Toph and Alex, 13/08/13
Aug. 13th, 2013 08:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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om_mainToph and Alex take a break to beat the crap out of nature. What? It's training. Besides, nature probably had it coming, what with the sinkholes and the Black Plague and poison ivy and stuff ...
After everything that had happened, Alex had thought he'd be a little more reluctant about practicing with his powers outside the Danger Gym. Weirdly enough, though, he found that wasn't the case. Maybe that was because the grounds outside the school felt like they went on forever, and with nothing but wildlife and trees as far as he could see it was hard not to imagine he was somewhere a lot more remote than a New York suburb. Or maybe the Institute had started to feel so much like home that it was hard for him not to feel safe, wherever he was on campus.
Either way. He'd already done his time in the containment suit, so his movements were freer and lighter than they would have been otherwise. That was good. Alex had the feeling this training was going to be even more grueling than his sessions with Scott. Straight-up hardcore.
Grinning, he flexed his fingers and looked over at his partner. "You ready to do some major property damage?"
From the grin practically wide enough to split Toph's face, the answer was evident. "Oh yeah," she said, bouncing on her heels a little. She'd already dug her toes right into the dirt, sending every part of the yard into sharp relief in her perception. "So how do you want to do this?"
He thought about that for a moment, the, "How about you set 'em up, I knock 'em down? That should make for a pretty good warm-up."
Well that was easy enough. A few sharp gestures and the giant stone person-looking shapes that Angelo had made her create pulled their way out of the ground to ring loosely around them. "Like that?" Toph asking, partially smug but mostly curious.
"Perfect," Alex almost growled, gathering the plasma into his fists and letting fly almost as soon as he finished speaking. Two of the sort-of-earth-golems exploded on impact, as he raced forward and twisted to get a bead on another, laughing. "If all they're gonna do is stand there and wait to get blasted into dirt clods, this is going to be easy!"
It wouldn't, he knew; he just wanted to torque Toph off enough to get her to really come at him.
Toph just barked a laugh and sank down into a deeper stance, feet shifting further into the ground. He wanted hard? He could get hard.
The remaining stone figures suddenly turned sharply, two of them converging on Alex much faster than they should have been able to move. Which should have been an excellent distraction for the fact that another one was lifting itself out of the ground right behind him.
"Shit," Alex yelped, blasting one of the stone men into just a pair of ankles attached to the ground, only to get cuffed hard in the back by the one he hadn't seen coming up behind him. Grunting, he manged to turn his fall into a roll, and jumped back to his feet, releasing an omnidirectional plasma wave. Not as destructive as a concentrated beam, maybe, but hopefully the rapid change in temperature would make the stone automatons a bit tougher for Toph to manipulate. Hopefully.
"You suck, dude!" he accused, though he was grinning as he said it. Honestly, this was the most fun he'd had in a long time.
"You started it!" Toph called back cheerfully, flattening her arms out in front of her to pull more rock out of the ground and start reforming her figures. It was weird when they exploded.
"Yeah ... well ..." Alex really didn't have a retort for that. So he just exploded another golem. Then ran like hell from the others that were closing in around him. Since these were earth-figures, totally controlled by Toph, he had to adjust his thinking. Blasting them in the head or chest wasn't going to do him any good; he should go for the legs, if he really wanted to slow them down. "You still stuck!" he called from behind a tree, laughing and firing off another stream of superheated matter.
It was only when the feeling of something going by registered that it occurred to Toph that she was kind of standing out in the open with stuff flying around. Pulling her arms in sharply to raise stone walls to almost encase her took care of that, and it wasn't like she needed to see what she was doing anyway.
Though if Alex was going to be complaining anyway...An almost evil looking grin spread across her face. And the ground underneath the other boy suddenly crumbled, though it was really only a few inches deep.
"Dammit, Toph!" Alex squealed from his hiding place, blasting the ground around his feet to free himself. "You're a complete cheater, you know!" Well. No. It was just slowly dawning on him how hard it was (would be) to fight a girl (anybody) who could pretty much make the earth itself do anything she (they) wanted.
He supposed that, for now, he'd hope it didn't come up in real life. And, if it did, he was glad Toph was on his side. Girl kicked serious amounts of ass.
