Thanks: Phrykyh, for putting up with the most hassle you've had to deal with while editing a chapter. The next one will be better. 
 

Chapter Eight
 

“What you see before you, lady, gentleman, and our newest addition to the Summers clan, is the Danger Room. It combines high-level, experimental United States technology with some sophisticated robotics, and then adds in the holographic techniques of an alien race called the Shi'ar. It's a place where we, the X-Men, can hone our fighting skills and our teamwork, so that we can continue to be the best, finest, and most loveable crime-fighting superhero team in the continental forty-eight."”

Ian Summers looked around for a moment after Hank McCoy finished speaking and then he said, “So it’s a big, empty room.”

Hank blinked. “Well, not exactly… hm. It does look that way, doesn’t it?”

“Just humor the man, Ian,” Alexander said, patting Ian on the shoulder. “This shouldn’t take long. We just need to show them a little of what it is we do.”

Hank nodded. “Robert and Remy are up in the Control Room to oversee this demonstration, and they’re going to monitor the energy levels of the entire room. Scott and I are going to be observing this with you on the side, and Warren and Logan are going to be in the scenario with you two,” he gestured to Margaret and Ian, “so that we can get a feel for it from all sides.”

“Except from the receiving end?” Margaret asked with a smirk.

Hank grinned back. “I know that I would prefer not to face the three of you without first knowing what you’re capable of.”

 “So c’mon, bub,” Logan said. “You an’ the girl.”

Margaret hesitated for a moment, then grabbed Alexander’s arm and dragged him about ten feet away from the rest of the group without saying a word. Alexander blinked and allowed her to ferry him away, shrugging when Ian gave him a questioning look.

When they were out of earshot, Margaret frowned at him. “Are you all right?” she asked quietly.

Alexander raised his eyebrows, and then nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine. Why?”

Margaret shrugged her shoulders. “On the way down here Ian told me about the parking garage thing, and he didn’t know if you were all right after that.”

Alexander grinned despite himself. “I’m fine, really. It just ended up being a little flashier than I had hoped. But seriously, I’m okay. You don’t need to worry, or anything.”

Margaret grinned. “Well, you dying would kinda suck, so I’m making sure you avoid that.”

“Awww. You’d miss me?” Alexander asked with a wry grin.

“Miss you? Hell no. You still owe me twenty dollars from our little run-in with the Etherites four months ago,” she said, grinning.

“Well, how was I to know that Ian would actually go through with the dance? I thought he had more dignity than that,” Alexander said, rubbing the back of his neck. “What I really should’ve known was not to make any more bets with you. Anyway, we should get started.”

They walked back. The X-Men and the mages had already broken into the two groups. Margaret walked over into the center of the room, where Ian, Warren, and Logan had gathered. Alexander leaned back against the wall in between Hank and Scott. “Everything all right?” Hank asked conversationally.

“Hmm? Oh, yeah, we’re good,” Alexander replied, with a dismissive wave of his hand. ”So what do we have planned?”

"Well, we want to test their abilities slowly. That way, while we're getting a look at what you all are capable of, you can explain the details of whatever happens out there. So, after some discussion, we've decided that we're going to set up five drone robots which don't have attack mechanisms."

Alexander snorted quietly under his breath. “Right. And with this data, you can be absolutely sure how they will fare the next time they face five drone robots which don’t have attack mechanisms.”

Hank raised an eyebrow. “I apologize if we seem hesitant in our methods, Alexander, but we merely wish to gain a general understanding of a ‘mage’ is capable. We don’t wish for any harm to come to them through our negligence.”

“Fair enough,” Alexander said, giving Hank a sharp glance, “but don’t give them something so easy a toddler could run through it. Make it at least partly difficult. Have it try to hit them. Or avoid them, or something.” 

Hank nodded, and waved up to the control room. “Robert? Increase the difficulty by two factors. And then begin.”

The lights dimmed significantly, and a low, menacing whir filled the room. Ian turned and faced the back of the room, idly scratching his chin. Margaret leaned back against his back, her hands in her pockets. Logan and Warren took up a position on either of them, both looking a little more wary than the two mages.

Hank slightly lowered his eyebrows. “They don’t appear to be taking this very seriously, Alexander.”

Alexander watched the center of the room intently. “You’ll see.”

