4107/Open Doors: Foreshadow

Open Doors: Foreshadow
Date of Scene:	12 November 2020
Location:	Empty Room - Avengers Mansion
Synopsis:	Something odd haunts the rooms of Barton and Rogers!
Cast of Characters:	Tony Stark, Clint Barton, Steve Rogers

---

Tony Stark has posed:
It starts with just a call, from Stark. Both Rogers and Barton will get the same communication, a group connected call. It's strange in that it's late, and may wake up those who are sleeping. But this call has the tone of being urgent to it, breaking into slumber for good reason.

A quick look will reveal the time at 12:02am.

"Apologies about the beauty sleep, guys," Stark is saying loudly. So intrusive. "Buuuuuut I'm getting some alarms going off. As you know, we don't /watch/ your rooms. Honestly I don't want to. But there's something coming up on my brand new security scans. Might be nothing. ...it's probably not nothing, though. Permission to run some better, in-depth scans on your rooms?.... and, ha ha, ... do you /see/ anything in there with you?...."

The tone is not appropriate to be a prank, Stark isn't laughing. Examinations of the rooms visually doesn't reveal something immediately, but there's an eerie feeling. One that's clung a few times over the past week or so, but no doubt thought to be nothing. A sense of anxiety with no exact source.

...or was there something, that shadow cast by a lamp.....?

Clint Barton has posed:
Sleeping. That's actually what Barton was doing. Finally having lost the nightmares of demons chasing him, they had been replaced with the 'working too hard/too much' dreams of sand and Afghanistan and Russia.. fighting the 'bad guys'. Much better!

Rolling over, Clint puts a pillow over his head, but the coms? They're built special for his room; can't always be assured he's got his hearing aids in after all, so there's the added physical 'bzz' vibration; subtle but something that'll wake the light sleeper. Rolling heavily onto his back, the pillow thrown the side, Clint rises to elbows when he catches the sound of Stark's voice.

"What--" Alarms? "What alarms?" Blue eyes look around the room, the dim lights casting shadows.

In the next moment, the archer is rolling off his bed, barefeet hitting the ground, "Yes," there's a beat before, "What sort of alarms? As in 'magic stuff' or 'hell stuff' or .. 'alien stuff'? It actually makes a difference here."

Steve Rogers has posed:
Content to sleep with no lights on but for the ambient lighting of the property through a crack in the blinds, Steve is, well...out like a light when the call comes at 12:02am. It brings him to awaken with a soft snort. Just as quickly, adrenaline has him sitting up and blinking at the thin beam of light falling in through the pulled curtains.

Oh, it's Tony -- but 'guys'? The Captain peers as another voice hops in: Barton. Sitting up in bed now, he reaches blindly over to smack at the touch-base of his lamp and floods his room with light, JARVIS be damned.

"Scan 'em, Tony," chimes the man even as he too is getting out of bed. The carpeting feels cooler tonight, but it's also autumn. Sleep-warmth still clings to his sleep t-shirt and seer-sucker cotton sleep-pants. "'nd what stuff?" he echoes of Clint, already walking more tentatively towards the main living room of his quarters.

The air has a feeling of a held breath and he doesn't like it.

Tony Stark has posed:
"Uhhh, gut instinct?... let's go with 'possibly alternate-dimensional', but this is actually something I added to help pick up on telekinetic energy, so ... sort of a question mark, which is why I'd like to do more in-depth look. But I respect your privacy -- not that I would if I thought it was eating your faces. Just to clarify that," Stark chatters, but he's actually enacting the scans.

"So, no slender-man in there with you? That's good. Maybe. Could just be invisible. I'm getting it on your shared wall," Tony clarifies.

That is, in fact, the wall with the lamps, for both men; the surface of the painted wall shows nothing at all. Perhaps the scans are wrong.

But Rogers and Barton both know what it feels like to have an enemy's eye on them from an unknown place. It's just disconcerting.

"Um." Not a good start. "Huh." Tony's deciding how to put it. "It's looking at you, Steve. Pretty sure."

There's nothing there.

Clint Barton has posed:
"Okay, remember when I said that 'it makes a difference'?" Clint grabs a handful of specialty arrow heads (piles) for a quick flip, "Not with 'alternate dimensional'. That's, like, all three."

Clint's trying to keep talking, though he knows he can be tracked.. just in case. Old habits and all. Blue eyes look towards the wall in question, squinting as if that may help him see something in another dimension. Nope.

"Stark, I'll blow that wall out if it helps.. Steve? You okay, buddy?"

Steve Rogers has posed:
Steve emerges out into the living space. It's quiet here too, lit by the strips of light where he'd drawn the blinds hours back. Another quick and stealthy step over to his work desk and he pulls the click-string, floods the room with a surprising amount of light for the size of the lamp.

