10292/SWORD: Close Encounters of the 3rd Degree Burns

SWORD: Close Encounters of the 3rd Degree Burns
Date of Scene:	26 February 2022
Location:	Ava's Loft - Hells Kitchen
Synopsis:	Darcy, having had a bad day already, ends up at Ava's Warehouse requesting help making a device to read the radiation signature of a victim of a new kind of alien threat. Plugging this in to the fancy new SENSE satellite system, she discovers an imminent alien invasion.
Cast of Characters:	Darcy Lewis, Ava Starr

---

Darcy Lewis has posed:
The black SUV with the silver S.W.O.R.D. logo rides up on to the curb side. It's perhaps more attention than Ava would like but Darcy's care factor for that has dropped to zero. A bystander bangs his hands on the hood and shouts at her, "Hey I'm walkin' here! Asshole!"

Darcy can't believe the guy. She beeps the horn at him and yells back through the thick bullet proof glass, "Giant logo with a big sword through it, are you blind?" The man in the seat belt next to hear groans in to the makeshift gag from his own tie and jacket. Puffs of smoke part his burned lips and his eyes swirl about independently.

"Yeah I know buddy, new yorkers are the worst," she undoes her seat belt and winces. There's burns up and down her left arm and her official work uniform is in tatters there. The man walks past the drivers side and gives her the finger and she stares at him in disbelief.

He spies the messed up face of the guy in the passengers seat and does a double take. "Oh shit!," he says and starts running off down the street. Darcy slides out of the SUV and leans up against it for a moment.

Her eyes shift up and down the street, then she walks over to the buzzer and presses it for Ava's lair. As if it's now appropriate to be more sneaky about who she is seeing. "Hey. Quantum. It's Darcy," she says dryly over the intercom as if it were an opener for a bit. "If I sketched you a schematic drawing could you make it for me?"

Ava Starr has posed:
Oh, it's a *lot* more attention than Ava would like, hence her recent conversation with Finley (who is currently out buying real food at a real grocery store; their kitchen may implode in shock) about better separation between 'home' and work'. Maybe she'll have to spend a little bit more of her money on better security separation, too. Can she afford that? Maybe if she finds the right mercenary job... Tougher, since she's not doing wetwork any more.

She hears the buzzer and finds the hackles raising on the back of her neck. Shoulders bunched, she calls up the entry cam view on her tablet, interrupting her online research. "Bollocks," she mutters as Darcy's voice comes through the speaker.

Well. She owes the woman. So, what the hell.

Wiping her research off the screen, she thumbs the door release and heads for the stairs to meet the woman on the main floor of the warehouse, rather than inviting her into their living space. If she's going to build something for the astrophysicist, she'll need room, anyway.

The door to the building clicks as the lock releases, a small shift of the door's weight suggesting it can be pulled open to allow Darcy in.

Darcy Lewis has posed:
Darcy pulls the door open and then slides a random piece of brickwork in place to keep it from shutting, then heads back to her SUV. Back seat, she grabs her work bag and slings it over one shoulder. Then, she opens up the side door and lets Agent Fry out.

He ambles awkwardly out of the SUV on a leash. Rope. It's the best she has. Some of his saliva manages to make it past the gag and drips on to the rope causing it to sizzle. "Now you behave, we need Quantum's help." He groans muffled in to the gag again and reaches out his burned hands toward Darcy and starts walking toward her as if seeking brains.

"That's right. Keep coming. This way," she says as she walks backwards through the door. Someone shoots past on a bike and swerves around the S.W.O.R.D. S.U.V. The rider takes a moment to yell out, "OH COME ON!?" What's left of Agent Fry turns and he tries to move toward the faster moving target until the rope goes taunt. The guy seeing the burned up face of, gag, and what he incorrectly assumes is the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo freaks out, tumbles off his bike, and starts running.

Darcy has to put her less than considerable weight in to yanking on the rope to try and pull the bigger heavier agent with her in to the warehouse, "No. This way acid breath - genpop is not for you any more." Still, her expression is not jovial. She knew this guy for less than a week and she thought he was nice. 'Was' being the operative word.