The sound of metal grating across metal clanged against the ears of the Danger Room inhabitants, and the two X-Men focused their attention on the wall, about five feet below the control panel. Precisely at that spot, a section of the wall was noisily sliding to the side. As it slid, it revealed a bright white light, not unlike the headlight of a motorcycle."

“Ten, seven-thirty, five, and three,” Margaret said in a low voice, staring down at the floor. “And up.”

Hank, Warren, and Scott all looked around the room, taking Margaret’s words as an indication of numbers on a clock face, and using the first open panel as the “twelve o’clock,” At each spot, a panel was opening, and a light was shining out into the room. In places, Hank and Scott could only see the bright light. Ian and Alexander didn’t seem to pay it much attention.

Logan chuckled. “Yer off a bit, girl. I’d say that’s -–“ he jerked a thumb over his shoulder “—five forty-five.”

Margaret looked up quickly and turned her head to where the panel was sliding open. She shook her head. “The opening is. That one comes out at an angle, and it’s at five-thirty to me right now.”

Logan waited a moment. Then, “Hank?”

“She’s right,” Hank said, his perplexed expression matching the tone in his voice. “I’m not sure how, but she’s right.”

Underneath the control panel, the light grew brighter, and the source slowly meandered out into the room. The headlight itself was just that, a light built into the front of something that looked not unlike a probe droid from Star Wars. A sleek, black dome made up the hull of the robot, with the light being up a little ways. Four antennae of various heights protruded off the top, the tallest one blinking a small red light off and on rhythmically. 

The lower half of the robot was a mass of wires, rods, pipes, and other metallic paraphernalia. The core of the robot seemed to be an upside down cone, and the mess of wires coiled around it tightly, the ends hanging off the bottom loosely. A long, multi-jointed robotic arm dangled loosely from the tangled mess, with a large three-pincered claw on the end. The claw dragged over the bottom edge of the port before coming over into the room and swinging down through the air as a pendulum.

Ian turned his head to the side and regarded the droid out of the corner of his eye. “So what’ve we got?”

Margaret squinted at it. “It’s pretty well made. The power to it is centered in the lower half, I think, from the way it’s running -– there’s a small current running to the light and covering the hull. I think that’s it.”

Ian arched an eyebrow. “How’s it able to move?”

Margaret watched it for a moment. “Do you see how it wavers every few seconds? I think there’s some sort of force equaling the pull of gravity on the thing, and that helps it move around. I’d guess that the force behind it could increase or decrease anytime that the robot needs to go up or down.”

“What about that claw?” Ian asked.

“I’m pretty sure it’s unpowered,” she said.

Ian grinned sharply. “Cool.”

Hank turned to Alexander. “I’d assume that you have an explanation for her level of knowledge about a device that she has seen for all of two minutes.”

Alexander grinned. “If you asked her, she’d say that she’s helped Ian and I tinker around with enough weird stuff to know more than her share of electronics, even in strange things like that. Actually, especially in things like that. The real story, however, is that she’s able to see the setup of electronics by watching the flow of electric current inside of whatever she’s observing. Actually, she’s able to observe basically any level of force rather easily, just by concentrating on it.”

Hank raised his eyebrows. “Is this an ability you all share?” he asked.

“Well, yes, but… hmm. Okay. Let me try to explain,” Alexander said, leaning up off the wall and facing Hank.

“Now, a long time ago, some scholar in some tower in Tibet, or something, decided that the study of magic needed to be categorized, so people can study just one field of it at one time if they wanted to. So this guy, and we think he was a Hermetic, broke magic down into nine Spheres. Correspondence, Entropy, Forces, Life, Mind, Matter, Prime, Spirit, and Time. Stop me when you lose the plot.

“This idea basically gets passed down to the point where it’s the only way you can learn anything about magic. You have to go through these Spheres, because no one knows anything else. So that’s how we all learned, and we mostly learned different Spheres.”

In the center of the room, Ian and Margaret broke from each other and spread out, Margaret walking nonchalantly around one side of the first robot, Ian ambling around the other side. Ian shoved his hands into his pockets and watched the robot level off before it lumbered quietly towards the center of the room.

Alexander continued. “Now, when you learn more than one Sphere, you start to develop a style, a signature of sorts. As you define your abilities, you start to define a style and a rhythm to the way you do your stuff. We’ve been doing this long enough to have our own little signatures to how we do things.”

