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xp_logsClint's late night research is interrupted by a thief in the night.
Clint narrowed his eyes at the mysterious tube, its glass as opaque as ever. He'd had to clean it when he'd gotten back from 'vacation,' since one of his coworkers had redrawn the odd smiley face on it. Still, it withheld its secrets from him, no matter how hard he studied it. Wanda hadn't gotten back to him yet after he sent her photos of the actual glyphs and symbols, but from what he understood, her language guy was the best around and she had contacts in the occult world that he didn't. He trusted her with it.
What he didn't trust was the way the power surges from the unknown power source had been increasing exponentially. It wasn't quite as bad as a strobe light, but there were definite pulses of light every fifteen minutes or so. His colleagues had taken note, after he'd pointed out the first few that he'd noticed, and begun logging it. Apparently some of the higher-ups had been informed, as well, and they were looking at sending another set of scientists to check it out.
That just made Clint frown harder as he headed away from the tube's storage room and back to the front office. If not for a helpful reminder text from Matt - as well as the alarm his brother had somehow managed to program into his phone - he'd have forgotten to eat dinner. Of course, the night shift was always weird when it came to food, anyway. He was hungry, though, so leftover pizza at two in the morning it would be.
Right on time, the guard made his patrol of the the warehouse and headed back to the front office to get his food, the same as every night since she'd been here. Sue knew she didn't have all the time in the world, but the 15 minutes to half a hour the guards took in the front office before resuming their work would be more than enough for her to sneak in and out of the warehouse with the tube in tow. She still didn't know exactly why her mother wanted it, just that it was a matter of life and death. She didn't even how her mother knew she had the skills to break in to this facility, something the blonde would have to grill said mother about once she got back to New York.
Still, she'd stashed all the equipment on her previous trips, the security system wouldn't be a problem - she'd compromised it already, along with the secondary system, the tertiary system, the failsafe, and the failsafe's failsafe. The staff here really did believe in redundancy. Though there wouldn't be a trace that she'd been here. A little mystery for them to ponder - as a gift, she thought. Still up the side of the building and across the roof to her gear, the winch was already warmed up so it was the matter of just a few seconds for Sue to clip herself in before she lifted the Plexiglas skylight and descended silently to the warehouse floor beneath her.
Two minutes after leaving the pulsating tube to reheat his pizza, Clint flipped the light off in the front room and, food in hand, made his way back through the warehouse toward the tube's storage room. Which was when he started noticing that something... wasn't quite right. The SWORD warehouse was one of the most secure facilities they had, the failsafes had failsafes - there were redundancies built into redundancies. But there were weaknesses. There were weaknesses in any facility, no matter how large or seemingly well-protected.
It was the draft that gave it away. The hair on the back of his neck had stood on end as soon as he felt the pull of cool air - the warehouse was climate controlled, no telling what the freezing cold or the damp or any other conditions might do to some of the items stored here. Looking up - no one ever looked up - he saw one of the skylights propped open, just enough to allow the rope in. And the rope was taut, swinging ever so slightly - weighted, either someone was in the warehouse or they were putting something in the warehouse.
Fuck, he thought. That was all he needed - someone blowing up the whole damn facility on his watch. He was already skating on thin ice. Setting his pizza soundlessly aside, Clint walked toward the area the rope dropped to and when his blood practically froze in his veins, it had nothing to do with the sub-zero temperatures sweeping into the building. The tube.
Clint moved fluidly, years of training, both before and after SHIELD recruited him, took over and he made his way to the tube's storage room just in time to see the rope go slightly slack. Its end pooled on the floor, obviously not necessary for the moment, but the door to the room itself was ajar.
The tube was exactly where Sue had predicted it would be, standing in the middle of the room, though not connected to a power source. She hadn't expected the pulsing energy but that was neither here nor there, a puzzle for her to worry about on the way to the airport. The rope came off her belt and the carabiners started snapping onto the tube. It was actually lighter than she'd expected it to be. There shouldn't be any major problem getting it out of the warehouse and away from the facility. Or at least that was the plan... but something was wrong,
Sue didn't know if it was the creak of a door or a breeze on her neck, but she just knew something was wrong - call it a premonition based on years of thieving experience. The blonde dropped into a crouch, pulling up a forcefield around her as her eyes flickered all over the room trying to locate what she had sensed.
Clint approached the door from an angle, making sure he didn't cast a shadow whoever was in there would be able to place, and then he waited for several long moments. There were no tell-tale sounds, no steps echoing or heavy breathing. If he was smart, he'd just close the door and lock it, leaving whoever was in there for the proper authorities. There was a panic button on his comm that would alert SWORD security in Barrow, itself, that something was wrong.
