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| The face not shown to strangers; Tag: Orchard | |
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| Topic Started: May 7 2015, 04:18 PM (340 Views) | |
| Ted Kaplan-Altman | May 7 2015, 04:18 PM Post #1 |
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Mutant Skrull Physiology
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April 28, 7:27 AM, somewhere completely uninteresting in, let's say, Iowa. Background here. Well, I guess this is the place. If he was going to be honest, Ted would have to admit he wasn't exactly sure why he was meeting Orchard in a mostly empty diner like a couple of movie spies. Granted, they were a couple of spies, but they were a couple of spies who had access to conference rooms in the flying headquarters of the greatest spy organization on the planet, which was, well, different from the movies. (Well, other than the movies about SHIELD itself. Which Ted mostly tried not to watch; the temptation to giggle hysterically was too great.) That said, there was one possibility that suggested itself prominently... namely, that the SHIELD helicarrier wasn't a reliably secure location. Which was a disturbing thought, but given that the organization Ted was seeking to infiltrate was itself a world-class information hub and had managed to break its members out of SHIELD custody more than once (most recently on Ted's watch, which still grated), it wasn't a ridiculous idea. Of course, it was only one possibility. Maybe Orchard was just hedging his bets as a matter of principle. Or, heck, for all Ted knew Orchard had misplaced his Helicarrier access badge and was rescheduling meetings off-site rather than deal with getting SHIELD Human Resources to issue him a new one. Which Ted could appreciate; dealing with HR was always a nightmare, and they simply did not seem to understand that SHIELD ID's were not indestructable. Or maybe this place just had really awesome pancakes. With Orchard it was really hard to tell. Well, regardless, he'd arrived a few minutes early, so he settled himself into a booth, ordered some coffee and a Hungryman Special, and waited for his supervisor's arrival. |
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| Henry Orchard | May 20 2015, 11:37 PM Post #2 |
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“Sorry to keep you waiting. The set-up back there is atrocious.” Henry set Ted’s order on the table and dropped into the seat opposite. He lifted the hem of his apron used it to wipe the grease and sweat from his brow. He had made little attempt to blend into their surroundings beyond removing his jacket and donning an apron. If anything, that he wore his holster over the top quite possibly undid any efforts at disguise. “You know,” he began, the words drawn out as the thought formed “American Diners like this one are utterly fascinating to people back home. We see them in movies, all shiny and with glorious rocket-red upholstery, and it just epitomizes that weird Frontier Glamour.” “We have these back home, of course. Greasy Spoons, we call them, dreadful little cafes that haven’t been redecorated since the last visit the Luftwaffe paid. Well, since the Seventies. Everything old in Britain is from the Seventies.” “My point is, a Greasy Spoon has been there forever and it feels like it’s going to be there forever. It’s a harder place, more tangible, more real. These Diners though, it’s like they’re not really here and no one here is really in them.” “Look,” he gestured around, and up and down the length of the space “Everything in straight lines, capsules within a capsule, all fused and long for things to slide about. In, out, onto point B. This isn’t even point A, this isn’t even a letter in the alphabet. It’s punctuation. This is America’s space bar.” He trailed off, his attention flitting away from the diner and it’s place in the psycho-cultural landscape. On his return he simply turned back to Ted and as if nothing had happened just said “So, Ted, how’re things?” |
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| Ted Kaplan-Altman | May 25 2015, 05:12 AM Post #3 |
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Or, Ted added privately and more than a little incredulously when Orchard came out from the kitchen with his breakfast, maybe he works here. It wasn't an option he'd considered, which right away was a point in its favor, and on the face of it it was a ridiculous notion, which was another. Given a choice between a plausible and an implausible option, Ted had learned that Orchard would reliably find a third, even less plausible option and take that instead. It had taken the junior agent quite a while to recognize that this was actually a surprisingly effectively tactical stance. It made Orchard a wildcard, consistently unpredictable, and while that wasn't the sort of thing the X-Men tended to emphasize in their training Ted had to admit Orchard made it work. And while Ted would stack Cyclops' strategic and tactical field training up against anyone's, it was admittedly not optimized for the kind of stealthy solo missions that SHIELD agents tended to engage in. So absurd as the sidearm-wearing frycook "disguise" and the disquisition on UK vs US diners might seem on the face of it, Ted didn't laugh. With Orchard, he'd come to believe there was always something non-obvious going on under the surface. Instead he shook his head seriously when his vorpal-manipulating superior described the diner as "America’s space bar.” "No," he replied judiciously, "the Space Bar's in Seattle. Billy