Ian spun on his heel as the robot lurched past him. He placed his hands behind his back, his eyes fixed on the dangling claw below the robot. He watched it for a moment, and then scratched his chin idly.

“Ian’s flashy. You probably could tell that, just from the force of his personality. Ian’s a showman, an entertainer, a comedian, and a few other things I won’t say. So everything he does is also flashy. You could say that his magic is an extension of him,” Alexander said.

Margaret squinted, and watched the claw arm twitch a little. “Ian, I think that thing’s coming to life a little,” she said.

Ian grinned. “I know. I was hoping it would.”

Ian leaned forward on the balls of his feet for a second, and then took off running towards the robot, angling his body forward as he ran. The robot’s body began to swivel alarmingly fast, and the claw picked up off the ground and began to swing in a wide arc towards him.

Ian ducked down just before the claw flashed through the space where his head had been a moment before. He dropped into a baseball slide, feet in front of him, before anyone had a chance to react, and skidded to a stop underneath the robot.

“What’s he doing?” Scott asked, leaning forward off the wall, peering into the room.

Alexander leaned back. “You’ll see.”

Ian sat up and reached into the mess of wires underneath the robot and fumbled around, his grin fading into a grim determination. His eyes lit up, and he jerked out a thin metal rod about a foot and a half in length. There was a crackle of electricity and a small spurt of sparks when he did.

He rolled out from underneath the robot as quickly as he could. “Margaret!” he shouted as he clambered back to his feet. “I’ve got an idea! All we need to do is -- uh oh.”

The long clawed arm spun around the side of the robot and smacked into Ian, cutting short anything else he was going to say. He managed to twist around out of the claw’s grasp before it could close around him, but the force behind the blow knocked him off his feet, and he wrapped one arm around the robot’s appendage to steady himself.

The next thing he knew, he was floating about twenty feet off the ground, still holding onto the robot’s arm. The robot’s propulsion systems had obviously kicked in, and it flew slowly up into the air, moving closer to the robot lowering down from the ceiling.

Margaret blinked, startled, and looked over at Logan and Warren. “What are you here for? Decoration? Aren’t you going to do anything?” she asked quickly. 

Logan grinned darkly. “Darlin’, I’m the best there is at what I do.”

“And?” Margaret askd.

Logan popped the three foot-long bone claws from his clenched fist in response. “And what I do ain’t pretty.”

Warren stepped in just as Margaret opened her mouth to rattle off a reply to Logan. “I’ll venture a guess and say that you need someone to go help him get back down?”

“Unless you’re only here to watch, yes,” she said, glancing up at Ian, who was trying to keep his arms around the robot.

Warren shrugged his shoulders once, and a pair of white-feathered wings unfolded gracefully from his back. He flapped them once, looked Margaret in the eye, and said sharply, “I’ll be right back.”

Warren lifted off and immediately took off towards the group in the air, his wings flapping slowly and forcefully. Ian had both arms wrapped around the “wrist” of the robot, clutching the rod in white-knuckled hands.

Ian rocked back and forth a few times, gaining momentum, before swinging forward and kicking the robot’s “elbow” joint as hard as he could. He did this three more times, and on the fourth kick he got a satisfying crack.

With a groan, the arm pitched forward, the claw crashing down into the top of the other approaching robot, piercing the hull with a second loud crack and a painful shriek of metal grinding against metal. Ian swung forward and kicked a second time, severing the arm from the first robot, and let go of the arm with one hand to maintain his grip on the rod.

He shifted around so he faced the gouged robot, still hanging fifty or sixty feet in the air, and started to push off it with his feet, pulling at the clawed arm as he did so. With each shove, the claw slipped down a little, coming closer to being free.

Warren tucked his wings back a little and flew a little faster towards the scene.

In the corner of the room, Hank tilted his head to one side. “Alexander, what is your friend up to?”

Alexander frowned. “While he was hanging up there, I could tell that he was weakening the bonds of the metals in the joint so he could kick through it easier, but I’m really not sure what he plans on doing now. I guess he figures that he’s not in danger of falling with the winged crusader flying around now.”

Scott arched an eyebrow. “I thought you said that magic had to be subtle, in this day.”

Alexander nodded. “Oh, Ian’s magic is subtle. He’s just not. At all.”

