El!
El has been with the site for nearly two years now and has continued to prove her value. Currently, she is heading up our site event, Battle for Liberterram, on top of keeping up with her own personal plots.
CHARACTER
SPOTLIGHT
Peggy Carter!
Lux's posts are all wonderful to read. She has done a wonderful job of grasping the new universe and incorporating Peggy into it.
CHARACTER
SPOTLIGHT
Peter Parker!
It's good to see Spidey back on the site. Watching him deal with the universe shift in his own snarky way has been nothing short of entertaining.
THREAD
SPOTLIGHT
Eight O'Clock on the Dot!
El and Lux are making magic in this thread. Straight up fireworks, and the way they've played with drawing out the reveal is top class.
There was probably about a five minute span. Five minutes between JARVIS' pickup via Quinjet and them touching down on the Helicarrier where he had peace. Not much of any kind of peace, though. Comms were filled with chatter about attacks going down on the East Coast. The bastards had coordinated and waited for them to leave their home turf before they went after New York, which seemed to have a pretty large and well-coordinated assault against it. Thankfully NYC wasn't left entirely defenseless, and rag-tag hero teams seemed to hold off this round. But once they were on the carrier, intelligence suggested that things weren't even close to over. This was a lull, and that meant organizing defenses and making preparations while the forces regrouped. Intel suggested NYC would be ground zero for what was going to come next, and they thought it was going to be bigger and badder than what already happened.
Obviously, this made it hard for Steve to do anything other than oversee preparations and organize defenses and rally the team, but he wasn't given that option. After a minute long argument with Fury on the matter, hew was carted off the medical and put under for the duration of the flight back, plus a little while longer. When he came to, the torn ligaments and tendons had been addressed as best they could, he was on a cocktail of drugs to bring down swelling and numb pain, and his right arm was in a flexible cloth cast, sort of like what carpal tunnel victims wore. Only it was even tighter, limiting his range of motion down to the slightest movements. Which meant he write anything, hold a gun, squeeze a trigger, or even ball a fist. Between that and the other stitch work on his body, he knew they'd force him to sit out.
He couldn't blame them. He'd make them sit out this time around, too.
Out for over an hour past landing, Steve was forced to find the team and touch base. Making the rounds, he started with Nat, who had at least seen him loopy enough on painkillers before that she couldn't judge. Thankfully the side-effects had been trimmed back, which meant no mild-to-severe hallucinations, and only the tiniest bit of euphoria. But he was still a little sluggish until his metabolism worked the last of the anesthesia out of him. Thankfully, Nat humored him and filled him in on all that he missed while he was down and out. SHIELD was operating off of what Fury and the others had dreamt up, and some Avengers were going off of that, others were doing their own thing. Some of what he had suggested had been incorporated at large, as well, but that mostly came down to common sense. He was positive those suggestions would've been made with or without him.
The second stop was Carol. By the time he was to her, all of the sluggishness was long gone. Carol was doing some heavy lifting and helping set up barricades and choke points to create good defensive positions around the city. Thankfully, she was in the same neighborhood as Nat, so he didn't have to drive very far, which was good because he seriously felt like he was putting the SHIELD agent out by making him be a chauffeur. Issuing an apology and his thanks simultaneously, he popped out of the car and rounded a corner to the other side of a large building, where he stood for a while and just stared. Seeing Carol in action, even inoffensively was still damn impressive.
Once she was done, he came her way and gave a snappy salute with his left hand. "Major." He gave a little nod to the structure she'd just put up. "Good work. Just came by to check in on you, see how you were holding up. I know you took some pretty impressive damage back in Seattle," his baby blues flickered over her in observation.
Carol heard the telltale snap of the rope an instant before one of the soldiers cried out in warning, and her head snapped around toward it. What she saw was what she'd feared - the rope they'd used to hold up the heavy barricade sections while the crane lifted them hadn't been strong enough after all, and a six-ton section of twenty-foot high wall hit the street below on edge with a thunderous crash, then began tipping over toward the squad of National Guard engineers below.
