4262/Locking Down the Site

Locking Down the Site
Date of Scene:	30 November 2020
Location:	Municipal Redevelopment Site, NYC
Synopsis:	Agents Morse and Fitz join Agent Carter at the site of the anomaly that ate Agent May. Readings are taken. Memories are jogged. And clues are suggested.
Cast of Characters:	Peggy Carter, Bobbi Morse, Leopold Fitz, Melinda May
Tinyplot:	Times That Bind

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Peggy Carter has posed:
An emergency call went into SHIELD after Melinda May and Peggy Carter went to a site originally owned by the Roxxon Corporation, now being revamped through a huge New York City redevelopment grant (part of which is funded by Roxxon.) It was also the site of the first recorded Nitramene Explosion back in 1946. Of course, it was rebuilt afterward, but it never quite saw the same level of use in subsequent years. The implosion site was always difficult to work in. People complained of "weird things" happening there. But nothing was ever proven. Especially, given the fact Roxxon never let anyone in to investiage. And their own investigations went nowhere, shelved after a dozen years as fruitless. So, that part of the site was abandoned... and mostly forgotten.

When the city finally appropriated the site, Roxxon didn't protest too hard. Expecially since they were given the right to put their branding on it as a major corporate donor. There shouldn't have been any problem really. And, bureaucratically, there wasn't.

The mayor held a ceremony to break ground. And when the digger moved in to scoop that first shovel... all hell broke loose. Relatively speaking.

An anomaly appeared. Rippling the atmosphere like haze off ashphalt on a hot summer day, it coalesced into a shimmer of dark energy that warred with golden light. The digger was sucked into it, the man running it bearly jumping free in time. Authorities cordoned off the area. The city tried to launch its own investigation, but that only resulted in lost equipment and the apparent deaths of two men. Thus, they finally wised up and called in SHIELD.

That was a few hours ago. The emergency call from Peggy Carter went as follows: "We've got an emergency. Agent May has disappeared, seemingly into the distortion at the old Roxxon site. We were attacked by half a dozen masked men and, in the fight, she was pulled into the distortion. I need a full science team down here NOW." Then she went to fully securing the men that did attack them, her scanning tablet still running on the distortion, but she knows this is above her head.

Bobbi Morse has posed:
The response scramble is different every time. Hostiles, agent missing, weird energy distortions. This is disturbingly becoming more and more common for SHIELD.

Gonzales hangs up the phone, Bobbi sitting across from him at his desk. "We have an emergency. Barbara you're up," Gonzales says. Bobbi hates that name but no matter how many times she's told the old man her name is Bobbi, he refuses to use it. Some people. If he weren't such a good director she'd have told him to sod off. Well, she's done that anyway, but some dogs can't learn new tricks.

The three quinjets and a small fleet of SUV's pull up at the construction site. One quinjet stays in the air as the other two land. Bobbi steps out and immediately she's in action, "I want the perimeter up. Agent Stanos get all those civilian cars moved two blocks south of here. Agent Harrows, take three teams and sweep the area. Arrest anyone who isn't meant to be here. Agent Yakov start moving the science gear out. I want a forward base up and running in fifteen minutes, fully operational within the hour."

She claps her hands, "Get moving people." Sunglasses go on, she's got to be SHIELD boss lady today and that carries with it all kinds of unfamiliar stresses. This is the part of being level seven she's still not completely comfortable with and why she always turns down promotions to level eight.

<Agent Carter, this is Agent Morse, I'm on site and on my way> she says over comms. The comms chatter lights up as SHIELD agents go to work. This site is going to be locked down completely. It's rare that she gets to be involved in this sort of thing.. and this is the first time she's been in charge of it.

Leopold Fitz has posed:
There are times that Fitz really, really appreciates being an Agent of SHIELD.

For all his complaining about the sometimes adverse conditions on some of the field operations he has begun to participate in, the challenges that they present are usually unique and filled with all manner of interesting lines of inquiry that need to be properly observed, followed and broken down.

This one though, this one certainly has the potential to stand head and shoulders above the rest. He just loves a good energy portal. The only way that it could be any better is if there was clearly some technology on site responsible. But he will settle for the sheer physics problem.