Tending towards silence when dealing with an unknown, unseen enemy, Steve listens and carefully, carefully looks over the shared wall in question. He can see absolutely //nothing// currently, not even a fleck of paint out of place.

It makes the back of his neck tingle something fierce. "'m still here, Barton. Nobody's got any lines of sight on the windows...?" he asks very quietly, associating this sensation of being watched with the near-sixth sense he has for snipers.

Thanks, Barnes, you taught him well.

Tony Stark has posed:
"I mean, not that I'm against wall destruction, but--- oh wait, hold up. Some movement now. I look forward to showing you this recording. A little bit Poltergeist---"

There's something now, a ripple across the wall. Both men on either side will see it, as if a pebble was dropped onto a perfectly still liquid surface, yet it is sideways, on the wall, spreading out across the paint flecks, as if the light were warping with the flutter through it.

And there's the outline of a shape of a person, and the sense of being witnessed from that area. "Okay, it's fading," Stark reports.



That can't be right. There's someone there...

Clint Barton has posed:
Clint's watching intently, trying to see what it is that Stark is supposedly seeing, even commenting, "Okay, Halloween is over. Supposedly all those little dimensions to hell are closed, right?" Except for that stupid demon.. thing.

"Wait.. I see something," and Clint's eyes are riveted to the wall, "What's your read, Stark? Is it actually anything? IR? Help me out, here.."

Clint tosses an arrow tip towards the apparition; a goop-filled.. and should it hit solid, it'll deploy some viscuous .. goo. It'll also take some time to clean up afterwards..

"This.. it feels like someone's here.."

Steve Rogers has posed:
Steve watches this eerieness with a stillness of poise very counter to the riffling moving across the wall itself. His eyes narrow as the subtle motions seem to formulate into a recognizable humanoid shape and he inhales to say something, most likely argue against the report from the scan.

Instead: "Something's not right about this."

Then, the Captain falls silent as a weird wash of vertigo overtakes him.

THUMP. That's definitely the sound of a super-soldier trying to grab at his chair and failing.

Everything blurs to his vision -- goes technicolor and abstract, familiar and not --

-- leaves him with his palms over his face as god-only-knows how many seconds have passed. He's on the floor. When did he end up on the floor? Everything has after-lighting glow around it before he blinks it away.

"'s'not fading," he then reports with a bit of a shocked croak to his words.

Tony Stark has posed:
Clint shoots at the wall, and the humanoid shape on the other side seems to collapse - even though the goo just splatters all over the wall itself, impacting that reality, not actually shooting through the wall at all. But that's what Clint sees.

On Steve's side, his wall suddenly seems to pulse with liquid goop-mess, five or six strange droplet-like radiants of ripples coming out of multiple sites on the wall. Or maybe inside the viewer's vision? Is perception to be trusted?...

--
"Yeah, I could have been more descriptive. It was sort of a mass on the wall, with these round things that are probably eyes. It's faded out now into just this little patch there, I'm losing track of it. I'm not getting it on any of my normal scans at all, just this new one. This thing could have been on the wall for a month and we'd have no idea...." Tony's chatty.

That probably makes everyone feel a LOT better...

"Clint, Steve's down!!" Tony says urgently into the comm. The unspoken being 'get the hell in there'. The humanoid shape may have been Steve.

Clint Barton has posed:
"You really could have. Work on that, okay?" Clint's backed up by the bed, and as the goop arrowhead deploys, it splays all over the wall. "Pass my apologies on to the housekeepers, okay? I'll give 'em..."

'... down!'

That's all that Clint fully catches, but with the *thump* that sounds in the other room, the archer is the hell out of his own room, grabbing one of his telescoping sticks while gripping a couple of tips in his hand. Down the hall only a couple of steps, and without knocking, the archer is setting his shoulder to the door to help push it open on the off chance that it's locked.

"Cap!" is called out..

Steve Rogers has posed:
He can still see it -- how the wall suddenly began to melt and reform and suddenly his own vision went askew and is //still// askew by how he's having trouble rolling from his back to his side.

"JARVIS, 's'Barton, unlock it," he says, stumbling over the words. The door, he means, but surely the AI is smart enough to extrapolate this, especially in light of Tony's warranted concern. "Barton, 'm fine."

His desk-chair slides as he reaches for it as a crutch and wood whacks off the desk, marking the man a liar as he at least makes it onto one knee. "Tony, there's //something there//," Steve insists more firmly now, regathering his composure even if he's still woozy as hell.