Carol slammed the piece she'd been lifting into place with more force than she probably should have, then turned and rocketed across the increasingly fortified intersection in a blaze of golden light. She caught it almost low enough to stand on the street herself, and fell the last few feet until she held it up with her boots on the pavement, grunting in effort - and no small amount of pain thanks to her damned left arm - as she brought it to a stop. The soldiers, now frozen in various states of running away and falling beneath the concrete and rebar slab, gaped up at her for a few seconds, and Carol let out a relieved breath when she saw that none of them were hurt.
"You guys alright? Aside from the pucker factor?" They nodded, a couple managing thanks, and Carol flashed a grin. "Air force, soldier. Saving the asses of you ground types since 1947. Maybe get something better to lift these things?" She waited for them to file out from under the thing, then she lifted herself back up, pressing the wall upright again and slotting it into the base the engineers had built earlier. Once it was there she held it until the first few bolts had been driven to secure the thing, and the massive steel supports brought in to back it up before she floated away and back to the ground.
Once there, she made a few circles with her left arm, wincing and rubbing at her shoulder afterward. The site was almost done - once it was, it would be a hell of an emplacement, not just for facing down ground troops, but the AA guns and rocket batteries would be damn useful. But still, building something like this in a city, even on the outskirts... She shook the thoughts off, then walked over to the last section and grabbed it by the upper rim, lifting it in an almost casual clean and press (that made a somewhat shocking noise as the far end of the slab grated on the street) before she dug her fingers in and pushed it up into the air. The finger marks weren't ideal, but she figured no one was going to complain... minimal damage.
She was holding it up for the supports again when she heard Steve call out, and she glanced to the Chief nearby - he gave a thumbs up, so she dropped back to the ground and snapped a salute in return. "Captain. Thanks - didn't do it by myself. Feels a bit like playing with oversized Legos, but then I'm just doing the heavy lifting." She rubbed again at her shoulder when he brought up Seattle, and gave a shrug that she did a fairly good job of pretending didn't hurt.
"Reminds me I'm still a little bit human. And Stark's fancy, superpowered MRI says nothing's broken, so I suppose there's that. Feels better if I keep it moving, if I lie down now I'm worried it'll swell up and I'll end up in a sling. Note to self, ease off on body checking anything a couple hundred times my size, maybe." She walked over to where there was a table set up with bottles of water, and cracked one open before taking a pull.
"Besides, I should probably be asking you that... How's the hand?"
Steve Rogers --- literally, she lifted the heavy things
"Yeah, it's not like you could contribute intellectually. You only came out of NASA," the soldier snorted sarcastically. Sure, she might not have been an astronaut, but he doubted that a program jointly operated by NASA and SHIELD would've picked just anyone for their program. And pilots already had to be up there in the brains department... and being considered for the air force alone usually meant you scored pretty damn high on the aptitude test.
Damn, sometimes he had to remind himself why he was leader of this team. Well, try to remind himself. He got told why he was an Avenger, and most of it had to do with charting well with the public. Why he got chosen to be the leader? Not a damn clue. He would've asked Fury but the Director wasn't the one that named him for that job, it was the group. At first probably had something to do with having the most team combat experience, since Thor seemed to mostly run solo from his understanding, but after the first few runs? He wasn't so sure. Habit, maybe?
Watching the woman roll her shoulder, he frowned in sympathy. The suit she was wearing meant he couldn't get eyes on the situation. He was used to shrugging off wounds and everyone else shrugging off theirs--it usually came with running with a team of combat hardened types. But that didn't mean that she wasn't operating through pain and running already fatigued muscles so ragged they'd be stiff or damn near cripple her once the adrenaline and drive was out of her system.
