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At Least It Was Here; Cassandra Lang
Topic Started: Mar 5 2014, 11:18 PM (448 Views)
Henry Orchard
Unregistered

Manhattan, en route to the East Village.
February 23rd

Manhattan made Henry uneasy. Sometimes he felt as if the buildings loomed over him, like the tombstones of immense and ancient creatures placed in judgement of the lesser creatures that scurried about in their shadow. He mentioned this to the taxi driver and, after a short discussion as to whether or not he was some kind of nutjob, decided that he should walk the rest of the way. The driver concurred and deposited him somewhere on Houston.

Henry took a moment to weigh the significance of what had just happened, and how it might relate to past and future events. Before he could catch those threads and pull them into order the cold began to bite at his toes. Reminded of his purpose he turned north, and began to walk.

It had been weeks, months even, since he had seen Lang. The last time she had announced her intention to leave MDIV, and when that had been Henry couldn’t exactly recall. The happening was clear enough, he could go down into his memory and pull it out, play it back like it was yesterday, but it seemed somehow loose, disconnected from the rest of time and space. It reminded him of school, those times when everything that had been bottled up had just burst out were perfectly preserved in his mind but felt foreign, as if they belonged to someone else. He’d put those things at distance, disavowed himself of responsibility, as much the act of a child now as it had been then.

That pattern of thinking continued, turning over on itself like some heavy machine the drive of which carried him from block to block, and before he knew it he was admiring the red brick of Lang’s old firehouse. It was a sight to behold, bold, characterful, and distinctly American in flavour. Plus, also, Ghostbusters and so under a wave of nostalgia all self loathing was temporarily forgotten.

He found the buzzer at the door and pressed for the intercom.

“Hello, we are corrupt police officers of the worst bent. Open your door so we can arrest everyone for crimes of our own invention.”
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Titan
Unregistered

"Atta' girl."

The hulking form before her, it was tense, it seemed, well, worried. Dark eyes shifted here and there and regarded the blonde girl before it with a distrust. Knobby fingers clutched at the shredded ground and unclutched again, ready to grab for a mad scramble for escape.

"Just take it. Don't be shy. It's good."

Another half dozen glares mounted on her and she wasn't sure if it was in a good or a bad way. The ground flexed under her feet. Waxy, not used to the weight of someone so substantial and non-hollow, but it was strong, like those who'd crafted it, and didn't give way.

The frequency kept them interested and out of the realm of terror and anger that would spell the girl's doom.

The spongy ground opened up before her, and she moved towards the immobilized creature, its swollen back end pulsing in an odd dance that years ago she'd have found strange, unsettling, or even disgusting, but in the last few months had been desensitized to if not outright ambivalent towards.

The thing reached its fearful maw forwards, a construct of muscle and odd teeth and strange formations that to any self aware human were things of horror or at the very least alien nature. The wasp queen finally took the tablet from her hand, and Lang quickly backed away, not wanting to push the wiles of the frequency she was tuning.

It quickly ate the gel, voraciously almost and with that Lang walked out, the eyes of a hundred wasps watching her as she backed away, intent on finding one false move. Searching for one hint of violent pheramone out of place. Anything. These were monsters that wanted to tear her apart. And she was keeping those instincts at bay. The golden cybernetic-mesh of wire and light erupted from the harness at her back, and their flapping buzzed her into the air. She took out through one of the tunnels, bolting through myriad honeycomb passage ways which she navigated and owed her egress solely to the GUI on the inside of her helmet.

Emerging from the hive and then from the special housing that contained it, her feet set on the floor of her personal workshop. Sticky and in need of washing; a waxy paper hive was no beacon of cleanliness. But Wasps were something interesting, and something of a literal hive mind. There was potential there for all sorts of applications, but she would need them to be able to overlook her if she were to make good on any of that potential, a notion that this experiment had boded well for.

"Lang Journal Hive Project Year-One-Month-Two-Day-Twenty-Three." She said, the helmet unfolding its strange face to reveal her own. She took it off and moved through her top-floor workshop, pulling free the fastenings on her suit. "Hive Two was receptive to the knew control frequency; it is noted in the logfiles of the helmet as well as the documentary program. Supplement two has been administered to Hive Two's Queen, observation to follow." Lang put the harness and helmet and gauntlets onto their appropriate rigs.

