mercury independent - POWERS FOR HIRE [rrrawrf/eheu]

[rrrawrf]

As far as convoys went, this one was pretty small - only an armored truck and one big SUV trailing along behind it, looking for all the world like a family going on vacation. (If that family were made up of hefty, well-armed men and women, anyway.) Considering what they were transporting was both stolen and probably illegal to own without a double handful of permits from the government, they probably didn't want to draw too much attention to themselves.


Unfortunately from them, they'd certainly caught someone's notice.


Texas had a lot of open, flat land. Their target was heading south; Eli was willing to bet they were making for the border. He was about 89% certain they were making for the Gulf, and the direction they had taken today seemed to support that, but it was still a long, long drive to the beach. Eli would rather stay away from water; he had made a point to plan this out so that they wouldn't have to try and catch their target on the ocean.


The targets had left Amarillo about two hours ago; Eli and the rest of his team had spent most of the night prepping the intercept point. Once the two vehicles took an exit ramp, with no one but a dark red truck following them at a safe distance, road work signs and barriers had been pulled across the exit ramp, to prevent anyone else from driving unknowingly into the trap.


Several miles away from the interstate, and tens of miles away from anything that could count as civilization, Eli had dragged three heavy roadwork barriers across the road. His teammates were less than helpful - "They're too heavy for us," they claimed innocently, because they all knew that Eli's strength increased when he transformed. He was pretty sure they were all just being lazy, but didn't see any point in yelling at them for it.


He had eight members of his team at the intercept point; Kawai was following the target in her red truck with two others. Maybe a dozen people was a bit overkill, but Eli had been given a pretty good-sized budget to work with, and he'd rather spend it on an excellent team than surplus equipment. (He knew some team leaders who would be as cheap as possible on the mission, and then pocket the leftover cash by claiming a ridiculous amount of small expenses like food and board.)


Eli himself was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with the bulk to back it up. Despite the hot noon sun beating down on them, he wore a long-sleeved shirt with a high collar - Eli had some fairly memorable tattoos on his arms and neck. He'd prefer to keep those hidden during jobs, to avoid being recognized later by someone they had worked against.


Kawai radioed ahead when they were about five miles away from the interception point. Eli and some of the others hunkered down behind the barriers they had dragged across the road, to force their targets to a stop; Kawai would block the way out with her truck.


He had a pair of pistols tucked into his shoulder holsters, but they were all armed with bigger rifles.


"Don't want to start a fight right away," he told the others; they all wore an earpiece. "Let's try scaring them into giving up first."


That was probably a long shot, but Eli would prefer to get this over and done without killing anyone.


link to character sheets

 

[eheu]

Kawai’s Truck, approx. 4 Miles to Barricade


Oliver Burns sat with his legs crossed at the back of the truck, eyes and fingers glued to a laptop of comically small dimensions. It was quite amazing how he could manage to have all ten of his fingers squeezed together on the tiny keyboard and still be continuously typing at a speed such that the sounds of keys being pressed blended together into a continuous stream of clicks.


They were actually not sure what exactly was in the truck except what their contractors told them, and he was dying to find out.


"Don't want to start a fight right away, let's try scaring them into giving up first." The radio switched on and that was Eli’s command.


“Augh. Okay.” He said.


He originally had a very elaborate plan to do the scaring that involved some gymnastics with the vehicles’ electronics that would allow him to broadcast directly into the sound systems inside the truck and the SUV that was tailing it (they’d find that really scary, he was thinking), but somewhere down the line he decided that his curiosity took a higher priority. He hadn’t found many pieces of new information since that decision, but as a result he kind of ended up not having the time to set up preparations for the broadcast.


He had another, much simpler way to talk to the folks inside the truck, anyway.


Inside the Armoured Truck, approx. 2 Miles to Barricade


The young man’s name was Byron Trier. He was wearing a white, sleeveless shirt, and jeans, and looked particularly uncomfortable huddled between the seven armed people in uniforms on the narrow seats that lined the inside of the armoured truck: three on the left side with him, the other four on the right. The floor between where they rested their legs was occupied by a narrow, rectangular box.


There were a total of ten people in the vehicle. On the front passenger seat, a man leant forward towards the windshield and squinted his eyes. He could make out the shape of roadblocks some distance away. He couldn’t say he was surprised - there was always the suspicion that his intelligence wasn’t as airtight as he would’ve wanted it to be.


The man moved away from the windshield, left his seat, and then squeezed through the little space left between the driver’s seat, the passenger seats, and the cargo on the centre of the floor. There was not much place left to sit, so he stood, but he did bend down so that his face was on level with the young man he talked to.


“It looks like you’ll be turning out useful after all,” he said as he rubbed his palm on the Byron’s head. There was no hair of the clean shaven scalp to be ruffled, though.


“You got this, right?” He asked for reassurance, “Byron?” ”He moved his hand to rest on the boy’s shoulder. The boy still seemed nervous.


“Y-” He started, but interrupted himself halfway to clear his throat. “Yeah.” He said, his tone this time much more determined. He rubbed his hands together, and a couple of sparks flew off and disappeared into the ground.


At The Barricade


Emily Burns was never quite fond of the sun. And while she never lost her temper over things as petty as this, there was no denying that having to stand on the centre of the road under early-afternoon Texas weather was putting her in a mood worse than usual.


She was several paces onto the road that led to their barricade. Someone’ll at least need to show themselves if there was to be any sincerity in the customary offer to open a dialogue, and the fact that she could get out of the way relatively quickly if things headed the wrong way probably made her the convenient choice.


She’s been told that they’ll be trying a less violent way of persuasion first, so she would have no real work until someone steps out of the car, if that happens. The idea narrative was a subsequent attempt to talk-slash-threaten them out of their operation. Up until now, though, she had been spending most of her time peeling dried pieces of skin off her lips with her teeth.


The two-vehicle convoy pulled to a rather uneventful stop in front of her, and she put down her hand that was up to this point held up in a “halt” gesture. Her other hand was on the rifle.


A loudspeaker was mounted somewhere behind her, closer to the barricade. The volume had been turned up enough to be heard from inside the vehicles, and that was unfortunately a few notches above the maximum volume she could bear to listen to without visibly cringing.


“Hello.“


The voice was Oliver’s and the loudspeaker was apparently his contingency plan just in case his hacker antics fell through - or he got distracted.


“It has come to our notice that you’re in illegitimate possession of - a box.”


Oliver, are you even trying, she muttered under her breath, but not loud enough for it to go through the microphone.


“We’d like to have a nice, civil conversation … about … that box. Now if whoever’s inside would just kindly step out of your vehicle -”


Either Oliver considered that a valid intimidation speech or that he had temporarily run out of things to say. Either way, nothing else came out of the loudspeaker except for amplified background noise.


For a few tense seconds, nothing at all happened.


Then the door of the truck opened, and though the door emerged, at the same time: a man dressed in uniform and military equipment, and a much younger person with a shaved head, wearing a bulletproof vest over civilian clothing. The younger one was unarmed and had both of his hands in the air. One of the man’s hands was empty, but she couldn’t tell whether or not he was holding anything in the hand behind the boy’s waist.


She originally had the rifle aimed at the door just in case, but upon seeing the two passengers of the truck she lowered it a bit. She wasn’t entirely sure what was happening - no-one told her anything about hostages, but the boy didn’t look like he could fit into everything else any other way. It also mattered what was in that vest - explosives seemed to be a favourite for people who did this sort of thing, but there was no confirmation. The channels were strangely silent and she contemplated asking through the earpiece.


