Avengers Assembled

April 26, 2013

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The ceiling takes its sweet time sliding into focus. Jen is not incorrect in deducing that she's having difficulties with her senses, maybe because her brain took a high-velocity bang-around the interior of her skull, or perhaps she was drugged.

--not drugged enough, she might determine, the when agony flares through her ribs the next moment. By then, though, she can smell something foully like formaldehyde, and something sweeter than that riding a subtle current. She can even make out the ceiling: corrugated metal, sloppily layered over in white, meeting the top of a concrete wall, bleach-scarred.

She can't see much further than that because searing light falls there, too-bright too-white, laking over the edge of her face, strangling her pupils into pinpricks and lancing a headache through, harsher than a dental surgeon's lamp. Dental surgeon. Maybe that's why she's strapped down on a chair. <i>Her teeth are the only part of her body that don't hurt</i>.

Someone is talking to her. "I have accounted for sex and decided against concern about the phenotypic differences." At her, rather. Whoever they happen to be, they're standing too close to the light for her to see, but the register marks him as a him; perhaps small; probably American. "After all, Subject Zero was more of an ectomorph before transitioning from Bengali to North American cuisine. Remaining injuries include fractures of the fourth and third rib, and contusions on forty-eight percent of the body."

Talked //about//, more like. It may occur to her that she is naked.

"In other words, negligible."

In the back of her mind, she could joke about alien abductions.

Which would probably strike her subconscious as more entertaining if she did not know there were such creatures out there in the universe. All fun and games until someone invades.

Thusly, Jennifer is left to wander in the back of her own head when her conscious mind catches up to her senses, themselves as if filled with wool, deadened with static, or even fogged over like a bathroom mirror. Her sense of smell, likely for the fact it is most immediately stimulated, returns before her eyes crack to see through already filtered lashes; the light sears past, and rather than close them again, they slip lazily open to examine the ridges and waves of the washed white of the ceiling, the far lines of corners where it meets wall. Her gaze reaches the source of light, only to shrink back behind her eyelids once more.

The breath in her chest hurts to keep, though the exhale just as much, and the inhale by far the most. She maintains small breaths, enough to get by, ragged in her lungs. Her ears are last to form sense out of the world, muffled noise gaining clarity with passing seconds. Everything seems to hurt, even the voice on her eardrums.

<i>Who’s talking</i>?

Vocalization is above her, as is self-awareness of her physical state past the initial pain. Such a fact will come to her, in time. It does not prevent Jennifer from twitching to apparent life; fingertips first, as the tiny twinge of muscle travels up into her wrists, only to find themselves pinned snugly into place.

There's a riffle of motion, the stranger's attention settling on her face with quick curiosity. The round corner of a silhouette-- by default, a shoulder, partially eclipses the lamp's hard light. There is something wrong with the man, other than the fact that he didn't give her enough morphine and his practice smells like formaldehyde. Maybe she's still woozy, but it seems like his head, the shadowy smear she can make of it, looks too dark.

"Subject Three appears to be regaining consciousness as of 3AM, Eastern Seaboard, April 26th, 2013." He sets something down, plastic on metal, and then a hand closes on her chin, pulls. The light twists back into her face, which is-- awful, runs a hot twinge through her scalp, electrifying what feels like her optic nerve itself. Helpfully, the stranger determines, "Pupils are responsive and emotional lability is appropriate. Subject three appears to be in optimal condition for the Gamma treatment. While genetic specificity precludes replacement, the likelihood of reoccurrence of side-effects per Subject One is infinitesimal.

"I am confident that the dosage will be successful." He lets go of her head, moves over. In the shadow of his body, she can make out a massive, gloomy tank on the other side of the room, something approximately humanoid floating in the slow, rotating current of the viscous medium. Lazers flicker over the surface of the glass, running a gridded mesh of light over the topography of the creature's body. It doesn't seem to be moving. Despite the uncertainty of distance, it must be twice as large as the largest man she's met, but there's something-- off about it, like there was something off about the man she's with, something amiss in proportion and expected shape.

The upward tick of muscles in her neck does little to lift her skull, and between giving up and being vaguely aware of a force called Gravity, it slips quietly back against the table while the dark shape casts near, over part of the bright light. Jennifer is able to recognize the familiar note of shoulder, the outline of upper arm on the far side, the darker corner of her vision that precludes torso. That there is something amiss does not escape her; initially, it is the idea that he is <i>just</i> out of sight, out of light.