Pulling her hair from its updo, she shook it out, peeling the armored second skin from her body and then pulling pants on for the sake of modesty, she looked out the window at the freezing outside.

"Winter needs to end." She mused inwardly. "And I want some...thing."

Coffee, maybe? No, too late in the morning for that.

Maybe a danish. Kate and Parker'd probably do with a donut too.

-Bazzzt-

The sound caught her attention and she moved to a panel near the lift. "Quien es?"

The voice on the other end was familiar and welcome if altogether unexpected.

The button she pressed would allow entry to the vacant ground-floor, which, while clean, was wholly empty and full of echoes. Lang didn't own a car. No real point in New York City. By the time a few minutes had passed, she stood at the top of the slide pole, the rushing sound as she moved down towards the ground signifying her entry. Converse hitting concrete, she pulled her hair back into a single long ponytail as she approached Orchard, now with a hoodie to protect her from the cool down here.

"Well well well." She said, affecting her best impression of a bad Bond villain. "Look who we have here."

She wasted very little time wrapping arms around him in a hug. Part of it was genuine joy, the other part, well, obligation. Memories were a touchy area with her, but she at least knew who she was supposed to like, and nothing gave any indication that Orchard had ever been worthy of something other than amicability.
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Henry Orchard
Unregistered

The slam of the door behind him had chased away the sounds of metropolitan life, and for a few seconds New York was resigned to memory. Soon enough though, it crept back into the world and the loudest of it’s calls began to sound along the edge of his hearing. Horns and calls, the distant hunt. He crept further into the station, as if the the slightest noise might bring those imagined stalkers. This place was sanctuary, an old secret of the prey-kinds, where the hungry thought not to tread.

His eyes adjusted to the dim and all notions of prehistory ran has Manhattan had, only never to return. He rubbed at his eyes and pushed out a sigh. He knew that sort of thinking should concern him, but increasingly he found he could do little better than pretend to care.

A squeal behind turned him on his heel in time to see Lang descend the pole. A bolt of noise and colour shot from one side of his head to the other, images of Stature and Cassandra from, well, before. He smiled, for once it was good to remember.

He still tensed when she embraced him. All terribly British, don’t you know.

“Hello Lang,” he patted her gently on the back. He sniffed, some strange waxy odour on her hair. “Been up to old tricks, have we?”
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Titan
Unregistered

"I'm actually conditioning paper wasps to respond better to HF signals so I can better steer them. I'm... I have weird hobbies." She said, her voice a shrug in vocal form.

It was good to see Henry Orchard. One of a handful of faces she truly had memories to pin with, upon her brief return to SHIELD facilities he was one of an even more select few who treated her as a person with a problem rather than as a traitor or a child. Never the warmest, but still yet never truly cold, his appearance was a reminder that things hadn't always been so terrible in her time there.

"Uhm..." Cassie leaned back on one heel, arms folding as she looked around the state of the garage momentarily before her eyes widened a bit more and she seemed to have a bulb turn on somewhere over her head. British. Roughly midday.

"I have tea?" She hazzarded, not sure if that was vaguely offensive or typically cliche.

She cut short any possible awkward pause with something else entirely. "Or you know you could do what everyone else does when they come here the first time and ride my pole for half and hour?" The uncharacteristic phrasing intentional, the dirty joke plainly intended, her expression took on a coy sneer, the curve of the faint scar on her cheek pressing into existence the face of someone who wasn't quite Cassandra Lang either.
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Henry Orchard
Unregistered

Perhaps it was tiredness, or that he was wrong in the head, but the idea of Pole Rides sent Henry’s mind wandering off in the wrong direction. Along the way it found a number of truly salacious images which it, being ever the most dutiful brain, decided that Henry needed to see with the utmost urgency. He blinked them away, the pink afterimages faded away to reveal Lang’s smiling face.

The first word that leapt onto his tongue was the worst thing he might have said. He killed it stone dead before the first syllable had a chance to sound, then found himself standing, staring, and without anything to say. He shuffled on the spot, trying desperately to find somewhere else to look.