In the moment she got herself distracted by that, the man let go of the boy and shoved him in her direction.


Simultaneously the following events happened: The boy staggered a little, stumbled a few paces forwards. The man himself leapt aside.


Emily let go of the rifle and shoved both of her hands forwards. A circle dilated facing away from her and at the truck, flickering flashes of white light marking its unstable edge. The other end of the portal was directly above her and pointed towards the sky.


In her direction erupted a stream of orange flame.


Inside the dark red truck some distance away, Oliver watched the strange scene fed to his screen through a camera off the side of the intercept point: a beam of fire the flowed down along the straight country road towards the barricade. A few paces distance in front of the line of roadwork barriers, however, the centre of the beam took a ninety degree turn, shooting upwards into the air where it dissipated.


“A flamethrower?” Oliver, over radio: “Who even opens a negotiation with a flamethrower?”


There was, of course, no flamethrower; and the flames were originating from the space between the young man’s held up palms.


Emily gritted her teeth and shifted her foothold a bit. The extent of the flames was large, and it didn’t seem to be dying down any. The portal had just enough time to expand to a size at least enough to shield her entirely, but it was intended as an emergency defense measure against maybe a couple of unexpected gunshots - portals of that size weren’t meant to be something that she would have to maintain for an extended period. Slithers of fire slipped past the rim, carrying smoke and heat distortion that prevented her from seeing anything clearly to either side - there was suddenly irony to her complaints about the heat in the weather earlier. Over the whirring noise of airflow she could hear the sound of feet hitting the ground from the direction of the truck - more people unboarding maybe? But at this point she couldn’t move anywhere without risking breaking concentration. She’s not sure to what extent the people behind her were affected - couldn’t turn her head far enough to see with her hands held up like that.


“Guys?” She spoke into the earpiece, “Can’t see. Help.”

 

[rrrawrf]

The rest of the team was already moving as soon as the two vehicles came to a stop; about a minute and a half behind them, Kawai's truck whipped around, screeching to a stop so that it was perpendicular across the road, blocking off the other vehicles. (Her rough driving also threw her two passengers all over the place inside the car, but she ignored their complaints.)


"Stay in here," she told Oliver, a little unnecessarily. Frost was already slicking the door handle as she gripped it; when she stepped down onto the pavement, a thin layer of ice spread out from every footstep. She could see some of the others on the team moving around to flank the halted convoy, but her attention was caught mainly by the man - or, more appropriately, the kid - still shooting a stream of flames into Emily's portal.


"Got you covered, E," came Eli's reassuring voice over their shared radio. He had squeezed in between two of the barriers to come up beside her. In each ear, he wore several different earrings, each made of a different material; Eli reached up to finger one, a more heat-resistant alloy than the others.


In an instant, his body changed. His skin took on the color (and approximate feeling) of a gleaming metal; his eyes and hair followed suit. "Back up," he told her, lifting the rifle, and as he angled around Emily, her portal, and the flames, he levelled his rifle at Byron and the man and shouted, "Put it out, before we open fire."


He'd rather not shoot Byron; the kid wasn't as well-armored as the others apparently were, and pretty young to be a part of this nonsense.


A couple of the convoy men had gone to face Kawai's truck when they realized she was one of them. The woman's long, incredibly bushy dark hair had been pulled back into an untameable ponytail, and she stamped one foot; ice suddenly shot away from her along the ground, and trapped one convoy guard's legs before he could take another step.

 

[eheu]

Moments earlier.


“...and I ran out of things to say.” Oliver had said in a voice that the microphone couldn’t pick up after his not-well-thought-up attempt at intimidating the target.


He was then ordered to stay in the car.


“Wait, this isn’t actually you hating me just because I messed up the speech, right?” Kawai was already out of the truck by the time he finished the sentence.


“...ugh.”


He laid his laptop aside and pulled himself up. Before he was on both feet, though, the sudden noise of a stream of bullets against the side of the truck threw him stumbling back into the floor.


“Okay okay I’m staying in the car,” he said to no-one in particular.


Oliver was getting a very strong feeling that today everybody around him was trying their best to make it clear that they did not like him.


-


The pair of portals collapsed once Eli was in place. The stream of fire almost produced an audible thud as they deflected off the metal that Eli was now made of. She pulled her shoulders together and shielded her face from the heat with her arms as the flames not blocked by Eli’s silhouette streamed past her, dangerously close on both sides, making her struggle to catch her breath a lot more difficult.


"Put it out, before we open fire."


Immediately Emily felt the dip in the temperature around her, the flames around her dissipating into puffs of thin, black smoke. Almost too easy? The young man stood on the other end of a strip of scorched pavement, which was still sprouting little flames all over the place. There appeared to be much hesitation on his face, but he didn’t lower his hands.


Then there were gunshots. Either the man that was holding Byron earlier was holding the handgun with the hand he hid earlier, or he had produced it from one of the many holsters and storage compartments in his outfit - he fired several successive shots in Eli’s general direction, one with each step he took backwards. Only one or two of them landed on their mark only to ricochet off the metal skin.


Byron turned to look at the man as if asking for a command. The man looked back at him, but said nothing as he emptied the magazine with a final couple of shots, and hastily hauled himself back onto the front passenger seat of the armoured truck. From behind the windshield he mouthed something not very nice.


Byron appeared to have made a decision and took a step back before put both of his hands back up. Before the first sparks were produced, however, he was distracted by the characteristic white flash of a portal tearing itself open.


-


“Uh, Kawai?”


No bullets have hit the side of the truck for a while, so Oliver assumed it was relatively safe to peek his head through the open door.


“Are things going okay out there?”


Kawai would likely not have heard him, since overlapping with his voice was a burst of light in the air and a very loud crash. The noise also turned the heads of several guards on the ground, including the one who had his feet stuck in ice.


Emily was aiming to get Byron out of the way before he lights anything else on fire. But even with all the complications of split-second decisions taken into account, one and a half metres above the SUV was still one of the worse places the other end of the portal could’ve led to.


She landed on both of her feet, producing a rather large dent on the SUV’s hood. A dull pain in her left ankle indicated a potential injury that could be neglected for now. Byron landed back-first into the top of the vehicle.


Some distance away, Oliver nervously pulled himself back inside the back of Kawai’s truck.


-


Simultaneously, on the other end of the road. Amidst the sounds of gunshots and yelling and shouting produced by the convoy guards, the man took over the driver’s seat. Immediately after Emily tacked Byron out of the way, he stepped on the pedal, and the armoured truck started accelerating towards Eli, the roadblocks, and the rest of the crew behind it.

 

[rrrawrf]

"You can come out when I need you, Oliver," Kawai snapped into her earpiece, clearly irritated with his constant talking. She was keeping herself and another MI agent safe from bullets with a thick, chest-high wall of ice. Once there was finally a lull, though, Kawai popped out of her hiding place and sent another stream of ice shooting towards one of the convoy shooters. It froze his gun and his arms. She flinched at the crashing sound, and looked around before finding the source.


Kawai cursed and ran forward. "Careful, Em!"


Eli was more than relieved when the stream of fire cut out; he couldn't stay fireproof forever, and his shirt looked fairly ragged at this point. He surged forward - and then bullets were pinging off of him.