Ava Starr has posed:
It's a good thing the warehouse floor is already pretty scuffed and dinged from decades of stuff being schlepped and shoved all over the place. Not to mention the heavy materials and building efforts of recent years. Ava arches a brow as Darcy leads her 'pet' in. "What the hell, Sparky?" she snarks as the man drools on her floor and sets it to sizzling. "Who's the drooler? Pretty sure the Triskelion has something for that..." As opposed to her.

Darcy Lewis has posed:
More smoke puffs out of his nostrils and mouth as he chews on the makeshift gag. His eyes are wandering all over the place and what remains of his charred uniform reveals a small bit of surviving S.W.O.R.D. logo on the front of the vest.

"Agent Fry," she says without much in the way of emotion. She ties him to a big steel beam and then finds a chair to sit on and some desk space. From her bag she takes out a laptop. The burn on her arm is similar to the burns on his body - it looks very much like a defensive wound.

"Is the victim of a minor alien invasion, may be," she shrugs and starts to draw on the laptop designing what it is she wants from Ava. "That's my working theory. But with your help I'm going to see for sure if this is a one off thing or a bigger thing." She finally takes stock of the space and asks, "Where's Agent Ellison? I was hoping to use SHIELD to do medical scans of the thing in him. Are there other agents you trust I can call here?"

Ava Starr has posed:
Ava snirks. "Simmons," she says shortly. Yes, she trusts the biologist. "Fin'll be back in a bit. She decided we needed... real food." Her tone is dry, to cover up her bafflement. Neither fo them cooks. Delivery is perfectly acceptable. But, there it is.

"And what do you mean 'minor alien invasion'?" She eyes the bloke in the tatterd SWORD uniform. "What the hell happened, Lewis?"

Intangible, though not in her Ghost suit for the moment, she circles the man, eyeing him. "What sort of aliens are we talking about?" Because, you know, she's met aliens. Most of them weren't friendly. Even the ones that were supposed to be on her side.

Darcy Lewis has posed:
"There is a disproportionate number of British people in SHIELD," she says matter of factly as she sketches out what can only be described as a meat probe of sorts, though it clearly is of the quantum variety. It's designed to look for residual cosmic radiation.

"You know how your mom is always - hey, a good day is just one good deed away? well that's obviously crap," she says with a huff when she's questioned about what the hell happened. The man lumbers about at the length of the rope and reaches out to grab at Ava; which fails since she's intangible.

"Agent Fry and I were working on a new sky survey system that can detect smaller objects falling from space. We recorded an event with impact here in New York City, so we jumped in a car and went to check it out."

She looks up from the laptop to make sure Ava is actually listening. She always gets the impression that Ava takes her seriously, which is good because she's rarely not brutally honest about things.

"Not far from here we found the impact crater on a cement basketball court. Thawed out was this little green blob of goo. Surprisingly square and very much alive. It could jump seven feet easily and burned us when we touched it - acidic. As Fry was talking to it, it jumped right up in his mouth."

There's a groaning and a sudden belch of acid that burns through the makeshift gag. Some of it drools out on to the floor making it too hiss and smoke. The man awkwardly looks at his hands, grabs the rope and bites on it.

Ava Starr has posed:
Ava pulls back a little when Agent Drooler's hands get grabby and wiggle right through her chest. "That's rude, mate," she says, reaching out a more solid hand to cuff him up the side of the head with a pretty solid *thock*. Not that it discourages him any. He turns to his rope instead.

"Stop that," she says and she closes a fist around the untouched part of the rope. A ripple of quantum energy travels up its length to smack him in the gob and shock him into releasing the rope. "I think you need a thicker rope, Doc. Drooler's getting fiesty."

Darcy Lewis has posed:
Darcy sighs, "I'm really going to miss that guy. He carried heavy things for me and could reach the high spaces." She is being very glib about it but what's done is done. A bouncy cube of alien acid jumped in his mouth. There's no coming back from something like that.

A few more taps on her keyboard and she says, "Done. Can you make this?" She turns the laptop toward Ava and then stares at Fry for a little while longer. Her eyes focus and she realises the gag is gone, "Oh crap, not again."

