Owner	Pose
Melinda May	The cave is surprisingly light, when Melinda May awakens. The embers from the fire of the night before are banked, cooled from what they were, but still faintly glowing with lingering heat. Her body insists it's morning, despite the fact the light tells her it may be later. Then again, her body is programmed for New York time. Nepal is just a little less than 10 hours ahead. So, 5am in NYC is nearly 3pm in Kathmandu. Even so, keeping one of those blankets she found the day before wrapped around her, she moves remarkably quietly about the foreign space. She finds more fuel for the fire and sets it to blazing, pushing back the chill of the mountain air. She then finds a pot she can use to boil some water for tea -- she packed some green tea in her go-bag before she left, because on vacation there are some essential luxuries you allow yourself despite tight space. Perhaps when Bobbi wakes up, she'll want some, too. The MREs she finds for food aren't nearly as appetizing as the tea, but they are essential. And they'll heat up well enough. In fact, that's all part of their packaging design. She sets them aside, for when Bobbi wakes up, and moves toward the cave mouth while she waits for the water to boil. She wants to try to get the lay of the land now that the weather has cleared and the avalanche risk has passed.
Bobbi Morse	Industrious May gets quite the head start on the day. Bobbi eventually stirs and sits up. Her hair a mess and her eyes half lidded. Bobbi is sometimes a morning person, but usually that involves better sleeping arrangements than this. Still, she's a veteran agent of SHIELD and even in this state she's ready for action.     Her eyes spy around the cave and she spots May near the entrance. Nothing untoward is going on so she can let her 'waking up' guard down. She checks her wound. It's closed but fissured still. This is a more than half a day of healing sort of wound. It hurts a lot less today than yesterday at least.     There's hints of a pathway leading out from the cave. In places where the snow hasn't completely covered everything, stones seem to define a pathway through the trees. Bobbi pulls the blanket around herself and walks over next to May. The cool brisk morning air hits her in the face causing her skin to flush. "Morning"
Melinda May	"Morning," May replies, still looking over the bright landscape. She turns her head slightly to give the other woman a small half-smile. "Tea's on. Crap food, but I brought green tea." She has a bit of a thoughtful look as her eyes follow that path down. "C'mon. Water's just about boiled. I'll make you a cup." She turns and heads back toward the fire, beginning to do just as she said she would. "How's your side?" May still intends to explore the ruins, today. Whether or not Bobbi comes will partly depend on that injury.
Bobbi Morse	Bobbi turns and heads back to the fire. She doesn't need to be prompted twice to return to the heat. Unlike May she didn't pack for the cold. Layers upon layers are helping but thermal layers are best and she's lacking those. "I'd kill for a coffee," she jokes. She's quite comfortable with tea though. Thanks to Lance.     Bobbi pauses at the weapons rack for a moment and then takes one of the quarter staffs. She smiles and gives it a twirl and then uses it as a walking stick back to the warmth of the stove.     "A lot better. Another day and it'll be just about fully healed. It's almost as bad as when my doppelganger shot me with a harpoon gun in the thigh." A raised eyebrow. No one had fun with doppelgangers that month. Though, she's not sure she ever told May about that incident.     Bobbi takes a seat at the table and watches her breath puff through the air. "MREs?," she asks and picks one up, "Ooh. Only two months old. Good vintage."
Melinda May	May snirks softly. "Yeah. This is one of those bootcamp resorts. Diet food, exercise, and cold showers." There's a hint of humour in her tone. As far as spas go, this one sucks. Good thing she's not a spa type. She sets a couple of teabags into the boiled pot of water and stirs them to allow them to steep. Then she finds a couple of cups that are clean enough to work to hold the liquid and, once it's at least steeped enough to start to pour, she divides the water ration between them. Each gets her own tea bag. Those, May has in abundance. "Harpoon gun, huh? That must've left a mark." She shakes her head. "That world they came from... must've been worse than the Framework." Which is kinda scary, in her books.
Bobbi Morse	Bobbi smiles with amusement. It's been so long since she's heard May crack a joke. The tea is welcome though and she lets the cup warm her hands and the liquid warm her insides. "Mm. Well, I heal so - no mark. But it smarted. They thought they had us in a tight spot after that ambush. Babs apparently hadn't considered I might be a super soldier."     "Their world.. seemed like an armageddon scenario and they were the survivors. I think everyone did anything they could to survive. Adjusting to our world? probably impossible. I don't know how ARMOR has been doing but I think they've gotten almost all of them rounded up by now."     Small sips of the drink. She checks her phone battery and then puts down the tea. The device on her wrist.. she unbuckles it and turns it off. She _knows_ things are better now. She can't prove it yet and she hasn't done the battery of tests Jemma will want to run, but she knows in her heart that things are fixed.     "I'm planning on coming back to work when we move in to the Triskelion again. It's going to feel weird though. Fewer people. A mess left by the US Military. They came in to our space.. touched our stuff.. if you want me to come to HYDRA Academy in Colorado....." a long pause as she looks down and then sips her tea, "I will."
