5893/Broken Mirrors: Proyekt Bliznetsy

Broken Mirrors: Proyekt Bliznetsy
Date of Scene:	09 April 2021
Location:	Camp Century, Greenland
Synopsis:	Natasha ventures beneath the arctic ice of Greenland's abandoned Camp Century and learns the horrific truth of Proyekt Bliznetsy.
Cast of Characters:	Nadia Pym-van Dyne, Natasha Romanoff

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Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
Greenland, The Artic Circle

The information that found its way into Natasha's mind from the mysterious individual claiming to be Epsilon Red has lead her here, to one of the least hospitable places on Earth where a vast sheet of ice covers the earth, several kilometers thick in some places, and the wind is bitingly cold. It is not a place where humans were ever meant to tread and yet there is evidence that humans have tread here before.

The first evidence of this is the barely visible decaying remains of a chain link fence and barbed wire, almost completely consumed by the ice and snow and a sign frozen into the ground: Camp Century - Authorized Personnel Only. That such a statement would be necessary out here in the arctic ice is almost laughable, with the nearest human habitation being America's Thule airbase 150 miles away.

Further in at the site of the coordinates Natasha received at first there seems to be nothing, but the snow and ice here seem to hide many secrets and beneath the blanket of white powder is what appears to be a frozen over a circular metal door of some sort, like an entrance into the ice itself. Whatever it is, it doesn't look like it has been used in decades.

Natasha Romanoff has posed:
    Wearing heavy furred layers over the... slightly old school (or, outdated) Black Widow outfit she procured from an old safehouse, Natasha Romanoff finds herself immersed in the worst of the bitter cold she'd been relieved to leave behind.
    She looks down at the frozen door, and gives herself a moment to catch her breath, kneeling on one knee on the ground. If this is the place - and it's occurred to her more than once that she may have sent her old allies into a trap while she wandered and died in the ice - she can only assume the Red Room can't easily detect her here, lest she be caught immediately upon entry. And if it's not, well... she'll need a pickup anyway, even if it means jail time. To that end she retrieves a small beacon from her satchel and sticks it to the ice beside her, set to begin broadcasting her location to... relevant channels on a delay.

    If Epsilon has a problem with her extraction methods, he should have specified.

With that, Natasha reaches for the door, searching for the means to open it or, she suspects, activate something more useful.

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
The door is thick with ice, a frozen relic of another time, but nothing that the application of a blowtorch or the Widow's Bite can't fix.

Heaving open the heavy metal door, a long shaft is revealed, a tunnel carved into the ice. The shaft is metal-lined though the metal has begun to buckle with age and the shifting ice into a twisted tangle of a chute. The climbing rungs seem sound enough at least but without any power, wherever it leads is quickly consumed by darkness.

If this is an entrance to an active facility, it certainly isn't the front door, or even in any sort of active use.

Natasha Romanoff has posed:
    Natasha peers down the long shaft cautiously. Any wry remarks or exasperation for Episolon Red she may have to hand goes unvoiced. She's working right now, and with no one to communicate with, that means absolute silence.

    Natasha removes her bulky coat, briefly enduring direct exposure to the cold before she begins to descend, activating a mild heating function on her Widow gauntlets, causing them to vribrate slightly.

    And down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.

    Not for the first time, she thinks she'd be better off without all these stories in her head.

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
It is a harrowing trip down the shaft, even for one of Natasha's training and skill. A lesser individual likely would not have survived the descent, lost falling into the darkness or sliced to ribbons upon jagged metal. It takes nearly thirty minutes to descend the shaft due to its various perils.

Finally though Natasha reaches the other end and while it too is not very receptive to being opened at first due to disuse, a swift kick is enough to dislodge as aged mechanisms give way allowing her to emerge from what seems to have been some sort of maintenance shaft and drop into an apparent tunnel under the ice

The tunnel is faintly lit, at least in one direction by light fixtures, apparently powered from somewhere, attached to the supports that keep the tunnel from collapsing. The other direction seems to have caved in at some point in the intervening years since whatever this was was shut down. Leaving only one way to go.

