X-Force: New Beginnings
Feb. 14th, 2022 03:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsX-Force has a meeting about the intel they are now receiving and how it changes almost everything.
It was a typical day at Snow Valley. Or, in actuality, it was only typical because it was different. Between the move, missions, reveal of the Hell-Lord and Brotherhood, and a snowstorm, a normal standard business day now counted as atypical. But they'd all been asked to the conference room right off the bat, a request which had little more context than the fact both Kevin and Marie-Ange had spent the weekend behind closed doors. The only indication of life was when it cracked open long enough to acquire another pot of coffee or some sandwiches.
"Good morning. Sit, get a plate." They'd catered, that alone meant it must be something big. Marie-Ange had a mug of tea, her hair in a messy bun and the remains of a danish on a plate next to her.
She waited. Everyone shuffled around a little, notepads and tablets and cups, pencils and post-it notes.
"Garrison Kane is not dead, and that alone would be a miracle. I am not going to waste time recapping the very actual hell he went through. He brokered us a deal, with Brand." She flicked her phone, and notification noises went off on every device in the room. "We have been given a windfall of intelligence. I do not exaggerate when I tell you that it is like nothing we have seen in.. " She flicked a stray piece of hair off her eye. "In the sixteen years since I came on. This is enough to change how we operate entirely."
"Like Colbert said, this level of intel changes everything. Right now, this is a decent visualization of our network." Kevin touched a button on his laptop, and on the big screen, a 3D rendering of the world appeared, with tiny light lines representing their networks of allies, informants, and assets depicted. It was like a net of fine wire crisscrossing the globe. "As of now, we use our computer analysis tools to help fill in the gaps the best we can. You all know this. It's what you do every day. Now, here is what the intel from SHIELD/SWORD looks like... roughly."
He tapped another button, and the globe was now wrapped in large bright coils of assets and intel sources. "Yeah, I know."
Natasha gave a low whistle because while she'd known that SHIELD and SWORD had resources and connections she didn't, she hadn't known the extent. "Well, that puts my paltry little network to shame." SHIELD had liked to keep things silo'd and compartmentalized as much as it could. Until things blew up in everyone's faces and then compromises had to be made.
"Fucking hell." Gabriel put down the bagel out of which he was about to take a mega-bite and sat up a little straighter. "Don't suppose the feds gave us their super-computer that makes sense of all that shit." His eyes followed one of the lines. "Greenland to — what's that, Cambodia? Laos? The hell is that person smuggling."
“People, probably,” Jubilee muttered, giving the intel a quick look over from her seat on one of the tables. “We’re gonna need to spend time looking over it all. I can already see some places we can move assets around.”
"Depends on where the other strings are going from it. Rosewood, live reptiles, drugs, people," Darcy replied absently as she looked between her tablet and the screen, already calculating how to shuffle things around so she could spend more time digging through all of this. "Exotics have weird trade routes. Obfuscated to make it harder to seize and prosecute. Greenland to Cambodia's probably drugs, maybe ivory, although they usually route that through China or the edges of Russia. If there's a loop through China back to Greenland.. can't tell, it's not zoomed in enough for that, probably some sort of complex rosewood-drugs-ivory situation."
"They do people via China to Russia as well, but that's mostly dissidents fleeing the Chinese Government," Jubilee pointed out, although she had more personal knowledge of drug-running than people running via that route. "The drugs are more prevalent though, and might use the same people."
“True, true. Drugs hide the exotics sometimes too. Better to get busted with a bunch of cannabis instead of an elephant’s tusk or something you’ll really have to pay someone off for.”
"Or they might just be slight of hand tactics to have people looking one way for the easy found vs what they've really truly hidden and want kept private." Natasha typed several notes into her laptop as personal reminders to check in on her network and tighten up some loose strings. There was a lot more contingency planning she needed to look into now too.
"Putting the exotic smuggling ring aside for a moment." Kevin said, pulling them back on track. "So why does this mean more than just a big funnel of extra data? Because if you look close, you see some interesting things." Kevin zoomed into Germany. "See how their coverage works? Now, look at ours. They cover ten times the area, but they still have gaps. And in some of those, we have assets they don't. That's what this represents."
Artie held up a hand, before projecting "So, is this a two-way street and they have our assets, too?"