and I went there for his birthday once. It's right next to the Space Needle. They wouldn't serve us, though... we were underage back then. View was great though." He had no idea what he was talking about, really, but as long as the conversation had started off on this utterly non-linear foot, he figured he might as well dance with it. And apparently it worked well enough; after a long pause Orchard came back with a much more routine question. Of course, it still left ambiguous whether the man meant how things were personally, or professionally, but Ted decided to answer the latter. Fewer ways for that to go wrong. "Pretty good," he replied confidently. "I've made contact with the Guild -- or, rather, Blackwing has," he corrected himself. Of course, Orchard would have read his reports by now, knew all about how "Blackwing's" failed diamond heist had brought him to the Thieves' Guild's notice and how he'd leveraged that into a somewhat trusted relationship with Stacy X and Alex McKenzie. But the point of these sorts of debriefings was to get the agent's own perspective on what mattered, so he didn't mention that. "Reports about connections between the Guild and the Red Court seem to be on the money... not really a secret, honestly. Regan Wyngarde's the outfit's fence; Lord knows what sorts of artifacts she's already acquired that way. Guild scuttlebutt is the Court pulled off a heist from Asgard, of all things, though I think that's mostly pure brag. Still, there's a pyrokinetic who can't hold his liquor but seems honest enough and swears they travelled through a portal to the Norse gods live, so... well, you know." They'd all seen crazier things than that, so it could be true. Hell, Ted's family came from another dimension, and Billy commuted to one for work, so by this point he was pretty blase about interdimensional travel. "I think McKenzie's my best bet for getting at the Red King, though... rumor is they're close. I just need to give him a reason to trust me. Haven't found the right lever yet, though." Honestly, Ted had mixed feelings about that. He knew what the job required when he'd taken it, but he hadn't expected to like the folks he was infiltrating. Not that it changed anything, of course; the job was the job. It just meant he liked it less, was all. "And, hey, if SHIELD has access to a priceless artifact it's prepared to sacrifice for the cause, I could probably arrange an actual physical meeting with Wyngarde, maybe bring her in." Which wouldn't really make up for having allowed her and her father to slip through his fingers a couple of years back, but it would be a start. |
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| Henry Orchard | Jun 3 2015, 12:29 AM Post #4 |
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Henry kept quiet and listened. The reports he’d received described an apparently stable situation, the cover was solid and Ted seemed at no immediate risk one way or the other. Hearing it in person and seeing how calm and confident the kid was just affirmed that assessment. There was, however, still that one thought that wouldn’t let him fully commit to that sentiment. He felt it as a cold pressure, like a coin pushed into the base of his skull. Now and again, when recalling the facts of this case things would echo from that place; metal on stone and the meat between, an icy wind through Hell's Kitchen, and dark eyes in the wrong face. When Ted was done he pretended to consider what had been said, instead taking a few moments to pack away bad memories. Eventually, he got on with his job. “The kind of artefacts we’d have in our possession we really don’t want any of them back on the market.” Caution was the order of the day. Henry was determined to minimize any potential risk, even if it meant going to long way around every time. “Also, we couldn’t guarantee that she wouldn’t know that we had it or couldn’t find out where it came from. Alternatively we could arrange, very quietly, for something along those lines to become somehow vulnerable and let it be known that it is such. Then if you were to just nick the thing there’s not so much of a problem.” He pulled out his work phone and laid it on the table and tapped in note with the blue fingers of his right hand. “We can do that, just need to lean on the right insurer. Fortunately, there are bloody loads.” That hand, and the rest of the arm, served as another reminder of that last fatal error although it seemed to him purely incidental, a footnote. He wasn’t worried about anything that might happen to him. That wasn’t so important. “In the mean time, let’s talk about Mr McKenzie. What’s his deal?” |
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| Ted Kaplan-Altman | Jun 14 2015, 12:00 AM Post #5 |