And yet...
Instead, he pushed the door open slowly, staying out of line of sight from any angle in the room, and said, "You might as well come out. Unless you can phase through walls, you're stuck."
There was a man in the door, the guard. But he shouldn't have been back for at least 15 minutes...and to be fair he should have been a she. So the guard must have switched shifts with someone who didn't take so long, it was always the little things that got you. Slowly, as stealthily as years of practice could make her Sue started inching away from the tube. She wasn't quite sure how she was gonna get out of this one, but she if she stayed where she was she couldn't keep her force-field up indefinitely.
Clint took a small risk can peeked around the corner, eyes there and gone in less than a second. He didn't see anyone per se... but there was definitely an anomaly near the tube. He needed to get a better look at it, but he had no idea who or what he might be dealing with. Protocol dictated he sound the alarm. His gut kept telling him to investigate. Glad that he'd at least followed protocol enough to don basic body armor despite being in a facility in the middle of nowhere, Clint glanced toward the rope and the skylight above, then turned to fill the doorway face-first.
He'd been prepared to say something - anything - to get the person (people?) in there to reveal themselves, but then he got a clear look at the anomaly and he paused, eyebrows rising. "Are you seriously... wait - no, that's not... are you using a device to do that? We've only got prototypes for individual use and they're more likely to explode than actually function at this point." They had the cloaking for jets and helicarriers, but not for agents - not yet.
Forgetting himself for just a moment, Clint took a step forward and focused entirely on the odd bit of space next to the tube. Shorter than he would have expected for a person - maybe this was a distraction. Or maybe whoever it was had crouched. Or maybe this was a magical bomb and he was about to get blown to pieces, a footnote in the SWORD training manuals reminding future agents to follow protocol. "Refracting - no, it's got way more curvature than a refraction would - you're bending light. But is it a perception, are you influencing my brain, or are you legitimately bending light?"
He could see her?! Sue almost dropped her forcefield in surprise there was no way anyone had ever seen her before, she'd breezed through cameras like they weren't even there but now the blonde's brow furrowed. Wait no he hadn't seen her, he had noticed the light bending around her, the distortion was almost unnoticeable but he had, that wasn't quite as bad. She almost wanted to answer but that would be giving herself away. She couldn't move obviously, or he'd see the movement but she could move within the forcefield she realized reaching into her bag her eyes darting desperately around the room. There had to be a way out of here without being caught. Breaking into a government facility wasn't something even she could walk away from.
The anomaly didn't move, but Clint decided it'd been sitting there for too long to mean anything good - and since he hadn't gotten an answer, he was leaning more and more toward this being some kind of a set-up or bomb. He pulled his bow over his shoulder and nocked an arrow almost in the same motion, aiming directly at the strange area of bent like. "Last chance - this arrow's got a localized EMP attached, it triggers on impact. Either show yourself or I'm shooting you. Whatever you are." If this wound up being an inanimate object, he was going to feel slightly ridiculous and his coworkers were going to laugh themselves silly when they watched the replay.
He was pointing a bow and arrow at her now! This was way out of control, who even used bows and arrows these days? When she got out of this Sue was going to have to have words with her mother, this was nothing like what she'd been told about. Mantaining the force field in situ she knelt down trying to get as close to the floor to present as small a target as possible, her taser aimed securely at Clint.
Clint was going to have to file a report for firing a weapon on the grounds of the facility, but this was getting ridiculous and he'd rather know already. Stepping forward, into the blue light cast by the tube, he released the arrow he had nocked.
The arrow sped into the force field, setting of the EMP but having no effect on the actual field itself. The girl inside was another matter entirely. Reacting instinctively, she let part of the force field fade and fired the taser. It was only when her eyes caught up to her brain that she realized who she was seeing. "Doctor Barton!" Sue was so surprised by the presence of her old TA that she dropped the force field entirely and just stood there staring at him for a moment.
The arrow had bounced harmlessly off the anomaly, but then a blonde appeared and tried to tase him... which didn't work, since his body armor prevented the electrical current from reaching skin. He still stood there, stunned in a different way, when she said his name. It took him a second, but he placed her and replied, "Susan Storm - I knew you weren't in Barrow just to take over a company!"
"And I should have known someone like you wouldn't just be up here for your health," Sue shot back dryly. "You're an agent of SHIELD now?"
"No, I'm an agent of SWORD - don't you even know what agency you're breaking into?" Clint asked, pulling the taser plugs out of his body armor.