Amanda snorted. “Fuck, no. Brand isn’t going anywhere near our assets.” She’d stayed quiet so far, given her role in procuring the information, content to let Kevin take charge of what was undoubtedly his element. “As far as what we owe in return, we’ve already paid it with what went on with Olivier. The leather brigade and SHIELD have an understanding about lending help when it’s needed, but that doesn’t include us.”
"Well, that's something at least," Artie replied.
"We can use this intel not only to expand our own networks and process more information, but we can also re-align how we spend our time and resources. Instead of copying work they are already doing, we can focus on where our networks provide unique further intel and pour our integration and analysis resources there. In a sense, our mutant intelligence at the end of the day should end up being more comprehensive, because we're piggybacking off all their resources."
"Do we know if this is higher-level operatives or things like milk runs as well?" Jubilee asked.
“No. The one thing we don’t get is their sources. But we can infer from the intel that comes back what are high and low priority channels.”
"Making inferences and extrapolations from raw data? I know my job when I hear it." Doug drummed his fingers on the table, already roughing out queries and ways to visualize data in his head. "Please god tell me it's in some sort of easily importable format, though." he thought of doing that much data entry was definitely not high on his list of enjoyable tasks.
"Not just your job, bet." Darcy poked Doug's forearm with the end of her stylus. "We're gonna need another Precious at this rate. Hand importing that much information.." she let out a low whistle. "Take way too long, especially if we have to deal with compatibility issues."
"Hmm, if not, I'm sure there's something we can dash up that'll automate a majority of the process. As long as it's not paper files." A corner of Natasha's mouth quirked in displeasure. SHIELD tended to be more hidebound than it needed to be. She hoped it'd changed but then a focus on red tape and paperwork rather than efficiency was a ship that took far too much time to turn.
"One of the few times a giant stack of paper files might be easier," Darcy replied. "Get a high volume document scanner, pay one of the college kids to feed and babysit it for a few hours per day so we don't have to do it. Maybe Ryan, she already works with Topaz in the library at home."
"I don't know. The OCR capabilities would need to be extensive to make it usable because sure everything's now in PDF format but can we copy any of the text or data into whatever programs or algorithms we need? Might still be entirely too much manual data entry. We'd need a million clones of each of us to get it done quickly enough so the intel doesn't go bad." Natasha drummed her fingers against the table top. "Let's hope there's been some modernization going on behind the scenes."
"Thank you for volunteering, you three are now in charge of the technology overhaul we are going to need to process this." Marie-Ange pointed at Darcy, Natasha, and Doug. "It had already started, with the intelligence from Clint Barton. Expect to need.." She waved a hand. "I am sure you are all doing the math in your heads. Upgrade whatever you need, but do not get stuck in the details. Big now, small later."
“And you need it all yesterday, right?” Doug’s question wasn’t sarcastic in the least, the memories of Pete asking the same of him over a dozen years ago coming as a comforting reprise. He rolled his shoulders and grinned. “Allons-y!”
"Shit, do we have the space for.. wait, no. We can figure that out later," Darcy muttered half to herself, a neat "Petabytes? Reno already???" added to her growing list of notes as she gave Ange a thumbs-up.
"Regarding magic, it looks like Brand decided to be generous and put us in SWORD's loop for that intel as well. So over the next few weeks, we're going to be shaking up all of our networks and intel runs. And completely changing our intake so that the information we're getting is being integrated with all the extra info. So both field and analyst people, you're going to be looking at how to rebuild everything from the ground up in terms of how you operate to make all this work."
"How generous," Topaz muttered. Yes, she recognized that this was a huge thing, and she could put aside personal biases of course (even if Brand made her skin itch). And she could only imagine the kind of info they'd be able to get their hands on. Not to mention what they might expect in return - generosity only went so far sometimes. "How much of this is going to involve culling our own networks? I know the Baltimore coven can't really compare to whatever contacts SWORD has, but they've still been helpful and I'd like to keep them."
"Do not cull anything, but I would like you to see how much you can use the Megs in lighter contact. Nothing intelligence-related, of course. I sent you an outline." Marie-Ange flicked the screen of her tablet to send a document off to Topaz's phone. "We may do some re-arranging of who contacts whom, some assets may see less attention as we get all of this processed, but our personal information groups in our specialties are still valuable."
"Oh," Gabriel groaned. "So those of us without specialties get to start from square one. Lovely."