Ian pushed off of the hull again, and this time he yanked the arm free from the hull. With nothing else to hold him up, Ian began to fall towards the floor, holding the rod in his left hand and the clawed appendage in his right.

After a second Warren caught him, snatching him by the wrist in mid-flight with both hands. “You know, next time you might not have me around to catch you,” he said down to Ian, angling his head to the side so the rod didn’t poke him in the face.

Ian grinned back up. “I didn’t have you to catch me the first or second time I tried that stunt before, either. And I’m obviously still alive.”

An explosion rocked Warren as he flew, and both he and Ian twisted their eyes back to see the second robot descending to the ground like a wounded duck, smoke and flames leaping out of the gaping hole in the hull.

“Hey, Birdman! Fly me over to the one I ripped this off of,” Ian shouted up at Warren, waving the claw arm around.

Warren bristled, and angled towards it. “What, and just drop you on it?” he asked, confusion evident in his voice.

“Well, yeah. And pick me up afterwards, too,” Ian said, shifting his weight a little.

“How far above it?” Warren asked as he gained altitude.

“About... ten feet, let’s say. Give me a good attack angle, too. And speed. I need speed.”

Warren scowled. “What am I, a B-12?”

Ian thought for a second. “Well, I don’t see your wings shooting anything, and unless you’re more like a bird than I think you are, you probably don’t do much solo bombing... I’d say you’re a big glorified transport plane.”

Warren circled far around and above the robot once, and then started his descent. “You know, I really should misjudge this drop and let you hurtle into the floor,” he said, narrowing his eyes as they whipped through the air.

“That wouldn’t be very hero-like,” Ian said, angling his body so he wouldn’t hit the hull face-first.

“This -is- going to hurt, you realize,” Warren said down to him.

“Oh, I know. Hitting something metal, that’s not going to give much, at the speed we’re traveling? It’s going to hurt a good deal,” Ian agreed, preparing for the drop. “But I’ve got one thing on my side.”

Warren asked, “What’s that?” and let go of Ian’s wrist.

“I’m too good to die!” Ian called back, bringing his knees up in front of him and dropping the rod. 

Ian readied the clawed arm above his shoulder a split second before he crashed into the robot’s hull, taking most of the impact in his knees and shins. The claw absorbed the rest of the impact, gouging a tear in the hull and slicing through the electronics. A few sparks jumped up out of the hole.

Ian quickly brought his knees up against his chest so his feet were against the hull, and pushed back off into the air. He twisted his body so he could angle down a little more, and deftly snatched the falling metal rod he had dropped earlier out of the sky.

A second later, he found himself flying horizontally at an incredible pace, as Warren deftly snatched the falling mage he had dropped earlier out of the sky.

A second later again, the robot exploded.

Ian shielded his eyes with his free arm as pieces of the robot flew past him, little trails of fire and smoke behind some of the faster-moving ones. Warren flew back towards the ground, and dropped Ian safely off onto the ground before landing himself.

On the far side of the room, Hank thought for a moment, and said, “I would assume some explanation comes along with that?”

Alexander chuckled. “He created an electrical surge inside of that claw that he released once it was inside. When it sliced into whatever was inside of that robot, it fried everything and exploded.”

Hank turned his head. “That’s it? That’s all that was magical?”

Alexander nodded. “That’s all I saw.”

Hank watched him for a moment, and then turned back to watch the others. “Oh my stars and garters...”

Warren folded his wings in behind him and walked into the center of the room with the others, watching the other three robots warily. “Are you two done?” he asked Ian and Margaret.

Ian flipped the rod up into the air and caught it. “Far from. We were going to suggest some teamwork.”

Margaret nodded. “Things will go a lot quicker if we work together, and it makes more sense for you to observe our teamwork if you’re actually part of it. Plus this way, we can see just what it is you’re capable of.”

Logan nodded. “Makes sense. So who goes where?”

Margaret pointed to Warren and Ian, and then to one of the remaining robots. “You two take that one out. We,” she gestured to Logan and herself, “will take care of the rest.”

Ian nodded, turned around, and took off running towards the robot she pointed out, readying the rod in his hands once Warren flew above him and lifted him into the air.

Margaret turned to Logan. “So here’s the plan, in short. I’ll subdue it, you do whatever it is that you do,” she said, eyeing the claws on his hand. “I think I get the idea of just what that is.”