"Stark hasn't invented some kinda long lasting, field-ready cold pack yet?" Steve quipped, but was actually half-surprised that wasn't something either the genius, billionaire, playboy philanthropist or SHIELD hadn't invested in, yet. It wouldn't be handy in the middle of a fire-fight, but for in-between moments and lulls like this, probably. It'd save on swelling the next day, too. "You did good, though. Don't think we would've pulled through if you hadn't been there." They were a bit shorthanded where the heavy hitters went at the moment. Tony was no slouch in that department, but he didn't think they guy could handle all five Leviathans on his own.
Following her to the table, he held the water bottle between his right forearm and side, and twisted the cap off with his left hand before he took a swig.
"It's nothing major... Major," the volume of his grin and the crease under his eyes suggested that he was at least fifty-percent too proud of that joke. "Won't be making any fists or firing any guns anytime soon," he tried to sound as nonchalant about that as possible, and did a halfway decent job. Truth be told, if he hadn't been expressly told to sit this one out by everyone he'd talked to, he'd be fighting the fight alongside Carol, making his injury a whole lot worse. "But I'll sit up in mission control and manage." Yep. He'd manage. And try not to go crazy thinking about how many people he could be helping if he weren't busy benchwarming. But at least he wasn't out cold.
Carol snorted at the comment, taking another drink of the water before shaking her head. "Not like I was ever an engineer. I know enough to keep a bird in the air, make some emergency repairs, sure. But it's not like I've ever built anything. Dad was a carpenter, but... Well he took my brothers to jobs, always said it wasn't a good place for a girl" She might have been making kind of a joke, but she couldn't exactly keep the bitterness out of her voice on the last part.
Steve might have doubted his place leading the team, but it would never occur to Carol. Maybe she'd been an officer in the military too, but she very much doubted she could keep the team together the way he did, especially given the dysfunction between the teammates. She still wasn't so sure what to make of all of it - the arguments would never fly in the military, but then Steve knew that. He kept a lid on it all anyway, somehow, and he was always the man with the plan in the middle of a fight. He'd earned the spot - until he died or found someone better, as the old movie saying went.
"If he has, he hasn't told me about it. You think it'd work? I'm never sure what'll work on me anymore - Tony's said there's a few doctors he'd trust to work on the problem, but there's a fair bit of... different about me from what they're used to." Actually, she wasn't sure they made a cold pack that was cold enough to do much to her body. Only thing that kept her from being able to sunbathe out in the void between worlds was that she still needed to breathe, the rest of it she didn't have even a little problem with, amazingly. It was going to make the whole thing awfully convenient, whenever she did make it back up there.
"Anyway I heal faster than I used to. Should be alright in a few days. And thanks... I'm sure you'd all have figured it out somehow. But I'm starting to worry about Thor and Banner. I mean, with everything else going on, if they got caught alone..." Then again, if there was a couple guys who could probably fight a series of leviathans on their own it was those two. They were welcome to it - she wasn't that much of a tank, not yet anyway. She was getting stronger though, the fight had proven that. Just as well as it had proven that she was NOT invincible.
"Ha! How long have you been waiting to use that one?" Leave it to Steve to go for that one... At least he delivered it with some irony, Tony would have deadpanned it in passing and it would have been even more eyeroll-worthy. She frowned a bit though when he mentioned the issue with fighting, nodding in understanding. "Stinks, but there's nothing to do about it. Sorry to hear you're benched. I keep hoping we've seen the end of this, but... You obviously don't think so, huh? What's the word from SHIELD?"
Steve Rogers --- that pun gets worse every time I think about it
"This is the part where I'd joke about 'isn't that all the same?' but Tony kinda make that joke un-fun a while back," Steve grinned. For as irreverent and snarky as Stark was, it seemed like a few things really got his goat. Steve learned what those were a while back. Incorrect science, preferring Trek to Wars (which he did), and of course, being Captain America. Frowning at what Carol said next, Steve shook his head and ground his jaw a bit. "I kinda thought we'd be over some things by now." Some things had come a long way, but there was still a long ways left. Other things had regressed. And some other concepts were new, alien, or offensive. It made him wonder sometimes if he would've been changed over the decades, seen and supported what policies were instituted, or if he would've stood his ground even as the world warped.