Artie nodded in agreement. Sure, this was good but goddamn, the work it was going to take to verify and validate it all.
The opening vocals to Santana’s “Black Magic Woman” sounded on Doug’s phone, and he flipped it over to see what it was. “Text message from one of Wanda’s burners…oh, it’s emoji time.” His eyebrows raised slightly in amusement as he read. “Five party hats, throwing the horns - party time, excellent.” Another notification came through, and he smirked. “Eggplant and a pair of watermelons. Apparently this is sexy and the absolute tits.” He tapped a quick reply and then set his phone back down.
"You'll always be special to me, Gabe," Jubilee gave him a saucy wink and a grin. She couldn't resist the urge to tease the younger man, just a little. "Don't worry, I don't think anyone is gonna get stuck with only grunt work."
"No one is starting at square one. I do not have a metaphor for this." Marie-Ange explained. "Yes, it will take work to integrate this into our existing networks, yes we may have to put some existing sources on the back of the oven for now, but we have a network, we just weave this into our existing one, and then re-examine what is and is not valuable. No one starts over. That is a waste of our hard work."
"Sounds like I'll be leaning harder on some resources for their resources and expanding outwards into areas I wouldn't have looked at before." Natasha shrugged and added a few more points to her ever increasing lists of to do items. They'd get relegated to the various appropriate bins once the meeting was over and wiped from her computer.
"Being the cynical bastard that I am, we'll be keeping some parallel networks running, as test groups to check SHIELD's data against. If we start seeing variants, we'll know they are tampering with what they are giving us."
"That was my thought too. I wouldn't put it past them to keep the really important stuff under lock and key even from who we'd think would be high enough up the chain to know it all." Natasha said.
"You're making some pretty big assumptions about their assets' goals matching ours here, Kevin," Artie replied. "I personally don't trust that a network built by a bunch of flatscans, fascists, and human military types really will have contacts and goals that align with ours or are looking for the things we need to know."
Darcy scoffed. "SHIELD--and by extension SWORD--want to know everything about everything so they can control it. Of course their assets aren't always going to have goals that align with ours. None of us is idiot enough to ignore the contacts we've cultivated and vetted for what we're being spoon-fed out the side door. It's like looking at scientific data. If three of your reports are giving consistent, similar feedback and a fourth is kicking back weird numbers, you keep an eye on what's being consistent but focus your attention on what's causing the range to fluctuate so you can figure out and address the issue."
"You know, interestingly enough, I might have a clue how bias in intelligence gathering works." Kevin's voice went cold. "And if I hear the term 'flatscan' in this shop again, I fucking personally guarantee the person using it goes out an upper floor window. Am I clear?"
"Well, excuse me if I don't have a lot of like, or patience, or whatever for goddamn humans," Artie replied. "I'll stop calling them flatscans when they - collectively - start to consider that mutants might be people.”
“Dude, stop being a fucking bigot.” Jubilee slid off the table she’d been using as a seat and glared. “You may have no human family or friends but we do. So quit with the bullshit slogans and grow up.”
Artie stood up, glaring at Jubilee, and signed, "What the hell ever. I'm outta here, passer." He left without looking back.
Kevin shook his head as Artie left, but made no move to stop him. He'd noticed the young man getting increasingly more vocal about mutant rights and biases. Would it bleed over into his work. He made a mental note.
Doug did his best to school his features and keep them neutral, and not pointedly follow Artie with his eyes as he left, but there were plenty of tells for those who knew him best, mostly in the tightness around his eyes and his fingers going still. He was aware that perhaps other than Kevin, he was the ne plus ultra of passers, and it could sometimes be a sore subject.
Darcy gave Doug's fingers a reassuring squeeze as Artie stormed out of the meeting, looking down at her schedule. Nothing that couldn't be shifted back a day. She settled back in her seat as the meeting continued, letting the information wash over her as she made plans for some practical work.
Natasha hmmed a noncommittal noise as she picked up a puff pastry from the middle of her plate and bit into it. That would be something she'd have to look out for while she was working. Possibly even incorporate it into a few of her personas depending on if her covers were still blown or not. Though, with the missions X-Force tended to pick up, she wasn't expecting that to be much of an issue and with her having gone dormant the last few years she'd long faded from most people's radars.
