She'd really just been trying to help keep the mansion picked up. That's why she'd scooped up the note from the hallway floor. Claire was still pretty new around the school, though she'd met a few people. She had a class schedule that she'd be starting on Monday, so she couldn't hide out too much longer. But this note demanded exploration immediately.

It said "Here's your Danger Room access code". No name or anything, so she couldn't exactly return it to its owner. Not directly anyways. A student assistant had lost it while running notes to others, and it had actually been theirs. Afraid to admit the loss, in truth they were still searching and hoping it would turn up. But as fate would have it, the note had already fallen into the wrong hands apparently.

What could checking this room hurt? Claire thought. She'd gathered that this 'danger room' was some sort of gym. When she arrived, she found that there was no lock on the door, and the room inside seemed pretty much like any gym except for a computer panel on one wall. The room actually was used for a standard gym, but it was so much more than that. It was designed to test and drill a mutant's skills. But she didn't really know much about that. Claire went over, and keyed in the access code, ever so curious to see what would happen..The somewhat petite redhead was dressed in a green peasant blouse and jeans. Hardly the proper attire for the training sessions the Danger Room could dish out...She had a few pre-made origami models in her purse thankfully, though she was blissfully unaware of what she might potentially be getting herself into.

Even with personal codes and safety measures, it was good to check on the Danger Room every once in a while. The X-team usually took turns, based on how occupied they were... which meant that, more often than not, it was Mirror's job to make sure the only students using the DR were the ones that were allowed to. Having the Brat Brigade in the Mansion did not do anything to ease that load either. For kids with non-teleport powers, they had a mysterious way of getting in everywhere.

Walking into the God Room, Maya took a look through the window at the girl below. She did not look like she was dressed for training... but she clearly had the code, since Mirror saw her walk in. She did not look familiar - probably a new student, then.

For a moment, she reached for the comm to ask her who she was. Then she thought better of it. If the kid was here to train, that was her business. If she was here snooping... well, the DR would eventually take care of that. Sitting back, Maya hit a few buttons, allowing the DR to respond to voice commands and movement cues. If she knew how those worked, she had been briefed; if not... well, she was in for a surprise or two.

The lights dimmed, and a voice said "System Active. Ready for request". Wow... voice activation and everything. But...what should she do now? Hmm... what to try? Ah, how about this!
"Help menu please?"
"Activating guidance menu system." the voice said, followed by "Select Difficulty level"
"Ah... Easy?" she hazarded.
"Error detected; difficulty should be an integer from 1 to 10"
Ah hah! "Um, level 2 then."
"Difficulty set. Select Threat level"
Hmm. Well, the goofy thing wanted a number the first time she thought, but 'threat level' sounds a bit more menacing. "Level 1" she replied. Wow! A walk-in video game!
"Select scenario; Say "Display Menu" for a list."
Um, okay. "Display menu" she replied, sounding more confident now. She looked a little shocked however when a holographic menu appeared out of thin air in front of her. Claire stared with her big blue eyes for a minute, before a grin started to spread on her freckled face.
"Whoa...." was her only comment as she began to look through it, still blissfully unaware that she was being watched...

Yeah, no, she was definitely not briefed.
And yet, she was progressing with the program.

Maya rested her chin on her knuckles as she watched the girl probe the computer system. Interesting. She was clearly not dressed for training - which meant she just happened to wander in, somehow, with a stolen code, and she was ready to jump right into a DR scenario. Maya couldn't tell if that made the girl brave or silly. She'd have to wait and see.

She asked for a menu of scenarios, and seemed surprised by the number of them. The DR had a large variety of beginner setups - most of them would just create a generic attacker that threw punches and kicks, while others did the whole Jedi training thing with flying objects and laser shots. None of the beginning scenarios were designed to do actual damage beyond bruises, but some of them looked quite threatening anyway.

Also, many of them had fantasy names, courtesy of Sam.

Claire scanned down the list of scenarios. Lots of them looked interesting, which caused the same problem she usually had with cable tv - too many choices. Then she saw one that caught her eye.

"Killer Garden Gnome Pinball?" she read the name aloud, giving the screen a very quizzical look. The menu reacted to her voice, and gave an expanded description under that title. "Goal is to cross the room, from bottom to top. Avoid the Garden Gnomes to escape the room, and your doom! Beware of bumpers and flippers - you're just another pinball to them.3 hits by Gnomes, and the game must be started over at the bottom. Good luck! PS Blue Gnomes are far more shocking than Red Gnomes. Just say'n."

