13526/Unidentified Flying Nerds

Unidentified Flying Nerds
Date of Scene:	07 December 2022
Location:	Maria Hill's Office
Synopsis:	Maria Hill meets with Darcy Lewis with regard to a spike in UAPs around the Atlantic Starport and some of SHIELD's assets.
Cast of Characters:	Maria Hill, Darcy Lewis

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Maria Hill has posed:
It may or may not be a unusual situation for the Deputy Director to send a summons to Darcy's work space, but today... it happened. Maria had sent out the message through the SHIELD in-system wire, and given little to no reason why just 'Come by my office when you got a chance.'. So it didn't sound urgent, if that mattered to the astrophycisist.

The Deputy Director's office is up on the floor with all the other fancy offices, its walls all glass, but the glass fogged out from the exterior hallway. The glass doorway IN to the office was not fogged-out though, and it was even open when Darcy would eventually arrive.

Maria stands beside the windows looking outside. She has her back to the door, and her phone is heled up to her right ear. She's dressed in a dark blue SHIELD jumper, a black utility belt around her waist... She was always prone to dressing in uniform, rather than a suit or some such... likely the service-history side of her persona.

"Right. No, I know. You didn't need to hear any of that." Maria is saying in to her phone as she turns around then, taking a step back toward her desk....

Darcy Lewis has posed:
It's probably unusual!

Most people forget Darcy even works here. As a spy, she's... well, she's not really a spy. She's the former grad student of someone much more famous, and her qualifications for the job are a dash of academic performance and a whoooole lot of 'wrong place at the right time.' Meet a space-god, stumble into government cover-up nonsense, get hired so you don't cause trouble!

But hey, it pays the rent.

These days, of course, she works more formally for S.W.O.R.D, and generally only in R&D and on 'long range observation,' because frankly she's happy not getting shot at by weirdos and chased by monsters from the beyond, thankyouvery much. So a message on the internal system surprises her only in the sense that it means someone is actually concerned with her admittedly obscure work. Oh, and someone important. She'd probably have kept anyone else waiting for a while, especially with that leeway of 'when she has a chance,' as rigorous observation of hierarchy and bureaucracy are not her strong points. Butttt she'll make an exception for one of the bosses. Plus it's a slow day.

She still doesn't RUSH, though.

Which is fine, because it seems like the Deputy Director is on a call. She reaches up to give a little knock-knock on the open door just to announce she's there. Oh, listen to that, spy stuff. Her eyes roam to look up and off at some random corner of the ceiling. Lalala...

Maria Hill has posed:
The sun is headed down outside, thus the view behind Maria is a bleak grey sky with a nice cold wintery undertone to it, there's a Quinjet visibly making its way out from the headquarters, having clearly taken off just a few minutes ago. Maria looks up from leaning a little over her desk, she looks to Darcy in the doorway and raises her free hand to motion her in with a 'come here' gesture.

"No, I get it. You weren't even supposed to be there." She further says in to this obviously Super Spy conversation she's having on the phone.

"Look, Nichols, I have a situation I need to tend to, but when I have a chance, I'll make sure that the night crew don't mess with the monkies anymore."

What?

"Mmmhmm, thanks." She further says before pulling her smart phone from her face, tapping the button and then setting the phone down. She exhales, and clicks something on her laptop on her desk.

"Sorry about that. Apparently some of the labs downstairs are fighting with each other over who gets a specific type of monkey to experiment on. It's.. a mess... and the monkies aren't very happy about it either." She grumbles before motioning to the chair across her fancy desk. "Darcy. It's good to see you." Maria says with a smile. "Agent Lewis, even."

Once on the edge of her chair, Maria sits with her back straight, but her elbows forward on the edge of her desk. She folds her arms over one another and stares over the desk at the other woman.

"So... I asked you up here, because something odd has come across my desk, and I wasn't sure who else to talk to who was in-house today. I glanced down the roster of people here now..." Maria glances at her laptop, then smirks and looks back. "And, well, here you are. How ready are you for something weird? Something ... possibly dumb?"

Darcy Lewis has posed:
Encouraged forward, Darcy takes a few steps closer, inevitably overhearing more of the conversation than she probably cares to. Her normal operating philosophy is the opposite of being a busybody, in fact. As far as she's concerned, if she doesn't know about it, it's not anything she has to worry about! Ignorance is bliss! So much for that, anyway, since the Deputy Director insists on explaining it.

"If they can't work it out, maybe they can just experiment on each other, give the monkeys a vacation. Human DNA isn't far off," she suggests. This is a very Darcy thing to say!