He couldn't help it. He flinched. After all these years of being (sort of) bulletproof didn't stop Eli from worrying about getting hurt, and he'd definitely have bruises from those two bullets later. Thankfully, it was just a handgun.


As Byron disappeared into one of Emily's portals, Eli pinched another earring, his body shifting to another metal a few shades darker (and much denser) than the previous. Others on his team were trading short bursts of gunfire with some of the convoy guards, and he just hoped that no one was going to get a fatal shot in today. Eli was heading for the truck with every intention of getting the package himself, when he realized that the truck was coming to him.


Eli sighed. "I got this," he said, to no one in particular, and stormed forward.


The truck didn't quite have enough room to build up enough speed to be a threat; maybe if it had been anyone else, the vehicle wouldn't have had a problem plowing through. This was Eli, though, and he braced himself, lowered his shoulder like a linebacker, and let the truck slam into him.


The hood of the truck crumpled around Eli; he skidded back several yards, his feet digging shallow gouges in the asphalt before the truck came to a stop. Gritting his teeth, Eli disentangled himself from what used to be the hood of the truck, grabbing a pistol from one of his shoulder holsters.


Backing up a few paces, Eli shook his head until the blurriness cleared from his vision, and then he aimed at the truck's windshields - now spiderwebbed with cracks from the impact - and put three bullets into the thick, bulletproof glass of the windshield.

 

[eheu]

Emily was quite surprised by the fact that Byron was already back on his feet by the time she managed to regain her balance. She was forever perplexed by how young people performed these incredibly swift recoveries, despite only nearing halfway into her twenties herself and supposedly having no right to complain about young people. She was also unsure whether Kawai telling her to be careful was directed to her landing, which she agreed could use being a little more graceful than it turned out to be, or directed to the sight of a jet of flames that scarcely missed her face.


Byron was standing, but hadn’t gotten his feet steady just yet, and likely wasn’t aiming properly. Emily was thankful for that because she in fact hadn’t had time to dodge, and the reaction to take a step backwards only came after the flames have already whipped past. It was narrower and more concentrated - a suitable adaption to a single target instead of a barricade of people.


She had time to react to the next one, however. As she stepped over the windshield and onto the roof of the vehicle, a precise sequence of hand gestures conjured a series of pairs of portals, and the couple of incoming fireballs were redirected them away in arbitrary directions. Byron was surely powerful, but his command was not as practised - and now that she knew what to expect, it was possible to see the next shot coming before the sparks ignited in his hands. It was a scene vaguely reminiscent of a very fancy fencing match, with a bursts of of flame and a flurry of white circles intercepting each other in place of clashing blades. One of the reflected fireballs happened to find its way onto the helmet of one of the convoy guards that was shooting at Kawai. Byron backed away to the rear edge of the SUV, and she pushed her footsteps forward.


She focused and sought an opening through which she could fit a punch or kick or whatever else suitable - she just needed to be one or two steps closer when it happened. Before that chance arrived, however, came an interruption that was the sound of a crash, of metal scraping against crumbling metal, and of shattering glass.


The entire scene appeared to fall to silence for a moment, and the three gunshots that followed seemed to ring a lot louder than everything preceding it in comparison. Then there was more silence.


For a while, neither of the two people on top of the SUV moved. Byron was gazing past Emily, probably at the armoured truck. Smoke came out of what was once the truck’s hood.


Byron swallowed a lump in his throat, then put his hands up again. This time it was in a way that showed no intention of spewing flames from them.


Emily started saying something, but the sentence didn’t come out before the punctuation of a rather exasperated sigh.


“...I suppose that settles it, then?”

 

[rrrawrf]

Kawai and several of the others had been busy in the meantime. About half of the team were holding back, as per instructions; Eli or Kawai would call them in if necessary. But once the truck totaled itself against Eli's unforgiving, metal body, most of the convoy guards (who weren't frozen to the ground or dodging redirected fireballs) were quick to back off.


Several of them congregated around the truck. Eli himself, grimacing at the scratches on his arm and shoulder (a few were even bleeding, the blood a stark red contrast against the silver gleam of his skin), marched around to the driver's side of the truck and yanked open the door.


He reached in to drag the man out of the truck. The convoy leader was bleeding from his shoulder, where Eli's third shot had finally penetrated and hit him. It wasn't a bad wound - punching through the windshield had taken away much of the bullet's velocity - but he couldn't do a very good job of resisting as Eli yanked him to the pavement and put a gun to his head.


"Tell your friends to stand down, and we'll patch you up before we go," Eli said. He rolled his eyes when a convoy guard, sneaking around behind him, shot a spray of bullets at Eli's back.


They did absolutely nothing. "Do you mind," Eli snapped over his shoulder.

 

[eheu]

There was a short pause, and, after he had exhausted all the possible ways to come up with a plan and decided there really was no immediate way out of this, he put his hands up - however awkward that looked lying horizontal on the pavement. He muttered something unintelligible to himself and tucked his chin in.


Some of the guards lowered and dropped their weapons immediately, a few others were either more cautious or more hesitant.


Finally deciding that everything was safe outside, Oliver bounced out of the red truck. He let out a cheer as he pumped his non-laptop-carrying arm into the air, but then swiftly realized that he was in a mood too cheerful in comparison to everything else in the scene, and quickly transitioned from the fistpump gesture into rubbing his nose for a couple of times. He was sure that the sun was going to force him back into the truck sooner or later, but he was content with just wandering around for a while before that happened. A convoy guard with his feet frozen in place tossed a strange look at him, but apparently he didn’t notice.


Byron had climbed off the back of the SUV and was under the watch of a couple of MI’s agents. Meanwhile, Emily sat on the deformed hood of the SUV, feet hanging in the air. She was twirling one ankle around, then the other, and it was quite evident that doing so with her left foot was a lot more uncomfortable. These things always hurt a lot more after the mental tension of being in a fight wore off. As a remotely comforting thought to herself, at least having messed up a foot made for a nice excuse to be sitting there squinting pointlessly at the sunlight instead of helping with the cleanup.

 

[rrrawrf]

The Mercury Independent team was quick about its business; while the package was moved from the (uselessly) armored truck into the back of Kawai's truck cab, the convoy guards' weapons were collected and dumped in a pile. Kawai, leaving the rest of her team to do the heavy lifting, picked through the confiscated weapons and decided that she liked a good third of them, deposited them (and all of the ammunition) into the lockbox in the bed of her truck.


More than one of the convoy team were clearly upset about Kawai's looting - good guns were hard to come by - but it wasn't like they were in any place to object now. Most of the weapons were probably already stolen, so Kawai just figured it was all fair game, and quickly enlisted Oliver's help in loading up her new toys.


It didn't take long before everything was more or less squared away. Eli heaved the roadblock barriers into the ditch, leaving the road clear again; on their way back, they'd stop by the freeway exit and unblock that, too. A young-looking black man who had hung back while the rest of the MI team took care of business now walked over, kneeling next to the convoy leader.


"Sorry," he muttered, pulling out a knife. The bullet hadn't gone out the other side, but instead lodged in a bone; Sam had to dig it out before he could heal it up, or else risk more long-term damage. After an extremely painful couple of minutes, though, he laid his hand flat over the man's bullet wound, and it drew itself together until the bleeding stopped.