"Begin scenario?" the computer voice prompted after enough of a delay for her to read the full description.
"Umm, yah. Sure." Claire replied, looking confused but too curious to turn back.  She stood there, expecting some sort of holographic pinball machine to appear in front of her. Instead, the whole room began to shift, throwing her off-balance for a moment. She waved her arms wildly and regained her balance, like on a rocking ship's deck.

"Proceed to lowest point of room" the DR's voice prompted her. Indeed, the whole floor now sloped down at a pretty good angle. Looking confused, and very wide-eyed, she nonetheless moved to the room's bottom, and then the next shift occurred - pinball bumpers sprouted from the floor, and flippers extended from the walls behind her as well as several along the walls. There were four bumpers in a diamond pattern in the middle, as well has lighted bumper areas lining both walls going up. A little bridge on the left side went up and over about a third of the floor, but was guarded by two  bumpers in front with only enough room, if one were careful, to squeeze through or around without touching them. It would get you above the middle diamond of bumpers however if you took it. That is, if the ball didn't come down it going the opposite way... A silver bar at the end of a plunger, at least as tall as her, appeared on her right. At the very top of the room on the wall was a large green button that read "FINISH".

Pity that she didn't know the command to turn the silly thing off, if she really got in deep.... Short of completing the game that is.

The plunger pulled back, then flew forward, launching the ball, and that was all the warning she got that the game had began. Claire was standing with her mouth open, when the flipper behind her smacked her in the backside, launching her forward, as the ball hit the top of the game, and began to careen down towards her, shooting off any bumper it hit with considerable speed.

"Oww!" she exclaimed, with a quick look back. Her attention snapped back on to the ball though, as little doors slide aside, and out came three Gnomes, with Red hats & jackets. They were each four-foot high - bearing rather mean expressions - and started towards her at roughly a race-walk speed. Luckily, she saw one out of the corner of eye, and took off running - uphill - like crazy.

She intelligentlyt said what any teen being chased by crazy Gnomes would say at this point.
"Ahhhh!!!!"

This was definitely not what she had been expecting... but she had also decided she didn't want to find out what happened when a Garden Gnome got you!

{Feel free to control the Gnomes and or direction of the pinball if you'd like... The pinball isn't real heavy, but will definitely bowl her over. The gnomes are electrified and give a nasty shock if they touch her, but not really dangerous beyond that. }

>>"Killer Garden Gnome Pinball?"

Oh boy. She really had done it this time.

Maya leaned forward to watch as the girl opted to actually begin the scenario. Was she this dumb or this curious? Either way, this did not bode well for the brat-to-X ratio of the Mansion. Deliberately volunteering to be a pinball sounded like something Jiri would do.

Gone Pinball was something that Sam made up, not entirely sober, at one point when he got bored of the plain old training scenarios they had cued up in the DR. It was not very difficult, and definitely not designed to hurt anyone... but it was definitely trippy.

Maya found herself more than a little bit curious how the girl would fare in it.

She made a surprised sound as she got smacked on the butt - yup, Sam custom designed this thing - and simultaneously targeted by the ball. The gnomes careened around on the field, standing at odd angles. The only way out of this scenario was to make it up to the top as fast as possible. The girl had already lost valuable time. She was not exactly the survivor type.

Maya pressed the button for the comm.

"Enjoying the Danger Room so far?" she chimed in, watching the events below unfold "I'm curious, what part of "danger" and "room" was not quite clear?... If I were you, Katniss, I'd start running..."

Claire was running - or at least dodging as the ball zipped past - when someone started talking and it distracted her. She froze, and looked quickly around, finding the control room window fairly quickly.
"Wha... Oww!" she started to say, only to get zapped by a gnome. She pushed the thing away, started to run, only to find her path blocked by bumpers and a Gnome. She started to scuttle away backwards, only to hit the side bumper - which shoved her forward with a solid thump in her back. The gnome was waiting with outstretched arms, but she'd processed that only the hands seemed to be electric. When she'd shoved it away, she hadn't gotten zapped again.