Emma, who had been delicately consuming a tiny, exquisite piece of patisserie finally looked up. "I assume this will cost me either a lot less money or a lot more money. If it’s the first," she aimed the words somewhere between Kevin and Marie-Ange, "let me know so I can tell my accountants and buy them champagne. If it’s the latter, make sure the petty cash forms are filled out correctly."
“This is going to cost you more money, but your return on investment just went up by a factor of ten.” Kevin confirmed.
Felicia, who’d so far spent the discussion silent and, judging by the quiet rapidly changing music from her phone, scrolling Instagram reels, murmured with a half smile, “And I’m sure we’ll somehow help you spend it.”
"Which reminds me, I need to put my expense report in later," Jubilee muttered with a semi-guilty look toward North. It wasn't that she'd forgotten, it was just that she hadn't exactly remembered either. "I'll get it done today."
Topaz was fixated on her phone by this point, swiping through what Marie-Ange had said and barely looked up as Artie walked out. "I'll start getting my contacts organized and see where things fit in. Unsurprisingly, SWORD has more reach than I've managed to accomplish through internet forums, but they've also neglected a lot of smaller areas, which I'm sure the locals are happy about. And I'll try to grab the Megs for a meeting this week."
"Fantastic, and just so. We use our smaller contacts to fill in the gaps, instead of trying to use them to build big." Marie-Ange pointed at Topaz. "Work with Amanda and Wanda, obviously, but also with Darcy and Doug for your internet people."
That got Marie-Ange a vague thumbs up in return. “Everyone can expect lists and contact infos in the next week.”
"In the next several weeks, Kevin or I will meet with each of you." Marie-Ange said. "Nothing on the calendar right now, it will depend on how all of this information moves as we poke it with sticks." She finished the dregs of her tea, and tipped the mug out on the saucer. "Nothing mystical, no predictions. We have been gifted something amazing. "We cannot waste this. We will not waste this. Expect to be busy, expect sleepless nights, travel to absolute shite locations, expect the job to change. But."
She paused, and looked at Kevin. "Kevin asked me what our mission was once. I told him that we prevented people from being turned into monsters. Until now, we threw darts and got lucky. Sometimes we put the monsters down, sometimes we adopted them. With this - it is not just one or two mad doctors at a time now. Now we have a roadmap to the monster factories. Now we go tear them down, and salt the roots."
It was a typical day at Snow Valley. Or, in actuality, it was only typical because it was different. Between the move, missions, reveal of the Hell-Lord and Brotherhood, and a snowstorm, a normal standard business day now counted as atypical. But they'd all been asked to the conference room right off the bat, a request which had little more context than the fact both Kevin and Marie-Ange had spent the weekend behind closed doors. The only indication of life was when it cracked open long enough to acquire another pot of coffee or some sandwiches.
"Good morning. Sit, get a plate." They'd catered, that alone meant it must be something big. Marie-Ange had a mug of tea, her hair in a messy bun and the remains of a danish on a plate next to her.
She waited. Everyone shuffled around a little, notepads and tablets and cups, pencils and post-it notes.
"Garrison Kane is not dead, and that alone would be a miracle. I am not going to waste time recapping the very actual hell he went through. He brokered us a deal, with Brand." She flicked her phone, and notification noises went off on every device in the room. "We have been given a windfall of intelligence. I do not exaggerate when I tell you that it is like nothing we have seen in.. " She flicked a stray piece of hair off her eye. "In the sixteen years since I came on. This is enough to change how we operate entirely."
"Like Colbert said, this level of intel changes everything. Right now, this is a decent visualization of our network." Kevin touched a button on his laptop, and on the big screen, a 3D rendering of the world appeared, with tiny light lines representing their networks of allies, informants, and assets depicted. It was like a net of fine wire crisscrossing the globe. "As of now, we use our computer analysis tools to help fill in the gaps the best we can. You all know this. It's what you do every day. Now, here is what the intel from SHIELD/SWORD looks like... roughly."
He tapped another button, and the globe was now wrapped in large bright coils of assets and intel sources. "Yeah, I know."
Natasha gave a low whistle because while she'd known that SHIELD and SWORD had resources and connections she didn't, she hadn't known the extent. "Well, that puts my paltry little network to shame." SHIELD had liked to keep things silo'd and compartmentalized as much as it could. Until things blew up in everyone's faces and then compromises had to be made.