Sam didn't heal him completely; he took his hand away before the hole in the guy's shoulder closed completely, and suggested, "Go see a doctor, there might be some bone fragments left in there and it could get infected."


He still made sure the convoy leader got his hands cuffed behind his back for the time being, and wandered off to see if anyone else (on either side of the scuffle) had gotten themselves hurt; Emily would receive his attention. Eli, once he had ensured that they weren't likely to have any more trouble with the convoy guards, came around to where Byron was being watched by a couple of eagle-eyed team members.


He waved them off for a moment. "You're a little young to be running with these dogs," he commented, much more friendly now that people weren't shooting, or throwing fireballs, or driving trucks, at him. He had switched back to his normal, flesh and blood state, and now he eyed his shirt a little ruefully. Most of one sleeve was gone at this point, revealing floral tattoos crawling up his arm from his wrist.


Eli didn't give Byron a chance to reply before he said, "I suggest you find a new line of work, kiddo. Playing flamethrower for these bas - these, ah, nice, friendly, murderous people - that's liable to get you killed." He eyed Byron seriously, clapped him on the shoulder, and added, "You won't get warned again. Good luck."


WESTERN AMERICAN MI HEADQUARTERS





Mercury Independent had a number of offices scattered around the US, but most of them were usually small, mobile, and/or temporary, depending on how much work they had in that area, or how close they were to getting into trouble with local law enforcement. There was a very small town in Colorado, though, where they had made a more permanent base of operations, and hadn't had a single problem for years.


It helped that less than a thousand people lived in the area, and several of those families often belonged to some of the older MI agents. Eli himself had a house here, though at present, his daughters were up in Chicago, visiting his one of his sisters until they had this job squared away. He had been paying a neighbor's kid to keep their rabbits fed; the very first thing he did when he finally got home was to check on them, and was not at all surprised to see that Heatwave had gotten pregnant. Again. He'd ask around the office to see if anyone wanted a bunny; if he gave them away before his daughters got back home, they wouldn't be so upset.


It had taken a couple days to get out of Texas; first, they had to take the package back to its (probably) rightful owner, ensure that payment was wired into the Mercury Independent account, and then Eli remained behind for a while to ensure that there wasn't any public notice, by the news or police or otherwise. The convoy they had hit wasn't likely to report their theft, especially considering that they had stolen it in the first place, but there was always a possibility that someone had noticed the conflict and would investigate.


Fortunately, everything seemed clear. Eli, enjoying the perks of being team leader, got to fly back to Denver, rather than drive, and picked up his car from a good friend who lived in the area and drove back to their Colorado headquarters.


The team had to all congregate at the office to debrief and submit their reports. What Eli had for them was much, much more important to most of the group, though, and he walked into the headquarters with a thick handful of envelopes.


From the outside, the building looked relatively harmless. It was in the main part of town, but only because this was where the only paved road was, and the sign out front was painted only with the Mercury Independent logo and the building address, rather than declaring just exactly who they were.


Most of the group were in one of the back rooms of the building; it was supposed to have been a tech lab, but was large enough that someone had hauled in a couple of couches to turn one corner into a break room. Someone had also co-opted the large, wall-mounted flatscreen TV to play the latest episode of Scandal, but the handful of people that had gathered were more interested in chatting with each other than actually watch the show.


Eli smacked his stack of envelopes against the edge of a table, grinning, and announced, "Guess who's about to make it rain?"


Kawai, who had appropriated an entire couch to herself, lifted her head. "Paychecks here?"

 

[eheu]

Emily was sitting on the armrest of the couch instead of the couch itself. Oliver nearby was “on the couch” in a more conventional sense, but he was slouched diagonally down the cushions in something that was wandering indecisively between a sitting pose and a lying one. The tiny laptop was, as usual, sitting besides him within an arm’s reach.


"Guess who's about to make it rain?", Eli.


“Uh, Weatherman?” Emily said as she lifted her head to look at him for a moment. Most of them at that table have been around long enough to remember a rather uneventful security mission carried out a couple of years back, on request of an eccentric man who was transporting parts for an experimental machine that would amplify his low-key meteorokinesis abilities so that he could raise storms on a scale large enough to damage cities. Three months ago he unintentionally impaled himself with a rebar while messing around with a tornado.


“Too soon, sis.” Oliver winced in theatrical objection. He pulled himself away from the exceedingly unhealthy pose to reach for an envelope.


“I will totally not say I feel guilty getting paid for this job, but fwip,” he said, waving the envelope as he bounced back into the couch and wriggled himself into an upright sitting position, “there was virtually zero cleanup this time.”


Despite their best efforts to avoid leaving behind any traceable evidence - especially of the photographic sort - erasing text, images, and videos from the network remained a large part of Oliver’s job. He’s since built automatic routines for the sources that most often required attention (road cameras, video sharing sites, and a few online forums in particular), but that didn’t save the rest of the crew from having to hear him complain every time about the fact that he needed to remain at work a couple of weeks after the rest of the crew had signed off their part of the case. This time, though, the absence of video cameras on the vast Texas flatlands took care of most of the problem for him.


“A shame, actually,” said another Oliver who was still fiddling with a few pieces of his tech at a desk on the other end of the room - the capability to be lazy and productive at the same time is one thing he’s been consistently proud of, “the internet would’ve come up with such amazing explanations for a freaking pillar of fire.”


Emily squinted at the Oliver that was sitting next to her because it was much less work. It takes different amounts of time for different people, but most of them, after staying around Oliver for long enough, eventually learn to consider each existing version of him part of the same, spread-out existence of an annoying person. She didn’t say anything though, since she also admitted that getting herself stuck back then was a blunder and that she had Eli to thank for her being able to get out of it at all.


Emily let out something that sounded like a sigh and sank her chin back into her hand. She suddenly remembered that while prodding around with her injury waiting for Sam, she kinda also neglected to pay attention to the cleanup that was happening simultaneously. She looked and Eli and asked, “What happened to the boy in the end, though?”

 

[rrrawrf]

"Yeah, it was pretty easy," Eli agreed, sorting through his pile of envelopes to hand over first Oliver's, and then Emily's. He passed the rest of them out - in Sam's case, he stuck it on the arm of his chair, because the man was on his third bag of chips, eyes glued to the TV. Two empty takeout boxes from the local diner were at his feet, as was half a box of energy bars. Sam was generally a little on the thin side, but he ate more than six different Olivers at the same time; his appetite got worse when he had people to heal.


"Fire kid?" Eli was the only one who dared to encroach upon Kawai's couch; he just lifted her feet out of the way and settled in. She dropped them back on his lap. "Oliver, you been keeping track of him, like I asked?"


That wasn't technically part of the job, but Eli would like to know what kind of jerks ran around pulling kids into their business like that. Mercury Independent tended to recruit a little older; there was no good reason to use such a young guy as a shield.


"I told him to get out while he still could," Eli added. "Why are we always watching these crappy TV shows?"


"Because no one else likes My Tiny Horsey, or whatever," Sam said, in between stuffing his face with chips.


"It's My Little Pony," Eli corrected with a huff. "How much longer until this episode's over? I need to use the screen."

 

[eheu]

“Oh, about that,” on the other side of the room, Oliver held up a finger, and then was forced to realise the difficulty of maintaining the dramatic value of that finger while also having to scramble for one wireless keyboard he forgot where he put. There were at least four of them on his desk.