Further down the tunnel looks like it joins up with another tunnel that is more brightly lit and better maintained.

Natasha Romanoff has posed:
    Signs of civilization are, at once, heartening, and cause for tension. Natasha sinks low and moves quietly towards where the tunnels meet. She puts her back to the nearest cover and peers around slowly before deciding whether to proceed, carefully pulling a taut line of garrote wire from her right gauntlet and keeping it to hand as she moves on.

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
The larger tunnel is either an engineering marvel or whoever is down here has someone with considerable power to control and shape ice in their employ. Whichever it is, the decay and destruction of the old base brought about by the shifting ice is not in evidence here at all. The lighting is also more sophisticated.

As Natasha moves to the edge of her cover and looks around the corner into the larger tunnel she is greeted by the sight of human activity, a lot of it. A heavy truck looking vehicle fit with treads to better navigate the tunnels rumbles up to what appears to be a massive freight elevator and a group of ten individuals in high tech looking full artic fatigues begins unloading crates and other supplies from it, ferrying them into the large freight elevator.

Natasha Romanoff has posed:
    As a stack of crates are pushed past her hiding place, Natasha creeps low behind him, silently trailing them by mere inches and letting the boxes around her conceal her from others while they're in the position she needs them to be.

    When the crates are set down, and the worker turns around, Natasha simply darts around his blind side faster than he can turn, moving quickly and soundlessly towards the back of the elevator, before putting her hands onto the edge of the roof, and lifting herself op and around to land on top of it, keeping herself flat to the surface.

    She's motionless until the elevator reaches its destination, where she moves to the edge and watches the men she counted leave. When the last man she counted steps out of the elevator behind him, she simply reaches down and twists his head into an... unsurvivable position, and bodily pulls him up onto the roof without a sound, or change in facial expression. A remarkably short time later, Natasha drops down from the roof, dressed in the worker's uniform, following the rest of them.

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
The elevator opens up into a much more base-like base area and one can only gather that it is fully beneath the ice sheet now. Neon lit metal corridors with the same-ness of standardized construction lead off in all directions forming a maze of tunnels that extends who knows how far. If this is the remains of Project Iceworm though, that could be very far indeed.

Then men push the dollies of freight and supplies through the corridors past signs for things like 'Armory' 'Barracks' and eventually to 'Central Storage' which seems to be a massive underground warehouse full of all kinds of supplies. Once inside things are offloaded and forklifts begin taking pallets and crates to their eventual home. There is some joking in Russian and typical crass behavior between the soldiers doing the work but the general consensus is that it could be worse and at least they aren't around the labs and all the creepiness down there.

Natasha Romanoff has posed:
    Natasha absorbs everything silently, drawiing no unneccesary attention to herself. While her primary concern is simply 'Killing Mother', she's not oblivious to the deal she's made... or uncurious about what the Red Room could be doing in a lab that intimidates these meat heads.

    Once she's identified who's carrying clearance for the labs, she tails them until they're the right combination of 'out of sight' and 'in proximity to a closet or bathroom' before wordlessly putting a garotte wire around their neck and dragging them inside, only to emerge minutes later with a security clearance card, and a corpse neatly packed away behind her.

    As she moves towards the labs, she thinks - and not for no reason - <Epsilon, if you've a carrot you'd like to present, now's the time.>

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
Natasha's thoughts find no answer as she makes her way through the halls of the base. It is something of a hike from the central storage area and out of the logistics and support section to the area where the science division has set up shop. Unlike many villainous bases, this one has pretty good signage and maps at key locations so it is not so hard to find one's way around. Visitors are not exactly expected in a secret facility below several kilometers of arctic ice.

The lab area seems to be divided into numerous secure work spaces housing scientists conducting all manner of experiments from advanced materials sciences, to high energy physics, to genetic enhancement, and everything in between. In some ways it feels like wandering through an AIM facility but more Soviet. The most secure of the labs though seem to house young girls working on all manner of advanced science projects, who can't help but remind Natasha of a certain young science widow that showed up at Avengers Mansion out of the blue one day. None of it rises to the level of what seems like it might have creeped out those meatheads though.