"SWORD, SHIELD - two sides of the same coin," Sue countered standing up and making her way around the tube so that it was between herself and Clint. She really was going to have to have a talk with her mother when she got home, the intel was obviously wrong.
Clint kept himself between Sue and the door - her position in the room didn't matter as long he blocked the only exit. "Wrong," he said, frowning intently now. "Definitely wrong. But that doesn't explain why you're trying to take my tube." Just then, the item in question pulsed its bright, blue light again and he glanced toward his watch to check the time. "Damn, those really are decreasing exponentially."
"Your tube?" Sue asked, arching an eyebrow as she glanced at the glass. "How long has it been building like this? It looks like it's generating quite a charge in there." Her eyes flicked down to the vague shape of a person visible inside then back to Clint. "I think maybe we don't want to be here when it goes off."
"Right, but what is it building to?" Clint asked, fighting the urge to go to the console they'd set up that was monitoring every possible thing they could think of to monitor. Most of it was coming up useless or pointless, but the energy spikes registered on some level. "There's literally no power source, Miss Storm," Clint said, automatically defaulting to his TA voice. "The wires you see are from our equipment. And anyway, given the rate at which the pulsing has increased, I'd give us less than a six percent chance of getting out of the blast radius at this point, if it's some type of bomb. But you can see the silhouette inside." Another pulse lit up the room, throwing everything into sharp contrast. "I don't think it's a bomb. And I think whatever's in there is the power source."
Sue nodded, her previous discussion with Clint temporarily forgotten. "I think you're right. It's definitely working on some kind of internal power source, but there's no radiation coming off it? That's impressive in it's own right. No form of energy we have access to right now is 100% efficient, not even the ARC reactor technology. So whoever built this was working with tech way beyond the cutting edge." The blonde reached over and poked at one of the screens, looking at the readout of the pulses as they got closer and closer together. "I don't suppose SWORD happens to have a first-contact procedure does it? Cause I think we're about out of time."
The blonde grabbed a hold of Clint and pulled up a force field as the pulses, which had been getting faster and faster, suddenly paused before blue waves of lightning swept through the tube, providing a brief moments of luminescence so bright it was as if a new sun had flared to life in the room. Then the light faded, leaving behind an ozone-like scent, and taking with it the lights. In the darkness a soft plop was heard, and then a silence, broken only by the drip of liquid hitting the ground.
Clint narrowed his eyes at the mysterious tube, its glass as opaque as ever. He'd had to clean it when he'd gotten back from 'vacation,' since one of his coworkers had redrawn the odd smiley face on it. Still, it withheld its secrets from him, no matter how hard he studied it. Wanda hadn't gotten back to him yet after he sent her photos of the actual glyphs and symbols, but from what he understood, her language guy was the best around and she had contacts in the occult world that he didn't. He trusted her with it.
What he didn't trust was the way the power surges from the unknown power source had been increasing exponentially. It wasn't quite as bad as a strobe light, but there were definite pulses of light every fifteen minutes or so. His colleagues had taken note, after he'd pointed out the first few that he'd noticed, and begun logging it. Apparently some of the higher-ups had been informed, as well, and they were looking at sending another set of scientists to check it out.
That just made Clint frown harder as he headed away from the tube's storage room and back to the front office. If not for a helpful reminder text from Matt - as well as the alarm his brother had somehow managed to program into his phone - he'd have forgotten to eat dinner. Of course, the night shift was always weird when it came to food, anyway. He was hungry, though, so leftover pizza at two in the morning it would be.
Right on time, the guard made his patrol of the the warehouse and headed back to the front office to get his food, the same as every night since she'd been here. Sue knew she didn't have all the time in the world, but the 15 minutes to half a hour the guards took in the front office before resuming their work would be more than enough for her to sneak in and out of the warehouse with the tube in tow. She still didn't know exactly why her mother wanted it, just that it was a matter of life and death. She didn't even how her mother knew she had the skills to break in to this facility, something the blonde would have to grill said mother about once she got back to New York.
Still, she'd stashed all the equipment on her previous trips, the security system wouldn't be a problem - she'd compromised it already, along with the secondary system, the tertiary system, the failsafe, and the failsafe's failsafe. The staff here really did believe in redundancy. Though there wouldn't be a trace that she'd been here. A little mystery for them to ponder - as a gift, she thought. Still up the side of the building and across the roof to her gear, the winch was already warmed up so it was the matter of just a few seconds for Sue to clip herself in before she lifted the Plexiglas skylight and descended silently to the warehouse floor beneath her.