"Well, I don't know much about your anatom--uhhhh physiology." The veteran quickly corrected, clearing his throat to hide the slight voice-break that happened when he scrambled to fix his mistake. Except by fixing it, he was pretty sure he made a small screw up a lot worse, and barely managed not to wince over it. Smooth. Years and years since the USO show days, and he still wasn't too good with women, even just casual interaction. "But I wouldn't see why not. I mean... blood flow's the thing that causes swelling, right? So slapping ice on it slows that down. Don't see why that wouldn't work for you, too." Even if she adapted to temperature extremes better, putting ice on a wound wasn't enough to give it frost bite, so it wasn't exactly damaging the area. And blood was mostly fluid, and water at that, so...
But... then again, science wasn't his strong suit. This was all just speculation.
"Even if you end up pulling something in the next fight?" Steve asked, more curious than concerned, and that registered on his face and in his voice. It wasn't like he was trying to scare her off against defending the world or anything like that. Again, moot point even if that was how he felt. "Probably would've. We're pretty resourceful." He shrugged, thinking of Tony and Nat specifically. "But it probably would've taken a lot longer and had a few more injuries thrown into the mix." If it weren't for her 'thanks' he would've thought she had a thing about taking compliments--something he could relate to.
"Mmm," Steve offered noncommittally and shifted his weight from one foot to the other before he took another gulp of water. It had been a long time since he'd heard from Bruce, and he was getting worried. Thor had activity in Asgard that he needed to settle, but the radio silence from Bruce for so long had him worried about whether or not the man was okay. He was durable, sure, but psychologically? And what if someone developed some kind of sedative or pheromone or something to keep him calm? It wasn't like half the bad guys or more weren't interested in Hulk. "I'm sure they'll manage. Thor's got a kingdom and Banner's the Hulk." Better not to voice his Bruce-related concerns right now.
"Not as long as you'd think," the Captain grinned, his simple sense of humor bolstered by Carol's laugh. He was pretty sure anyone else would've thrown something at him for that one. Offering a half shrug, he tried not to focus too much on it. Not that he wouldn't. He had a way of overworking things in his mind--it was a pretty nasty habit. "SHIELD thinks they're coming tomorrow sometime, but have no way of knowing for sure." They were flying by the seat of their pants, here. Steve wasn't used to being this in the dark in the modern age. "How many more of these are scheduled?" The soldier asked with a nod to the defenses. He knew how many were planned, but not how many had been done in the time since.
Carol snorted lightly. "He would, wouldn't he? But then again that's not so much a Stark thing, I know plenty of engineers who get touchy about that stuff. And yeah, you'd think, huh? But even with the benefit of all that extra time they had compared to you, whole lotta people never bothered to catch up with the times. Like dear ol' Dad, for example." She almost commented that he'd probably been too busy drinking, but she squashed that one before it got out of her head. No sense taking this conversation down that dark a place, after all. Wasn't where she'd meant to go with it anyway.
Carol was turning away, reaching for the jacket she'd left on the back of a chair near the tables where the Army engineers had put up their drawings, when Steve's slip caught her, and she turned to look over her shoulder at him, lifting a brow. "Oh don't you now?" she asked, a just slightly mean bit of playfulness to her tone. She really couldn't help it after that. But she supposed she'd let him off easy. "I'm just gonna let you think about what Nat would do with that one." she added, picking her jacket up. Golden light washed over her, converting her uniform back to civilian clothes. She was just in jeans and a tee - which left uncovered the dark purple bruising that mottled her left arm from a little below the elbow to up under the sleeve.
