8846/Deus Ex Congelatoria!

Deus Ex Congelatoria!
Date of Scene:	28 November 2021
Location:	W.A.N.D: Triskelion
Synopsis:	Alien problems in the freezer are just the tip of the gross-berg.
Cast of Characters:	Michael Erickson, Jane Foster

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Michael Erickson has posed:
    It would appear that - in the immortal words of Loverboy - everybody's working for the weekend, though in this case, /on/ the weekend is rather the chosen toll. And so, having just finished a chat with the Chief, the Shi'ar officer who calls himself Michael Erickson goes trawling the halls in search of Doctor Foster. Dressed in a black suit, looking more as though he should be silencing UFO witnesses in the Fifties, the grim-faced fellow goes wandering through the Triskelion until he finds...ah. WAND's offices. He inquires after Doctor Foster at the front desk, then, and since he hasn't got the clearance, waits in the lobby for the good doctor to come out and wonder what he's doing there.

Jane Foster has posed:
Jane Foster does not live by normal hours. Astronomers stopped being chained to their desks dusk until dawn somewhere around the advent of the electronically-controlled observatory, and certainly well before she was born. Welcome to the new age, when the computers do the work and humans the interpretation from those terrestrial and cosmic-bound workhorses.

But she can stay up, pooled paperwork in front of her, both SHIELD-related and something about a new satellite being tossed into a geosynchronous orbit soon enough. Her finger tracks along a line of data on her tablet, predictably the glass refusing to even identify her touch. She can shake it, glare at it, even, looking up and rubbing the back of her neck even though pain there is more imagined than real. Benefits to being incarnated oddly, and not actually /in/ the room in a functional sense, at least as anyone normal would recognize.

The MIB out to put down a Foo Fighter gets a raised brow, and she offers a wan grin. "You shouldn't be a night owl," she warns. "They expect you to make a habit of it."

Michael Erickson has posed:
    Michael is a night owl by nature, if strictly speaking evolved from another bird of prey; his eyes are bright despite the hour, and when Jane emerges from her offices to recieve him the tall, quiet man offers her a nod in greeting.

    It's his nature to show respect to superiors in organization, after all. The good old Shi'ar way.

    "Doctor," he offers by way of greeting. "Good evening. I've just come from meeting with the Chief. Tell me, what do you know of the Badoon?"

Jane Foster has posed:
Night owl, night hawk, there is a precedent here. Add Strix and a Darkhawk, all might be turning on a different axis of history entirely.

He is met with a chuckle as Jane finally turns to the coffee, more for pleasure than any other reason. A deep sip taken revivifies her from staring at complex equations and an assortment of faded, grainy images like in a child's game of 'Spot the Difference' found at pancake restaurants.

"There's relatively fresh coffee in the pot if you feel thirsty," she offers as a greeting. "You met up with the Chief? How is she doing?" Progressing, the word almost trips off her tongue. "The /Badoon/?" The word tumbles backward. "Socially dimorphic based on sex, and not terribly common in these parts, or else we'd have heard of them far more. Are you about to tell me they're dwelling near Proxima Centauri and we need to worry about an imminent visitation?"

Michael Erickson has posed:
    "The Badoon," he echoes, brows arched. "I don't know much of them - but two days ago, while exploring the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, I came upon an abandoned gas refinery of some sort that bore all the hallmarks of their architecture." Straight to the point, our lad. No time for nonsense. "It was about to go into a chain reaction thanks to its reactor failing, so I had to destroy it." A beat. "But I was able to secure one of its maintenance automatons. I've got it in my freezer chest at home."

Jane Foster has posed:
"That's about all I have at my fingertips on memory, not to say that would be the limits to what we might have stored on file. Did the chief suggest anything different?" Jane taps the screen of her tablet six times, and around the fifth, it finally decides to lock instead of glowing as it has for the past thirty seconds.

She swivels in the seat, prepared to rise if he needs though Michael's position relative to her makes for an easy conversation so far. "You found a /gas/ refinery in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter. Despite the questions I have about radiation, that suggests they were harvesting hydrogen and helium. Not enough methane to be worthwhile unless they can concentrate it, though the molecular concentration could be excited with the right engineering. Although exactly how, we're talking about a space race with access to wholly unknown abilities or architecture on my part, so presumably anything is possible." Her finger slips across the table and point. "Better not to irradiate the atmosphere, albeit a shame about the loss. Star Trek taught us well not to mess about with alien tech by dragging it home without good reason. If you can contain that automaton... then... you've got about a hundred people here ready to scramble out of bed at the first flash you broadcast, if you do."

