School Spirit (Part One)

I always had my own theory about the goal of the Xavier Institute's whole 'mutant equality' thing.

Going for the big prize of everybody loving everybody and everything being cool all over the world was nice. Unless someone hopped on Cerebro and gave the world a psychic lobotomy, it was unrealistic that it would happen in my lifetime, given that people of different races and religions were still messing with each other even now, but it was still a nice thought.

No, while you were aiming for that, you also had to put in the work to do it a different way to cover all of your bases. The hard way. The slow, creeping, step-by-step way, by ingratiating yourself into different aspects of society over time. Dazzler started to do it with entertainment, and since mutants were public now, we could too. It wouldn't even have been that hard.

My thought was: if the Xavier Institute had ever thought to just televise Field Day, it would have done a lot to warm people up to mutants.

Stay with me for this one.

First of all, instead of just keeping us stuck on mansion property in Salem Center, usually behind gates and security, it would have let people see that we were all just kids trying to do our best.

Look at college athletics and high school sports in small towns. People latched on to talented student-athletes and tried to live vicariously through them. Well, what about students that would eventually save your sorry ass from whatever megalomaniacal freak decided to take a chunk out of your neighborhood? I bet people would care then.

Second of all, people could get to know us a bit before forming at least a partially decent opinion case-by-case. I for one didn't have a problem with anyone seeing me and deciding that I was an asshole after the fact. There were plenty of good reasons to dislike me. One of them was not because my body processes ran off light energy. Screw that.

Third, and probably most important to the whole thing working, it was entertaining! It was televised competition with different colored uniforms, flowery names, team dynamics, a few mascots (like Lockheed), and all of that other 'rah-rah', 'go team' horseshit! People would have lost their minds for it!

At its core, Field Day was a bunch of kids running around doing superhero shit. What's not to love about that? Put some well-spoken, knowledgeable gentleman on with some other charismatic S.O.B. on commentary, and the masses would have eaten it up!

Treat it like a real sporting event, like the Olympics, or those crossfit competitions they air on ESPN sometimes. If people would watch the World Series of Poker for two hours every night for a week or tune in for play-by-play of the July 4th Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest, they would sit down to watch a 16 year old kid deadlift ten tons or dodge some lasers on a crazy nightmare obstacle course.

Once it caught on, broadcasting rights would have eventually made the school a disgusting amount of capital. No more relying on wealthy benefactors and alumni, or however the hell we were funded, to keep the whole machine running smoothly.

Hey, if colleges could make money and gain notoriety off the backs of their athletes, the Institute could do it off of us. Yes, indeed. It was the first step to equality and understanding for a place of education for mutants – running your young studs into the ground for profit in exchange for room and board.

There was originally a point to all of this, I swear. I just need to remember what it was.

Oh yeah! Field Day!

Competitions had started, and whenever you weren't in an event or getting ready for one, you were sitting by a monitor, watching the action as it went on. All of the events would be happening on different parts of the Institute so everyone could watch, and there were security cameras all over the property, so it wasn't difficult to re-purpose them for catching everything that was happening. We even had a drone cam, which was useful for keeping track of everyone doing the speed and control event.

Ah, the speed event. The only one that we all thought we had a good chance at winning.

I personally thought that if we picked the right people for the right things, we had a good chance to do well in everything. Sadly, the beatdown my team had taken during the last Field Day had not endeared them much toward my mindset.

Be that as it may, Eddie went out determined to get us off on the right foot in the first competition of the day.

Eddie flew around a massive course that had been laid out on the Xavier Institute grounds. There were bright glowing holographic arches that he had to go through one after another until he was done. All of the checkpoints were close to the ground, for those students participating that weren't capable of flight.

It started with twenty-five visible checkpoints. For every checkpoint you hit, it would disappear and at the end of them, a new one would keep popping up until you got to seventy-five. That way, twenty-five checkpoints could always been seen on the field until you got close to finishing up at the number one-hundred.

If you missed one or skipped one because you were cheating or weren't keeping track of where you were going, but continued on to the end, just focusing on pure speed, you were heavily penalized. Eventually you were disqualified if you kept doing it. Hence the 'control' portion of the speed and control competition.

From what I could see on camera, our boy was killing it out there. He hadn't missed any, and his speed was absolutely absurd. Four people had gone before him, and looking at his checkpoint count to his time, he was doing better than anyone I'd seen up to that point.

"Come on Eddie," I could hear Hisako mutter under her breath. Her fists were squeezed tight. She wanted him to do well, probably more than even Ruth and I did.

As he flew through the last checkpoint and his time was stopped, his score was tallied right there on the spot, taking all of the factors of the event into account.

Speed & Control Competition: Wing – 9.2

"Hell yeah!" I jumped up and clapped in satisfaction, getting a few looks from the other kids not on the Paladins. Screw them. That was an outstanding score, "Yes, sir! More of that, please!" Hisako was ready to respond to the high-five that I so desperately wanted at that moment.

It took a little while for us to settle down from how jazzed we were. What a way to start our fortunes off on a good note. Man, we really needed a team celebration or something.

Hisako was very happy about our teammate's performance, "Last year, he missed three checkpoints last year and got disqualified right in the middle of his run," She told me, frowning a bit at remembering "It absolutely killed him."

Another minute or two passed before Eddie made it back to where our team had agreed to meet up in between competitions. As he approached, I saw a medal around his neck with a large 'X' on it, presumably from winning the speed competition.

...I wanted one.

I went up to congratulate him on doing well, but when I got close enough, he didn't look pleased.

"Shit!" He exclaimed, first and foremost, before looking at us with an air of disappointment on his face, "My bad, guys. I couldn't get a ten."

What kind of perfectionist was he to think that getting a score higher than a 9 wasn't something to puff one's chest out at? He won!

"No, that was a great score, man!" I assured him, "Unless you can teleport or something, nobody's getting a 10."

And I believed that. Flying was what Eddie did. There were plenty of other students that could do it, but it wasn't the main focus of really anyone who was actually in the competition. It seemed the most natural and effortless for him than for anyone else I'd seen so far. Plus, he told me that the fastest he had ever gone was past the speed of sound. If that was the case, he was absolutely the right pick for us. I had no idea how fast he was going, but it got the job done.

The way Field Day worked this time around was based on multiple factors. Teams would choose one representative for solo events. The scores were then averaged together and would be averaged again later with the scores we got from the team challenges and then practical exercise, which was basically the big main event.

...That was more math than I felt like handling without a calculator in my hand. The scoring system was a mixed bag for the Paladins.

Full teams could only use a representative once in the six solo events offered. You couldn't have a single ringer do them all. You needed at least three people on a squad to so much as take part. Teams of four could have one person go twice. Teams of three could have two people go twice.

To make things fairer for full teams of six, all squads could dump their lowest individual score to make their averages better.

We had to pick and choose which events we thought we would kick the most ass at, because for us, every score was important.

Eddie had been signed up for the speed event. It was a no-brainer, as he was our fastest guy. He could hit the speed of sound if he pushed himself hard enough. None of us were messing with that.

We thought about putting Hisako in the strength competition, but while she was the strongest out of our team, there were plenty of students way stronger, a painful lesson she learned the last go-around. So we decided to ignore that event altogether, take the big, fat 0, and drop it.

Instead, we stuck her in the durability challenge. Her name was Armor, so why not?

For that event, the competitors were placed into a chamber where the general settings would be constantly readjusted for five minutes. Every thirty seconds, you got a point. If you lasted the full five minutes, you got a perfect score. Sounds easy, right?

Not so much. In addition to the gravity, the air pressure, the temperature, pretty much anything you can think of would be physically changed. And as time went on, it got progressively worse. If you gave up or dropped, it was over. If you gave the instructors any reason to turn it off, it was over. It was the most dangerous solo event in the entire line-up. When people chose events to pick members for, that was usually the one they avoided all together. They took the score of zero, and then made up for it with less sadistic competitions.

Durability & Willpower Competition: Armor – 7.0

Eddie had gone with her, which had been a good idea, because walking on her own was quite the feat afterwards. Thankfully, team stuff didn't start until the next day, so she had that much time to recover. She probably only needed an hour or so to get back into form, though.

By the time she got back to us, Hisako was more upset about her score than anything else, "A seven..."

"It's not the end of the world," Eddie tried to say, "That's a rough event to try and compete in. Maybe we should have gone for something else?"

"No, that one was the best my powers would have been good for," Hisako said, bemoaning her score. In all fairness, matching up to Eddie's 9-plus would have been hard in any event, "...Bling! from the Chevaliers and the Mercury girl from the Hellions got 10s."

"Well, as far as we know, they're straight-up diamond and metal," I said before reaching out and grabbing her bicep, "You might have that armor, but it doesn't last forever and you're just squishy teenage girl underneath," Hisako pulled her arm away and glared at me, but didn't dispute anything, "Fates be willing, you'll never have to be under enough pressure to smush coal into diamonds for five minutes straight, and no, Ruthie, I do not want to know if that ever really is going to happen," I finished quickly, preempting Ruth before she could interject with something from the future.

She just shrugged at me. I had no idea if that meant she had something in mind or not, but for the sake of spoilers that we apparently couldn't change anyway, I didn't want to know one way or the other.

There wasn't really any time to consider it either, as I had to get to the next competition area within the span of a few minutes. It was my turn.

Choosing events that we could do well at was hard. Last time around, part of the problem was that my teammates hadn't done it exactly right. The appropriate people weren't in the proper competitions, so their scores weren't as good as they could have been. Even if their team and practical exercise scores had been great, which they hadn't been, what they'd gotten from the solo events would have still sank them anyway.

Even though I'd felt like we'd chosen well this time around, our boon wasn't going to come from the solo events. That wasn't how we were going to win. Our goal was to stay competitive through the solo events, and then make our push during the two other phases of Field Day.

That didn't mean I wasn't expecting to win, though.

When I showed up at the entrance courtyard that was being used as the contest site, I saw a woman wearing a more traditional black and yellow color scheme version of the X-Men uniform. She was a Native American with long black hair plaited into two braids. From the team intros, I remembered this was the advisor for the New Mutants squad, Dani Moonstar.

She noticed me coming, "Solaris?" I nodded in confirmation of my identity, even if I still hated that codename, "Alright. I'm the proctor for this test."

"Did your team go yet?" I asked, trying to make some kind of conversation. Talking helped me calm down. I didn't think I had any nerves, but if I did, speaking with someone would make me forget about them, "I meant to be here earlier to watch, but I was too busy making sure Hisako was okay after the durability competition."

"Yes. I think you and the last competitor will have your work cut out for you to beat Wind Dancer's score," Dani replied with a good-natured smile on her face.

"Sofia?" I asked, remembering the girl that I talked to sometimes in Mr. Logan's hand-to-hand combat classes. I hadn't fought her yet, but she seemed like she knew her stuff, "Well shit. What did she-? Wait, don't tell me what she got. It doesn't matter. All that matters is what I'm about to get."

From the proud way Dani had mentioned Sofia and her score, she must have been the leader so far, or at least close to the lead. The belligerent little bastard in me that drove my every attempt at trying to achieve anything now wanted to get the top score, not just for my team, but so I could see the look on Dani's face after I outdid her student.

...Because I was competitive and hated losing at things.

Dani seemed accepting of my challenging nature. Why wouldn't she be? That was the point of this whole thing, to do your best, "You know the rules, right?" She asked, guiding me into the starting area, "You have one minute to hit as many targets as you can. Some are worth more points than others. You can move however you want, wherever you want, to get the job done. The number of points you get will determine your score."

"Got it," I said, cracking my knuckles and kicking my legs to loosen them up. There was nothing like a little target practice, "What if I run out?"

"You get a perfect score," Dani told me, getting a hum of understanding from me, "Okay, are you ready?" She asked. I nodded instead of speaking, my game face thoroughly on by this point, "Alright. I'll start the countdown once I get clear. When you hear the buzzer, do whatever you can to hit every target you see."

I stood and waited, focusing on my breathing and the feeling of the mystical, magical sun beaming down on me.

"Begin in Ten! Nine! Eight! Seven! Six! Five ! Four! Three! Two! One! Go!"

Dozens of drones descended on the area and my hands started flying. Nothing but closed fist blasts, because open-hand stuff would have made explosions, which meant smoke that would have made it harder for me to see.

Some of them remained still, but most of them had some kind of movement to them, and with so many of them flying around, it was easy to lose track of what you were trying to hit. It was like a hive of gigantic, angry, metal hornets, even down to the distracting droning hovering sound that they made to stay in flight.

I had to keep my eyes and ears open, because at best they didn't pay any mind to where I was. At worst, sometimes they would go straight for me. I didn't know if someone was controlling them, or if they flew independently, but getting hit by one of those would have definitely left a mark. Probably would have lowered my score too.

In the end, I found the sweet-spot of a quick enough rate of fire paired with accuracy that let me hit what I was shooting at with each forward thrust of each hand. If I had enough time to line up my shot, I felt like I could hit anything, no matter how far away it was. Light blasts didn't have mass, so they didn't lose momentum. They would just lose their beam form if I fired a shot far enough away and didn't maintain it, but they flew so fast that it hardly ever mattered unless I was sniping.

An errant drone flew too close and nearly clipped me, but I adjusted for it and knocked it aside with a punch. The part on the front that lit up as it fell to the ground told me that it had counted toward my score, but it messed up my flow. I spent the rest of the test trying to get back into rhythm, but I only had a few seconds left. It ended before I could hit my stride again.

As a buzzer sounded and all of the drones flew off to where they had come from, even the ones I had shot, I tried to mentally calculate how many I had hit.

"That's the end of the test, Solaris!" Dani Moonstar shouted at me from where she had been keeping time from, "Come out of the exercise area!"

I was eager to see how I'd done, so I jogged over and got a look at the tablet she was using to keep tabs on all of the scores. She noticed I was trying to check and gave me some help by turning my way once she had seen what she'd needed to from it.

Accuracy & Efficiency Competition: Solaris – 8.3

I saw that as things stood, I was at the top of the leaderboard for that event. Sofia, Wind Dancer from the New Mutants, had scored a flat 8. The only other person that had gotten close was some student codenamed 'Network' who had gotten a 7.6.

I stepped back and held up my fists, both glowing with light energy building up just beneath the skin, and blew on both before tucking them away in make-believe holsters. It was goofy, and Dani let me know about it when she shook her head at the action.

It wasn't a 10 or a 9, but I was more than happy to take it. The score was high enough to get me in the lead with one more person to go.

And I passed by that person on the way out of the courtyard. When I saw the red of Julian Keller's Hellion's squad uniform, I could feel my lead vanish just like that.

"Fuck," I blurted out. It was too late to take it back though. He could already smell my anxiety.

"Marcher," Julian said, more easygoing than I would have preferred. He walked like his winning was money in the bank already. Seeing as how sabotage was more than likely frowned upon, he had a point, "I entered this thing to show Sofia what I could do, but smacking you down is a bonus I can get behind. You want to stick around and watch me win this thing?"

"Nope!" I said, not even bothering to look back as I walked past him off of the course. I couldn't get far enough away before I heard the start of his session though, and curiosity, rotten bastard that it was, won out in my mind.

From that point on, all I could do was sit back and listen as my score was left in the dust. With every flick of his hands, it seemed like Julian was dropping four or five drones, smashing them into each other, or sending them flying. Anything that hovered into his field of vision was caught in a green field. It wasn't even the objects themselves, it was the area around them.

When time started to dwindle, he seemed to get tired of the manual process and let his power explode all around him. Anything that was left in the air around him dropped to the ground and deactivated.

After the last drone was downed, the time stopped with five seconds left on the clock.

Accuracy & Efficiency Competition: Hellion – 10

If there was a word better than bitter to describe the taste in my mouth at that moment, anyone could have felt free to use it.

The guy would have been so much easier to deal with if he either weren't such an asshole, or he wasn't so good. Unfortunately, he was both, with a power that lent itself to him being badass. It was my fault for not being up to snuff to force my own perfect score.

My best wasn't good enough. In a situation like this, all I could do was suck it up and take my loss like a man. But God, I really didn't want to.

"Man, that was too easy," Julian said as he walked off of the competition field, "You like that, Marcher?"

I was perfectly honest with him, "I don't like that. I don't like that at all," I said, "If you're in this, who did the speed competition?" Because the Hellions weren't in the top five scores for that one, but I'd never seen who'd gone for them. I'd felt like we could have taken them for a moment if Julian had done that one and hadn't even placed.

"Sooraya. But that's the score we're probably going to drop," He said with a shrug, the expression on his face changing to one of thought, "Either that or Brian's score in the telepathy thing... or whatever Kevin gets on the flying test. Whichever's lowest."

And here I was hoping he'd be some kind of egomaniac and put his squad members in competitions without thinking of who would score the highest in what. Quite the contrary, clearly. This gave them at least two scores of perfect 10. Thankfully, there wasn't much time for him to lord the win over me. We both had to get back to our teams for the rest of the competitions.

Eddie had been waiting on me, not far from the front of the main school building, in plain sight of the competition field in the courtyard. There was an understanding look of pity on his face. That made the loss hurt that much more. But, stiff upper-lip. Nothing was over. There was still plenty of work to do. Eddie respected that much and didn't bother saying anything. He just opened the door for me and fell in step as we started searching for Hisako and Ruth.

