“Pfft,” [i]f@#$ing Riley[/i]. Of course she’d get a computer virus on the phone Alex had used to piggyback onto the Guardian’s hard light room control system mainframe with. At least, she assumed that’s what this was all about. Nothing else had been changed, so far as she knew anyway, this was the one and only new variable, the only variation in the cold, calculated universe of Anne Scarborough’s neurotically hyper controlled, pet project pocket dimension. Then again, with the general shittiness of her mom and the rest of their little cabal taken into account, this could just as feasibly be something they programmed to happen from the get go, really, ‘test them youngins’,’ with something they wouldn’t see coming and couldn’t have prepared for ahead of time, ‘‘n all,’. She couldn’t help but notice that, ‘coincidentally,’ none of the grownups happened to be around offering advice or jumping to the aide of their, ‘young charges,’ as the pr@n mannequin so eloquently referred to their little group, [b]her[/b] little group, and it was almost impossible not to consider the fact that this might just be their way of mixing things up. Purposefully throw them into a situation that they knew would split the group along party lines, those for and against the absolute rule of their elders commands being followed as if codified, deliberated and notarized legal ultimatums, before throwing them into a tricky situation that would require them to work together as a team across a distance to accomplish the ultimate goal of shutting down the computer system and saving one another from, ‘[i]gasp[/i],’ certain peril! The kind of peril followed with a capital d, colon emoji. 

Alex tightened her grip on Andrea’s hand and locked her elbow in front of and pressing against her friend’s shoulder toward her core, not to hold her back from engaging the opposition, she hardly had to move into brawling distance to fight as it were, but rather to ensure a clear firing lane for herself. Unlike her reluctant dancing partner, she couldn’t maneuver corners, or much of anything else, to launch attacks at range. Standing a foot taller than her best friend had elicited stares and comments practically all their lives, even when they were kids there was always a dramatic difference in their size and she’d been taken as a year or two older than she actually was while her bestie had been thought to be two, occasionally even three years younger than was the reality, but in this particular situation it just might save them both a whole lot of trouble. She had no way of knowing what the intentions of the virus, the Guardians, or whatever it was that controlled the blue sex plastic Barbie were, but considering what she feared they might be, after all, no one wants to play around with what might happen to be a sentient pr@n virus that can manifest physical form and has you and your friends locked in a tiny steel cage, and assuming from the suddenly violent holograms that had been dancing to Livin’ La Vida Loca only moments before the blue bitch arrived on the scene that it clearly wasn’t anything so benevolent as to make them smoothies, she decided she’d rather not let them grab her and her friend in order to find out. 

“Ssst,” lasers, as it were, are rarely so loud as the gregariously booming, ‘[i][b]WOHNK[/b][/i],’s and, ‘[i][b]WHOO[/b][/i],’s most popular Space Operas would lead you to believe they should sound like. Alex’s sounded a bit like raw bacon thrown on a frying pan coated in some butter. What was left over after taking her lasers head on also, often as not, smelled like cooking bacon. It was probably the least super gross thing she could do to a living being with her super powers, nothing broke or cracked under the pressure of her fist, caved in around her flesh or covered her in sticky, goopy nastiness; it seemed like a pretty baller alternative until her vision came back into focus a moment and a blink or two after using the ability, and she could see just what had become of whatever it was that she had likely just sliced in half with a precision beyond that of any surgical tool. She’d never done it to a human, of course, but the holo room did a pretty good job of simulating the visual experience in all its grisly detail, all the leftover bits and pieces cauterized as they were simultaneously removed from the rest of the body to which they had formerly belonged, even got the smell pretty right somehow. She’d never actually considered how it was that holograms could actually smell like much of anything let alone the correct something, some kind of fancy concoction of Anne’s no doubt, molecular particle fabricators of some form or another, maybe simple common use, “smells of the battlefield,” attached to some kind of aerosolized sprayers hidden in the floor and wall panels? 

That hardly mattered now, though. Alex trained her eyes on the furthest hologram to her direct right, and let loose with her laser eyes. “Ain't gonna play nice, bitch!” she yelled at no one in particular, meant in response to the pr@n mannequin’s comment on her taste in music of course though she couldn’t know for sure if the thing could even hear her, and should everything go according to plan she would attempt to sweep everything in a full two hundred seventy degree turn with her lasers. That particular degree of movement was no accident. The one thing the Guardians had that gave them the power to have places like this little hidden fortress straight out of some movie or something was a vast degree of funds, and even though the computers lining the wall no doubt cost tens of thousands of dollars, she had no qualms with slicing them to bits in order to save her friends, well, teammates anyway, and as far as she knew they were the only things causing this simulation to even run whatsoever. Hard light projectors shouldn't be any good without receiving code to tell them what to do by the computer. Hell, she had cereal companies offering her enough advertising monies to replace the mainframe, “Hey there, I’m Polaris, a mildly popular superheroine who happens to be the daughter of Lodestar, and in my morning routine, I always choose Qwik-E-Os as a part of my balanced breakfast,’ ‘[sub]Qwik-E-Os may contain an excessive amount of pencil lead, rat poison, and/or crushed glass, and should not be consumed by anyone. Consumer takes all responsibility by unwisely choosing to consume Qwik-E-Os products[/sub].”