Tony Stark has posed:
"Okay, I'm not there; boots on the ground is all you, Clint," Tony says firmly. He's at the tower: he'd been handling everything remotely. "Really, I'm not getting anything here anymore, it's faded out. I'll get analysis going on all of this immediately, but ... I really suggest you get the hell out of there. I think it's just that wall, but until we know what it is, how to contain it... well. You're both welcome at the Tower if you're feeling freaked out. No judgement."

The wall seems back to normal. Even that shadow from the lamp is gone.

Maybe it wasn't the lamp.

Clint Barton has posed:
Clint shoulder shoves the door open, just as JARVIS releases it. Ever helpful, that AI.. and he stumbles one step, two before righting himself. "Cap.." and the archer is crossing the short distance in strides to get to the man.

Offering a hand up for steadying, Clint's glancing back at the wall. "Yeah, I saw something too.. " Now, however, he has the grace to look vaguely apologetic. "Little mess on the wall.." though now, he's got his attention firmly back to Steve.

Brows rise, "Let's get you up.."

"Tony, yeah.. I'm thinkin' the couch downstairs would be good. I'm sure you don't want me or Steve cramping your style out there."

Steve Rogers has posed:
"Thanks, Barton." Gratefully, Steve takes the archer's offered hand and gets to his feet. He still needs to use the back of the chair to steady himself, dizzy as he is as if he'd had too much oxygen and too little sleep at once.

"Gonna give Janet a ring," he says, in agreement that he's got a place where he won't be interfering with the genius inventor's work. "Still gonna stop by, Tony. I want to see what those scan's pulled up, if anything. Thinking for now, we seal off the rooms. Maybe this'll keep it contained."

Whatever //it is// -- because Tony's not wrong. This is eerie as hell and enough to knock a metahuman sideways; more than enough to warrant some immediate action.

Tony Stark has posed:
"Yep, I'll keep vigilant with these scans... and I think I can do some calibrating now that I've got readings on it to improve visibility. .... but that's a project for 9am Tony, not past-midnight Tony." Since they appear to be safe and the danger is not immediately down their throats!

"I wouldn't invite you if I weren't fine with it. I'd have suggested a hotel," Tony teases Clint, as well. There's no actual pressure in it, though: it doesn't insult Tony even a bit. "I'll rouse the folks on either side of you now too. I just enjoy hearing Sam grumble."

Despite the chattiness, Tony is relieved under it. This could have been far worse. Still very alarming, though.

Suddenly, their mobile devices chirp: Tony sent some images over to whet their appetite. It's very odd looking, sort of mushy like infrared, but in tones of black and white. There's a shadowy THING on the wall, a mass, with some eyeball like forms that are, in all the pictures, oriented right at the small little blips that signify the men in the rooms. ...It most certainly was staring at them. And the codes on the pictures suggest it was there for over an hour.

"It was watching you sleep," Tony helps.

Clint Barton has posed:
Clint is more than happy to serve as an anchor for America's Hero, and he stands stock still while Steve catches his balance. He's creeped out, and his glance keeps shooting back and forth; he's on high alert, and he can feel his own heart pounding. "I'd almost say to shut down the floor, one up and one down."

Though, the fact that Steve is headed to Janet's gives the archer a quick nod in acknowledgment. "I'll figure it out. The hardest part of moving is the equipment." All his bows and arrows!

The *ding* of pictures as they're uploaded causes Clint to move the arrowheads to a pocket in exchange for the phone. Opening it up, he stares at it for a long moment before shaking his head, turning off the phone and setting it into his pocket once more.

"Great. So not getting any sleep tonight..."

Steve Rogers has posed:
"No kidding. Gotta quick-pack," mutters Steve of moving equipment and various sundries of his own as he lets go of the chair now. His balance seems to have returned. He's aware of Clint's own uncertainty and doesn't deny it in himself. Anxiety is something he'll listen to now and then, if he's certain it doesn't emanate from himself. The wall now doing nothing but //being a wall// gets a long, suspicious true-blue look from the Captain.

But then comes the chime. Steve pulls his own phone from his pocket, somehow having remembered to grab it up when he'd left his bedroom. He too stares at the picture and notes the time stamp.

"Looking forward to seeing what you come up with in the morning, Tony," he says in a cheerfully forced manner before sliding his phone away. NOPE. NOPE NOPE NOPE. "Let the others know they're fine to move rooms or take up that hotel idea of yours in the meantime?"

Tony Stark has posed:
"Yep, already done, way ahead of you," Tony says, cheerfully, though his undertone betrays that he may or may not actually sleep himself, and might just work on this. The man doesn't really know how to set down an interesting project: and this certainly qualifies.

"I'll keep you updated on the other things I find." Of which there will be things. Guaranteed, from Stark!