Two minutes after leaving the pulsating tube to reheat his pizza, Clint flipped the light off in the front room and, food in hand, made his way back through the warehouse toward the tube's storage room. Which was when he started noticing that something... wasn't quite right. The SWORD warehouse was one of the most secure facilities they had, the failsafes had failsafes - there were redundancies built into redundancies. But there were weaknesses. There were weaknesses in any facility, no matter how large or seemingly well-protected.
It was the draft that gave it away. The hair on the back of his neck had stood on end as soon as he felt the pull of cool air - the warehouse was climate controlled, no telling what the freezing cold or the damp or any other conditions might do to some of the items stored here. Looking up - no one ever looked up - he saw one of the skylights propped open, just enough to allow the rope in. And the rope was taut, swinging ever so slightly - weighted, either someone was in the warehouse or they were putting something in the warehouse.
Fuck, he thought. That was all he needed - someone blowing up the whole damn facility on his watch. He was already skating on thin ice. Setting his pizza soundlessly aside, Clint walked toward the area the rope dropped to and when his blood practically froze in his veins, it had nothing to do with the sub-zero temperatures sweeping into the building. The tube.
Clint moved fluidly, years of training, both before and after SHIELD recruited him, took over and he made his way to the tube's storage room just in time to see the rope go slightly slack. Its end pooled on the floor, obviously not necessary for the moment, but the door to the room itself was ajar.
The tube was exactly where Sue had predicted it would be, standing in the middle of the room, though not connected to a power source. She hadn't expected the pulsing energy but that was neither here nor there, a puzzle for her to worry about on the way to the airport. The rope came off her belt and the carabiners started snapping onto the tube. It was actually lighter than she'd expected it to be. There shouldn't be any major problem getting it out of the warehouse and away from the facility. Or at least that was the plan... but something was wrong,
Sue didn't know if it was the creak of a door or a breeze on her neck, but she just knew something was wrong - call it a premonition based on years of thieving experience. The blonde dropped into a crouch, pulling up a forcefield around her as her eyes flickered all over the room trying to locate what she had sensed.
Clint approached the door from an angle, making sure he didn't cast a shadow whoever was in there would be able to place, and then he waited for several long moments. There were no tell-tale sounds, no steps echoing or heavy breathing. If he was smart, he'd just close the door and lock it, leaving whoever was in there for the proper authorities. There was a panic button on his comm that would alert SWORD security in Barrow, itself, that something was wrong.
And yet...
Instead, he pushed the door open slowly, staying out of line of sight from any angle in the room, and said, "You might as well come out. Unless you can phase through walls, you're stuck."
There was a man in the door, the guard. But he shouldn't have been back for at least 15 minutes...and to be fair he should have been a she. So the guard must have switched shifts with someone who didn't take so long, it was always the little things that got you. Slowly, as stealthily as years of practice could make her Sue started inching away from the tube. She wasn't quite sure how she was gonna get out of this one, but she if she stayed where she was she couldn't keep her force-field up indefinitely.
Clint took a small risk can peeked around the corner, eyes there and gone in less than a second. He didn't see anyone per se... but there was definitely an anomaly near the tube. He needed to get a better look at it, but he had no idea who or what he might be dealing with. Protocol dictated he sound the alarm. His gut kept telling him to investigate. Glad that he'd at least followed protocol enough to don basic body armor despite being in a facility in the middle of nowhere, Clint glanced toward the rope and the skylight above, then turned to fill the doorway face-first.
He'd been prepared to say something - anything - to get the person (people?) in there to reveal themselves, but then he got a clear look at the anomaly and he paused, eyebrows rising. "Are you seriously... wait - no, that's not... are you using a device to do that? We've only got prototypes for individual use and they're more likely to explode than actually function at this point." They had the cloaking for jets and helicarriers, but not for agents - not yet.
Forgetting himself for just a moment, Clint took a step forward and focused entirely on the odd bit of space next to the tube. Shorter than he would have expected for a person - maybe this was a distraction. Or maybe whoever it was had crouched. Or maybe this was a magical bomb and he was about to get blown to pieces, a footnote in the SWORD training manuals reminding future agents to follow protocol. "Refracting - no, it's got way more curvature than a refraction would - you're bending light. But is it a perception, are you influencing my brain, or are you legitimately bending light?"
He could see her?! Sue almost dropped her forcefield in surprise there was no way anyone had ever seen her before, she'd breezed through cameras like they weren't even there but now the blonde's brow furrowed. Wait no he hadn't seen her, he had noticed the light bending around her, the distortion was almost unnoticeable but he had, that wasn't quite as bad. She almost wanted to answer but that would be giving herself away. She couldn't move obviously, or he'd see the movement but she could move within the forcefield she realized reaching into her bag her eyes darting desperately around the room. There had to be a way out of here without being caught. Breaking into a government facility wasn't something even she could walk away from.