Melinda May	"I hate to say it," May says, coming to sit cross-legged beside her, her tea in hand, "but you're the best guide to the site we've got. I wasn't there nearly as often as you." As in, she visited once or twice -- enough to say she knew where it was and have a rough layout of its grounds, but not the intimate memories Bobbi likely has. That said, they could both be wrong. It could look completely different, now. They have no way to know how or when AIDA pulled the blueprints for it. "I like the Playground," she admits. "But I miss New York." She sips her tea, watching as Bobbi puts her devices away. She might as well. They're not really going to help out here. Though, the heart monitor does get a second look. "I have to say, though," she says, giving Bobbi a sidelong look. "I *don't* miss the moustache cam. Drunk is about the *only* way to watch that."
Bobbi Morse	Bobbi raises an eyebrow and smiles. "I'll do my best then," she comments. It will look different and she doesn't have the kind of memory for places that Matt has. But it's a skill all spies eventually learn - mapping a place out in your head as you go.     "It's cosy. I've gotten used to it too. But I do miss being open about who we are and what we do. Having people think we're the bad guys hurt. Now we have to rebuild that trust the world over. Thankfully there's no shortage of actual bad guys to help us prove the point."     A laugh and she sips her tea, "Drunk was the only way Lance and I watched moustache cam. We're going to have to deal with the moustache in person though. He was a handful the first time. I think we let Phil do all the talking. That way he can't twist our words around on us." A roll of the eyes.     Bobbi sits quietly, just enjoying the company and the tea, if not the MREs, for a while. The sound of cracking outside, loud booms, herald that the sun has risen enough to make things warm. Ice is cracking, water is flowing. This is the dangerous time for avalanches, but also the perfect weather to go exploring.     "What do you say, shall we go to Afterlife?"
Melinda May	"The Batman *chased* me," May says dryly, recalling their last botched mission against Maelstrom. There is some sense of reproach in her tone. Yeah. Being blacklisted hurt. A lot. Pissed her right the hell off on so many levels. (Not that that's hard.) "It will be good not to be on every hero's hit list anymore." Finally, though, tea is done, MREs are crumbs, and the day is wearing on. "Mm," she agrees, pushing to her feet. "Yeah. I never got to see it up close, except when I was fighting." In both realities. She lends Bobbi as many layers as she can and even manages to find her an oversized Nepalese jacket that will probably be better than most anything else she has against the cold. Then, face wrapped against the chill wind and coat zipped up to her eyes, she steps out of the cave to get a better look at the ruins of the once peaceful village.
Bobbi Morse	Bobbi chuckles. "I remember. I called Nightwing to save your bacon." Because that batwing? they both know the kind of armaments that thing has. As manoeuvrable as the Mockingbird wings are they are no match for Batman, Ironman, or even the Falcon.     The nepal jacket is a bit still from lack of wear but starts to warm up pretty quickly once donned. The pathway winds through the trees and the snow starts to get deeper. There was a lot of fall over night. Soon they are at the walls of Afterlife. Parts of those walls have been blown away. Inside, snow covers the pathways, half destroyed and fully destroyed buildings. The paints are starting to fade from the weather too sapping away the liveliness the village once had.     Bobbi heads in to an open area and says, "Welcome to the village square." She motions, "Over there was a lovely herb garden. The main administration building is behind us. In the mornings they had a sort of open cook off breakfast. Very little meat in their diet."     She points and heads down a path, "This is .. or was .. Mark's house. A mini-biolab and clinic was somehow squeezed in there." Further down the path, "This is where Daisy, Matt, and I stayed when we were abducted here. For me the second time."
