Beautiful City

[Avenger Assembled]

"Oh, really?" asked Mr. Archer mildly, all his attention focused on Alex. "In what way?"

[alderwitch]

"Well, all the ones standing around were vapor locked, which was okay. I mean, that was probably easier than the actual real life situation. Assuming those who had the usual flight response were gone by the time we arrived, one or two bystanders should have responded with some sort of aggressive behavior. I mean, that would have made them a liability in conflict. You figure that roughly half will run but of those, the standard response is to find cover. Of that half, only a third of those should have been off the scene by the time we arrived. The others would have been hiding in buildings or even behind dumpsters. The ones that don't run are likely to freeze which was the response of all the ones we encountered. And maybe ten percent should have had an aggression response."

Alex responded enthusiastically as she would have to any teacher, rattling of the expected psychosematic responses cheerfully, "At least, that's according to the by-the-book statistics. Any real world situation will have some variance based on socio-economic factors and the generic make-up of a given population. Not to mention, sometimes there's a mind control ray. Actually, often there's a mind control ray."

[Electra]

"The bystanders are stupid," Erin added, less helpfully. "Nobody's just going to stand there while a giant guy in armor is waving a telephone pole at them. Even at top speed, it took us forty-five seconds to get there from the time the simulation started, when he was already in action. Somebody would've been a jell-o puddle by then if it had been a real villain."

[Avenger Assembled]

"I'll tell you what," said Mr. Archer, looking up from his clipboard when he was finished speaking. "Since the two of you have these concerns, we can work together to address them. Why don't both of you report to me at noon on Saturday to write our own training session together? It shouldn't take more than a few hours. Erin, that can take the place of your usual weekend drill, there's no reason to make you do it twice."

[alderwitch]

Alex gave a little shrug, as she was never bothered by extra school work, "I'm always happy to help, Mr. Archer, although I'm not sure I'm the most qualified expert on A.I. around campus. I mean, its entirely possible that the simulation generated the correct bystanders based on parameters we didn't see. It just didn't seem real likely."

[Electra]

Erin rolled her eyes. It would probably be fruitless to try and explain to Alex that Archer didn't want help with the simulation or any helpful tips, he just wanted to prove that even though he was old and slow and weak, he could still hand down punishments. In her own case, the punishments were generally ineffective, just because she had so little time that wasn't already spent doing things for school, which really just made the teacher more aggravated. "We'll be there," she told Archer, her voice deliberately toneless. "Anything else?"

[Avenger Assembled]

Archer hmmed. "Well, you'll have a chance to prove your theory, Ms. Albright." He finished writing on his clipboard and said, "All right, I'll expect to see the two of you at noon sharp on Saturday. Go enjoy your afternoon, kids."

[alderwitch]

"Thank you," Alex said politely, her glance at Mr. Archer curious. There was no sarcasm in her tone as she added, "That should prove interesting."

As that seemed to be an obvious dismissal, she fell into step with Erin to head out of the Doom Room.

[Electra]

Erin hurried out of the Doom Room, glad to be finished with and away from another session with Archer. "Sorry about that," she told Alex. "He probably won't keep you very long on Saturday, he'll be too bored to hang around himself." She tucked her bat back into its holster, then tugged the band from her hair. "Could be worse, he could've sentenced us to another trip through on Saturday so he could kill us off in simulation. He loves that. Anyway, besides him, what did you think?"

[alderwitch]

"Its no big deal. Programming the Doom Room should be all kinds of interesting! I wonder what laws of A.I. they're using. I'll have to do some research," Alex said cheerfully, "I think he went easy on me, honestly. Its probably very difficult to calibrate it so that my mental senses even affect the simulations. I think that its a fascinating piece of science. We did quite well at it!"

[Electra]

"I guess that's one way to look at it," Erin agreed, laughing a little as they walked up the long hallway. "But if you can figure out how to get the people out of the way faster, that should be worth extra credit. It's such a pain to try and fight when they're just standing there and don't even move when you yell at them. I think Mike runs into the same problem." She trailed off after that. They'd pretty much left the subject of boys in general off the table for the last few days, since the thing with Mike and Mark on the quad. Erin still didn't know exactly how to feel about all of that, so it seemed better to just ignore the whole thing. That wasn't exactly easy when they were all living in each others' laps all the time