10912/Arrangements for the Orphan

Arrangements for the Orphan
Date of Scene:	26 April 2022
Location:	Gotham City
Synopsis:	Nadia and Natasha search a bunker in Gotham after an outbreak of Red Room operatives sterilizing their targets for information.
Cast of Characters:	Natasha Romanoff, Cassandra Cain, Nadia Pym-van Dyne

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Natasha Romanoff has posed:
She's sore, bruised, and just given Dottie Underwood permission to go off on her own agenda. Desperate times, desperate measures. Natasha Romanoff goes to take her fingers up to her cheek, and her comm <<Nadia, I'm going to need to have you get me some information. And pass some along. I'm sorry for making you play telephone here.>>

Cassandra Cain has posed:
Having had to keep things on the down-low, the local vigilantes have apparently persuaded the City Council that this area was largely condemned. They haven't gotten nearly as far as they could have in the excavation as if it were being done openly, but they have managed to clear the main room area.

This includes a great deal of smashed and destroyed equipment. The damage looks consistent with what would happen if one of the walls exploded outward, likely a shaped self-destruct charge activated to remove the site from existence. It SHOULD be much worse, the fact that there's the possibility of excavation at all is unheard of.

Only one bomb would not be the norm for the Red Room. There would be others, but a quick inspection shows that those have been disarmed, likely crudely and in a rush. The site was saved at the last second, at least partly. The lower levels are likely to be undamaged.

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
Computers deeper than they should be? That is worth checking out and there are few people more qualified to do that than a scientific genius familiar with Red Room technology.

Once it seems like the scene is secure and she's verified everyone is in one piece, Nadia begins descending down into the bunker. There are of course mystery agents that need to be pursued, but if there is one thing the Red Room drilled into her from a young age it is that information is power.

<<Just tell me what you need.>> Nadia replies. Sending messages is something she is fairly good at, between her access to all manner of technology and network broad network of contacts. <<First though, I think we should figure out exactly what was going on down here.>>

Natasha Romanoff has posed:
Natasha Romanoff knows well how these sorts of things go. She helped assemble several such sites, and wipe them. She's going now with Nadia down in the bunkers. Weapon in front of her, a small flashlight, a gas mask.. And some light ceramic plates over on top of her bodysuit for some of the nastier booby traps that could be there.

<<I'll need what data the locals have on the girls and the sites. We need to hit the ground running and work together. Give them information from SHIELD's files on the Red Room. And the antidotes that Melina made>> They need to have communication setup quickly.

Natasha goes to start to sweep, a first go over for any bombs left over or booby traps. She looks.. Where she would put them to cause the most damage and cover. She trusts Nadia to handle her own end as Natasha carefully sweeps for danger..

Cassandra Cain has posed:
Nadia's systems would encounter the expected walls, blocks put in in case anyone tried to do exactly what she's doing. The systems that are still active and alive are heavily protected. Nothing that can't be gotten past, but they aren't a joke either. The only thing she can pull out immediately is a record of the system already having been accessed, fairly recently. It seems that someone else already pulled the files.

Good luck to them though. Without the encryption codes, they're probably -still- decrypting them!

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
Nadia escaping the Red Room triggered a larger response than any other Widow defection. This was not because she was the deadliest, she was not, it was because she was part of the Science Class, Lyudmila Kudrin's initiative to arm the Red Room with Super Science such that they could go from assassinating individuals to assassinating nations. The Science Class was behind the Red Room's rapid transition from KGB era gadgetry to sophisticated robotic decoys and even advanced cloning in recent years. All of that is to say, when it comes to the advanced technologies employed by the Red Room, Nadia is very much in her element.

<<This shouldn't take long.>> Nadia calls back to Natasha. Encryption is all well and good to stop most people, less so when they secretly built themselves backdoors into all of the projects they worked on, which were then later disseminated to the different branches of the Red Room at large. She's not Oracle, Oracle could likely crack these systems from the outside, but with a home field advantage, she doesn't need to be.

<<Well this isn't good, it looks like someone was already in the system recently, the data may have already been copied or possibly tampered with.>>

Natasha Romanoff has posed:
Natasha Romanoff would murmur <<Someone probably took it as backups and dwonloaded it. If they had the time they might have tampered with it. You can reconstruct it.>> She would now to go to sweep her weapon around, searching for wherever hte bunks might have been. If this was long term storage there would still be living quarters for the girls here. It would be somewhere they were expected to stay for an extended period..

<<Who was the girl that attacked us? She's good. SHe was able to ambush me>> Natasha is very, veyr paranoid. Being struck out of nowhere by someone is -damned- hard. The number of people on the planet who can do it is small.

TIme to add another to the list it seems.

Presuming she can find where the bunks would be, Natasha would look around.. Then slide her eyes towards where personal spaces would have been. Girls underground would still be girls. They would still socialize, spend time with one another..

She starts to slide her eyes around, looking for sunken places, wall panels..