Awareness swims steadily back to her, mulled once over by the bleary note of painkillers; there is not enough, and as her awareness returns, the reverberating pain becomes more evident. Jen opens her lips to form something, which only comes out as an abrupt, choppy whimper. The sound folds out louder, and then into a raspy groan when her face is taken in an unseen hand, the light shone straight into her eyes. The groaning attempt at communication turns into a deliberate cry of dismay. Head throbbing, she can hardly hear his voice.

<i>Responsive, subject three, treatment. Genetic, side-effects, subject one.</i>

This is all that her mind acquires fully, and perhaps it is enough.

She readjusts to the lesser light when the man moves off, brown eyes flicking over the ceiling, and off into his shadow to examine the room beyond her portion of it. Air tightens rapidly in her chest, ribs stinging as her breath gets caught down between exhale and inhale; looking upon the vat not far away has set something to crawling up and down her spine, digging its talons into the base of her brain. There is, unfortunately, another pained, dismayed cry-- this time a prelude to what panic her state allows her to drum up. Weakened, bruised limbs jerk clumsily against bindings. The abject fear washing over her is unmistakable, and the awareness that she is ultimately at her most vulnerable is inescapable.

“<i>Nnn</i>.” What constitutes a vocalized, emphatic <i>No<i>. Mouth dry and throat sore, Jennifer’s tongue proves that it can’t quite obey commands as of yet.

One might imagine that the specimen now afloat in formaldehyde was -- sad, scared before it was rendered inert and motionless. It seems like that kind of place. Nudity and injury aside.

The stranger stops, hanging his shadow over just one of her eyes. Stoops down. His breath doesn't smell like anything, which is perhaps a random thought to have, the second before it sinks in: he looks awful. Wrong. Olive-colored flesh, stark contrast to the cheddar-orange fit of his turtleneck, is contoured over a Caucasian man's face, vulpine and narrow, squint-eyed. He is green up to the exaggerated bulge of his forehead and then his skull expands upward, bloats outward, unsubtly //wrong//, if not quite grotesque in its dimensions.

Not human. At least she doesn't feel like she's gotten probed yet; merely hit by a car. Way-- better.

"Test of mental status."

He stoops down, brings the recorder near her face. It's a nice recorder; she's seen CNN personnel carrying equipment like that, for hundreds of minutes of footage. This isn't an interview or an audience anybody would envy. "Good evening." His breath touches her face. It doesn't smell like anything, or maybe the formaldehyde is yet too heavy. "What is your name?"

Before all of this, before the Chitauri, before the Hulk, before Iron Man-- once upon a time, Jennifer did believe in aliens. But they were never those awkward, slant-eyed, clip-art aliens. Not like this. Is he, though? She can tell it is a Him. Can tell that his features are human, at least from the shape of his face, from chin to brow. His stature is seemingly slim, but still that of a person. The stranger's head is what echoes her reminders of days past, of little green men with beady eyes and gangly little limbs.

Naturally, it upsets her. Jennifer's dark eyes rove to and fro, observant even through the state she is in. Her mind, once past the too-weak painkillers is her only tool left. Fear bleeds in with anger, when Jen meets his gaze, brown to an otherworldly green. She gives another small strain at the bindings, fruitless in her effort and this only serving to remind her that she has nothing between them and her skin. It is also not so toasty warm in here, at least for Jennifer. Her brow deepens together over her nose, and the growl in her throat is unmistakable for anything else.

It is also the first sound to be picked up by the microphone on the end of his recorder.

She could not answer. She could fuss and writhe. She doesn't. The man-- ?-- is clearly intelligent, and clearly curious. To what end, Jennifer can't say. But in her eyes, curiosity means that he may be less likely to do something else to her, if she can hold him to it. Muscles relax slightly, though her spine remains rigid.

"Jennifer..." She replies, weak-voiced while she is more disoriented than not. Her tone is cooperative, carrying a universal tone of nervous question within it.

“...Wh--” Who are you, where am I, what’s happening-- indecision makes her pause on which question to pose first, face still contorted into something akin to defiance.

'Universal' should probably only apply to circumstances that apply to everyone. Of course, extrapolation probably doesn't hurt; that most people, who woke up strapped naked to a chair, would experience some level of fear and defiance when asked what their name is.

