2016-01-29 Delivery Thing
  • Avengers Commons - Stark Tower *

Players
Natasha
Ben Grimm
Tech NPCs

The Elevator makes a soft *ding* and the door slowly opens. There's an audible *thud* as the passenger steps off the elevator, followed by the soft, very faint sign of metal as if the elevator is happy to be free of it's hurden. Stepping out into the common area, blue eyes scanning his location, is the solid blocky frame of one Benjamin J. Grimm, otherwise known as the Thing of the Fantastic Four. Balanced on his shoulder is one very large, tightly woudn roll of some sort of navy blue material, that could weigh almost as much as he does.

Natasha had been dealing with technicians all day. She'd been recently assigned the duty of only using Less-than-Lethal weapons in her fights and it hasn't been an easy transition for her… she was used to killing, and having her License to Kill taken away from her wasn't something she was particularly comfortable with. But she also wasn't in to breaking orders either.
Today and now, Natasha Romanova sits at the bar here on this floor of Stark Tower called the Commons Area. She'd been talking to several of the techs that she was working with to improve the under-utilized LTL weapons, to just make them work better… design wise. The two techs that were with her both looked up at the elevator when the Thing arrived and they seemed a bit off-put by his sudden presence in the room… Natasha herself, looked away from the case holding the LTL-pistol and she saw the Thing and smiled over at him. "Ben." She said to him, raising up from her bar stool, she smoothed her hands over the black skirt she was wearing and walked toward him, extending her right hand for him. "I haven't seen you in forever…" She said to him in her husky voice, a friendly smile on her red painted lips.

Seeing a face that's not just lovely but also friendly brings a big smile to his face. It gives his face an almost sinster cast for just a moment, but the gentle twinkle in his blue eyes is impossible to hide, "Nat! It's been to long!" As his voice booms however the tech's recoil and instinctually recoil a bit and try to find a pillar or something to put between themselves and the Thing. He looks at Nat's extended hand, which causes him to look around for a moment, and not seeing anywhere better he sets the big roll on his shoulder down next to him before he reaches out to take her hand. He gives it a shake that is restrained enough that he's not crushing anything, but firm enough to not be insulting to her. "How have you been? The Cloak and Dagger game still treatin' ya well?

Natasha returned the shake and she grinned faintly and lopsidedly through the physical exchange and the verbal. "Its definitely treating me." She replied to him dryly before drawing her hand back and place either her hands onto her hips. "The level of which its treating me is still up for debate though." She added with a little smirk. She eyed the big object he sat down before shaking her hand then and she nodded once toward it. "Are you running a delivery service now, big guy?" She asked him, looking up at him with a smile.

"Well, