Who: Piotr, Dani NPCs: n/a When: 10/25 Where: X-Force HQ What: Piotr tinkers with the team’s vehicle, and manages to hurt himself in the process. There’s got to be a band-aid somewhere in HQ, right? With any luck, team leader Dani knows where. Rating: PG-13
Chicago was simmering, Piotr thought as he opened the hood of the X-Force SUV and checked on the engine. It was the sort of drawing out of tension that was just waiting for something to break it, but until then, on the surface, it was quiet. He hated this sort of waiting. He thought pretty much everyone did, from the average bystander to the people very intimately involved in the thing. Piotr knew how to be patient and wait for things to start moving again: as there wasn’t much to do until they did, he found projects for himself.
For example, the X-UV.
He’d already checked the oil in it twice this past month. In the past fortnight, actually, if he wanted to be specific, but he thought it wouldn’t hurt to check again. Then maybe strip out the engine and give it a good once-over, just like Professor Scott (he just couldn’t bring himself to refer to his former teacher by only his first name) had taught in Shop class back when he was still at the Institute.
That reminded him – he needed to email Illyana, see how her classes were going. It would be easier with a Russian keyboard – surely there had to be one somewhere in Chicago? Focusing on these and other assorted problems, he settled down to fiddle with the engine, concentrating (more or less) on the moment and ignoring future problems.
Maybe it was because of this split focus, or maybe because he was used to not having to worry about such things in his steelform, or maybe it was just because the meditative feeling he got when working with metal and art meant that he didn’t pay attention to the fine details of just where his fingers were. However it happened, he moved his hand wrong, and suddenly, his fingers jammed into the engine.
Swearing in Russian and English, Piotr gritted his teeth against the pain – he tended to forget that things tended to hurt - and gingerly extracted his arm from within the guts of the engine. He grabbed one of the shop cloths and wrapped it tightly around his bloody fingers, already heading for the closest medicine cabinet. He could worry about how deeply he’d cut his right – dominate, damnit – hand when the bleeding stopped. And about disinfecting it a couple dozen times, given where the cloth had been prior to this.
One-handedly, he rooted around the cabinet: they had to have band-aids, right? They were only superheroes who went into dangerous situations as a matter of course: they had to have band-aids. Hopefully, he would just need some band-aids and not stitches. Muttering in Russian - mostly curses he wouldn't say in English - he sorted through the little boxes and bottles of pills.