Ruth was our only telepath, so she was obviously the one who was set to compete in the telepathy competition. I was afraid for her, but if I babied her and kept her from competing, it would have done us all a disservice. She was training to be one of the X-Men just like the rest of us, and if I gave her an out just because it might have been unpleasant for her, it would have been the same as looking down on her.

Also, we needed all hands on deck. Everyone had to put their best foot forward. We all wanted to win, or at least prove that just because there were only four of us, that didn't mean we weren't just as good as any other team.

Hisako and Ruth sat on a bench outside of one of the auditorium classrooms where the telepathy competition had been scheduled to take place. Ruth was holding her head and leaning against Hisako.

Had she gone already?

Hisako noticed me first, "How did it go?" She asked at first, apparently not noticing the scowl on my face until I got closer. It must have been quite bad for her to not even need any verbal confirmation from me, "Oof. That bad, huh?"

I sighed and sat down on the other side of Ruth. When I did, Ruth switched from Hisako's shoulder over to mine. I didn't mind it any, "It's not that it was bad, it's that I never had a chance at winning. Not with who else was in it."

Eddie chimed in, willing to explain my circumstances in more detail in my stead, "Hellion was the last guy to go, right after Bel,"

Hisako winced. Was that a show of sympathy? That was new, "That sucks."

'Sucks' was an understatement. It sucked spilling your drink all over your hand because the top wasn't secured tightly enough. Losing like that was a heartbreaker. Victory snatched from the jaws of defeat.

"He doesn't even have to aim. All he has to do is barely focus on the general area around his targets," I said, "I'm gonna make a suggestion for the next time. If it's an accuracy contest, it should have stuff that we shouldn't hit," I stopped when I realized that complaining over my circumstances wasn't exactly going to do anyone on my team any favors. You can't be top dog if you act like a pussy, "Sorry. I'll let it go. An 8.3 is good enough for what we were looking for, I guess."

It wasn't bad, if we were judging on the scale of 'good enough'. It just wasn't enough to win.

Hisako's expression changed to a sly one, "Well, while you were away, something happened that might cheer you up," She pulled up the student website on her phone with the listing of current Field Day scores on it, "Check that out."

Telepathy: Blindfold – 9.5

It was a good thing she didn't let me hold the phone, because I would have dropped it. I looked at Ruth, who was still leaning against my shoulder, a quiet, satisfied smile on her face, "Ruthie you got a-... that's a really good-... y-you almost beat the Cuckoos!" I pointed out, noticing that the blonde triplets on Mr. Summers' Corsairs squad had only edged her out by .3 points, "How the hell did you do that?"

Almost on cue, Miss Frost walked out of the auditorium classroom, giving the lot of us a side gaze as she stopped by us, "Most of her score came because I literally cannot read her mind," She said, sounding the slightest bit annoyed. Is it wrong that I enjoyed that? "With my girls, I can at least get something, but... with Miss Aldine, her mind is in too much flux for me to read."

"I'm not really surprised," Eddie said from off to the side, getting everyone to look at him momentarily, "What? You're telling me any of you are?"

None of us could say that we were.

"Huh," I muttered, looking over at Ruth. I wasn't surprised. Who could have figured that would have wound up being an advantage? I would take it, though, "That's a hell of a wrinkle."

Miss Frost's nose crinkled up slightly at the thought of being mentally rebuffed by a student, "Indeed. Even if it was because of a factor out of her control, I had to score her accordingly," She said, before changing her tune somewhat, "But, that doesn't mean she's immune to telepathic assaults. That is where you lost points, dear. Celeste, Mindee, and Phoebe are superior mental combatants. When they are together, they're nearly impossible to defeat. You were barely able to defend yourself."

But she had lasted long enough to outscore almost the entire rest of the field. Right now, that was what mattered. Anything else was a work in progress. We would deal with it in due time.

I was going to say something, but Ruth of all people actually beat me to it, "She knows, yes. Others are counting on her. She wants to do well," She said, slowly sitting up straighter and more confident, "Yes, this is just a start."

Miss Frost regarded Ruth closely before looking over at me and nodding. Apparently she accepted that and left us to our own devices.

Good. I was not in the mood to get punished for arguing with a teacher, because that was what it felt like was going to happen. I was not in the mood for any lectures, especially on something that we already knew we had to take care of.

It would be handled in due time.