As intriguing as the alert might have been, he was in the middle of another investigation, locked away in one of the clean rooms back at the Triskillion. Some things just can't be rushed so Fitz is not in the first wave of agents that walk off the quinjets. He is just a few minutes late, arriving with that convoy of SUVs that pull up to the sight minutes later, popping out of the back of the vehicle almost before it comes to a complete stop, circling around to the back to quickly retrieving his gear, those heavy duffle-bags slung over his shoulder as he starts to trot towards the scene.

He's not rubbing his hands in glee. That would be untoward given that they might have an agent in danger. But he might just be a little more chipper then usual. <Fitz here. I'm on my way with the scanning gear.>

Peggy Carter has posed:
As Peggy sees more SHIELD back up finally arriving on site, she lets out a breath of relief. She's had to properly ICER, instead of just knocking out with her fist, one of the five goons who are left from the initial attack already once. She'd rather not do it again. She starts handing them off to the containment team. They're all dressed in blacks, wearing balaclavas and goggles. They definitely don't look like legitimate construction workers. "They were trying to intimidate May and I off site. I suspect they don't know much of anything but they were being paid to be muscle, but it'll be worth questioning them."

Then she hears Bobbi's voice over the comms and her shoulders relax just a bit more. She's still on high, worried alert, hovering about 20 feet away from where she can still see the faintest of shimmers of that anomaly, but it's died down dramatically since it took May into itself. <Good to hear your voice, Morse. I'm about 20 feet from the anomaly, it's a few hundred feet into the site, towards the center north area. I've got my sensor pad running but... I'm hoping the science team can tell us more.> And then she hears Fitz' voice over the comms and that's about the only BETTER news she could have gotten <Fitz, you're a godsend. Meet Morse and I near the site. I'm getting as much data for you as possible but the energy seems to have died down since it... Ate... May. But we've been running sensors since we arrived.>

Peggy stands there, looking worried and a little useless now, though she's a stiff guard of that dangerous area. Especially since it'd be impossible to tell that there's anything even there, unless one was specifically looking for it. She's in SHIELD blacks, a small cut starting to bruise on the side of her face from the intial fight, but uninjured otherwise. The dust and dirt around the area shows the scuffling footsteps of a pretty good brawl.

Bobbi Morse has posed:
Bobbi rounds the corner with ICER out and a team of six other agents. The spread out in the room and start taking the goons away. They'll be interrogated in short order and Bobbi won't be taking no for an answer. They don't look like the usual sort of merc but whatever they think they're doing here.. their window of opportunity has passed.

"We'll get everything out of them we can," Bobbi says and then pats Peggy on the shoulder, "Are you okay? Exactly where is the .. ano~ okay well there it is then." She takes a moment to look at the faint shimmering strangeness. <Agent Conroy help Agent Fitz with all the gear we've got an 0-8-5> she says over the comms and then steps out of the room, switches channel and says <Agent Morse. Yes put me through> There's a short pause, <Director. No sign of her yet. Definitely some sort of. 0-8-5, I'm locking the.. yes sir it's ... yes sir ... ye~... yes sir>

The conversation is ended from Fury's end and she walks back in to the room. "Take a breather Peggy. Then run me through what happened," she says. The site is a buzzy hive of SHIELD operatives now. A few more SUVs pull up with even more gear.

Leopold Fitz has posed:
See? That is the one thing that keeps Fitz from positively bouncing. As much as he lives from the strange and fascinating problems that working for SHIELD presents to him, he is not a complete sociopath. He is all too familiar with the human toll these missions sometimes take. Far more so now that he actually has started going out on these missions. It's possible that he still has nightmares about jungles and nuclear bombs. Perhaps another reason he is so bound and determined to sneak a cot into the lab. There's nowhere else that he feels so much at home.

While Fitz might regret not being amongst the first on the scene, it was unavoidable. And it does have a fringe benefit. It's not hard to figure out where he's going. Just follow the flow of SHIELD personnel already making their way to the scene, be it to take the unknown combatants who started this into custody, or those others sent to secure the scene. Even a few of the other science types. Just so long as it isn't Perkins. Oh how he hates that man.