He brought up a few legal documents, as well as a handful of photos apparently snapped off and magnified from larger images. There were just around enough of those to fill two larger screens, which he rotated so that they faced the direction of the corner with the couches. The Oliver on the couch turned and pretended to listen to it, just because everyone else at the corner was doing so.


“Name’s Byron Trier, I can’t believe you didn’t ask,” the one behind the desk glanced at Eli, “but I’m also glad you didn’t ask because that’s...almost literally all that I’ve been able to find out about him.”


“What?” He noticed quite a few disappointed looks in the audience. There were always unreasonable expectations regarding what he could or couldn’t do - it was not like the dirt on the Texas flatlands was on the network.


“Anyways, local kid, utterly unremarkable background,” he held the keyboard like an accordion and punched keys with one hand, and the documents on the screen switched past too quickly to be read. They weren’t meant to be read anyway.


“Aaand no complicated ties or whatever, at least not that I can discern.” That was mostly said for Eli - he knows that he’s always working to minimize unnecessary consequences of their actions, and it was probably important that no-one was after the boy because the convoy got hit. “He’s probably safe, at least for now.”


Oliver swiped the last image off the screen. “Oh, and, in case any of you were wondering, he’s seventeen,” he said, before pointing at Emily, “which makes you officially Too Old For Him.”


That earnt the other Oliver, who was sitting besides Emily, an elbow in the ribs. She admitted that she wasn’t in the best condition for that operation, but somewhere on the way back someone came up with the theory that she was “going easy” on the kid because “he was cute”. It was quite clear that it was nonsense, but that was precisely the reason why Oliver was probably not going to let her hear the end of this any time soon.


"I'll be able to tag him when he shows up somewhere that actually has video cameras." He wrapped up the part about Byron with a little complaint. Then he carried on.


“And then there’s this guy.” Oliver waved his hand at the assortment of different images and documents that populated the screens again. Maybe not all of the people in the room recognized the face - it was the man who was with Byron who apparently led the operation of the convoy. “Alexander Raskin. He’s a lot more fun.”


“Former military. Other-than-honorable discharge. Not that bad, considering that afterwards he’s most likely been behind a few really outrageous things,” the screen rotates through news clippings and official reports, including a couple of quite memorable heists in recent years, concluding on the one that was intercepted.


“He’s essentially a warlord now, if that makes any sense.” He shrugged. Another few clicks, a fresh screen. “But what’s interesting isn’t him, it’s the connections. Those thingies I just mentioned? I only know that because I’m magic. It’s always someone else who was held accountable.”


It was in moments like this that it became entirely apparent how Oliver is genuinely proud of himself, what he’s doing, and the amount of effort he’s devoted to it. In most people’s impressions he spends most of his time slouching around, but he only affords that because he can be scary efficient when there’s something he’s obsessed with cracking. Somewhere in this case, one could tell that there was something that caught his interest.


“Guy just went down like a punk, but betcha he’s gonna pop up again in not too long.


“His funds also come from all over the place. You trace the history of his resources and there’s...just too many things aren’t natural.“ he waved his hands around, wriggled his fingers, before eventually opting for the vague explanation.


“It’s all very wibbly wobbly. The further back I go, the more obfuscated things get. And uh -” He bit on his lip for a second, “I haven’t been able to work it all out yet.”


Despite the terminology, one could tell that he meant it. And there weren’t many things he couldn’t work out.


“What I’m saying is essentially that someone’s watching his back, and whoever that is he’s pretty good.”


He put the keyboard down on the desk and tapped on it a few more times, “I’ve got nothing solid yet, but I figure it’s a fair enough guess considering how often the name pops up.”


“Gideon Lindenmayer,” There was one last file, but no photograph, “it’s an alias for all we know, since officially that person is a professor of economics over in Boston.”


He pulled his hands away from the keyboard, and let out a sigh. That was the end of his little impromptu presentation, and he sincerely hoped that someone on the couch would be able to tell him something he didn’t know, because that was the only thing now that could possible get him unstuck.


On the other end of the room, the tv screen cut to black, and the credits to the episode started rolling.


"Also, there's your screen." spoken to Eli, from the one on the couch.

 

[rrrawrf]

Eli twisted around to look over the back of the couch, giving a little groan; being made of metal was helpful, sometimes, but still, being shot in the back at close range with a freaking assault rifle had still given him a good amount of bruising, at the very least. Kawai didn't look up; she pulled out a tablet, instead, and swiped her way into Oliver's set-up so that she could just screen-share without having to change position. After a moment, she showed it to Eli, as well.


Both of the names Oliver had gleaned bothered Kawai and Eli both. The latter frowned, rubbing one of his earrings, and ignored both of the Olivers for a moment. "You sure that was Raskin?" he said, glancing at the Oliver on the other couch. He looked apologetic a second later. "Not that I'm saying you didn't do a good job, but - I mean, Hertz ran across him a few times and always had problems. It feels like he went down way too easily for us."


"Maybe we're just that good," Sam said, stretching out his legs now that the show was over. He stood up and began to gather all the carnage of his post-breakfast snacking.


Eli shrugged vaguely. "Maybe," he said. Hertz, another team leader, was maybe a little more... aggressive than Eli would have liked. He was a lot more tolerant of casualties and collateral damage, anyway, but the guy got results, so MI just tried to send him to more obscure areas, where his style was a little less remarkable (and a lot less likely to get them all arrested).


"I'm more worried about Lindenmayer," Kawai said quietly. Not quietly enough, because someone else piped up.


"Why are we worried about Lindenmayer?"


Eli rubbed a hand down his face. "It's just one of a list of aliases for some guy HQ's been trying to dig up," he said evasively. "I can get you the list if you want, Ollie, we've got some free time coming up anyway and I'm sure the HQ cyber rats wouldn't mind the help."


He tapped Kawai's feet and she lifted them up so that he could stand. "Anyway, we gotta go over the debriefing real quick. Have you all finished your reports yet?"

 

[eheu]

Oliver did not at all appear disappointed at Eli questioning his results, mostly because the point he made was very valid.


“I was actually wondering that too.” He scratched the back of his head as he said this. But at least with the part regarding Raskin, the data he collected led pretty unambiguously to that conclusion - it would probably take Eli, or anyone else that stared down the man in close range providing a negative identification to have him reconsider the possibility that the man wasn’t who they thought he was.


“I think it was him,” Emily said, but not loudly because she knew that physical resemblance alone didn’t add much to determining identity. Still, being distracted paying attention to the man was part of the reason she lagged in her reaction to Byron in the first place; and the face in that fragment of her memory matched well with the photograph on the screen moments ago.


“Yeah that would be great,” Oliver said, referring to Eli’s offer to provide him with extra information, “I was under the impression that HQ hates me, though?” referencing the last time he got the chance to visit the headquarters and spent most of the time being too excited over all the fancy equipment they had - which was apparently severely disruptive towards work, resulting in quite a few complaints towards him personally and towards their team in general. They may or may not have also noticed that the fact that he couldn’t resist the temptation fo sneaking a snippet of untested code into one of the newer machines (just to see what it would do) was the reason behind the system-wide crash that happened a couple of months later.


Emily let out a whimper and put her chin on the back of the couch, which was her way of expressing her lack of enthusiasm. Still, she soon removed herself from the armrest and settled into a much more constrained sitting pose on the same end of the couch: as much of a pain it was to go through, the reports were still an unavoidable part of work.