Rather than saying any of that, he sprinted into the trees, and fired off another plasma burst at her earth-built thugs.
"Can't cheat if there are no rules!" She called back, accompanied by something that sounded a lot like a cackle. Though her little enclosure did shudder slightly as something hit it. What the hell was Alex actually throwing around?
Well if he wasn't too concerned with any of it hitting her, Toph wasn't going to be either. And it was easy enough to grab hold of her automatons again and send them to flank either side of him.
Alex managed to cut one of them off at the knees, but took a fist to the chest from the other one that sent him bouncing off one of the nearby trees. Though it hurt like a bitch, he knew Toph was holding back--if she ever decided to hit him with everything she had, he knew perfectly well he wouldn't be walking away from it. Or possibly walking at all ever again.
"I thought Marquess of Queensbury Rules were implied!" he yelled back, breathless, melting a hand that came reaching for him into molten earth. Not that he knew who the Marquess of Queensbury was, much less what the guy's rules were, but still.
"I don't even know what that means!" But she brought one of the figures to a complete stop as it leaned over him, nearly pinning him between the ground and the motionless stone. "Give up?" Toph called out once she was sure it wouldn't fall, sounding just slightly smug.
He responded by incinerating the figure in front of him from the waist up and attempting to roll clear of the circle of stone and soil creations surrounding him in a tightening circle. "I have not yet begun to fight!"
Toph snorted a deeply inelegant laugh, and let Alex get a bit of distance so she could build her figures back up. "If you say so."
A gout of plasma burst clear of Alex, traveling so close to the ground it seared the grass beneath it black, destroying the closest of the figures and glancing off one of the walls of Toph's shelter. Shit. Alex was going to have to pay closer attention to his output, and his aim. "Sorry! My bad!" he called over to her.
"Just don't hit me," she huffed, never mind that she was already building the walls back up almost offhandedly. "Those things sound like they hurt."
"Yeah, sorry," he apologized. "I suck, totally." Another of Toph's earth creations exploded, but almost immediately began pulling itself back together again. This was ridiculous. At this rate, it mostly a matter of which one of them got too tired to keep going first. And Alex suspected it wasn't going to be Toph, just out of pure stubbornness.
An image flashed through his head of Scott or Lydia or Vance finding them in the woods in a few days, staggering around throwing lukewarm plasma bursts and mud-midgets at each other. But that was way too embarrassing to contemplate for long.
Besides, he couldn't afford to be distracted. One of the clay-creatures threw a fist his way--literally threw it's fist at him, another one shaping from the rock and soil to take its place--and Alex found himself falling backward, spitting up mouthfuls of dirt and grass and--Jesus Christ, was that a fucking worm?
"You okay?" Toph called over cheerfully, all of the figures suddenly going still. The whole point of the exercise wasn't to actually hurt one another, though when she got into it, it was occasionally hard to remember.
Besides, the whole thing had been Alex's idea in the first place.
After a few more moments of sputtering, Alex managed, "I'm fine." Then he thought about that for a second and backpedaled. "No, you know what? I am not fine. I had a fucking worm in my mouth, Toph! A worm! I think I might have swallowed the fucker!"
"Sucks to be you," she snorted, letting the walls around her collapse down into the ground. "Want to take a break?"
Still spitting out bits of dirt and forest litter, he began pushing himself upright and rubbing vigorously at his face. Grudgingly, he said, "Maybe just a short one. While I clear the soil out of my sinuses."
"Sure," Toph said easily as she padded over to him, stone figures sinking their way back into the dirt. She was stilling grinning more than a little, but it was at least slightly less vicious looking.
Alex pulled himself into a seated position and looked up at her. "You're really good, you know," he admitted, not even a bit grudgingly. "I practice my ass off in the Danger Gym, but I get the feeling that if this is for real, you would pwn me several times over. That's awesome."
"I've been doing it since I was six or so," Toph said with an answering shrug and let herself flop gracelessly down to sit across from him. "Just got a lot more practice, is all."
"Well, it shows," Alex grinned, pretty sure she'd be able to hear it, even if she couldn't see it like most people would. "And I'm just as glad you're on our side. I don't think I could take this kind of ass-kicking for-serious. Fragile boy-ego, y'know?"