Logan grinned ferally. “Whatever you say, darlin’.”

Scott looked over at Alexander. “I’m still a little sketchy on when they were using magic.”

Alexander shifted so he was looking at Scott. “Okay. Basically, we can’t throw fireballs at people, like we’ve said. If we did, well, we’d die. So what we have to do is use magic in a more subtle, quiet manner.

“The quiet, as Ian has shown you so far, is pretty optional. But the point remains. We have to use magic now as support, basically.”

Scott crossed his arms across his chest, not in an unkind manner. “How do you mean?”

“Well, basically, we can’t do anything that is completely impossible, like I said earlier. Whatever we do, we should at least make it appear as if we could have done it without using magic. Take Ian’s stunts there, for example. To the average person, it was incredibly skilled and probably an amazing run of luck, but not impossible. Had he started flying around by himself, well, that’s not possible. Ian can do it, now, he just prefers doing that.”

“Essentially, you can’t reveal that you have extraordinary powers,” Hank said.

“Exactly. Now, if you’ll bear with me, I’ll explain as much of it as I can, as quickly as I can. Again, stop me if you lose the plot.

“So you have these nine Spheres, right? Capital ‘S’ on Sphere, too. It’s important. Now, each one deals with something different. The names should make that obvious; Life deals with biological stuff, Forces handles all kinds of forces, both natural and man-made, and so on. Spirit and Prime you may not get. Spirit deals with all that Dreamspeaker spiritual bullshit, and Prime is what you use to create, since you can’t just make something out of nothing normally.

“Now, to use these as effectively as possible, you combine the knowledge of Spheres. Let’s say I wanted to make a gun out of thin air, okay? I create the essence for it using Prime and fashion it with Matter. Or if I had a gun back at home that I wanted to use, but I left it there, I could use Correspondence to open a little rift in space and grab it off my desk. Or if I wanted to take someone else’s gun from them and use it, I could use Forces and yank it out of their hand and have it fly over to me. For every simple action, there are about four or five ways to get it done.”

“And for the complex actions?” Hank asked.

“As you learn more about whatever Sphere of magic, you can do more with it,” Alexander said. “For example, Ian and Margaret. Margaret has a rudimentary understanding of the Sphere, Forces. Ian has a much, much larger understanding. Margaret can see forces at work around her when she concentrates, and she can observe where they’re going. She can sense them, basically.

“Ian can throw fireballs, he can guide airplanes around with the power of his mind, and he can pull off a -frighteningly- good Jedi Knight impersonation. Ian can power anything that’s not powered and do the opposite as well. Ian just knows more about that sort of thing than Margaret does. He’s studied it, worked with it, done his experiments, and screwed up an expectable amount of times.

“Now, let’s take the Life sphere. The biological one, the one that you can use to heal people, to really hurt them, to create life, to shift into other forms, anything that’s alive can be screwed with using this. And Ian doesn’t know it from Adam. Not even the most basic understanding. To be honest, I don’t really know much about it. I can watch, and I can try to do a few tricks with it, but they don’t work very well. Now, Margaret? This is her thing. She knows it back and front, and can do practically whatever she wants with it. 

“See, there’s stuff we can do, and stuff we can’t. The three of us together are a lot more formidable than we are apart, because we know exactly what the others are capable of, and can work off that.”

“You refer to these ‘Spheres’ in a very defined way. Why is that?” Scott asked. “You call them by the same name, every time. Where did you pick that up?”

“Ah. See, not every mage calls them what we call them, but most do. When Ian was a member of the Hermetics, they let him, and us by association, wander around in their libraries. Most of their books on the theories of magic had magic identified as the nine Spheres we’ve told you about, and as time went by, that’s what we ended up calling them. It just made things a lot easier, in the long run, so we all knew what the other was talking about. If you want, Hank,” Alexander said to the doctor, looking back over his shoulder as he did so, “I can bring in a few of the books we have and let you look through them. It might make things a little easier to understand.”

Hank grinned. “I think that would be a very good thing.”

A familiar snarl and the sound of crackling electronics drew their attention back to the main room.