The abrupt sound of the front door opening and closing behind hem caught the attention of a few members seated at the corner. A third Oliver panted for a few seconds at the door - it was apparent he was ran his way to the house - before he stood back up straight, holding triumphantly a thick binder of paper that could only be the completed version of his paperwork. The three of the same person in the room stared at one another for a few seconds before the one at the door spoke first.


“Also, did Sam just eat all the chips?”

 

[rrrawrf]

"We'll look into it," Eli promised them, referring to Raskin. He had only heard other teams' stories about the man, and so he supposed it was possible that this time around, they'd just manage to catch the guy on an off day. Eli was now regretting just gathering the client's property and driving off without inconveniencing the convoy any more than they already had, though.


Kawai raised her voice to inform Oliver, "Maybe if you stopped ruining their toys, they wouldn't hate you so much."


He had pulled out his phone, connecting it to the TV screen to share files, when Oliver #3 burst into the room. Eli grinned. "Glad to see someone's done their job," he said, with a pointed look at Kawai, who almost never got her reports in on time (if at all).


"Your fault for not being here," Sam said, as he crammed all his trash into the too-small garbage can at the end of one table. He was still a bit peckish, and pulled a bottle of pills from his pocket, shaking out a handful of a variety of vitamins, and tossing them straight into his mouth. "Are there any more?"


Eli wrinkled his nose and looked away, because it grossed him out to see Sam chewing up pills without even a glass of water. "Focus, guys, we can eat later," he said, and opened up a file on his phone. The corresponding images spread across the TV screen as well.


The debriefing wouldn't take long, but the first image on the screen had absolutely nothing to do with their prior mission. A small cardboard box full of five tiny, week-old rabbits filled the screen.


"Time to get down to business," Eli said, quite seriously. "I need names for these little guys."

 

[eheu]

The Oliver on the couch pouted in return to Kawai’s remark. He couldn’t do much more because, frankly, she was quite correct.


On the other hand, Oliver #3 was currently too out of breath to think of any witty comebacks to toss at Sam. Instead he walked up to the couches and placed the binder onto the table.


A portal abruptly appeared for a moment to spit out a satchel onto Emily’s lap. She flipped through the contents of it and produced a yellow binder. Leaning over the satchel, she stacked the binder atop the one that’s already on the table using both hands. Her report was underwhelmingly thin, especially when compared to the product of Oliver’s obsession over gathering as much information as he could.


"Time to get down to business, I need names for these little guys." Eli.


Oliver shifted his seat so that another version of himself wouldn’t block his view of the screen.


“Oooh. More rabbits.” How many were there in total? He couldn’t remember. He’s consistently impressed by how Eli and his children manage to keep track of so many of them, not to mention being able to take care of them in the first place.


Emily was originally in the process of putting herself in the mood for a debriefing - she had to make an effort to concentrate for things like this if she wanted to remember any of it later on. But her straight face immediately softened when the first slide came up on the screen.


She doesn’t smile all that often, but there were still a few things that she adored and didn’t mind the people around her knowing. Eli was one of the few people who knew that she would probably enjoy keeping a pet were it not for an allergy to fur and feathers making it all not worth the trouble.


“Is Firewall taken?” Oliver, from behind his keyboards. The alias of the esteemed but esoteric scholar was the first thing he thought of because he had to contact him a few times in his earlier research session. The old man himself isn’t exactly an active hero - his codename was a relic of his more reckless, younger days, and he all but despises it now - but the opportunity to spite was precisely the reason behind the suggestion.


“I think Firewall is taken.” The one on the couch, still having trouble with another him being crammed between the little space between the tea table and the couch. Oliver #3 sat down over the other him on the couch.


He shuddered a bit - not like it made dealing with the wibbly-wobbliness of overlapping memories any easier. After heaving through the mess for a bit (he forgets things, but the fact that different copies of himself forget different things makes it sometimes possible to retrieve some lost bits of memories when he merged back): “Yeah, taken,” he confirmed, much to his own disappointment. “Ugh.”


Emily had her chin in her palm and was quite intently trying to come up with something, but had so far not come up with anything satisfactory.


“I keep getting the feeling that we ought to name one of them after Sam,” Oliver said, “but no-one has ever feared a Sam, so.” It was hard to tell whether it was an honest suggestion, or just another of the things he said just for the sake of it. He held back on the “Emily burns” joke after the incident on the latest mission because the ironic, fiery death might as well be his if he did it to her face; but apparently the dig at Sam didn’t come with such a cost.


“Augh, why don’t we get to use all the fancy codenames and stuff here, though?”

 

[rrrawrf]

"Yeah, Firewall was one of the last litter." Firewall wasn't a particularly popular hero with little girls, but Eli's daughters had already exhausted their lists of favorites, and now they were looking for anything that caught their eye. He rocked back on his heels as a couple others threw out names, and Sam snorted at Oliver's suggestion.


"Don't name one of those gross little things after me," he grumbled. Eli, instead of taking offense, immediately pointed a laser at a small bundle of grey fur.


"Then come up with something a little better, or else he's Sam the Second," Eli said. He grinned as Sam rolled his eyes and wandered around the back of the room, apparently bored with just sitting around now that his show was over.


Kawai raised a hand to offer, "Bayonet? They've been around for almost a year now, that's long enough, right?"


No one was wholly certain who Bayonet actually was; some superheroes were more fierce about their secret identities than others. Bayonet also hadn't registered themselves with the government, which meant they were still classed as a vigilante and could potentially be facing a prison sentence if they were ever caught. On the other hand, Bayonet was doing a good enough job right now that no one was especially eager to throw the California-based hero in jail.


Eli nodded. "Bayonet's on the list, then," he said, "pending further approval." His daughters got final say on what their rabbits were called. To Oliver, he added, "No one's stopping you, buddy. You just have to make sure it's a really good one."

 

[eheu]

Emily turned to throw a very specific look at Sam - one that conveyed, at the same time, her disapproval of Sam’s opinion of baby bunnies, and the amusement towards Eli’s comment.


Oliver agreed that Sam the Second actually sounded a lot more intimidating than just Sam, if not also that much sillier.


“Oh yeah, that guy!” Oliver turn to point at Kawai immediately after she mentions the name. He had likely been subconsciously searching for the name since earlier, but it became apparent that Bayonet was the word he was trying to remember the instant he heard it said.


He actually wasn’t certain at all about the hero’s gender, and his choice of pronoun was a mix of Bayonet being one of the heroes with more elusive identities, his habit of referring to any vaguely defined person as “that guy”, and the fact that all along he had been paying much more attention to the armour itself than the personality it represented. Oliver was more familiar with floating points than he was with actual, mechanical, moving parts, but he knew enough to be able to tell that whoever was under the armour probably had good taste towards system design, and also had access to some very sweet tech.


“One second thought, never mind,” Oliver said, in reply to Eli’s suggestion about codenames, “someone’d probably come up with something really stupid to call me, and then it’d stick.” There was no way he’d allow that to happen.


Emily was somewhat hesitant to put her hand up. She didn’t normally offer suggestions unless specifically asked to, but the room has been quiet for a short while. “Eh,Lovecraft?” She said tentatively.