"Well I'm not gonna pet it for you," she declared, never mind the grin she couldn't fight from sneaking on to her face. "You do pretty good, though."
He guffawed a bit, "I hope so! Otherwise, all that time I spend in the Danger Gym has been wasted, and I might as well take up macrame, or some damn thing. Still got a long way to go before I'm any real use, besides as mobile, squishy artillery. I mean, even without creating walls and pitfalls and fucking colossus ...-es out of dirt, you still have those bad-ass martial arts to fall back on. When I run out of juice, I'm pretty much useless for anything but napping."
"So learn to fight for real," Toph said, as if it was just that simple. "You can't always just fling that whatever stuff at people, even if you didn't run out."
"You make it sound so easy," he snorted, waving his hands. "It's not like I can just ... I mean, I don't ..." Alex trailed off more than a little sheepishly, and poked at some twigs with his foot. "I guess I should learn to fight for real, huh? Know any good teachers? In this hemisphere, I mean."
"I could teach you if you want," she said with a slight shrug. "Long as you're not gonna whine about stuff. Otherwise there's lots of kids here who are pretty good. Ask them."
That caused him to blink a bit in surprise, though he figured the gesture would be lost on her--unless Toph's sensitivity to vibrations was a lot more acute than he imagined. "You think I could learn to fight like you do? I'm kind of a gawky white boy. Not sure my body was made to move like that, despite what all those Chuck Norris movies want me to believe."
She gave a deeply inelegant snort in reply. "Worth a try, right?" Toph asked, sticking one foot out to kick him lightly. "Like I said. If you don't want my style, there's other people you can talk to about it all."
Toph probably wasn't aware of his grin, either--not in the typical sense. She could probably hear it in his voice, though. "Cool. I'll try not to be too huge a disappointment. You want to get started now, or blow up the lawn s'more?"
"Not now," she said, shaking her head. "If we're gonna do it, you need to be ready. But if you want to run around more we can do that." And she may have been smirking. Just a little.
"Running around more works," Alex said, hopping to his feet. He crouched into a ready posture, preparing to dash off into the woods again. "But this time, give me a head start. Just to make it interesting."
After everything that had happened, Alex had thought he'd be a little more reluctant about practicing with his powers outside the Danger Gym. Weirdly enough, though, he found that wasn't the case. Maybe that was because the grounds outside the school felt like they went on forever, and with nothing but wildlife and trees as far as he could see it was hard not to imagine he was somewhere a lot more remote than a New York suburb. Or maybe the Institute had started to feel so much like home that it was hard for him not to feel safe, wherever he was on campus.
Either way. He'd already done his time in the containment suit, so his movements were freer and lighter than they would have been otherwise. That was good. Alex had the feeling this training was going to be even more grueling than his sessions with Scott. Straight-up hardcore.
Grinning, he flexed his fingers and looked over at his partner. "You ready to do some major property damage?"
From the grin practically wide enough to split Toph's face, the answer was evident. "Oh yeah," she said, bouncing on her heels a little. She'd already dug her toes right into the dirt, sending every part of the yard into sharp relief in her perception. "So how do you want to do this?"
He thought about that for a moment, the, "How about you set 'em up, I knock 'em down? That should make for a pretty good warm-up."
Well that was easy enough. A few sharp gestures and the giant stone person-looking shapes that Angelo had made her create pulled their way out of the ground to ring loosely around them. "Like that?" Toph asking, partially smug but mostly curious.
"Perfect," Alex almost growled, gathering the plasma into his fists and letting fly almost as soon as he finished speaking. Two of the sort-of-earth-golems exploded on impact, as he raced forward and twisted to get a bead on another, laughing. "If all they're gonna do is stand there and wait to get blasted into dirt clods, this is going to be easy!"
It wouldn't, he knew; he just wanted to torque Toph off enough to get her to really come at him.
Toph just barked a laugh and sank down into a deeper stance, feet shifting further into the ground. He wanted hard? He could get hard.
The remaining stone figures suddenly turned sharply, two of them converging on Alex much faster than they should have been able to move. Which should have been an excellent distraction for the fact that another one was lifting itself out of the ground right behind him.