Melinda May	May walks along with Bobbi, paying as much attention to the emotional resonance from her as her words themselves. She doesn't even realize she's doing it, honestly. But it does give her a perspective on the place she wouldn't have had alone. It gives her a sense of how the place felt. "I never did find out all the details of how that happened," she admits. Probably because she was neck deep in Peggy's investigation into the HYDRA 5th column as much as anything else. And Inhumans weren't her focus then. Really, until recently, they've never been her focus. Not intentionally. She's seen sites like this before, though, in her earlier sojourns in Asia. True, most of her time was spent in the big, bustling, metropolitan cities. But that didn't mean she didn't get out to villages, shrines, and more remote places. She gives a small smile, lifting a hand to point at a detail that remains on the corner of a half burnt house. "That is a Buddhist symbol for peace," she notes. The smile is sad. That destruction makes it rather hard to believe in magic. Probably just as well that her knife is still sitting on that table back in the cave.
Bobbi Morse	Bobbi nods her head, "Right. Don't.. their spirits aren't crushed. They're not done. This is just a place. They are bouncing back already. Afterlife has been here for hundreds of years.. a few missiles can't stop the idea." She raises an eyebrow and points again, "Up that path went to the dam generator." She sighs a touch and says, "Over here they were keeping Reina. One of the guest houses which we were in too."     She folds her arms and sighs a touch, "The place was so alive. Kids running around, families, people struggling to come to terms with who they really are and what their life would be like now. They've been forced in to the modern world and the modern way of doing things. I just hope Blackagar doesn't declare everyone go back to the way things were. Shut off from the world."
Melinda May	"Can he?" May's brows knit together, somewhat perplexed. "I get he's the King of the Inhumans." She doesn't acknowledge him as her king. Then again, she still has difficulty acknowledging herself as Inhuman. Metahuman, obviously. But 'Inhuman' was hard *before* the Framework. Now...? "He's from the Moon. My impression, from the conversations he and I have had, is that they didn't even realize there were still Inhumans of any sort left here on Earth." Or maybe he just didn't realize there were so many. She's not sure. "Have the Inhumans from Afterlife ever acknowledged him as their leader? If they haven't... how can he really tell them how to live?" These are unusual thoughts for Melinda May, these deep thoughts about race, identity, and the politics involved. Yes, she's grown up with all that. She's Asian, born and raised in a country where her family and others like them were considered 'ethnic minorities', second class citizens. There's a reason Asian communities in the US are as insular as they are, despite the proliferation of high profile professionals within them. Somehow, though, this whole Inhumanity question has reframed the question for her. She glances to Bobbi, starting to head closer to the administrative building. That's where she was, she thinks, when she... changed. "When we spoke, he made it clear he thought it was impossible for Inhumans and Humans to live peacefully together. It made him sound a lot like Magneto and other mutant and metahuman extremists." She shakes her head, pausing near the door to examine the broken frame. "I don't believe he is an extremist. But he didn't understand that my family isn't defined by genetics."
Bobbi Morse	Bobbi shrugs her shoulders. "Who knows how these things would go. Jiaying certainly acknowledges him as her leader. I got the impression Afterlife and Attilan were working together. Afterlife being a sort of.. halfway house?" She shakes her head. "Still, living on the moon. That's quite the trip."     "I think you're right though. The sudden influx of Inhumans has taken them all by surprise. Afterlife seemed to carefully control who got to go through terrigenesis... now it's all out of their hands."     Bobbi follows after May as they head in to the remains of the administration building. Part of it is collapsed - the part that Bobbi was in at the time. The other part has a big hole blown in the roof where the HYDRA shock troopers dropped in.     Looking around, Bobbi finds a small piece of terrigen. She holds up the chunk and hmms thoughtfully. It's the tainted stuff melted down from diviners. "I certainly had a big disagreement with Jiaying about that very thing. Several disagreements actually. Unlike Magneto it seems they just want to be left alone. I know Daisy has said the same thing too.. that Inhumans and Humans need to work together. Live together. Just like with Mutants."     She squeezes her hand tightly, demonstrating her super strength as she crushes it and a fine mist puffs out from it. Bobbi shuts her eyes expecting terrigenesis like in the framework... but nothing happens. "Well that settles that then. I really and truly am Inhuman."
Melinda May	May flinches a little, slightly alarmed as the mists puff out of Bobbi's hand. It's more of an instinctive thing. Aside from the Framework, she hasn't seen the mists since her own transformation here, where Gonzales died. "I suppose we're lucky it only seems to work once." Unless the concentration just wasn't high enough. "I'm not willing to hide in a retreat like this, or in some domed city on the moon," she says, carefully stepping in through the rubble. She uses a booted toe to gently sift through the ash and snow, not that she's looking for anything in particular. "I wish, though, there were some way to give this back to them, some way to give them a place to hide without feeling like they're being watched all the time."