“Er, so,” the fireman’s pole drifted into view and everything made sense, “Oh! Right! Yes, sorry, actual pole- not that I meant, altho- Wasps! How are the wasps? I trust that they’re all… however they normally are?”

He swallowed, pushed the panic aside and gathered up the remains of his composure. This was why he’d put these things away, and why he’d waited so long to come here. They were confusing, a conflicted mess of thoughts and feelings that he had decided, for equally dissonant reasons, were best left unexplored. Guilt, he had found, was a more manageable emotion. It was stable and the actions it demanded of him tended towards something not unlike altruism. He was happy with his guilt, for the lack of a better term.

He put on a smile and tried to brush the whole thing under a carpet of Stuffy No-Sex-Please-We’re-Britishness.

“Anyway, yes, let’s have tea and let’s talk wasps. Are they a Horizon thing?”
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Titan
Unregistered

She picked dust from her shirt shoulder and waved Henry further inward as he stumbled, almost visibly, over his words, eliciting from her as she turned a grin and a shake of her head, long blonde hair trailing in the wave a motion as she moved towards a half wall that split the former Fire Department staging area off from its downstairs offices, each of those mostly storage for she and her two roommates.

"Yeah they're really Waspy but not in like, the New Hampsire way." She joked.

She led him to the stairwell and then up into the apartment proper; the large studio deal was lit well in the daylight, the large common area smattered with things of her own as well as things of Parker's and things of Kate's neither of whom were present currently, Peter having had some errand to run and Kate out at work. It wasn't nearly so spartan as one might have expected from Cassandra Lang, especially after Bishop herself had had her way with the decor.

"Go ahead make yourself at home." Cassie said cheerily as took a few steps away. "My dad bought this place when he was making bank as uh, a security consultant for Henry Pym. Whole second floor's pretty gutted from the original floorplans; makes a great loft studio really." She tied her hair back and moved into the kitchen, pulling the box of teabags out of the cupboard. "Sorry I don't have an actual kettle or anything..." She called back "... does that matter? I just have uhhh. It's some brand from the bodega down the street."

Tea should not matter so much.

"How's M-Div?" She called back, pausing inwardly while she was still out of view; thinking back, memories stinging like the insects living in her attic. 'Still broken?' she wanted to ask, but wouldn't let herself.

"I miss everyone." She said instead, putting two cups of water on to boil in a pot before coming to lean one shoulder on the jamb of the door to look after her company. It wasn't exactly true. She missed a few people, most of whom were here.
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Henry Orchard
Unregistered

Henry chucked politely, having no actual understanding of how wasps and New Hampshire might relate. As they emerged into the apartment he felt more at ease. The normality was reassuring, no signs of any militant thinking in the design; no armour panels or piles of weapons. The influence of SHIELD, and more importantly that of The Brotherhood was conspicuously missing.

“Anything’s fine, really. These days it could be boiled piss and I’d drink it.”

He thought about that for a moment, his face pulling into a flat wince.

“I mean, because I spend so much time in the cold. Hot things yes, piss not so much. At all, even! I didn’t even know urophagia was a thing! And also I’m going to stop saying words.”

Ideally, he thought, for the rest of time.

He wriggled out from under his coat and folded it over the back of a chair. Out of habit his hand went to his hip and unclipped the badge and holster. What exactly to do with them he wasn’t sure, the exact etiquette eluded him so he put them on a shelf. He stood for a moment and tried to recall a time when he didn’t go into people’s houses, shout “urophagia”, and then hide a gun.

“I am such a butt.” he muttered to himself.

When Lang asked about the others he went on a brisk scamper around the room, peering out of the windows and under the furniture.

“Oh, you know, can’t really talk about work.” he called across the studio, perhaps a little too loudly. He stopped, covered his eyes and imagined imperceptibly tiny fibres shedding off him and disseminating through the air. Little images flashed up along the edge of his vision, snapshots of the apartment rendered enormous by the scale of the constructs.

“Security clearance and all that. Very hush, hush. Tippity toppity secret…”

After a few seconds a low whine circled the edge of the studio, each window in turn rattling in it’s frame before it completed the circuit and tapered off.