Write things to one another. Girls kept diaries. Even in these old places. If they'd been given orders to go to ground and scatter.. W ell.. Programming would have made them leave it here, and any other personal effects.

Cassandra Cain has posed:
The download begins. Standard Red Room operations system, a little bit low-budget actually. They didn't give this team the full treatment; it was an experimental setup, and budgets were getting tight back home.

The full staff and student roster is easy to find, including assigned names and pictures. It's just as simple to line them up with the dots currently loose on Nadia's tracker.

They're likely in their home turf now; these girls have had years to learn the territory. It won't be easy to get them all.

Mind control protocols are listed, because of course they would be. Also the pattern that everyone was looking for, that all the attacks have been related to the Bunker. Suppliers, trainers. The girls are doing exactly what they were told. Cleanup.

No wall panels would have survived that explosion. However Nat does find a passage, mostly cleaned out by the work team. There's a room off to one side, with bunks.

And one that shows signs of recent use. It appears that after the place was abandoned, one girl stayed behind.

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
<<Hard to be sure.>> Nadia replies when asked about the identity of the girl Natasha fought. <<I never got to get a good look at her.>> She'll definitely have to work on adding more speed to those wings to avoid further late arrivals when time counts. She does have some suspisions based on relayed pictures, but it's best to let Tim handle that for now, if its true.

<<Assuming it wasn't tampered with, all of this data lines up. They've spread out to assassinate all of the logistical loose ends that could possibly trace this project.>> The mind control data makes her frown. The Science Class thankfully escaped mind control in order to preserve their creativity, but that doesn't make her dislike it any less. <<It looks like they may be under heavy mind control. But perhaps we can turn that to our advantage making use of their conditioning triggers.>>

Natasha Romanoff has posed:
Natasha Romanoff is going to slowly sweep around with her light and her gun. First check over is to look for traps. Anyone's personal belongings would be setup with them. She'd learned that hte hard way that training didn't stop when it was time to sleep and relax. She's moving to slowly glance around and take the light to inspect things.

<<One of them spent more time here. After the others left here. The timing doesn't add up. If the place was abandoned, one of them wouldn't have come back here to stay. But this place is too lockedup for someone casual to have been here.>> She would look about, going to cautiously start to try and sort through the area.

<<None of the signs of the local groups. No signs of their particular theatrics or forced entry>>

Listening to Nadia back for a moment, thinking. <<Good. Also if we can figure out who their handler was.. They each have their own little techniques and styles. I appreciate whatever information you can get. Make sure you give the locals whatever we have on the countering agents>> A few more slow pokes as Natasha continues to investigate the mystery of the girl that stayed.

Cassandra Cain has posed:
There's an unending list of information to be collated and processed. All the necessary data required to raise thirty young girls. Training, adapted for the Americas. Scores and ratings for their time spent here. Reports of failures, which means the murder of the child upon failure.

Not a single full Widow exited these halls, it seems. They weren't here long enough for one: the locals are apparently efficient in monitoring their territory. The history of the site shows that they were noticed nearly immediately upon startup! Not directly, but enough to apply pressure to the work.

Natasha's work is a bit less direct. She finds a few black hairs in the bed. She finds scraps of food, all natural: the diet of a girl in heavy training.

Then she hears something. As if something in the room moved, on its own. Slight, barely there. And not repeated.

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
<<It's going to take time to sort through all of this, there's a lot here. For now, I

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
<<It's going to take time to sort through all of this, there's a lot here. For now, I'll just send you the highlights of what I've been able to skim so far and we can work from there. If we wait around too long a lot more people are going to get hurt if we don't stop the agents in the field.>> Nadia connects a datajack from her suit into the system and then routes principally the personnel files and mind control data through her comm to Natasha.

Natasha Romanoff has posed:
Natasha Romanoff goes to slowly scan around. There's that sense of something else being here. Moving. For just a moment. Then gone. Food. Lots of it. Heavy calories and protein. For someone pushing thier body to the limit. Hairs.. A small sample is taken over for later analysis. She would muse.. <<I think one of them stayed here after the place was abandoned>> That goes agains talmos tall what she's seen of the Red Room's conditioning methods.. Weapon in front of her, Nadia speaking.. <<Then decrypt and download it and make offsite backups in a couple of different places and make sure that they're isolated>> Natasha's in paranoia mode. They found a large Red Room cell that had enough personnel and infrastructure left to function.

Paranoia is justified as far as she is concerned. Then.. She goes to start to whistle, and sing. ~Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine~. She does a very good rendition of an old singer on the radio. Matching tone.. Having a presumption she was being watched..
    Conditioning equaled paranoia and wariness. So what one did was try to appeal on another level. Emotional confusion. That might get a chord.

And quiet. Nothing at all. Nothing but silence to greet her back. <<You're right. LEt's get going.>> Time to go up to try and stop the madness. And quiet is all that's left in the bunker once again