"Oh, no, no, Darcy's fine," she insists as the other woman corrects herself. 'Agent Lewis' makes that spy stuff all seem awful real, and puts her smack dab in the middle of it, making it hard to pretend her life isn't a total ridiculous mess. She deos sit down, though, because chairs are comfy. Comfy like her very dressed-down, non secret agent-y attire. She looks very much like any random collegiate hipster, though she has a labcoat on over the dark sweater.

"Something odd, right. Sure. That's kind of my department." Admittedly, there are plenty of weird things around here that are totally out of her line of expertise, but its a crapshoot who's on duty, and people are always trying to make her do work that's outside of her job description. 'Analyze the human-fish hybrid, Darcy.' 'Just get a medical degree, Darcy.' Real things people have said to her! "No promises, but I'll take a look?" It really has been a slow day, or she might not be volunteering!

Maria Hill has posed:
The younger Agent gets a even, warm even, smile from Maria. She lingers like that for a moment before she looks down at her desk again. "Okay, so... this is 'dumb' in so far as to say that the ... culture around it is dumb. The Agent who brought this report to me, Agent Garcia, said not to think of it as dumb, but to think of it as important, 'wrapped' in a 'dumb burrito'." Maria just exhales sharply then and there.

Her hands go to a tablet resting on the middle of her desk, she keys it on, spins it around and slides it toward Darcy. The tablet is locked to Darcy's clearance level, and will ID her face when she picks it up and looks at its screen, then it will unlock.

On the tablet is a series of images, images taken from aircraft surveillance cameras, from ground surveillance cameras, and from some that look like they're taken with handheld phone cameras. They're all mostly the same things, clear 'glass-like' bubbles with strange metallic shapes inside them. Cubes. Pyramids. Spheres. Even a cylinder. They all rest inside those glass balls and seem to be hovering in mid-air, or mid-flight alongside the aircraft.

"We're not alone in this universe anymore. We've known this for over a decade... I'm sure that likely influenced your career choices... but that's just me making an assumption." She shows a light lopsided smirk.

A nod is given to the tablet then. "But those images, most of them are taken from... well before I was even alive. Okay, not all of them, just some of them. Our earliest image of those objects dates back to the early 1960s, and as recent as... well... yesterday."

Darcy Lewis has posed:
The words 'Dumb Burrito' definitely have Darcy looking like she regrets coming up here so quickly!

Despite any resistance to internalizing her 'spy lady' identity, the woman nonetheless knows the drill, knows her procedures. She reaches for the tablet, holds for a moment for it to unlock, her expression bland and unamused.

Fortunately all of her facial recognition scans boast some powerful RBF. So it matches up!

Once unlocked, Darcy sits back a bit more and starts swiping through the files. "I wouldn't characterize any part of my so-called career as any kind of intentional choice," she mutters along as she continues to look. "More like an ongoing trainwreck. Also: it's more like 'never were' than 'anymore,'" she adds, correcting the Deputy Director (!) in her choice of wording. "That was kind of the key to Dr. Selvig's work, that Jane picked up on." Norse crap. Myths. THOOOOR.

Darcy flicks through another image. "Obviously I can't say much from just a photo, even a pile of photos. Could be almost anything. Some of these," and she pauses on the newer smartphone images, "could have been done up in photoshop. Though I trust the older ones come from some verified archive or whatever." After exhausting the list, she offers the tablet back. "At a glance, it doesn't line up with any of what we have on file for known extra terrestrial tech or species. Not Krpytonian, Asgardian, Shi'ar, Kree." She makes a circular gesture, like she could keep going. "Could be something new. Could be weird tech from here on Earth. I'd need a closer look."

Maria Hill has posed:
Maria just goes on to fold her arms across the edge of the table in front of her as she watches Darcy skim through the photos. "UAPs, as they're known these days. Unidentified Aerial Phenomenons. The thing is... those cell phone shots? They came from our own people. In fact, if you look at the second folder on that tablet, it has video footage too. These things have been... exploding lately. Not in the fiery, destructive, kind of sense of the word, but rather in the... they are being seen every single day now, around our Carriers, and around the new Themysciran joint Starport out in the Atlantic. The Starport has asked us to look in to them more, and this is where I am on it so far."

Maria leans back in her chair then, her elbows going to the arms of the chair, and her hands going in to her lap. "The damn things don't like being approached, but they don't mind approaching us... on their terms. If we try to return the sniff, they vanish. Just... up and vanish. One second they're right there out the viewport. The next? They're 50 klicks out."

She draws in a breath then, and slowly exhales it. "Now, since we've been dealing with a lot of open tensions with extra-terrestial species ... this probably isn't a big deal. For all we know, these things are maybe even not from space, but rather from here on Earth. Maybe they're Chinese drones. Maybe Russian. All I know is that we're seeing them, a lot lately. So I'm curious as to whether or not you'd like to get a few days assignment out at the Starport. See if we can't get you a closer look at them... if you'd be up for that. I need as many eyes on these things as possible. Eyes that have unique suggestions. Unique ideas."