The green man doesn't smile at her, but the expression on her face shines positive somehow, as if past the macabre samples and the felony and the coarse makeshift nature of his laboratory, there is a boy on Christmas day opening a box, finding something beautiful and real and new. This is wonderful to him; she is wonderful to him, for all that the situation is catastrophically awful to a normal person's assessment.

Maybe that means he won't hurt her.

Or maybe he's already hurt her. "What do you remember about the last thing that happened prior to reawakening?" There is a right answer to that question. The green stranger sits down on something that squeaks gently: by default, a chair.

She cannot stand being looked at like that. A gift. Not here. Not now.

It only brings to burden another ripple of attitude. Jennifer knows she is scared. Angry. Terrified, truly, and putting on this face so that perhaps he will not see it there. Yet, it shows in the quiver of throat, and the sheen in the whites of her eyes. A 'maybe' is just as bad as a 'will'.

"Who're you?" Jennifer blurts out a response in the form of a real question, voice wavering in her usual rasp, the sound somewhat comforting to her nonetheless. It seems that she <i>can</i> speak. It brings a new level of pain, and a subsequent exhale of air, quick and sharp. "Hhhss--"

"Taste." The metallic air in her mouth. The woman twitches at the neck in an attempt to better swivel her eyes elsewhere. Anywhere, besides the visible throb of a sickly vein across the long side of the stranger's temple. "Car..."

A beat.

"The subject's cognitive dysfunction does not appear to be all-impairing," the moon man decides, weighing her mono-syllabic vocabulary for a moment. Movement ripples through his narrow shoulders, shrug more for his own sake than for the tape recorder or, for that matter, for her. "Conversational ability is not an area of interest. Recall and reaction time appear adequate. My name is Samuel Sterns, alias Mr. Blue, when circumstances press for discretion."

Circumstances are apparently not pressing for discretion now. "I am a scientist. I believe it will improve your intrinsic motivation and overall outcome to know that your chances of survival are extremely high. While my sample size is small, according to the conventions of statistics and experimental research, my grasp of biology, probability, and your idiosyncratic genome constitute a virtual reality that render trial-and-error unnecessary." He reaches up to grasp the light over her head, tilts it to swoop the beam down her own naked body.

Despite the bleaching power of the light, she can tell her skin is all over purple and green and mustard-yellow, battered where it isn't broken up in tiny scudded cuts, cracks. Someone splinted her leg. It looks medically sound, at least, insofar as that she what she //should// have is X-rays, a second opinion, and a cast. She's still herself, though: nothing //missing//.

If she cares to look away from the spectacle of herself, the light is out of her face now. And the carcass in the tank, there, is more of a corpse. Has grey skin, tarnished golden metal embeds nearly like jewelry or armor glinting through the streaky glass. Familiar, or would be, were the thing not large enough to fill an eleven-foot tank even curled up, fetal. It probably isn't all formaldehyde-weight.

The alias does not become him, that much is for certain. Jennifer cannot see why it would. His name is vaguely there, in the back of her head, as if she has heard it but once over the course of her own history. That sensation of remembrance where you are not sure there is something. Despite the tension wired through her, Jennifer listens. There is nothing else that she can do which would benefit her more than this simple thing.

"<i>Survival</i>?" Going polysyllabic, at least for the purpose of parroting his phrases into a desperate question, voice low. She is already <i>not</i> dead from being hit by a car, what else is there to survive? "<i>What's going on</i>? What do you want from me?" The woman's voice croaks, down below its usual volume, as Jen attempts to break through the sting of her lungs filling with air and pressing against ribcage. She shies her eyes away from his grasp of the light, not expecting it to rove elsewhere under his guidance. This is the only thing so far to be a welcome surprise.

Closed eyelids allow Jen to adjust more quickly when she opens them again, familiarizing herself with the cool colors that the absence of stark light leaves behind. Yet, after she manages this, she turns her dark eyes down to follow the course of the lamp, a visible wince on her lips. Her face deepens several shades, partial shame, partial anger. She can't look for long, even with nothing truly amiss. This brings her around to looking away, and eyes alighting a second time on the distant casket-- such as it is-- of liquid and tempered glass, and the great figure that inhabits it.

It must be dead, after all.