Pre-emptively she moves further away from him. "He's a spitter. Acid spit. Acid bite." She holds up the glistered skin on her arm and says, "Not too bright, but he seems to be getting smarter." Case in point, the rope breaks and he reaches out once more toward Ava and stumbles toward her. His saliva drips out of his cracked mouth and the flooring sizzles with each drop.

Ava Starr has posed:
Still intangible, Ava is less concerned about herself than she is about Darcy -- whom she likes despite their snarking at each other. (Indeed, that just may be the evidence of that, instead.) Darcy was the first to really put an effort in to help Fin. That earned her serious brownie points.

Her eyes narrow and she extends her hands, palms open and spread apart, as if she were holding a large ball. And, perhaps, in her mind, she is. Her hands flick and a globe of energy swirls around him, lifting him off the floor, suspending him in a contained maelstrom of quantum energy. "I really should get a containment unit around here, shouldn't I?" She adds that to the list of 'improvements' she's been compiling in the back of her mind. "There's a cleaning rag over in the corner by the lift. Actually got washed recently. Grab it? I'll try to shove in his gob. And there are some lift chains over by the QT there." She means the half finished quantum tunnel type device in the middle of the floor. "One of them ought to hold him for a while. Drag it here." They're not excessively heavy links. Shouldn't be an unreasonable request. But the metal will withstand the acid longer than the rope.

Darcy Lewis has posed:
Darcy watches what's left of Agent Fry lift off of the ground and she lets out an impressed sigh. "Thanks for the weekly reminder that I am a fully qualified looker at stars working with people who can break the laws of physics as a regular flex."

Because now she's fetching a mop and some chains. The mop is stuffed in to Fry's mouth unceremoniously first before she disconnects the wooden handle. The chains are dragged over for Ava. "I haven't measured the Ph level yet but give him a few hours and I think he'll eat through that metal too."

Minor alien invasion. Just the one of these guys is problematic. Not that an a good alkaline won't fix the problem. She folds her arms and her eyes show more concern than the rest of her face which looks placid and calm. She is not calm on the inside but she has a nack for hiding it on the outside - until she can't anymore.

"A night sky survey should not turn in to death by alien acid cube of hell from Minecraft," she says as her lips quiver and her facade begins to fail. "Fry was the best kind of agent. One who knew just how I liked my coffee."

Ava Starr has posed:
There's probably an alkalyde kicking around the workshop. Or, hell. There's baking soda in the fridge, believe it or not. Though that's upstairs. "Likely," Ava agrees. "What the hell is he drooling? Sulphuric acid?" Because... ew.

She moves fluidly towards the struggling alien, keeping her energy shield around him as she pins him back against the steel post. To make her life easier, she picks up the chain in one hand and makes it intangible, too, sliding it through both his body and the post until it's on the opposite side of the post. She does that several times until it's wound around his torso and she tightens it and locks it using the industrial strength hook on the one end of it. "That should hold him for at least a little while."

She hopes.

Now, she turns back toward the laptop and its schematics. "So. What is this?"

Darcy Lewis has posed:
There's nothing quite like seeing an almost-friend suffering. Some guilty part of Darcy's brain tells her she dodged an attachment to a person who just didn't make it. But even this thought upsets her more. "Right," she says as Ava applies th chains to him. "I'm not a chemist. I'm an astrophysicist."

Speaking of which. She tears her eyes away from the struggling groaning Fry and back to the laptop. "This is a radiation detector for the creature inside Fry to map out its unique journey through space. That information will then be fed in to S.E.N.S.E., the new sky entity network sensory enhancer for tracking small objects coming to Earth."

She folds her arms, "It'll let me know if there are others here or more coming. To determine the degree of threat." She raises an eyebrow and then hand motions for Ava to hurry up, "Do your thing. People with super powers are such drama queens."

She is agitated enough that that is about as much of a lashing out as she has done in months now. The concern is not specifically aimed at Ava, more that struggling man behind her who lost his life today. When Foster detects aliens it's a big strong muscular man with a hammer. When Darcy detects aliens it's a horrible little blob of space death.