Michael Erickson has posed:
    "It's dead, alas," Michael replies with a tight smile. "And no, but she was a bit exasperated to find that I've had enough experience with storing bodies in my freezer that I wasn't bothered enough to stick it in there too." But alas! That is how things go. The Shi'ar pauses to check his watch, perhaps a bit surprised at the hour himself. "...well, at any rate. The rig seemed to have been abandoned for some several centuries - but the automata were essentially zombies harvested from human stock. That is to say, robots, but with human bodies used as the base platform. Augmentations aplenty on dead flesh, animated by what means I am not familiar with." Which is, of course, why he's here. "A science team is coming by tomorrow to pick the unfortunate fellow up."

Jane Foster has posed:
"Bother." No point in saying death is hardly an issue, since that very much lies outside the purview of the wider SHIELD community and even its tight-knit social ranks. The psychopomp in their presence keeps things politely underwraps, the gold bracelet on her wrist hidden by the sweater sleeve for the moment. "That would change little other than a line of questioning, I suppose. Was it dead on site, or perish en-route? I don't have a good timeframe for how long decay factors into transporting something like that out of the Jovian magnetosphere, and whether we need to let it cool off."

Oh, a double entendre. Radiation cooling and temperature cooling, the cleverness! Her cheek dimples for a moment, but her eyes are hard, brown usually warm but in this case darkened. "With a human vessel, we should be able to use mitochondrial DNA to establish where they came from, even the potential age of the body. It might help establish how long ago they were taken. Automata corresponding to the age of the rig, as you called it, should be expected? That's truly horrid, how they were being used."

Michael Erickson has posed:
    How would he react, if he knew she were a chooser of the slain? Would it matter for someone who has seen a galaxy of empire? Michael smiles a tad at her despite himself, though when she darkens, the smile vanishes. "Well, that's why I have it. Certainly necroplatforms have been used before, but that's something that's taken place back in the Empire - it's strictly illegal, but it happens from time to time. As to your question, I killed it on site. Tore out its motivating energy cell with my bare hands. The rest of the body is intact, as is its technology." Michael's fingers smooth his lapels, an unnecessary gesture that simply serves to speed his thinking. "It was frozen solid on the way back from Jupiter, as I had to take it through open vaccuum. Then I put it in the freezer. No biological contaminants, as it happens."

Jane Foster has posed:
Probably not very exciting, all in all, unless he knows what those deaths on the branches of Yggdrasil were. Not merely confined to humanity, not by a long shot. Jane has worn many lives, many faces, and their deaths were some of her own.

"The necroplatform. What an ingeniously hideous name." Jane's comment on that comes with the blunt force of a woman not bothered by telling Loki where he can stuff it. Michael is another story. "It was hardly a loss on our part that the reactor gave out, or if similar things were destroyed. Deciding whether the automata were alive is a matter of semantics, in the same way a slab of meat electrocuted by a current is alive if cells multiply."

There are better things to think about, truly. "A motivating energy cell, that's horrendous. We definitely would need to consider the effects of reviewing it, but Doctor Simmons needs more of those measures at hand. She'll know what restrictions to take."

Michael Erickson has posed:
    He gives her a faint smile. Very faint. "My people aren't terribly given over to soft language," he replies, shrugging faintly. "In any case, there wasn't any brain matter in the skull, based on the results of combat. Just computer matrices." The less /that's/ expounded on, no doubt, the better. "Agent Drew is going to be overseeing the extraction, as my handler. But I thought I would come by and tell you about it since I'm in the building. Obviously, I'll write up a full report."

Jane Foster has posed:
"Hardly a bad thing, though we've been for beat poetry. I know where the soul of the words lie." Jane runs her fingers again over the tablet. "Totally hollowing out the skull for a machine or battery is going to leave questions, like where they ended up hooking up. The brain stem? Directly into the spinal column? I leave that to Jemma, honestly."

She doesn't have much to add for that with Michael. Really, some things deserve not to be dealt with by anyone in the room. They have people for that. "I appreciate the report. What I can contribute on this one, as a bonafide metahuman, will be hampered by our relative lack of knowledge about them. Though it's an opportunity to learn and tap a few contacts."

God, this is going to make life interesting.

Michael Erickson has posed:
    "Well, I can go out and do some digging as well," he replies with a nod. "Do you have information on the surrounding systems? I'm quite capable of interstellar travel." And with THAT little bomb dropped, the contacts will be tapped, the information, it will be shared. And the question of what the Badoon were doing in the system some severeal centuries ago (if not still about) will soon be tackled...