Logan stood over the fallen, sparkling form of one of the robots, his bone claws extended and a certain feral grin spread across his features. Large gouges marked the hull of the robot, giving a hint as to what caused its demise. Logan waited for a moment, breathing heavily, and then grinned over at Hank, Alexander, and Scott. “I don’t get to do this enough,” he said in a low, harsh voice that was tinged with sheer joy.

A short ways behind him, Warren and Ian flew back towards the ground as the robot behind them slowly floated down, crippled with its own claw rammed through its hull, and a small black rod wedged deep inside the spot where the headlight previously was. Ian pointed to where the last robot was hovering, and Warren flew low to the ground just long enough for Ian to drop out of his arms and land running before the X-Man flew back into the air.

Margaret calmly walked to the robot’s other side, and Logan half-jogged, half-stalked behind her, keeping a wary eye on the droid himself. Ian slowed down to a walk as he observed his target, and Warren circled above it.

In a sudden, quick movement, the clawed arm on the robot shot out at Margaret, the claw itself opening up for either a grab or a gore. As this happened, Ian stopped short, Warren dove down, and Logan charged straight for her, clenching his fists.

Just as quickly, Margaret spun gracefully on her toe, slipping to the side of the rushing arm a millisecond before it would’ve struck her. In the same movement, she slid one leg forward and turned on her side to brace herself, and used the momentum of the robot’s movement to hold the arm in place for a second or two.

That second was all Logan needed for him to slash through the joint cleanly, severing the arm in the middle. Margaret stumbled to the side under the sudden weight of the freed arm, but still had the presence of mind to hold it up in the air for another second or two.

Warren snatched the appendage from her grasp, flew around in a quick, narrow arc, and dove straight for the robot’s hull, holding the arm like a knight on horseback would hold a lance. 

Ian ran and slid down on his knees until he was kneeling right beside the vulnerable electronics underneath the hull. He gripped the pipe closest to him and yanked it out in a sudden shower of sparks. The robot crackled for a moment, and then the headlight faded out and it started to pitch forward.

Ian scrambled back out of the way just as Warren drove the claw deep into the hull, smashing the robot to the ground a foot or two away from the retreating mage. The droid crackled one more time, and then fizzled dead, smoke rising out of the new hole Warren had made in it. 

Ian got to his feet, and as one, they looked over to the corner of the room where Hank, Scott, and Alexander were standing.

Alexander surveyed the scene for a moment. Warren stood on top of the dead robot with his wings still spread somewhat, one arm leaning against this clawed appendage that was about as tall as he was. Logan crouched to Warren’s right, claws still extended. Margaret stood on the same side, one arm folded across her stomach, the other one resting at her side. Ian rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet off to Warren’s left, hands in his pockets, his head swaying slightly to a beat no one else heard.

After a long silence, Alexander spoke. “It’s ‘God’s Army Meets the A-Team,’ I’m telling you.”

Hank fished out a black wristwatch from his coat pocket, and then nodded. “You didn’t make bad time, especially considering Alexander here had to explain everything that you did. This does, of course, still leave one major question unanswered.”

Alexander glanced over at him. “What’s that?”

Hank turned to Alexander. “Why on earth are you asking the X-Men for help?”

Alexander nodded slowly, and rubbed the back of his neck. “That’s a long, long story. And it’s late, too.”

Warren stretched both his wings and his arms. “Alexander’s right. We could finish this discussion over breakfast, you know.”

Scott seemed to think this over for a moment, and then nodded. “All right. I’m not opposed to that. It’s late, and we don’t often get a chance for a good night’s sleep. Everyone stay on the grounds tonight? I know Remy had some other plans, but I have my reasons. Alexander, Ian, Margaret; there’s a boathouse a short ways away from the mansion itself that my wife and I stay. I know you may not want to stay right here this close by, but that’s open for your use if you want. I’ll show you where it is.”

Alexander nodded. “Hey, if it saves us trying to drive morning traffic out of New York, I’m all for it. Thanks, Scott.”

Scott nodded. “Sure. If you need to get some clothes and things, I suggest you go ahead and head out to do that. Bobby? Remy?” he called up to the control room. “Go ahead and shut it all down once we’re out, and call it a night. Hank, Warren, if you have the time, I’d like to speak with you in Xavier’s study before you go do your separate things. I’ll see the rest of you in the morning.”

Everyone nodded and filed out of the Danger Room, and a moment later the lights went down and the one in the control room flicked off.