It was someone that Emily found endlessly fascinating, but for most people it would take while to recall who exactly that was supposed to be. Lovecraft was one of the more obscure heroes, even if he wasn’t more urban legend than hero in the first place. The most popular guess as to the origin of his abilities was a variation of accelerated regeneration with the slight quirk that it didn’t know where to grow which tissues and organs and didn’t know when to start or stop. And, true to the strange nature of the author was the namesake, there was an ongoing debate as to whether he was practicing vigilantism or if it was merely coincidental that fourteen out of the sixteen the people he had murdered (and maybe eaten parts of) so far later turned out to have histories involving much criminal activity.


Oliver, on the other hand, immediately cringed upon hearing the name because he was already most familiar with his sister’s esoteric conception of age appropriateness. “Sis, Eli’s daughters,” he protested.

 

[rrrawrf]

Eli's eyebrows shot up at Emily's suggestion. "That's, uh, an interesting choice," he said, though he didn't dismiss it out of hand. Kawai snorted.


"Eli, you named a rabbit after Ruby Mistress. She's even less age-inappropriate than Lovecraft."


Kawai definitely had a point; he grinned and gave her a nod of concession. "I'll put it on the list, the girls won't really know the difference," he decided. The discussion continued for a few more minutes; Sam even chipped in with, "Gemglow," who was fairly new to the superhero scene, but was making waves in California. By the time they were ready to move on to the actual debriefing, there were plenty of names on the list. Eli clicked his little remote, tapped his phone, and then had to enlist Oliver's help to get the TV screen to actually show the proper overview of their last mission.


Of course, that was when Eli's phone rang; the screen changed from a blank report everyone knew and loved (or hated) to fill out after op completion, to the screen of HQ NERDS CALLING: ANSWER / IGNORE.


Eli frowned, made an irritated noise, and answered the call with a brisk, "Montoya."


"Does this mean we're done?" Sam said hopefully, leaning on the back of the couch Emily sat on. He ran a hand over his close-cropped hair, and frowned as the expression on Eli's face changed from slight irritation to something more serious.


Eli glanced around the room, muttered, "Hold on a sec," and moved for the door, intending to finish the conversation out in the hall.

 

[eheu]

Meanwhile, on a rooftop in the middle of a city.


Julia Lauren tapped her finger repeatedly on the metal railing as she waited in silence with a cell phone held up to her ear. She couldn’t tell whether it was the placeholder tune that was full of noise or if it was just the consequences of cheap speakers on a cheaper phone. A duffel bag containing her gear lay on the ground next to her feet.


She looked over the railing and down onto the streets below. There was mostly panic. She tapped her finger a little harder.


This started out a rather straightforward security job: one crime boss apparently had a bone to pick with an old trade partner. Probably because he had a little too much cash on his hands, he decided that it wouldn’t hurt to hire some people to stand around on watch while he and his gang march down the street, just in case any of his other enemies show up.


Julia personally considered all that very silly and unnecessary. But then, her part in this operation consisted mostly of being perched on a roof and idly looking through binoculars, and it was too easy of a job to give her the right to complain. Besides, her building was right above a traditional market, and watching the crowd scurry and hide to make way for Alan Heng and his buddies was actually more entertaining than she had anticipated.


That was, of course, before she spotted a patch of identically-dressed folks four blocks away, with at least two of them armed and one of them wearing something that almost certainly had a bomb on it.


Two minutes ago, she notified his teammates of the discovery. Three of their agents were heading that way: everything had to be dealt with before the march passed through the place. But they had underestimated how packed the streets were, and the task of getting there in time alone was proving to be challenging. She phoned her boss, who in turn authorized a call to HQ. She had HQ forward the mission files to the other team, and so she was now listening to an incredibly cliché “please wait” tune while MI’s office routed her call.


There was a beep, and then the tune disappeared. “Montoya,” she heard.


So the noise was just the phone.


“Hello. Lauren.” She said, “I’m with Hertz.”


_____


At the coffee corner, Oliver hadn’t yet gotten over the idea of Eli’s daughters growing up and realising what exactly they’ve named all their rabbits after. And since he hadn’t gotten over it yet, he hadn’t stopped talking about it either.


“- but seriously though, Ruby Mistress?”


Some of the other members were entertaining his expressions of amusement, but with Eli’s face before he left the room, and the fact that he hadn’t returned yet after receiving that call, many of the minds at the corner were more occupied with speculation as to what news exactly it could be. Emily in particular had turned in her seat and was facing the open door through which Eli left earlier. There was nothing to see through it, but she felt a bit more comfortable keeping it in sight.


One of the many devices on Oliver’s desk behind them produced a very audible “ping” sound.


“Wait wait. I’ve got a thing.” Oliver pulled himself out of the couch and skidded over and picked up the tablet. He stared at the screen for a few seconds, squinted, and then pulled it closer to his face - not because he couldn’t see it clearly, but as a general gesture of astonishment. Then he read through the message a second time.


“What the actual fwick,” he said as he finished reading, putting the tablet down, “what is Hertz doing in China?”

 

[rrrawrf]

Kawai sort of wished Oliver would just shut up already, because she was more than ready for a nap. Debriefings were always a huge waste of time, she thought, and now it was just going to take longer before she could find a plane ride home. It was all very well and good for Eli to waste their time with rabbit-naming, and he'd probably offer her a couch to crash on that night, but she just wanted to leave.


The entire group perked up at Oliver's question. Kawai actually sat up, frowning, as the door to the room opened again and Eli came in. She quickly snapped, "Shut up, Burns," because they weren't exactly supposed to know about what missions the other teams were on if it hadn't yet been resolved.


"Gotta cut this short, guys, sorry," Eli said. He was already slipping into his Business Mode; there was a more serious tone to his words and his expression, and he went on, "Taule'alo, Burns - both of you - and West, stay behind, we got another mission."


Kawai groaned loudly. The only hint that Sam wasn't happy showed in his frown, but he started moving around the room to a set of cupboards in the coffee corner, pulling one open to start loading up on snacks, vitamins, and water. "What's the problem?"


Eli didn't know Julia Lauren very well, but he had appreciated how matter-of-factly she laid out the situation. He waited for the rest of the team to file out, before kicking the door close with his heel and swiping a finger across his phone screen. "You got the files, Oliver?" he asked. "I need you all to gear up, we're going to support Hertz in - how do you say that?"


He showed his phone to Kawai, who mouthed the word to herself, before saying hesitantly, "Shengzhen?"


"Yeah, sure. There's a bomb threat, public area, Lauren says it's fairly crowded. Wasn't supposed to be that tricky a job, so they don't have any support to deal with it." Eli fumbled in his pocket for a key card, and handed it to Kawai, so that she could open up the supplies room and they could grab any gear (and weapons) they didn't currently have on them. "Lauren's supposed to be sending us a map or a picture or something, Emily, so you can drop us off at different points, all right? Here's what the bomber looks like."


He handed his phone to Kawai, and she frowned at the blurry picture. "That's not helpful. Sure it's not just a fanny pack or something?"


"No one wears fanny packs anymore," Sam said, peeling open a granola bar. He wasn't all that hungry (for once), but there was a pretty good possibility that he'd need all the energy he could get pretty soon.

 

[eheu]

“Wh - ? But the folks at HQ just sent me these and -” Oliver interjected, waving the tablet at Kawai, but dropped the sentence as Eli arrived.


"You got the files, Oliver?"


“Uh, yeah,” he pointed at the screen of the tablet he was holding. He would’ve responded with something much more dramatic than uh, yeah had it not taken the extra few moments to process the fact that going on another mission on such short notice meant he would have to go through all the files he just received within the next few minutes.