In the end, Fitz does not respond that uch after the lead SHIELD agents, trotting into the room and glancing around. It isn't hard to pick out Agent's Morse and Carter -- or at least it wouldn't it Fitz was playing the slightest attention. But he is not. He most definitely is not. Understandably he only has eyes for that dark mass of the portal. It might not be love at first sight or anything, but there's definitely the potential for a summer fling there. His steps slow and he starts walking towards the anomaly, not directly towards it but a winding, circular path that lets him take it in from all angles. He hardly even notices when Conroy comes up to him, surrendering some of his precious gear without even thinking about it.

Half-way through his slow circling of the anomaly, Fitz abruptly drops into a crouch, hands clutched together and raised up in front of him, resting against his chin. "Woah," he exhales quietly.

Peggy Carter has posed:
The fight is long over and Peggy's breath is caught, but she's got an air of tension about her that is almost guilty? To anyone who didn't know her -- or wasn't a profiler -- it would be impossible to see. Peggy has a pretty damn good poker face. But there is just the edge of responsibility about this one, for some reason, in a tinge of tension at her brow and around her eyes. She gives Bobbi a little nod as she walks up, Fitz not too far behind.

"Uh... Fitz, I realize you might be in love at first sight, but you might want to hear this too. So..." Dark eyes turn back to Bobbi. If she needs to repeat for the enamoured Fitz later, she will. "This was the sight of the first massive Nitramene implosion in 1946. They were trying to weaponize the stuff after stealing the formula off of Howard Stark. When we founded SHIELD, he managed to get control of the site from the government for a while, but there were no apparent... after effects from the implosion at the time. Still, there's a lot of reports over the years of... Weird things happening here. THey've never really been able to re-develop. And in their most recent attempt, they stumbled on *that*. Or... a larger version of that. It looked like a desert shimmer or mirage, far bigger before. One of those who attacked us fell in, and May got knocked in not much later. Then it flashed a bit and got a lot smaller. I almost thought it was totally gone until I looked closer. The readings are far quieter than they were when we first drove up as well. I've lost all contact with May over the comms."

Bobbi Morse has posed:
Bobbi watches Fitz circling the anomaly with interest and then shrugs her shoulders. She listens to the report from Peggy and then nods her head, "Right. Let's think positive thoughts and wait on Fitz's report. I'm going to head back to base came. You should come and clean up, drink some water. Settle your nerves. Or stay here and aid Fitz, either is fine. There's still a lot of set up I need to do to secure this site."

She turns just as an agent walks in, "Agent Harrows, you're on security duty for this 0-8-5 area. Fitz and his team, Peggy, myself. Fury if he turns up. No one else. Repeat after me: No one else."

He says, "No one else Ma'am" He and several agents then take guard postings. Bobbi pats Peggy's shoulder, smiles, then walks away.

Leopold Fitz has posed:
Later baby. Duty calls.

It might not be easy to pull himself away, but Fitz gathers himself at Agent Carter's interjection, snapping out of his qausi trance and glancing over towards the pair of more senior Agents, trotting over quickly. "Sorry," he mumbles, as much to himself as anyone else so as not to interrupt the report of just what went on prior to their arrival.

And, as should be expected when dealing with any natural phenomena, the details are down right fascinating. At least to Fitz. Normally when he arrives on site like this he has already had a briefing, already knows a little about the background. But this particular assignment was a little rushed -- understandably given the circumstances. Even as he listens intently to the details provided by Agent Carter he begins to root through the dufflebag still in his posession, pulling out a number of high-intensity scanning amplifiers, beginning to set them down around the anomaly at more or less equally spread out locations. That portable scanning console -- a more powerful upgrade to the hand-held devices emerge next and he queues them up. "I'm going to route your feed and the data you've already gathered into my feeds. It should greatly shorten the amount of time it takes to analyse the type of energy the anomaly is giving out and taking some physical measurements of what we're actually dealing with," he says politely. Once they have that he can start figuring out exactly what they're dealing with. And how they're going to get Agent May back.

He gives a brief nod as Agent Morse issues her instructions. But his attention is already back, eyes flickering over the console in front of him before she has hardly turned to walk away.

