlett has posed:
A bushy black eyebrow is raised in response, and Logan snorts a gout of smoke from his nose in response. He doesn't say anything for a moment, puffing on the cigar a few times to savour the taste and then blowing the unpleasant smelling grey cloud in Illyana's direction.

"Can't argue with what works," he muses, tapping a brief snowfall of ash onto the ground where some smears the toe of his boot.

He nods his head in the direction of the distant mansion.

"You know they got a whole room in there just for swingin' knives around and playin' at soldier. S'got holograms and everythin'."

Illyana Rasputina has posed:
Smoke escaping the ever-healing dragon, albeit dragons in the ancient shamanic traditions of Siberia don't hold much in common with the fire-breathing flappy things from the west. She doesn't react immediately to the smell of the cigar, though tobacco goes down sweet in the pine woods and better than some scents. The tension of the frozen water beneath her buckles slightly beneath her weight, for Illyana's spell holds her up, but the lake isn't frozen. Thus water does what water's going to do, imperiling her to fall in ankle deep in a few seconds.

"Maybe just for the impressive effect? He excels in throwing. Balls, buildings, tractors." The way she pronounces the last, sharpened by Russain, holds shades of contempt that could no doubt destroy lesser beings. She doesn't bare her teeth, but might as well. John Deere is certain to respond with a complaint somewhere.

Logan earns that long, ice-pale stare. It's always that blunt, no shades of the child left. "We have a room. In that room are fantasies, imagined things. But in your mind, you know they are not /real/. Does that make them worse or better to train with?"

Logan Howlett has posed:
"Don't tend to think about it," Logan admits, rolling muscle-thick shoulders in shrug and taps the centre of his forehead with one finger, "Guess a part of me up here knows they're cartoons. Video games."

The cigar is lifted again for one long, drawn-out inhalation that serves as a yawning, punctuating gap between that sentence and the next. This time, however, he has the courtesy to blow the snake upwards towards the tree canopy.

"But that's not the part doin' the thinkin' in a fight. Even fightin' fantasies and imagined things."

Illyana Rasputina has posed:
"Da, and so out in the woods." Illyana need explain no more, considering they're two of the most laconic in the entire spectrum of mutants. Minus those without ability to speak, perhaps. The young woman thumbs her sword, point swept down, since she's not about to shear off the end of Logan's cigarette. Steel versus adamantium, no thank you. Further, he proves perfectly capable of trimming his own stinking burning husks of plant life.

The sinuous gap doesn't bother her as she steps across the water, shards of ice gone to molten wrack, her boots splashing in the shallows before attaining what constitutes drier land. Mucky, still, treacherous footing that forces her to slip and slide her way up to solidity. "Sometimes it is good. Sometimes, fresh air and hard wood and flesh are enough."

Logan Howlett has posed:
"Guess so," Logan rumbles in reply, letting another sprinkle of ash fall to the leaf-strewn ground. His own opinions on the matter are kept largely to himself, or perhaps he was simply making conversation because he happened across someone out here in the cold when he half-expected to walk the whole circumference of the lake without seeing a soul.

"Anyway," he pushes himself into a standing position with an affected grunt and rolls his shoulders, "Don't give yerself a papercut."

Illyana Rasputina has posed:
"Draw stars around the scars." A smart-mouthed retort but she's Russian, and in that black earth, the rodina supports its own. Fingers dance briefly, abruptly banishing the steel sword to nowhere good in a flash of falling stars and burning dust that ends up swallowed into the core of forgotten galaxies. She might lean on a tree, but Illyana's nature doesn't make much for leaning on anything. Stand on your own two feet or die? Who knows.

A look away to the direction of the house, then back to him. "You still putting plasters on people?"

Logan Howlett has posed:
"Odd question, darlin'," comes Logan's reply, perching the cigar between his teeth now and speaking through it in a way that is denotes years of practice speaking eloquently in such a state, "Don't know how to do much else. Plasters if they're lucky, stitches if they're less so."

"Why?" he follows on, eyebrows raising again over hooded eyes, "Need pointers? Got a l'il boyfriend you want to put the scare into?"

Illyana Rasputina has posed:
That perch on land is tenuous at best, dark as the mired shadows woven among the thin trees mowed down one too many times in recent history to count as old growth, not unless one of the children gifted in florakinesis has anything to say about it. Pinch a pound of dirt and seeds, so might giants grow. At least the sorceress isn't accelerating trouble, lift of her mouth a cornerstone of a smirk lambent in that sylvan gloom. "Not much else," she echoes, giving that Canadian drawl a distinctive sheen found only in Magadan, Yakutia, the basin of the Lena. "I know better. Be bashful or humble with children."

A distinct flick of her fingertips sends a faint ripple of ultraviolet light across the space, bringing the distinction of shadows into plum bruises, saturated heavily enough that she almost fluoresces in the space. "I am no child." That much has to be apparent, a smirk plain. "A nightmare dressed like a daydream. You are their bogeyman. Be good or Logan will get you. What happens if he does?"

Logan Howlett has posed:
Logan gives that a long thought, not bothering to try and fill the silence while he does. After a moment, one heavy fist raises up before his face with its hairy back directed at Illyana. It seems that a familiar flex of forearm muscle is forthcoming, and the emergence of those claws for which he is so well known. A pregnant pause.

But rather than flex those claws, he instead extends both forefinger and middle finger in a backwards V. A classically crude hand gesture from the Old World. He captures the cigar between the two fingers, lowering it down to snuff it out against the rough bark of the tree.

"Things."

Illyana Rasputina has posed:
No need whatsoever to fill the silence. Illyana supplies no words to soothe a need for small talk. The ruthless upbringing has something to do with that, Russian a portion, and no little interest to see what might happen by letting matters flow as they will. Claws ought to appear in that yawning void, a precipice about to be shattered by the split of skin or the telltale sound of scraping metal.

Ought, and when his knuckles move, her eyes earn that rim of cyanotic light chasing her pupils. Not the full sheet, but the lone hint of anything being channeled at all, a responsive reflex born from archaic habit. He's no demon. The Sword isn't needed.

A nod suffices. Forget the cigar, forget the tree, as she pins Logan to a half-dozen variations of outcomes to a mental game of chess played tactically with considerable soundness. "Demonstrate."

One word, the equivalent to stripping off a metal glove and tossing it at his feet.

The night falls, and with it, shadow.