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There was a long silence after he finished his summary as Orchard evaluated it. At least, that's what Ted assumed he was doing, although there was a weirdness to the way he did it. Of course, this was Orchard; there was a weirdness to the way he did everything. But still, there was something not-quite-right. Ted was not completely alien to the experience of trauma, and he knew enough about Orchard's recent SHIELD history to be primed for the possibility. That said, he wasn't particularly looking for it, and Orchard was a highly trained dissembler. Ultimately, the man returned to business, and Ted let such thoughts go and returned with him. His arguments against using a SHIELD-controlled artifact made perfect sense, and Ted nodded agreement with them; it had been a spur-of-the-moment suggestion on his part, and he hadn't really thought it through. The possibility of actually stealing a sufficiently valuable artifact to attract Wyngarde's attention had occurred to him before, of course -- after all, it wasn't much different from the way he'd infiltrated the Thieves' Guild in the first place -- but the stakes would be a lot higher than lifting a few diamonds, and without a reliable strategy for parlaying a professional contact with the Red Bishop into an opportunity to snatch the Red King, he couldn't really justify the cost. So when Orchard brought the topic back to McKenzie, Ted nodded in agreement. "Car thief, former gang member... bad blood with them. Not actually part of the Red Court, but might as well be; spends a whole lot of time in their base. Word is Hellfire actually recruited him off the street, if you can believe it. Technopath, specializes in cars... maybe they were looking for someone to replace Tessa Ayasli, after the Black Court broke its ties with Coleridge. McKenzie isn't nearly in her league, though, from what I've seen. It's all rumor and scuttlebutt, but I think he's also taken Ayasli's place in Coleridge's bed. Anyway, I figure if I can get on his good side that's an in on Coleridge, just haven't figured out how best to do that yet." |
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| Henry Orchard | Jun 22 2015, 11:29 PM Post #6 |
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“I think we’ve crossed paths before. Briefly.” He had a vague recollection of a car speeding away as Kate Bishop and Cass looked on. Henry had covered while the others pulled Mackenzie from the rubble but if they had actually spoken he couldn’t retrieve it. A lot had happened that day. “Well, if he and Coleridge are intimate we should probably leave that be. The last time someone threatened his nearest and dearest he turned into an extinction event. Let’s focus on his business and maybe he won’t get so angry.” He did not go on to expound on how this might make it easier to decapitate Coleridge. Ted was a nice guy and didn’t necessarily need to hear about certain protocols. Henry had seen the black book, the Sicaricon, an encyclopedia of killshot for the world’s most dangerous extranormals. He’d read it cover to cover and he still wasn’t sure it was real. Better to leave it that way perhaps. “I mean let’s not pussy foot around so, you know, reasonable means or whatever. We’re all grown adults so I’m not going to patronise you with the blatantly obvious.” He considered their options. The vacuum this effort apparently created in his head sucked his top lip behind his teeth, saliva slapped and popped as the air rushed in. The goblinoid impression broke as he reached a conclusion. “I’d say light touch there. Focus on the money and run with this Fake-Not-Fake heist thing. We should enrich some other relationships though, try and get some more fingers in our pie. This Stacy-X, sex worker and socialite right? That could be a good prospect, plenty of room to, I don’t know, germinate? Cross-pollinate? She could make you some new friends is what I’m trying to say.” |
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| Ted Kaplan-Altman | Jul 26 2015, 03:07 AM Post #7 |
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Mutant Skrull Physiology
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“I think we’ve crossed paths before. Briefly.” "Oh?" Ted was surprised to hear that Orchard knew McKenzie, but not especially shocked; in their line of work they tended to meet a lot of people, as Ted's own experience attested. "Anything I ought to know?" "Let’s focus on his business and maybe he won’t get so angry.” The idea that they might want to avoid angering Coleridge struck Ted as a little off at first, but then again "a little off" was pretty much the standard here. And Orchard did have a point; everything Ted had learned about the former Black King seemed to indicate he viewed his criminal career as just that: a career, something he was essentially pragmatic about. It had gotten out of hand during the Illuminati crisis, to put it mildly, apparently triggered by Doom's threatening his adopted children... and when push had come to shove, he'd apparently parted company with both Doom and Hellfire. At least, that was the SHIELD analysis team's best guess, and Ted was inclined to agree. And in light of that, he supposed Orchard's suggestion made sense, counterintuitive as it seemed at first. "All right," he agreed. "Light touch. And I'll see what I can do about... 'cross-pollinating' Stacy X," he added uncertainly, "though I don't have any likely prospects on that yet." She'd been friendly enough to "Ali," but he didn't really know much about her... she talked easily enough, but didn't say much about herself. "Say, have we gotten anything useful out of Blackheart?" It seemed unlikely... the darkforce-demon was anything but helpful, and there wasn't really a lot they could do to influence it. Hell, they could barely contain it, and it was a small miracle that they'd managed to defeat it in the first place. And the fact that it chose to look like Coleridge was probably just a function of the man's affinity with the darkforce-dimension Blackheart came from, and didn't mean anything significant. But even in his limited investigative experience, Ted had learned there was potentially a huge gap between probably and demonstrably, and while closing that gap could be tedious it could also mean the difference between life and death. |
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8:51 AM Jul 11