"Fucking hell." Gabriel put down the bagel out of which he was about to take a mega-bite and sat up a little straighter. "Don't suppose the feds gave us their super-computer that makes sense of all that shit." His eyes followed one of the lines. "Greenland to — what's that, Cambodia? Laos? The hell is that person smuggling."
“People, probably,” Jubilee muttered, giving the intel a quick look over from her seat on one of the tables. “We’re gonna need to spend time looking over it all. I can already see some places we can move assets around.”
"Depends on where the other strings are going from it. Rosewood, live reptiles, drugs, people," Darcy replied absently as she looked between her tablet and the screen, already calculating how to shuffle things around so she could spend more time digging through all of this. "Exotics have weird trade routes. Obfuscated to make it harder to seize and prosecute. Greenland to Cambodia's probably drugs, maybe ivory, although they usually route that through China or the edges of Russia. If there's a loop through China back to Greenland.. can't tell, it's not zoomed in enough for that, probably some sort of complex rosewood-drugs-ivory situation."
"They do people via China to Russia as well, but that's mostly dissidents fleeing the Chinese Government," Jubilee pointed out, although she had more personal knowledge of drug-running than people running via that route. "The drugs are more prevalent though, and might use the same people."
“True, true. Drugs hide the exotics sometimes too. Better to get busted with a bunch of cannabis instead of an elephant’s tusk or something you’ll really have to pay someone off for.”
"Or they might just be slight of hand tactics to have people looking one way for the easy found vs what they've really truly hidden and want kept private." Natasha typed several notes into her laptop as personal reminders to check in on her network and tighten up some loose strings. There was a lot more contingency planning she needed to look into now too.
"Putting the exotic smuggling ring aside for a moment." Kevin said, pulling them back on track. "So why does this mean more than just a big funnel of extra data? Because if you look close, you see some interesting things." Kevin zoomed into Germany. "See how their coverage works? Now, look at ours. They cover ten times the area, but they still have gaps. And in some of those, we have assets they don't. That's what this represents."
Artie held up a hand, before projecting "So, is this a two-way street and they have our assets, too?"
Amanda snorted. “Fuck, no. Brand isn’t going anywhere near our assets.” She’d stayed quiet so far, given her role in procuring the information, content to let Kevin take charge of what was undoubtedly his element. “As far as what we owe in return, we’ve already paid it with what went on with Olivier. The leather brigade and SHIELD have an understanding about lending help when it’s needed, but that doesn’t include us.”
"Well, that's something at least," Artie replied.
"We can use this intel not only to expand our own networks and process more information, but we can also re-align how we spend our time and resources. Instead of copying work they are already doing, we can focus on where our networks provide unique further intel and pour our integration and analysis resources there. In a sense, our mutant intelligence at the end of the day should end up being more comprehensive, because we're piggybacking off all their resources."
"Do we know if this is higher-level operatives or things like milk runs as well?" Jubilee asked.
“No. The one thing we don’t get is their sources. But we can infer from the intel that comes back what are high and low priority channels.”
"Making inferences and extrapolations from raw data? I know my job when I hear it." Doug drummed his fingers on the table, already roughing out queries and ways to visualize data in his head. "Please god tell me it's in some sort of easily importable format, though." he thought of doing that much data entry was definitely not high on his list of enjoyable tasks.
"Not just your job, bet." Darcy poked Doug's forearm with the end of her stylus. "We're gonna need another Precious at this rate. Hand importing that much information.." she let out a low whistle. "Take way too long, especially if we have to deal with compatibility issues."
"Hmm, if not, I'm sure there's something we can dash up that'll automate a majority of the process. As long as it's not paper files." A corner of Natasha's mouth quirked in displeasure. SHIELD tended to be more hidebound than it needed to be. She hoped it'd changed but then a focus on red tape and paperwork rather than efficiency was a ship that took far too much time to turn.
"One of the few times a giant stack of paper files might be easier," Darcy replied. "Get a high volume document scanner, pay one of the college kids to feed and babysit it for a few hours per day so we don't have to do it. Maybe Ryan, she already works with Topaz in the library at home."
"I don't know. The OCR capabilities would need to be extensive to make it usable because sure everything's now in PDF format but can we copy any of the text or data into whatever programs or algorithms we need? Might still be entirely too much manual data entry. We'd need a million clones of each of us to get it done quickly enough so the intel doesn't go bad." Natasha drummed her fingers against the table top. "Let's hope there's been some modernization going on behind the scenes."
