fandomhigh | Defending Yourself [Monday, Period 1]

"Welcome back. Hope you all enjoyed your weekend." Max eyed his students. "And that you took the time to do your homework."

"Today's lesson is actually going to be short because I'm going to try leaving most of our time for some demonstrations, but there is something I'm hoping you all pick up on today: each of you has a set of instinctive reactions when threatened. Everyone has different ones, of course, but the lesson to learn is that most of them are useful. Maybe not all the time, or in all situations, and it's useful to be aware of when to fight your instincts, but it's also important to realize that no matter how new you all are to the concept, each and every one of you has some ideas about how to defend yourself. And not all of those ideas are bad ones."

"For instance," another look around, this time with a grin, "I gave you a homework assignment last week I gave you a homework assignment with very little guidance, and I'm willing to bet that you all managed to do it. And I also suspect that most of you came up with something the others didn't, if only because of the way you think about things."

"So let's see them. Everyone take a moment to show us what you've brought, and explain why you picked it. And feel free to talk ideas with each other."

And then Max's grin turned downright evil, and he nodded toward the door that wasn't part of the usual classroom setup (thank you, Danger Shop!). "While you're doing that, you'll find a list of your names in ~~totally random~~ order by the door. If you're at the top of the list, come on through for a personal evaluation." That totally wasn't going to be an ambush so that Max could evaluate your instinctive reactions to surprise attacks. Unless it was.

Hint: it totally was.

[Continuing my no-sign-in experiment! If it really is a problem for you, feel free to leave an OOC comment, or hit me up via email! Or AIM! Or LJ PM!]

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"So why didn't you kick me?" Max asked, as if this were a completely reasonable question.

"...because you're a teacher?" Angelica said hesitantly.

Frying him wouldn't be much better, Angel.

"And how do you know I'm not a really evil teacher?" Max asked.

Hey! People had thought it of him before!

Because her evil teacher was back in Massachusetts!

"You'd get fired if you really tried to hurt your students," Angelica reasoned. "Miss Frost used robots to test us, so it wasn't like we'd be really hurting someone."

"And how do you know I'm not a robot?"

Okay, so now he was beyond the teaching portion of this discussion, and into the being ridiculous portion.

"I can't assume you're a robot! What if I'm wrong!" Angelica protested.

Max might regret it if she assumed wrong!

Max chuckled. "Fair enough."

Then he shrugged. "Still, I think we're going to have to work on your aggression. At least when it comes to defending yourself."

"You're pretty comfortable attacking robots?"

He was right about that. She was still far too timid.

"I've done it before in the danger room at my old school," she said, nodding. "They were programmed to really hurt us so we had to be really careful."

She wasn't always happy having to fight simulations, but it pleased Miss Frost, so she went ahead and did her best.

"But if it were a real person attacking you, you'd be a lot more hesitant?"

Like that wasn't pretty obvious from today's exercise.

"Well, yeah," Angelica said, shuffling her feet. "I don't want to kill someone."

"There's no in-between?" Max asked.

Now he was considering whether to work on aggression or control. Maybe Angelica would be more comfortable fighting if she didn't think she'd kill someone she didn't mean to.

"With a power like mine there's not much room for in-between," Angelica said. "I could really hurt someone if I wanted to. But I don't want to."

"What can you do, exactly? If you don't mind me asking."

Angelica only hesitated a fraction of a second. It was safe here to say what she was, and she might as well take advantage of that as long as she could. "I'm a mutant," she said. "I can control microwave radiation and use it to emit light and heat."

And, well, fly. Don't think about it too hard.

Defending Yourself [Monday, Period 1]

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