She pulled the jacket on though, wincing just a little, and let out a breath. "I'll check... either Tony or the SHIELD docs might know something. I just, mean... Heck I don't know. Movement's fine, I'm more worried about how tight it might get if I stop moving it. Then I'll be worried about tearing something." She left unsaid what they both knew - she'd be out there anyway. Fighting without him would be hard enough, but if he could chime in on the radio, that would still help. Without Thor and Hulk, her physical presence would be a big loss.
"Yeah." she agreed about their chances without her - not that she planned on letting them find out what that was going to be like, anyway. "I'll see if they've got anything for me, promise." As far as his terrible joke went... "No? I mean, I was halfway sure that joke had been percolating since the forties, you have to have known a Major back in your Army days. Crap though, tomorrow... Three more, this side of town. They were due to fly in the next set of walls in an hour last I looked, now I've got... forty minutes, give or take. What about you, finish your rounds with the team, then where are you off to?"
"Neurotic seems to run pretty high with intellectuals," Steve observed matter-of-factly. It was just something he noticed. Howard was probably the only exception he'd seen, but Howard was always part used car salesman, part mad scientist, part businessman so the combination was bound to make him pretty exceptional. "Lots of folks are afraid of change. It doesn't make them any less wrong." Even Steve had problems. A lot of problems with everything that changed. And maybe it was some kind of arrogance, but the ways he refused to change? His old fashioned ideals? He didn't think he'd ever give them up, because he was in the right. And damn it, if he couldn't make the country move to see it, he'd just stand his ground until the serum ran out and he crumbled to dust. Because sometimes being a patriot meant standing against your country.
And all those serious thoughts about patriotism and man versus society and why her father needed to get with the times were all put by the wayside. But not gently, oh no. He felt more like his train of thought was broadsided and he was mid train derailment trying to minimize the damage and grasping wildly for any way to right the situation and... he was just making it worse. Huffing a little and doing a small head-shake-bob thing like his head was bouncing around in an unstable freight car, he tried to fight the slow, creeping feeling of failure.
Nope. Some battles even Captain America couldn't win, and he gave so much ground that he was pretty sure that if he wasn't already flushing he was about to be. Right. He needed to save face. He was going to rise to this challenge. "Well, I mean... obviously I know your anatomy better than most since we're on the same team and--" oh Lord in Heaven. That made it sound really, really bad! He should've just said 'I'm an old fashioned idiot and was a lot more careful with wording than I should've been'. Or 'ha ha, yes, I've never touched a woman, can we move on, now?' But nope. Not him. He was pretty sure he was trying to put out a fire with gasoline now and if there was any time for a stray Chitauri to show up and energy blast his head into a smoldering husk, now was it. "You know what... I'm just going to not talk. For the rest of forever. Thanks." Muttering to himself, he twisted the cap of water back of, considered pouring it over his head and spitefully guzzled the thing instead.
One full bottle didn't do the trick. He was pretty sure he was going to have to drink all of the coolers before his nerves were gathered again. Christ. Some people just weren't meant to talk. He was one of them.
Okay. Opportunity to recover. It was easy enough trying to focus on more serious thoughts. He was just glad he had a reprieve. "Go with SHIELD docs first. I know they've been studying the Chitauri for a while and they're allied with the Atlanteans, so they probably have a greater understanding of alien uhm... physiology." Right, he was going to power through this. "I dunno if they've encountered whatever you are before, but they'd be my first stop." Not to mention that, for as brilliant as Tony was, he didn't have Howard's talent with biology. "Just... be as careful as you can be, alright? We don't need any more cripples on the team for a while." He offered a reassuring smile.
"Not many that I had much contact with, honestly. Not enough to crack jokes, anyway. The Commandos and Invaders were mostly free range assortment of soldiers. In the Invaders case, two soldiers, an android, a teenager immune to fire, and a royal pain in the ass." But no one had ever claimed that the Invaders were any kind of true military operation. Government contracted taskforce, sure. Military? A lot shakier when you had two civilians and a... whatever the hell you wanted to consider Namor on the team. "Yeah, tomorrow." He breathed a small sigh, not liking that, either. Hardest part was the calm before the battle. Anticipation and Steve weren't friends. "Want me to cut out and let you get to it? Don't wanna hold you up."