"Thank you for volunteering, you three are now in charge of the technology overhaul we are going to need to process this." Marie-Ange pointed at Darcy, Natasha, and Doug. "It had already started, with the intelligence from Clint Barton. Expect to need.." She waved a hand. "I am sure you are all doing the math in your heads. Upgrade whatever you need, but do not get stuck in the details. Big now, small later."
“And you need it all yesterday, right?” Doug’s question wasn’t sarcastic in the least, the memories of Pete asking the same of him over a dozen years ago coming as a comforting reprise. He rolled his shoulders and grinned. “Allons-y!”
"Shit, do we have the space for.. wait, no. We can figure that out later," Darcy muttered half to herself, a neat "Petabytes? Reno already???" added to her growing list of notes as she gave Ange a thumbs-up.
"Regarding magic, it looks like Brand decided to be generous and put us in SWORD's loop for that intel as well. So over the next few weeks, we're going to be shaking up all of our networks and intel runs. And completely changing our intake so that the information we're getting is being integrated with all the extra info. So both field and analyst people, you're going to be looking at how to rebuild everything from the ground up in terms of how you operate to make all this work."
"How generous," Topaz muttered. Yes, she recognized that this was a huge thing, and she could put aside personal biases of course (even if Brand made her skin itch). And she could only imagine the kind of info they'd be able to get their hands on. Not to mention what they might expect in return - generosity only went so far sometimes. "How much of this is going to involve culling our own networks? I know the Baltimore coven can't really compare to whatever contacts SWORD has, but they've still been helpful and I'd like to keep them."
"Do not cull anything, but I would like you to see how much you can use the Megs in lighter contact. Nothing intelligence-related, of course. I sent you an outline." Marie-Ange flicked the screen of her tablet to send a document off to Topaz's phone. "We may do some re-arranging of who contacts whom, some assets may see less attention as we get all of this processed, but our personal information groups in our specialties are still valuable."
"Oh," Gabriel groaned. "So those of us without specialties get to start from square one. Lovely."
Artie nodded in agreement. Sure, this was good but goddamn, the work it was going to take to verify and validate it all.
The opening vocals to Santana’s “Black Magic Woman” sounded on Doug’s phone, and he flipped it over to see what it was. “Text message from one of Wanda’s burners…oh, it’s emoji time.” His eyebrows raised slightly in amusement as he read. “Five party hats, throwing the horns - party time, excellent.” Another notification came through, and he smirked. “Eggplant and a pair of watermelons. Apparently this is sexy and the absolute tits.” He tapped a quick reply and then set his phone back down.
"You'll always be special to me, Gabe," Jubilee gave him a saucy wink and a grin. She couldn't resist the urge to tease the younger man, just a little. "Don't worry, I don't think anyone is gonna get stuck with only grunt work."
"No one is starting at square one. I do not have a metaphor for this." Marie-Ange explained. "Yes, it will take work to integrate this into our existing networks, yes we may have to put some existing sources on the back of the oven for now, but we have a network, we just weave this into our existing one, and then re-examine what is and is not valuable. No one starts over. That is a waste of our hard work."
"Sounds like I'll be leaning harder on some resources for their resources and expanding outwards into areas I wouldn't have looked at before." Natasha shrugged and added a few more points to her ever increasing lists of to do items. They'd get relegated to the various appropriate bins once the meeting was over and wiped from her computer.
"Being the cynical bastard that I am, we'll be keeping some parallel networks running, as test groups to check SHIELD's data against. If we start seeing variants, we'll know they are tampering with what they are giving us."
"That was my thought too. I wouldn't put it past them to keep the really important stuff under lock and key even from who we'd think would be high enough up the chain to know it all." Natasha said.
"You're making some pretty big assumptions about their assets' goals matching ours here, Kevin," Artie replied. "I personally don't trust that a network built by a bunch of flatscans, fascists, and human military types really will have contacts and goals that align with ours or are looking for the things we need to know."
Darcy scoffed. "SHIELD--and by extension SWORD--want to know everything about everything so they can control it. Of course their assets aren't always going to have goals that align with ours. None of us is idiot enough to ignore the contacts we've cultivated and vetted for what we're being spoon-fed out the side door. It's like looking at scientific data. If three of your reports are giving consistent, similar feedback and a fourth is kicking back weird numbers, you keep an eye on what's being consistent but focus your attention on what's causing the range to fluctuate so you can figure out and address the issue."