Else it would surely be able to free itself. The appearance of it is almost as unsettling as that of her implied doctor; the glints of metal put her off far more than the sheer size of the creature, those shards of reflection unnatural, just as is the rest. Jennifer tries to crane her neck this way only long enough to decide whether or not the corpse in the tank could present another threat. It must be dead...? Therefore, no. She shivers once and looks back to him with a pleading sound, for the air is chill and the world suddenly all too precarious.

"<i>Let me go</i>."

Mr. Blue's expression looks vaguely apologetic, under the green. Green has a way of taking away one's appearance of contrition, maybe because one tends to be a mutant with impairments of moral reasoning when one turns green. "That is not possible," he says, studying a particularly discolored spot on her shin. "Subject two is replicable to an extent, as evidenced by subject one, that you have taken such interest in." He gestures at the tank that's held her intermittent attention. When his hand falls, it goes to the little recorder he'd left by her.

"You, on the other hand, are particular and unique due to reasons outside of your control. You should dispense with any faulty schemas of guilt and self-condemnation." Mr. Blue replaces the recorder with a wide, stainless steel tray. There is a syringe on it, fat and thick, capped off at the needle; perhaps a needless precaution, there is a pair of surgical gloves beside it. "You did not ask for this; any contributions you made to your current predicament were negligible." He pulls on his gloves, one after another, wiggles his slender fingers to fill out the wrinkled clumps.

"If you had not been outside of your home at that time and place, you would have been taken at another time and place." He uncaps the needle, puts the cap away. Pins her arm down at the joint of her elbow with surprising strength. "If you had not relocated to New York City, you would have been taken from California. My work is covert. My employers are discreet. Your ignorance exculpates you. You should focus, instead," he tilts her a look, his thready brows lifting on his green forehead, "on survival.

"Do you understand?"

Contrary to popular belief, Jennifer does not have much experience when it comes to reading mutated facial features; any emotions of regrettable nature are muddled, save for his first look of apology, which seemed to come clear from his eyes.

Her hearing is all well and good. Jennifer hears him, as he tries to explain why it is that her circumstances were infinitely unavoidable. She is hardly <i>listening</i>. All which she processes into the realm of understanding is that this was going to happen no matter what she, or her friends, did.

A notion that comes while she keeps one eye on the steel tray, and the needle, he has replaced his recorder with.

He is right about one thing-- she didn't ask for this. Jennifer grits her teeth together when he pins her arm down; he is much, much stronger than he seems. Out the window goes her working theory about overpowering him if he ever undid the bindings. As for his professional inquiry--

"<i>No</i>, I don't--" The woman's jaw shuts tight with a wiry stretch of muscle, and she speaks again, this time through teeth. "<i>Stick me and you'll regret it</i>..." Not that she feels he will even regret keeping her here, much less regret for whatever he is about to do. Wherever here is. Whatever this is.

In truth, she has nothing to back up her ultimatum. Just thinking about the Avengers-- about Bruce-- sends a hollow ring deep into her chest. Are they looking? Do they have any idea? Her faith, at the moment, is not a mighty thing; the fortunate thing, however, is that she is primed for a fight. If that is not survival, what is?

//Twinge//. The needle goes in and then the ceiling swirls at her, mostly because her eyes don't steer right the next time Jen tries to shift a saccadic glance across the monster's face. (And he is: a monster.) "Remember this," he tells her, pedantic as only a kidnapper with inhumane scientific purpose can be. "Survival must be your imperative, your //prima prioritate//."

It looked like water in the syringe, but it wasn't, and she can feel it like a stormcloud coming over the edges of her vision, blotting out one coherent thought at a time. Maybe it's a blessing, that it kills the fear too; in that moment before her consciousness gives way and takes her voice with it.

She can answer if she wants, when he tells her: "The true research question, of course, is what //secundus prioritate// will be."

Jennifer clings to her consciousness like a desperate, drowning cat. There is only so much more time before that too will seep away from her.

The needle slips in, silent and efficient; it sends a spark of hatred through her before the chemical-- or whatever it was within-- begins to amass over her thoughts and sight.  Even now, she attempts to keep her word. To make him instantly regret keeping her, much less doing.. <i>something</i> to her. Jen’s wrists wrench fruitlessly, as if to grab at him. Her teeth clench, baring rictal pearly whites into a tired snarl, which wrinkles partly across her nose. Just before the fog turns to blackness, a stream  air pries forth from her mouth; the word does not form on tongue, but only on that visceral, animal hiss of breath.

Her //secundus prioritate//?

<i>Smash</i>.