Melinda May has posed:
    The readings Peggy has been collecting detail an exceptionally chaotic combination of forces, ranging from radiation to tachyon emissions to dark energy and more. The tachyons build and subsume almost everything else, interacting on a quantum level. At the moment of May's contact with the anomaly, there's a fantastic spike of tachyons and indications of a microcausality -- a localized Einstein-Rosen bridge that lasts for no more than a fraction of a second. Just long enough to swallow two human beings whole.

Then, the bridge collapses and the readings drop off to almost nothing. Only slightly above the level of cosmic background noise.

Peggy Carter has posed:
There's a deeper frown across her lips as Bobbi mentions heading back to base. "I... know there's probably not much more I can do here, but I hate leaving." The ache behind her voice is of a woman who feels like she's abandoning her team mate. And then she blinks. "Wait. Shit. I swear... when we came in in '49... there was a body. A guy dressed all in black. It was like he was trying to be a cat burgler or something. He was raving about... Shit. We thought he was insane. I need to get back to those old files. I'm sure I wrote up a report. Whether anyone digitized it..."

Peg sighs, looking back to Fitz and the science team as they set up. She's being more tempted to go. "You'll call me if there is ANY change, right? I'll come straight back here. I'll bring the old files if I can find them too. We didn't have near the sensors you do, but we had...a few things." Peggy gives him a weak smile, but then she's stepping over to Bobbi to start the way back to the Triskelion.

Leopold Fitz has posed:
As promised, adding the data gathered up by Agent Carter to his own feed almost immediately cuts the analysis time in half, that console spiting out information and measurements, able to make use of the earlier scans to map out vectors and demonstrate the surges of energy. And the regression of the same. It certainly helps to explain how this rift can have such a variable appearance, based on the description given when the Agents first arrived as comapred to what Fitz can see right in front of him now.

Given his reaction to it at this reduced state it might be better that Fitz didn't see it at its peak intensity.

Of course, the information that he is getting is decidedly of a mixed nature. The familiarity to what would be expected to be seen with a Einstein-Rosen bridge is hopeful. It might mean that Agent May and the vanished assailant were not simply disintegrated. That's good, right? That would be the worst case scenario. But the bridge might mean that if they entered the anomaly on one side -- on this side -- they could have emerged safely on the other. There's no guarantees of course, but some hope is always better then none.

The complicating factor? All that tachyon energy. It is a truly excessive amount, at least from his studies on the matter. The sort of out-pouring that gives Fitz a bad feeling. A bad suspicion. And while he does not discount intuition, not entirely, he is not going to start hypthesizing without a little more data to go on.

But Agent Carter's sudden comment about a man in black being found on site back in 1946 certainly suggests certain empirical evidence that those suspicions have a great deal of merit in fact.

"The old files can only help," Fitz agrees without hesitation. More information is almost always good and while they might not have had the technology of today, that doesn't mean there isn't anything of use in those reports. He does hesitate for just a moment before adding, "Maybe a particular focus on the cat burglar found on site," he suggests almost hesitantly. It's not often that Fitz is interested on interrogation reports, or medical details, or really anything involving squishy, messy people when he can have cold, hard numbers, or nice, clean technology. But there it is.

"I'll make sure that you're copied on anything I find," he promises without hesitation. He doubts Agent Morse could have any objection to that. With the console continuing to suck in data from the anomaly like a sponge, he turns away from a moment, beginning to pull out his small fleet of mini-drones to more thoroughly document the scene. Raw data is great. Sometimes they also find a great deal of information in a photograph or piece of video open. And when the life of one of their own is at stake, all avenues of information have to be sought out to their fullest, right?

Peggy Carter has posed:
"Thanks, Fitz. I'll get the old files to you as soon as I find them. I promise. We... we'll get her back. With you on task, I'm certain we will." Peggy murmurs softly, as much to herself as she does to him. She's got to believe that because then it's not her fault. Then she didn't get one of her few almost friends lost in an anomaly that is probably her fault in the first place. With one last, faint smile and a little salute in Fitz' direction, she then turns and double times it after Bobbi to catch up with the ride back to base. She has some file hunting to do.