xp_logs | Kevin & Wade | Saturday Afternoon (backdated)

Kevin and Wade talk at the bar while away on Snow Valley's 'team-building retreat.'

Sliding onto the stool at the end of the bar near where Kevin sat, Wade signaled the bartender for a refill of his empty glass and quirked a brow at his colleague. Wiggling his eyebrows a moment later, he asked, "Heya, hotshot. What's a fella like you doing in a place like this?"

"In any form, I'm out of your league, Wilson." Kevin tipped up his glass for a healthy swallow of the 'authentic' retro Manhattan the bartender had promised him. It tasted like a not great normal Manhattan. Maybe it was organic or dolphin free or something? He hadn't been underwater to truly be a man out of time, but the entire Hipster movement puzzled him. He'd recently seen a sign offering artisanal dental work. He knew what the individual words meant, but the sentence was lost on him. "What happened to your eyebrows?"

"From what I understand, they've been moisturized and exfoliated," Wade said, accepting his refill from the bartender with a nod. "So has the rest of my face. Almond something something. And possibly yogurt. Or seaweed. I'll be honest, I kind of stopped paying attention and just let them do whatever. Not like it could be any worse than the snowburn. You left the bar at all?"

"Of course. They don't like when guests do that sort of thing in plain view of the rest of the patrons." He said dryly. "It amazes me that all the things that I was told to eat to stay young in the 80s are now what you're told to smear on your face to stay young. I liked when moisturizing was when you had a Bloody Mary to thin out the booze for a few hours."

"Does alcohol actually work on you?" Wade asked, tipping his head to the side a little as he looked at Kevin.

"That depends what you mean. It tastes good- wait. Can you take this back and pour me three fingers of Chivas on ice. Thank you." Kevin pushed his glass over to the bartender. "I was saying- it tastes good, makes things fun and takes away the pain, without all those wacky drawbacks from comparable things like, say, heroin."

"So you could get drunk if you wanted," Wade said, taking a sip of his drink. "Assuming you haven't built up a tolerance."

"The opposite. I can get sober if I want to. Getting drunk is part of the process of drinking properly." He picked up his replacement drink and took a sip. "You're saying you don't get drunk?"

"Nope," Wade said, shaking his head. "Well, I guess I could, but Logan and I figure it'd have to be like ethanol through an IV or something. Kinda kills the fun." Then he shrugged. "Still tastes good, though."

"That's one of the most depressing things I've ever heard." Kevin scowled into his glass. "Social anesthetic is vital in our line of work."

"See, this is why I'm glad I do the shooting thing and not the covert thing. Cause I just shoot things that bother me," Wade said. He raise his glass. "It's left me very well adjusted, eh? Besides, it's kinda like the universe decided to do me a favor."

"The time to be able to make a distinction between the two is likely coming to an end." He shrugged. "This shop is entirely too small to carry anyone who is just a single resource." He took a contemplative sip. "That might mean we're all going back to school."

"Care to elaborate, Ominous McDoomCloud?" Wade asked, a eyebrow rising again.

"In terms of manpower, we're trying to cover a global network with the same amount of people that I would have had to cover St. Lucia in the 1980s. Look, there's great automation in place to close the gaps, but our HUMINT is low and our analysis is laughably undermanned. If we're going to do this, we either need to scale up or we need to increase our depth in each resource we have." He finished off the drink and waved for another. Again. "That means we don't have room for anyone to be 'just' one thing if we're going to be effective."

Wade didn't reply immediately, mulling that over as he finished off his own drink. "That's all true. Just don't try shoving square blocks in not square slots. There's natural growth, which SV had to do a lot of thanks to M-Day, and then there's over-extension. I'm happy to help out with contacts and networks, set up meet and greets, smooth ruffled feathers, kill people if I have to, handle safe houses. But seriously." He gestured toward himself. "I'm subtle like a brick. Besides, we've got the baby spies to keep training up."

"Yes, but being able to throw you into low level analysis helps free up the time for the more talented people to focus on the high level stuff. Same goes for the field. I don't expect to see Maddicks pulling duty as a sniper any time soon, but he should be able to handle a reasonable level of opposition so you're free to be shot a couple of dozen times somewhere more urgent."

"Ah, being shot," Wade said, voice dry. "But I see where you're going with this. What kind of analysis are you thinking I should start brushing up on?"

"Good question. That was something that I hoped we could address during or after this trip. Have a frank assessment of what we currently have on the table, resource wise, and what gaps we need to target."

"What, like a whole team meeting thing or my stuff specifically? Cause I'll be honest, I'm not sure we'll be able to pry Fe away from the fire or Cohuelo off that couch," Wade said, amused.

"I meant as a group. Hell, I don't know enough about your background to even start guessing at where you might want to focus."

"Yeah, that meeting's probably gonna have to happen next week. Possibly while everyone's still too dazed and hungover to argue with a 'meet in conference room two' ping to their phones," Wade said, smiling.

"And here I thought I was drinking with professionals."

"Sure, but I think you're the only professional drinker amongst us," Wade said, shrugging. "Besides, I think team bonding or whatever we're supposed to be doing is the antithesis of 'figure out where we can double up on skill sets.'"

"I was having a mud treatment during our group trust exercises."

Wade tsked. "That was you over there when they were smearing seaweed on my face? The sounds coming outta the mud room."

"Nah, one advantage of being me. I save a ton on haircuts, manicures and moisturizer."

Laughing a little, Wade said, "Back to the original topic. Sort of. Security analysis is what my cover at SV is. Threat analysis. Arms movement." He shrugged. "Those I can do. My contacts are mainly in South America, Northern Africa, parts of Asia, and mercenary circles."

"The network part is solid. I'm talking more about you being able to vet and contextualize the return against the wider scope of our intel. Or, at least, classify it so that someone else can run with it, without having to go through the dross first."

"That I can also do." Flagging the bartender down for another drink, Wade asked, "Anything in particular we're looking for, or just the generic 'all knowledge is good knowledge' type of thing? For prioritization purposes."

"Another good question. To be honest, our mission statement is a little vague."

"Spy," Wade said, nodding. "That's pretty much it. I mean, also 'stop godawful things from happening,' but mostly just 'spy.'"

"Yeah, which is along the lines of a football coach saying 'play good' in terms of usefulness."

"Good thing I'm not a coach," Wade said. "Not my circus, not my monkeys." He grinned as the bartender sat his drink in front of him. "What would you like our mission statement to be, Kevs?"

"Here's a lot of money. Go have sex with all those people over there." He sighed. "Unfortunately, I think we need to be a little more specific. If we're preemptive, we should orient that way. If we're HUMINT for the X-Men, that's a different structure."

Settling his shoulders against the wall adjacent to the bar, Wade thought that over for a few long moments as he sipped his new drink. "I think passing along intelligence to the X-Men is... what, an ancillary service? But not our primary function. Mainly because the X-Men see things in black and white - or it seems like they do, anyway."

"And we are not law enforcement. So, we don't want to be reactive. That means focusing on identifying and neutralizing threats before they become threats."

"Using any means necessary?"

"I'm alright with that. But it depends on everyone else."