Bobbi Morse	"Afterlife.. but with open doors?" She picks up an ICER off the ground. An Agent must have fallen in battle here against HYDRA, or may be it was just forgotten. It seems damaged and it's ammunition is fully spent. "We're already spending money on looking after them. May be Fury would be okay with helping them set up a place."     She looks around, "You don't mean this place do you? This'd be quite the fixer upper. Whichever the Inhuman is that kept the weather nice needs to get back here and thaw things out first," she says with a small smirk.     "Afterlife, in my opinion, needs to be opt in. They have the weight of history to back up their beliefs but it's worth fighting for.. unity and peace. Hiding away just pushes the problem down to the next generation - and eventually someone like HYDRA comes and ruins your party."
Melinda May	May shares Bobbi's opinion on that. "Change is the only constant in life. A refuge isn't a bad idea. But it can't become a prison and stay healthy." Not that she's really one to talk about refuges or healthy habits in that respect. She gits a faintly thoughtful look at the idea of asking Fury for help. Though, really, she's not convinced that, even if he was inclined to say yes, SHIELD is the right instrument to offer aid. Not, mind, that she can think of anyone better. But she remembers Jiaying's objections to SHIELD's involvement. To *her* involvement. And, really... she knows Jiaying wasn't wrong. "We're gonna take out HYDRA," she says, the confidence in her tone more a grim determination than a certainty. "Maybe not forever... but long enough that they can rebuild, if they want." It's up to them, though. Not her. Hell. Even if she brings it up to then, she'll probably be told to mind her own damned business.
Bobbi Morse	Bobbi tosses the ICER back on to the rubble. "So this is where it happened?" She asks shifting the subject from HYDRA to their deeds. She walks over to the ruined desk Jiaying used to work at. Looking back out to the area where SHIELD would have been standing. Gonzales.     There's a pause and then a small nod of recognition. Under her breath she whispers, "Good bye Robert." The feeling of love and loss is intense for a small moment. It's Bobbi's though and it's obvious from context what and who she is thinking of.     "I admit. I am looking forward to taking out Mallick's HYDRA elite. They've enjoyed hidden supremacy for far far too long." The sun overhead is quite nice. "Let me show you another spot..."     Bobbi heads off through the village, out of it, then down another path that leads to an overlook. A gazebo stands tall, untouched by the battle. Its roof is covered in snow. She walks on to it and stare out at the beautiful view of the snow covered mountains.
Melinda May	May pauses a moment, before joining Bobbi. She retrieves a fallen box from amidst the rubble -- a little wooden thing with old Chinese carvings on it. She's not sure what it once held. A caligraphy stamp, maybe. Dusting the snow off it, she opens it and looks inside. It's empty. Turning around in the space, she spies a piece of crumbled terrigen shell that hasn't quite blown away. With gentle fingertips, she scrapes it into the box and closes the lid. It's only then that she follows the blonde deeper into the ruins, box tucked into her pocket. When the reach the gazebo, she follows Bobbi's gaze out to the peaks beyond. She has no need to say anything more about it.
Bobbi Morse	"I figured. If you've come all this way - you should at least see this view." Bobbi says and tucks her hands behind her back. A shelf of ice breaks off from a distant peak and slides down the side of the mountain rapidly becoming a big ball of white snow. It takes a moment for the rumble to reach their ears.     If ever there was a peaceful quiet place to contemplate the nature of ones-self, it was Afterlife. "Beautiful," she whispers even if the wind is chilly against her face. It's the sounds and the sights and the smells that the framework could never get right. Instead it cheated - it tickled that part of the brain that made it seem like everything was normal and alright. Just like in a dream that feels oh so realistic.     "I don't know what comes next. I'm okay with that. Lance is okay with that too. He understands I need to connect with.. 'my people'," she lifts up her arms and does air quotes. "I've got a home, two puppies, a husband, a job I'm very good at.. and a chosen family I wouldn't want to trade for the world."     She places a hand to May's shoulder and looks over to the cavalry. She tilts her head and grins, "Though I do know one thing - I will never, ever, allow someone to make a Quinjet Prime."
Melinda May	For the first time, May actually laughs. "Yeah, that one just needed to die." There are only so many Darth HYDRA jokes a woman can stand. Even so, she watches the snow tumble down and then finds herself searching the sky. And she realizes she's looking for Phil and Lance. She knows it's too early for them, even if they started worrying right when the plane first crashed, they'd still be hours out from here. "I just hope we've seen the last of the Framework, Radcliffe, and that damned AI." The rest, she can deal with. Encountering any of those, however, just might cause her to go a wee bit postal.