She grabbed it near the elbows, then neatly spun around and sorta tossed it towards the bumper as if it were a dance partner. The bumper, which had hit her shoulders hit the gnome's head, knocking it down, at least for the moment. Not sticking around to see if it would recover or how long that would take, Claire took off for the bridge. She skinnied-up past a guarding bumper, and started over the bridge, which seemed the safest route. The ball was bouncing wildly around the board, bowling over gnomes, hitting bumpers (with the requisite pinball bumper noises) and getting hit by flippers only to zip across the board in a new direction.

She'd made it most of the way across the bridge, when the ball got hit around the curved top of the board, which guided it right up the bridge... Claire turned and ran back over the bridge  only to get slammed by the bumpers into the ball before it careened off again. She lay there moaning for a second before regaining her feet, just in time to knock a gnome into the bumper. Panting, she headed back over the bridge again...

Katniss? She got weapons at least! Claire thought as she ran. Wait... could a construct help? She began to fish in her purse, which she'd somehow managed to keep on her shoulder, for the box with the premade models.

Maya's comment managed to distract the girl, rather than help her. Maya wasn't complaining. If she could not handle some divine voice calling to her from the God Room while gnomes and pinballs were zapping her around, then she had no business being in the DR anyway.

She did quite well, though. She figured out the gnomes pretty fast, and used her surroundings to her advantage. Impressive. Maya's fingers drummed on the control panel as she watched the events unfold below.

She almost made it up the bridge when the ball knocked her down. Maya winced at the impact. Ow. The girl stayed down, digging around in her purse. What was she looking for? For everyone's sake, Maya hoped she did not bring a weapon into the DR. Real weapons on Mansion grounds were prohibited (except for the X-men). She would rather not have dealt with that crap.

Powers, however...

Maya found herself wondering what the girl's powers were. She was here, she was a mutant more likely than not. Maybe her powers were not combat-useful (there were a lot of those). Maya remembered Evelyn in the DR the first time... she held her own, but she was not fighting as much as figuring things out. Which this girl was doing as well. Mental-analytical powers? Maybe...

She pressed the comm button again.

"Get up!" she called out to the girl "Staying in one place is not gonna help you. Eyes on the prize, princess! Also, gnome at four o'clock..."

Dog.... dog, dog, dog, where did the dratted dog go?! Crane, dress, cat, bat, star. This was starting to feel like a Dr Seuss story she thought, when The Voice offered helpful advice... especially the part about 'gnome at four o'clock'...

Eek! Boat? No, where's the... wait. Boat?!? Hey! She stuck the paper boat, which was rather rowboat'ish, upside down like a hat on her head, and concentrated. Oow. She immediately got pushed to the floor again, but this time under the boat. And not a second too soon, as she heard the gnome thumping on the outside of the wooden boat a moment later.

A muffled "Ha!" followed by a "Pfffft!" raspberry came from under the boat. Nothing like maturity under fire. Claire began crawling towards the top, using the boat like a turtle shell. Weird, but effective, at least for the moment.

The girl dug around in her bag furiously, and Maya watched with interest as the gnome approached her. What was she up to? Gun? Knife?...

... Boat?!

"Whoa" the mirrorwalker noted as a small paper boat turned into... a real one, and the girl triumphantly disappeared under it, gnome pinging off the wooden boards. The boat then started to inch forward like a really awkward turtle, and Maya could not help but chuckle.

Go figure.

So, she did something with paper and objects? That was an interesting ability. She would have to test that some more. For now, she observed as the boat inched up along the bridge... to get out on the other side, however, she would have to give up her turtle shell. Also, the gnomes were not pleased with this development at all, and they all congregated at the exit point, disregarding the ball coming back around the bridge for another round.

Let's see how she figures this one out...

Thunk. Thunk, thunk, THUNK.
Nuts, Claire thought, hadn't planned on not being able to exit the far end! She lifted the boat just enough to peek out under the edge, only to see gnome feet- lots of them.
Darn, darn, darn it!
The boat just sat there for long seconds, then flipped on its side as Claire popped out from under it, swinging a baseball bat from her knees at the gnomes' stubby legs. It was the easiest weapon she could think to make in the dark under the boat. They went down like a bunch of big bowling pins, and she brought the bat down hard on the head of the nearest one. It's head popped off, and went bouncing crazily across the floor. Claire's blue eyes went huge, and she raised a hand to her mouth as she whispered "oh dear..." while she stood up.