Deep within the lab section, however, Natasha comes upon what appears to be a very secure elevator door. It is flanked by more heavily armed and armored guards on either side with what appear to be energy carbines. A sign above reads 'Proyekt Bliznetsy', unauthorized personnel will be shot seems to go without saying.

Natasha Romanoff has posed:
    It's with no small sense of foreboding that Natasha approaches the secure elevator, raising her clearance in front of them without a spoken word, her free hand hovering near the hilt of the combat knife issued to the unit.

    Catching the Black Widow off guard is beyond these men's capabilities, but she is at least factually surprised when they raise their weapons at her.

    With the speed of thought Natasha pushes the leftmost gun upward with one hand, while her right leg lashes out at the man on the right, kicking the gun such that it rotates most of the way off of his trigger finger.

    While the right man stumbles, Natasha buries a knife in the leftmost man's neck, pushing him downward until a swing from the right man forces Natasha to duck and twist to the side, putting her back to the elevator door.

    She twists once more to the side so that her front is facing the door, avoiding a punch from the guard which impacts on the steel door. Natasha switches the knife to her other hand and turns sharply back the way she came, putting the full momentum into a swing of the knife straight into the side of the guard's head, impacting it, and the tip of the knife against the steel door with the sound of metal on metal.

    So stealth will be out, shortly.

    With a heavy sigh, Natasha retrieves the men's guns and leaves them in a heap as she steps onto the elevator.

Nadia Pym-van Dyne has posed:
The doors close behind Natasha as the elevator begins to descend even deeper into the Earth. The trip down down down seems to drag on for several minutes before the elevator finally arrives at its destination, who knows how deep beneath the Earth's surface.

The metal doors slide open into a massive chamber. That they were able to excavate something like this is an incredible feat of structural engineering in and of itself. The space beyond the elevator opens into a lab space and control room filled with computers and other equipment. Beyond the immediate landing though, the space has since been filled with a lattice of walkways and catwalks around huge enclosed tanks filled with liquid and what appear to be humanoid figures. There are easily hundreds of them, too many to count easily. At this range it is hard to make out but the nearest ones seem feminine and have red hair.

At one of the consoles facing out towards the tanks with her back towards the elevator stands a teenaged girl with short brown hair that is eerily familiar looking. She is looking up at a screen above her on which is a face that Natasha could never mistake even if she wanted to.

"Yes, Mother. Everything is proceeding as planned. After the successes with the prototypes the first generation of new Black Widows is nearly ready." She even sounds like Nadia.

"Good, Otchayaniye. You really are the perfect daughter." A smile curls upon mother's lips as she addresses the girl as 'Despair'.

Natasha Romanoff has posed:
    Natasha can't help a sinking feeling as she enters the laboratory. Something tickles at the back of her mind as she catches glimpses of what's inside the tanks, a nauseous pit forming in her stomach, until finally she sees... her.

    Natasha is glad for the balaclava, as for once her stony expression breaks up into a look of mute horror as confusion turns to realization. The blood. The children. The frame-up. Shield's infiltration. The red hair.

    She gave Mother exactly what she wanted.

    Again.

    'The perfect daughter', Natasha hears Mother say, and she can't resist a hidden sneer. Yeah. She can be pretty liberal with that one. Makes you feel good. Makes you feel wanted.

    The beacon's up above. And despite Natasha's nature, she's learned to have expect a certain amount of bull-headed heroism from her friends back home. And she's lost the will for subtlety.

<Mark the day, Mother.> Natasha says in her native language, removing the camo uniform as she walks towards the screen until she is simply dressed as the Black Widow, her eyes, staring holes through the monitor. <I am disappointed in you. You would speak so passionately against...> Natasha gestures blandly with one hand, even as it holds her drawn pistol, <... shortcuts.>

    Natasha extends her arm, aiming directly at the 'child's' head.

    <I'm going to bring everything you've built down on your head.>