Darcy Lewis has posed:
"Oh, I believe it," Darcy stresses. "It'd be pretty strange to sit here playing skeptic when I still have a genuine alien ray-gun half-disassembled down in the lab and spend a good portion of my hours logging recon on an orbitting spaceship." She shakes her head, putting off any such idea, while she flips over to watch whatever video they have. Letting it play out, there's relative quiet until the video concludes. She definitely seems curious, watching the little things bobble about and then vanish.

Then, as a preface to any further thought, she announces: "Anything I say is going to be pure conjecture and speculation. Recon drones is definitely possible, based on the observed behavior... but I feel in situations like this I always have to warn people of Anthropomorphic bias. That we're trying to frame something totally alien in human terms, when there's no reason to assume it operates at any sort of similar level. It's just really impossible to make even a loosely-informed guess."

Eventually she pushes the tablet back across. "Earth-based is very possible. Everyone's got their own natives working on answers to StarkTech. Not exactly great spy drones if we're seeing them everywhere, but who knows." Her expression turns toward a somewhat scowling tell me about it look over their ongoing space woes, and finally, to just... bland acceptance. "Sure, why not. Wouldn't be my first time out there. But I don't know that my eyes are gong to do much for you. Both for the obvious reasons," she's not wearing her huge hipster glasses today, sure, but they're a frequent look at presumably replaced by contacts. "And, well, I guess the also obvious reason that we already have plenty of visual evidence. I can bring some of my equipment out for more scientifically rigorous observation, though you might have to get the locals to sign off."

Maria Hill has posed:
Throughout Darcy's response, Maria keeps her eye contact. She does show little facial expressions here and there, amusement at how Darcy speaks, or what she says, before there at the end, she just nods once. "Yeah, you know, honestly... whether we come up with anything or not, I just like the idea of having your name on this rather than... some random jet mechanic with his phone whipped out. Having your name on it legitimizes whatever we finally decide to turn in as a report back to the Director. The fact that these things predate the alien contact we've had in the past decade, by many more decades over.... I'd say this is what personally intrigues me the most about these things. As you said, it's not a very great spy drone, if we've been seeing them since Kennedy was in office. But, we've been seeing them since then, and still don't know what the hell they are, so maybe they're the greatest spy drone ever created."

She smirks at this then before sitting up in her chair again. "Thanks for being a good sport about this one too, I know its coming way out of left field, so to speak. At least the accomodations at the Starport are top tier, and hey... ocean view in every direction."

Maria accepts the tablet back and spins it around again. She unlocks it and taps something upon its screen.

"I'm going to send all of this to your station, for records purposes. I'm going to let the Quinjet you'll be tagged to know that you're bringing some of your own equipment too, and I'll set you up with the nicest room we got at the SHIELD Rotunda at the port. Agent Nichols is the current commanding officer there now. She'll be happy to see you, I'm sure. She loves the science types." Another quick smile is offered over to the other woman across the desk then.

Darcy Lewis has posed:
By contrast, Darcy doesn't seem intrigued at all. Possibly, it's because she's got a pile of work and ALL of it is alien nonsense of one variety or another. Work is work! She goes on, a little blandly: "Most of the existence of the universe predates us, so it sort of goes to figure. If anything, the remarkable part is that we've managed to align our civilizational timelines at all, to the point where we can interact. On the time scale of the life of the universe, a 50 year window is like picking out a grain of sand from orbit. And we've done it a bunch of times over. So take that, Fermi paradox." Is she always like this?

...yes.

"I'll just treat it like a fancy vacation," she declares, and starts to stand up. "Gotta love that Amazon hospitality. I'll put together a manifest of what I'll need so we can get that all loaded. Timing for this is pretty good, actually. Just finishing up at the University this week." Being a SPY LADY requires a cover, right? Or, well, just a day job. But either way, she does some teaching, too, following in the footsteps of her pair of extremely well-published mentors. "Wonder what kinda winter solstice type holdiay they celebrate..."

Maria Hill has posed:
Whether Darcy is like this all the time or not, Maria responds to it seemingly well with a warm smile for her initial tangent, followed by a soft laugh at the vacation angle. "That's the spirit." She replies. "And feel free to rummage through the scanning tech we have on offering, take whatever you are comfortable operating with you, I'll make sure to sign off on it."

"Thanks again, Agen... Darcy." Maria states as she stands up and steps around the corner of her desk to offer a handshake, being more prone to a bit of personal contact than some of the other upper-management types up here, Maria is known for being one of the kind ones, so long as you're on her good side at least.

"It was good to get to see you again too, I look forward to what you come up with on it."