"You know, interestingly enough, I might have a clue how bias in intelligence gathering works." Kevin's voice went cold. "And if I hear the term 'flatscan' in this shop again, I fucking personally guarantee the person using it goes out an upper floor window. Am I clear?"
"Well, excuse me if I don't have a lot of like, or patience, or whatever for goddamn humans," Artie replied. "I'll stop calling them flatscans when they - collectively - start to consider that mutants might be people.”
“Dude, stop being a fucking bigot.” Jubilee slid off the table she’d been using as a seat and glared. “You may have no human family or friends but we do. So quit with the bullshit slogans and grow up.”
Artie stood up, glaring at Jubilee, and signed, "What the hell ever. I'm outta here, passer." He left without looking back.
Kevin shook his head as Artie left, but made no move to stop him. He'd noticed the young man getting increasingly more vocal about mutant rights and biases. Would it bleed over into his work. He made a mental note.
Doug did his best to school his features and keep them neutral, and not pointedly follow Artie with his eyes as he left, but there were plenty of tells for those who knew him best, mostly in the tightness around his eyes and his fingers going still. He was aware that perhaps other than Kevin, he was the ne plus ultra of passers, and it could sometimes be a sore subject.
Darcy gave Doug's fingers a reassuring squeeze as Artie stormed out of the meeting, looking down at her schedule. Nothing that couldn't be shifted back a day. She settled back in her seat as the meeting continued, letting the information wash over her as she made plans for some practical work.
Natasha hmmed a noncommittal noise as she picked up a puff pastry from the middle of her plate and bit into it. That would be something she'd have to look out for while she was working. Possibly even incorporate it into a few of her personas depending on if her covers were still blown or not. Though, with the missions X-Force tended to pick up, she wasn't expecting that to be much of an issue and with her having gone dormant the last few years she'd long faded from most people's radars.
Emma, who had been delicately consuming a tiny, exquisite piece of patisserie finally looked up. "I assume this will cost me either a lot less money or a lot more money. If it’s the first," she aimed the words somewhere between Kevin and Marie-Ange, "let me know so I can tell my accountants and buy them champagne. If it’s the latter, make sure the petty cash forms are filled out correctly."
“This is going to cost you more money, but your return on investment just went up by a factor of ten.” Kevin confirmed.
Felicia, who’d so far spent the discussion silent and, judging by the quiet rapidly changing music from her phone, scrolling Instagram reels, murmured with a half smile, “And I’m sure we’ll somehow help you spend it.”
"Which reminds me, I need to put my expense report in later," Jubilee muttered with a semi-guilty look toward North. It wasn't that she'd forgotten, it was just that she hadn't exactly remembered either. "I'll get it done today."
Topaz was fixated on her phone by this point, swiping through what Marie-Ange had said and barely looked up as Artie walked out. "I'll start getting my contacts organized and see where things fit in. Unsurprisingly, SWORD has more reach than I've managed to accomplish through internet forums, but they've also neglected a lot of smaller areas, which I'm sure the locals are happy about. And I'll try to grab the Megs for a meeting this week."
"Fantastic, and just so. We use our smaller contacts to fill in the gaps, instead of trying to use them to build big." Marie-Ange pointed at Topaz. "Work with Amanda and Wanda, obviously, but also with Darcy and Doug for your internet people."
That got Marie-Ange a vague thumbs up in return. “Everyone can expect lists and contact infos in the next week.”
"In the next several weeks, Kevin or I will meet with each of you." Marie-Ange said. "Nothing on the calendar right now, it will depend on how all of this information moves as we poke it with sticks." She finished the dregs of her tea, and tipped the mug out on the saucer. "Nothing mystical, no predictions. We have been gifted something amazing. "We cannot waste this. We will not waste this. Expect to be busy, expect sleepless nights, travel to absolute shite locations, expect the job to change. But."
She paused, and looked at Kevin. "Kevin asked me what our mission was once. I told him that we prevented people from being turned into monsters. Until now, we threw darts and got lucky. Sometimes we put the monsters down, sometimes we adopted them. With this - it is not just one or two mad doctors at a time now. Now we have a roadmap to the monster factories. Now we go tear them down, and salt the roots."