Now she'd gone and done it. She'd killed one of the things to boot. But...they weren't real, right? They weren't like oompa loopas or something were they? She looked at the others for confirmation, only to have that deranged grin looking back at her. And did they look angrier now, or was that her imagination? One started to get up, and she whacked it in the chest knocking it back down, only to have another start to rise and get whacked. Thus a crazy game of 'Whack a Gnome' ensued. She'd missed that each time she 'killed' a gnome, the machine added two more to the board, and indeed, two replacements were headed from their little doors for her.

The girl came out swinging... a baseball bat. First a boat, and now a bat? Was she materializing things out of thin air? Maya was curious now. Making something out of nothing would have been some serious power, probably more so than anything else she'd even witnessed.
The gnomes were not very impressed, though.

Maya chuckled at the horrified face of the girl as a gnome's head popped off. It was implied that they would be mechanical, but in the heat of the moment, it was still a fairly shocking development. She caught up soon though... with the batting, anyway, but not with Sam's little system of hydra-gnomes that kept multiplying. By the time she would notice, there would be a whole crowd of them heading her way, surrounding her...

"Freeze simulation."

Maya froze the program as it was, with some gnomes already launched into the air. She merged into the reflecting surface of the console, and a moment later she appeared in the pinball field, heading over to the girl.

"You see the mistake you've made here?" she asked with a smirk, looking at her over the heads of the gnome mob.

Claire had the bat held high, breathing fast, looking around wildly and waiting for something to move. It took several seconds for the adrenaline to drop enough that she really processed what Maya had said. On the ground near her feet were her purse, some scattered origami models and a pad of paper with the top page torn out. One corner of the page was still in there, and if one looked closely, the bat had a chunk missing from the top in one place.

Claire leapt to a fresh, incorrect, conclusion as she started to babble. She was talking so fast that it all came out in one big stream that might make a listener want to breath on her behalf.
"I justfound the code, Ithought it wastrash so I wasjust picking itup but then Igot curious and Ithought this wasjust gonna besome sortof pinball machine Imean not THIS kindof machine buta real one..."

She slowly lowered the bat until the tip was finally dragging on the ground, her ice blue eyes still darting around like she expected the gnomes to start moving again at any second. To say that the place had her a little freaked out would be an understatement.

The girl looked slightly rattled, still holding the bat ready to swing. Now that Maya made an appearance, she also looked embarrassed, caught at trespassing and all that.

>>"I justfound the code, Ithought it wastrash so I wasjust picking itup but then Igot curious and Ithought this wasjust gonna besome sortof pinball machine Imean not THIS kindof machine buta real one..."

Someone left their code lying around. Maya sighed. She'd have to check whose code it was, and then talk to Sam about having a more efficient system than pieces of paper.
Talking about pieces of paper...
Maya glanced down at the scattered origami. Was that something she used for her power?...

"Nah" she waved a hand "Your mistake was not keeping an eye on your surroundings, and getting bogged down playing whack-a-mole instead of moving forward. The trick to this sim is to keep moving, no matter what. You stop to fight, you'll never make it to the finish line."

The mirrorwalked smirked and waved a hand.

"End program."

The DR merged back into being an empty room, and Maya turned back to the redhead.

"Hi. My name is Maya. I supervise the Danger Room. You're not supposed to be in here, but I guess you already knew that. New student?"

Claire's eyes darted around as the room changed back. She still looked a more than a little suspicious but then paused. She stopped and breathed, in what looked to be a very taught (hammered into her thick skull maybe?) calming exercise. Convinced that there weren't going to be any more waves of crazed gnomes, she released control on the bat, and it turned to dust. No reason to haul that around!

"Um, yah..." she replied, looking down guiltily. She'd figured out that she'd done Dumb with a captial D today by coming in here.

"My name's Claire. Claire Lockerby. I'm sorry. I just, well, got kinda curious. It's probably my worst trait but sometimes I just have to find out what something is and, well, yah..." she said with an expressive shrug and a glance around the now empty and very inoffensive-seeming 'danger room'.

"Pleased to meet you" she added, and it sounded sincere. She really was rather polite, at least when she wasn't snooping where she ought not to be. "We, ah, only found out a few weeks ago that, well, I'm a mutant. I think my parents were a little shocked, but they wanted me to get a handle on it, so they sent me here. My dad's a doc working a project here for another year or so. Then we were supposed to go back home to Colorado."