Ava Starr has posed:
Ava arches a brow. "Yeah," she says briefly, trying not to respond directly to the other woman's snarky masking. "Fabrication? Not my specialty, yet." This, despite the fact pretty much the first thing Darcy ever saw her do, aside from the whole Ghost trick, was make a sophisticated data reader out of... nothing.

She chuffs out a harsh breath, trying to ignore the space zombie tied to the giant steel pole and the fact that she can tell Darcy's not nearly as sanguine about his passing as she's trying to seem. "Radiation detector. Right." See? She has a feeling this would be a whole lot easier if Fin were here. Because Fin could probably describe how each component works. In the end, what Ava's mind takes away is: Make a thing that will detect all sorts of radiation and energy signatures... and make it look like *that*. So, that's whatever AI or mathemagical force that lets the q-bands do their thing gets to work with in understanding what Ava wants to create. She looks at the schematics as she thinks about it, though, hoping there's some sort of a-picture-is-worth-1000-words translation software in the q-bands that can bypass Ava altogether to get what Darcy wants.

She spreads her hands out over a bare bit of table and tries to concentrate. Slowly, energy patterns swirl in front of her and molecules are built out of quantum particles to construct the machine Darcy is hoping for. When it's done, it *looks* right. Whether or not it works? That's anyone's guess.

Darcy Lewis has posed:
As Ava goes to work creating the device, Darcy is spying all of Fin's electrical bits. She goes over to the small drawers and starts to poke through them looking for resistors and capacitors. She turns on the soldering iron too. "I'm not an electrical engineer, but my professor. Selvig. He made sure we knew how to assemble electronics because he would always make bad soldering contact points on his equipment. All his students who went on field trips with him quickly learnt how to fix them."

That includes Jane then and presumably several other talented students. Once the bulk of the device is made, there is a small but brief smile. "Thank you," she says directly, then moves it over to the station with the solder and begins to fit in the last bits of the electronics.

With the device completed, she puts in a battery and turns it on. A small LED lights up and she approaches Fry struggling against the metal and the mop gag. She stares at him a little longer and then whispers, "I'm sorry buddy." Forcefully, she stabs the device in to his ear, then walks back to her laptop.

She connects the new bluetooth device named 'EAR PROBE' and a spectra of information appears. Then, she feeds it in to the S.E.N.S.E. software and hits 'go'. A slow progress bar indicator appears. She looks back to Ava and then asks with all sincerity that somehow sounds insincere from her, "How is Ellison doing?"

Ava Starr has posed:
Ava watches Darcy's very utilitarian approach to science. It's vastly different than the HYDRA bastards and most of the SHIELD eggheads she's seen thus far. Finley is practical, to be sure. But still gentle. Darcy has no finess... though she does seem to be effective. It's just surprising that Drooler doesn't even seem to flex at the rough treatment.

"Huh? OH. Oh, she seems to be stable," she replies. "At least, that's what Simmons said. We still don't know what the little buggers do, or how to reprogram them. I've really gotta track down Danvers again. But... she's breathing and doesn't seem in danger of exploding messily all over the place. We consider that a win." A beat. "She's, uh, out getting groceries."

Her brows knit faintly. "Is it working?"

Darcy Lewis has posed:
Darcy nods her head at the news about Finley. She reaches over to her right with a cupped hand. There's no coffee there. She curls her fingers and then looks back at the laptop. "It's working." There's a beep and a model of Earth appears. Little dots start to appear around the world.

"That's not right," she says and zooms in. They mostly seem to be on the ground already. But then more and more dots start to appear, higher, falling, some out near orbit. They're tiny tiny things which is why regular satellite and monitoring equipment has so far missed it.

Darcy's expression becomes deadpan in shock. She double-checks it and then zooms out, with thousands upon thousands more little dots all seemingly approaching Earth like a swarm of locusts. "Uhh.." For the first time since she got here she looks totally rattled.

The word 'Danvers' was mentioned and so now Carol is firmly in her mind. She pulls the satellite radio from her belt and turns it on, then hits a few buttons and says, "This is Agent Lewis. Priority One, get me Agent Danvers. We have a serious imminent threat incoming."

(cue title music: Sixx: A.M. - This is gunna hurt https://youtu.be/dbjYLNxCwZ4)