Shrugging a shoulder, he gave it a thought. "Helicarrier, I think."
"Guess so." Carol shook her head about that, but she didn't know what else she was going to say about people - she'd been fighting that current her whole life. Ironic in a way that it was Nat's home country that had been the more eager to use women for their fighting ability and not just cooking and perpetuating the species. Carol was a patriot, sure, but there were more than a few things about her country that still pissed her the hell off.
Besides which, poor Steve had just slipped up in phenomenal fashion, and it was only Carol's understanding that he was just a guy from the forties underneath it all, not another modern airman (who she would have savaged for it) that convinced her to keep at least some of the laughter she desperately needed to let out inside. She even had a pretty good lid on it before he made his attempt to correct, and Carol lost the battle entirely, bursting out laughing and leaning against one of the poles of the command tent as she did, bruised up arm or no.
"Quit while you're behind!" she managed through the laughter, though it wasn't until he started chugging waters that she regained her composure, wiping at her eyes before she looked back over at the super soldier. "Don't be so hard on yourself, Rogers, you're comedy gold, you know." She was pretty sure if she made any kind of of offer, even joking, the man would have actively melted down.
"Right. SHIELD it is, then. And I'll try and be careful - Air Force had a fairly strict policy on breaking the equipment, so if nothing else I'm pretty used to it." She cracked a lopsided smile, and in the end of it all she reached out, putting a hand on his shoulder.
"I know it's gonna be hard, being up there with the rest of us down here. Used to feel that way when I was up running CAP missions, and I wasn't even meant to fight on the ground back then. But we'll take care of business. You just let me know where to meet up with the others when the time comes, yeah?"
Some deep, far reaching part of Captain Rogers' pride just wanted to smash his head against those nice new fortifications Carol had built. Or maybe crawl into a hole. Somewhere where he could just, you know, never see the world again and not have to risk sounding like a colossal ass. Had he been raised in the wilderness and dragged into civilization when he was nine or ten? Because he sure as hell felt like he had all the social graces of a feral child.
"I should take that lesson to heart." He grumbled. Flustered from his shoulder to the top of his head, he avoided all eye contact with anything, including any bugs on the sidewalk that might be laughing at his shame. Drowning what little dignity he had left in water, he had a hard time not sputtering when Carol paid her half-compliment. "Oh, yeah. That makes me feel better. You really know how to cheer a guy up, Danvers." The blonde snorted as he pawed at the back of his neck like he was developing a rash.
He did feel a little better, though. Even though he'd dropped a serious bomb on his dignity, at least he could amuse someone while going down in flames. Some people didn't even get that luxury and then awkward silences happened. And chugging water until he could barely breathe kinda blunted the emotional trauma he'd inflicted on himself. Hopefully they could just... never, ever, ever, ever talk about this again. It'd be one of those deep, dark secrets that you repressed until you weren't even sure it was real anymore. Like Tony apparently did with the prequel trilogy of Star Wars.
"Good call." He agreed with the choice on SHIELD, happy that she was willing to take his advice after the earlier shame. "Director Fury's not a man you wanna let down." Even with all the disagreements between them, he felt that was true. And Carol wasn't quite as stubborn as he was, or quite as old fashioned in some of his world views. He had a feeling she'd like Fury more than he did--or already did like Fury more than he did.
Carol seemed to tap into the defeat and restlessness he was trying to keep under lock and key. Must've been something in his body language or on his face. Despite all the USO training and the brief stints in Hollywood, he wasn't exactly good at lying when it mattered, and people usually could get a pretty good read on him even when he was putting on his reserved face. Or maybe Carol just knew because they were both military. "Yeah, I know you guys will. I expect a play-by-play of the battle once all this is over. Maybe get the Avengers together for some beers."