He returned his attention to Lang, more than a little embarrassed “Sorry, had to scrub for surveillance. I think most of them are fine, maybe a bit a frazzled here and there but not so bad. We’re all still cleared for the field at any rate. Seb was thinking about moving on, transferring or getting out altogether. I don’t know if he’s decided yet, we haven’t had a chance to catch up since I moved off the Liberty.”

The truth of the matter was his contact with the rest of MDIV had been limited. He’d purposefully distanced himself, trying to find some clear space away from the command structure where he could recuperate. That had been the whole point of the move, to get out and be somewhere where people wouldn’t ask awkward questions like “Hey, what's the deal with this talking dog” or “Hey, what's the deal with you being crazy all time time”.

He smiled unconvincingly, “I think things are getting back to normal though.”
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Titan
Unregistered

His responses to her questions were so typical for him that they were, as ever, incredibly atypical.

She quirked her brow a few times, gave an untargeted, side-long stare at nothing a few other times, and by the time she'd managed to find her way back to the kitchen to pour tea and bring it out on a tray with sugar and milk and honey she'd wholly remembered why Henry Orchard was simultaneously so strange in his mannerisms and yet also so enjoyable to be around.

Sort of. There was that, you know, blank empty space in her mind that barely knew anything, but it was filling in slowly, and when she offered him his cup and took her place in a chair, she shrugged.

"My apartment's been bugged twice since I left shield, both times I scrubbed the place out before deciding to install some field scramblers. It should be safe for cellular phones or burst radios but I'd check and make sure any apple products aren't fried when you leave."

She might not have been outwardly paranoid, but that didn't mean she wasn't paranoid at all.

She sipped awkwardly at her tea, her youthful face and off-put expression clashing together to form a look of resigned acceptance that she might suddenly seem like she was the sort to think tinfoil was not only a bold fashion statement but a keen way to keep the Reptillians out of your head.

"Seb..." She said, half wincing. There were things there, things she felt guilty about, or didn't want to think about period, and so she gave a nod at the prospect of him leaving. She remembered briefly in that instant a moment on the carrier's deck and the preceding year of involvement in secret that felt so wrong and alien in the aftermath of her days as a mole that it bound her stomach up in knots.

Her eyes canted briefly to his gun on the shelf; the nature of the thing so out of place making her assess any and all situations that could come of this. Henry was a friend, and she trusted him, but SHIELD as a whole? Never again. The bracelet at her wrist gave a ding to signal the hour; it didn't look unlike a watch, but it was more than that.

"So you're not living on the big iron breadbox anymore huh?" She offered. "Enjoying that expensive New York living?"
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Henry Orchard
Unregistered

Henry took the cup with his prosthetic hand and sipped experimentally. All too often these days he forgot that the arm didn’t have the full range of sense and ended up burning his mouth. “Aah, superb.” In truth, he couldn’t speak the quality of the tea, certainly it was suitable for human consumption which put it head and shoulders over the coffee-sludge he normally took.

He assumed SHIELD still had an interest in Lang which, after everything that had happened, seemed reasonable enough but the idea of his employers going so far as to invade her privacy irked him. When he got back to the office he resolved to make some enquiries.

“New york has actually been relatively inexpensive, I mean, there’s basically nothing in the flat. Boxes. The hardcase from work. I don’t really get much of a chance to spend any of my wages and most stuff, well,” he tapped the side of his head “Anything IKEA can do, I can do better.”

“Although, thinking of it the other day I did actually...” he paused and considered whether or not his encounter with Thebe Okonma was an appropriate topic of conversation. The idea of more secret wearied him and he began again.

“They guy who lives across the hall from me is some sort of criminal. The day I was moving in I watched him beat the shit out of some Russian gangsters who came to shake him down.”

Henry recalled the fight. There had been three of them, armed but all baselines, and Okonma had the drop on them. It had been over in a flash and the Russians definitely knew they’d been in the wars. So far they hadn’t been back but he assumed it was only a matter of time, and whether he wanted to be around for that he hadn’t quite decided.

“There’s a Costume involved so I paid Jamie Madrox to look into it. I don’t think much will come of it. Probably.”
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