"Shit," Alex yelped, blasting one of the stone men into just a pair of ankles attached to the ground, only to get cuffed hard in the back by the one he hadn't seen coming up behind him. Grunting, he manged to turn his fall into a roll, and jumped back to his feet, releasing an omnidirectional plasma wave. Not as destructive as a concentrated beam, maybe, but hopefully the rapid change in temperature would make the stone automatons a bit tougher for Toph to manipulate. Hopefully.
"You suck, dude!" he accused, though he was grinning as he said it. Honestly, this was the most fun he'd had in a long time.
"You started it!" Toph called back cheerfully, flattening her arms out in front of her to pull more rock out of the ground and start reforming her figures. It was weird when they exploded.
"Yeah ... well ..." Alex really didn't have a retort for that. So he just exploded another golem. Then ran like hell from the others that were closing in around him. Since these were earth-figures, totally controlled by Toph, he had to adjust his thinking. Blasting them in the head or chest wasn't going to do him any good; he should go for the legs, if he really wanted to slow them down. "You still stuck!" he called from behind a tree, laughing and firing off another stream of superheated matter.
It was only when the feeling of something going by registered that it occurred to Toph that she was kind of standing out in the open with stuff flying around. Pulling her arms in sharply to raise stone walls to almost encase her took care of that, and it wasn't like she needed to see what she was doing anyway.
Though if Alex was going to be complaining anyway...An almost evil looking grin spread across her face. And the ground underneath the other boy suddenly crumbled, though it was really only a few inches deep.
"Dammit, Toph!" Alex squealed from his hiding place, blasting the ground around his feet to free himself. "You're a complete cheater, you know!" Well. No. It was just slowly dawning on him how hard it was (would be) to fight a girl (anybody) who could pretty much make the earth itself do anything she (they) wanted.
He supposed that, for now, he'd hope it didn't come up in real life. And, if it did, he was glad Toph was on his side. Girl kicked serious amounts of ass.
Rather than saying any of that, he sprinted into the trees, and fired off another plasma burst at her earth-built thugs.
"Can't cheat if there are no rules!" She called back, accompanied by something that sounded a lot like a cackle. Though her little enclosure did shudder slightly as something hit it. What the hell was Alex actually throwing around?
Well if he wasn't too concerned with any of it hitting her, Toph wasn't going to be either. And it was easy enough to grab hold of her automatons again and send them to flank either side of him.
Alex managed to cut one of them off at the knees, but took a fist to the chest from the other one that sent him bouncing off one of the nearby trees. Though it hurt like a bitch, he knew Toph was holding back--if she ever decided to hit him with everything she had, he knew perfectly well he wouldn't be walking away from it. Or possibly walking at all ever again.
"I thought Marquess of Queensbury Rules were implied!" he yelled back, breathless, melting a hand that came reaching for him into molten earth. Not that he knew who the Marquess of Queensbury was, much less what the guy's rules were, but still.
"I don't even know what that means!" But she brought one of the figures to a complete stop as it leaned over him, nearly pinning him between the ground and the motionless stone. "Give up?" Toph called out once she was sure it wouldn't fall, sounding just slightly smug.
He responded by incinerating the figure in front of him from the waist up and attempting to roll clear of the circle of stone and soil creations surrounding him in a tightening circle. "I have not yet begun to fight!"
Toph snorted a deeply inelegant laugh, and let Alex get a bit of distance so she could build her figures back up. "If you say so."
A gout of plasma burst clear of Alex, traveling so close to the ground it seared the grass beneath it black, destroying the closest of the figures and glancing off one of the walls of Toph's shelter. Shit. Alex was going to have to pay closer attention to his output, and his aim. "Sorry! My bad!" he called over to her.
"Just don't hit me," she huffed, never mind that she was already building the walls back up almost offhandedly. "Those things sound like they hurt."
"Yeah, sorry," he apologized. "I suck, totally." Another of Toph's earth creations exploded, but almost immediately began pulling itself back together again. This was ridiculous. At this rate, it mostly a matter of which one of them got too tired to keep going first. And Alex suspected it wasn't going to be Toph, just out of pure stubbornness.