The anomaly didn't move, but Clint decided it'd been sitting there for too long to mean anything good - and since he hadn't gotten an answer, he was leaning more and more toward this being some kind of a set-up or bomb. He pulled his bow over his shoulder and nocked an arrow almost in the same motion, aiming directly at the strange area of bent like. "Last chance - this arrow's got a localized EMP attached, it triggers on impact. Either show yourself or I'm shooting you. Whatever you are." If this wound up being an inanimate object, he was going to feel slightly ridiculous and his coworkers were going to laugh themselves silly when they watched the replay.
He was pointing a bow and arrow at her now! This was way out of control, who even used bows and arrows these days? When she got out of this Sue was going to have to have words with her mother, this was nothing like what she'd been told about. Mantaining the force field in situ she knelt down trying to get as close to the floor to present as small a target as possible, her taser aimed securely at Clint.
Clint was going to have to file a report for firing a weapon on the grounds of the facility, but this was getting ridiculous and he'd rather know already. Stepping forward, into the blue light cast by the tube, he released the arrow he had nocked.
The arrow sped into the force field, setting of the EMP but having no effect on the actual field itself. The girl inside was another matter entirely. Reacting instinctively, she let part of the force field fade and fired the taser. It was only when her eyes caught up to her brain that she realized who she was seeing. "Doctor Barton!" Sue was so surprised by the presence of her old TA that she dropped the force field entirely and just stood there staring at him for a moment.
The arrow had bounced harmlessly off the anomaly, but then a blonde appeared and tried to tase him... which didn't work, since his body armor prevented the electrical current from reaching skin. He still stood there, stunned in a different way, when she said his name. It took him a second, but he placed her and replied, "Susan Storm - I knew you weren't in Barrow just to take over a company!"
"And I should have known someone like you wouldn't just be up here for your health," Sue shot back dryly. "You're an agent of SHIELD now?"
"No, I'm an agent of SWORD - don't you even know what agency you're breaking into?" Clint asked, pulling the taser plugs out of his body armor.
"SWORD, SHIELD - two sides of the same coin," Sue countered standing up and making her way around the tube so that it was between herself and Clint. She really was going to have to have a talk with her mother when she got home, the intel was obviously wrong.
Clint kept himself between Sue and the door - her position in the room didn't matter as long he blocked the only exit. "Wrong," he said, frowning intently now. "Definitely wrong. But that doesn't explain why you're trying to take my tube." Just then, the item in question pulsed its bright, blue light again and he glanced toward his watch to check the time. "Damn, those really are decreasing exponentially."
"Your tube?" Sue asked, arching an eyebrow as she glanced at the glass. "How long has it been building like this? It looks like it's generating quite a charge in there." Her eyes flicked down to the vague shape of a person visible inside then back to Clint. "I think maybe we don't want to be here when it goes off."
"Right, but what is it building to?" Clint asked, fighting the urge to go to the console they'd set up that was monitoring every possible thing they could think of to monitor. Most of it was coming up useless or pointless, but the energy spikes registered on some level. "There's literally no power source, Miss Storm," Clint said, automatically defaulting to his TA voice. "The wires you see are from our equipment. And anyway, given the rate at which the pulsing has increased, I'd give us less than a six percent chance of getting out of the blast radius at this point, if it's some type of bomb. But you can see the silhouette inside." Another pulse lit up the room, throwing everything into sharp contrast. "I don't think it's a bomb. And I think whatever's in there is the power source."
Sue nodded, her previous discussion with Clint temporarily forgotten. "I think you're right. It's definitely working on some kind of internal power source, but there's no radiation coming off it? That's impressive in it's own right. No form of energy we have access to right now is 100% efficient, not even the ARC reactor technology. So whoever built this was working with tech way beyond the cutting edge." The blonde reached over and poked at one of the screens, looking at the readout of the pulses as they got closer and closer together. "I don't suppose SWORD happens to have a first-contact procedure does it? Cause I think we're about out of time."
The blonde grabbed a hold of Clint and pulled up a force field as the pulses, which had been getting faster and faster, suddenly paused before blue waves of lightning swept through the tube, providing a brief moments of luminescence so bright it was as if a new sun had flared to life in the room. Then the light faded, leaving behind an ozone-like scent, and taking with it the lights. In the darkness a soft plop was heard, and then a silence, broken only by the drip of liquid hitting the ground.
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