As Oliver starting swiping through the pages of mission background, Emily was trying her best to get an idea of the location from the images on Eli’s phone screen. Shenzhen, China: opening portals that span the distance was not nearly as much of a hurdle as was placing the ends correctly. It took her quite a while of staring at photos and maps to make sure she wouldn’t be accidentally opening a tunnel into low earth orbit.


“Nobody wears fanny packs any-” Oliver just happened to be looking at the very same photograph on his own device, and went out of his way to divert his attention away from his files just so he could make the joke, but Sam finished the sentence before he could. “- damn you beat me by one second.”


“That wall.” Emily said, pointing at the part of the wall that isn’t covered by anything hanging off it or on the ground nearby. It should made no difference where the entrance was opened, but having it where a door could conceivably be just felt like it made more sense. The other end would lead to the rooftops first: they needed the few distraction-free seconds to assess the surroundings before jumping again to where the action was happening.


“Please only throw up after we get there,” Oliver’s pleading gesture was directed at the empty space in front of him, but the comment itself was very specifically meant for Sam, considering the amount of food he had just stuffed into himself. Every person responded to travelling by portals differently, but they would all agree that it wasn’t the most pleasant of experiences around. Emily takes public transport to work. Oliver tends to get a bit dizzy at most, so his main concern was that if any of Sam’s snacks comes back up halfway on their trip through the portal there was no telling where it’d end up when the team pops out on the other side.


Emily ran through the process in her head for a couple more times before she announced, “Okay.”


She was the first person to disappear from the room - the portal opened from the other end, seconds later. For a handful of seconds, out of an unused portion of one wall in the building in Colorado blew the winds from twenty storeys in the air above a bustling city in Southeast China.

 

[rrrawrf]

"Gotta be quicker, Oliver," Sam said blandly. Kawai was already off in the next room, grabbing the equipment she thought was necessary and shoving it into Eli's arms. Sam finished packing his essentials before the Samoan woman had returned, and he slipped on his backpack as Emily pointed out the wall.


As Kawai, wearing a reinforced jacket and carrying two more rifles than Sam really thought she needed, stalked back into the room, SAm pointed out, "Besides, Kawai's the one who pukes."


"Let it go, Sam," Kawai snapped. She had thrown up one time, and just because it happened to be all over Sam, he wouldn't shut up about it.


Eli snorted, and stifled a laugh; it was taking every ounce of self-control not to make another Frozen joke. Kawai was the next through the portal - and like Sam predicated, she staggered a bit and clapped a hand over her mouth when she came out on the other end, surprised both by the wind, the view from twenty stories up, and the usual gut-wrenching sensation that happened whenever Emily transported them somewhere else.


Sam and Eli were both quick to follow. The former reached over to steady Kawai, taking her by the elbow, and waited a moment for the dizziness (and the unsettled stomach he would never admit to) to subside. Eli held out both arms almost like he was walking a tightrope as he emerged, uncaring how silly he looked as he reeled from vertigo.


"Everyone out?" he asked, glancing around to do a quick headcount. He dropped a couple of the heavy duffels Kawai had pulled out of the equipment storage, and added, "Grab your gear. Is this the right roof? Lauren said she'd be around here..."

 

[eheu]

[SIZE=14.666666666666666px]The portal closed immediately after the last member of the team exited, producing a faint fwump as it did so. Far away, the air settled in the living room in Colorado.[/SIZE]


[SIZE=14.666666666666666px]“Yes, this is the right roof.”[/SIZE]


[SIZE=14.666666666666666px]Julia and Emily had been hidden behind the opening of the portal. It becomes immediately obvious, once thought about, that having the portal face away from one’s face is a good way to avoid problems involving being distracted by disoriented people tumbling out of it.[/SIZE]


[SIZE=14.666666666666666px]“Great to see you again.” Having been assigned to different teams, Julia and Kawai haven’t had much time to talk outside of work for a while. Julia doesn’t talk much outside of work at all, for that matter. She did, though, throw an extra, approval look at the rifles Kawai brought along. But the chat could wait until later.[/SIZE]
 


[SIZE=14.666666666666666px]A portable projector stuck on one of the walls cast a simplified map of the city onto the concrete rooftop floor: their building near the centre, the streets around it marked with their names. One particularly wide one runs all the way through the map. Pulsing dots mark the targets that they’re able to track - Heng, leading his gang down the road at one end, and the little batch of people standing still at the other. The map was updated about every other second - not exactly real time, but it helped.[/SIZE]



[SIZE=14.666666666666666px]“We don’t have a lot of time, so -” Julia paused for a bit to make sure everyone was there and listening, even though this was less of a brief and more just her quickly going over her mental checklist, “you’ve already seen the map, your gear’s sorted out, you know what’s going on - wait,” she pointed at Oliver, “Oliver, new intel?”[/SIZE]


[SIZE=14.666666666666666px]“Wh-” Oliver blanked for a second, both because he was busy recovering from the dizziness until then, and because he didn’t really expect someone to ask for updates so shortly after he gave the last one. “Uh, no, not yet.”[/SIZE]


[SIZE=14.666666666666666px]“Alright.“ Julia didn’t seem to take issue with that response either, “so we still don’t know if they’re there to wait for Heng and his boys, or if parade day just happened to be on the same date someone decided to blow up the city centre.”[/SIZE]


[SIZE=14.666666666666666px]Either way, it wasn’t going to be a good thing if it happened, and they were going to try to make sure it didn’t. And that as discreetly as possible.[/SIZE]


[SIZE=14.666666666666666px]Julia looked at Emily, and she responded with a thumbs up gesture that meant she had rested enough to be able to reliably pull of a few shorter range teleports to get people to their places. Julia nodded and stepped aside.[/SIZE]

 

[rrrawrf]

Eli turned as the portal collapsed, and he grinned and moved over to offer a hand to Julia. "Montoya, West, Burns one, Burns two, and I think you know Taule'alo." Julia probably already knew most of their names anyway, but Eli was both being polite, and checking that they were all on the same page. 


The projected map rode partway up Eli's back before he moved, so that it could lie flat on the ground, and they all had a decent view of it. Sam barely gave it a glance, before moving to the duffel bags, grabbing a ballistic vest and pulling it over his clothes. Wearing cargo shorts to a debriefing had definitely not been a good idea, but he'd just hope no one shot him today.  He listened to Julia with his eyes narrowed and focused on the map, the dots marking their targets blinking every second.


"Em, you'll drop me and Kawai off first," he decided, moving around the map and pointing out two side streets close to the suspected bomber and their two buddies. Kawai passed around earpieces to the group, and Eli absently fitted one into his ear. "Lauren, what's the frequency for your group? Thanks. Drop West off around here."


Eli scuffed a part of the map with his shoe, a point midway between the two sets of blinking dots. "Don't engage unless something either blows up or we call you in, got it, West? Ollie, come with either me or Taule'alo. Em, you're floater for now - keep watch from up here with Lauren. Use your judgment - if you think you need to be somewhere, make the jump. Otherwise, wait for us to call you in - oh, hello, Hertz."


Eli's earpiece, at least, had synced up with the other MI group, and he was treated to a harsh, "'Bout time you got here, what the hell took you so long?"


Eli rolled his eyes. "Always a pleasure, sir."