An image flashed through his head of Scott or Lydia or Vance finding them in the woods in a few days, staggering around throwing lukewarm plasma bursts and mud-midgets at each other. But that was way too embarrassing to contemplate for long.
Besides, he couldn't afford to be distracted. One of the clay-creatures threw a fist his way--literally threw it's fist at him, another one shaping from the rock and soil to take its place--and Alex found himself falling backward, spitting up mouthfuls of dirt and grass and--Jesus Christ, was that a fucking worm?
"You okay?" Toph called over cheerfully, all of the figures suddenly going still. The whole point of the exercise wasn't to actually hurt one another, though when she got into it, it was occasionally hard to remember.
Besides, the whole thing had been Alex's idea in the first place.
After a few more moments of sputtering, Alex managed, "I'm fine." Then he thought about that for a second and backpedaled. "No, you know what? I am not fine. I had a fucking worm in my mouth, Toph! A worm! I think I might have swallowed the fucker!"
"Sucks to be you," she snorted, letting the walls around her collapse down into the ground. "Want to take a break?"
Still spitting out bits of dirt and forest litter, he began pushing himself upright and rubbing vigorously at his face. Grudgingly, he said, "Maybe just a short one. While I clear the soil out of my sinuses."
"Sure," Toph said easily as she padded over to him, stone figures sinking their way back into the dirt. She was stilling grinning more than a little, but it was at least slightly less vicious looking.
Alex pulled himself into a seated position and looked up at her. "You're really good, you know," he admitted, not even a bit grudgingly. "I practice my ass off in the Danger Gym, but I get the feeling that if this is for real, you would pwn me several times over. That's awesome."
"I've been doing it since I was six or so," Toph said with an answering shrug and let herself flop gracelessly down to sit across from him. "Just got a lot more practice, is all."
"Well, it shows," Alex grinned, pretty sure she'd be able to hear it, even if she couldn't see it like most people would. "And I'm just as glad you're on our side. I don't think I could take this kind of ass-kicking for-serious. Fragile boy-ego, y'know?"
"Well I'm not gonna pet it for you," she declared, never mind the grin she couldn't fight from sneaking on to her face. "You do pretty good, though."
He guffawed a bit, "I hope so! Otherwise, all that time I spend in the Danger Gym has been wasted, and I might as well take up macrame, or some damn thing. Still got a long way to go before I'm any real use, besides as mobile, squishy artillery. I mean, even without creating walls and pitfalls and fucking colossus ...-es out of dirt, you still have those bad-ass martial arts to fall back on. When I run out of juice, I'm pretty much useless for anything but napping."
"So learn to fight for real," Toph said, as if it was just that simple. "You can't always just fling that whatever stuff at people, even if you didn't run out."
"You make it sound so easy," he snorted, waving his hands. "It's not like I can just ... I mean, I don't ..." Alex trailed off more than a little sheepishly, and poked at some twigs with his foot. "I guess I should learn to fight for real, huh? Know any good teachers? In this hemisphere, I mean."
"I could teach you if you want," she said with a slight shrug. "Long as you're not gonna whine about stuff. Otherwise there's lots of kids here who are pretty good. Ask them."
That caused him to blink a bit in surprise, though he figured the gesture would be lost on her--unless Toph's sensitivity to vibrations was a lot more acute than he imagined. "You think I could learn to fight like you do? I'm kind of a gawky white boy. Not sure my body was made to move like that, despite what all those Chuck Norris movies want me to believe."
She gave a deeply inelegant snort in reply. "Worth a try, right?" Toph asked, sticking one foot out to kick him lightly. "Like I said. If you don't want my style, there's other people you can talk to about it all."
Toph probably wasn't aware of his grin, either--not in the typical sense. She could probably hear it in his voice, though. "Cool. I'll try not to be too huge a disappointment. You want to get started now, or blow up the lawn s'more?"
"Not now," she said, shaking her head. "If we're gonna do it, you need to be ready. But if you want to run around more we can do that." And she may have been smirking. Just a little.
"Running around more works," Alex said, hopping to his feet. He crouched into a ready posture, preparing to dash off into the woods again. "But this time, give me a head start. Just to make it interesting."
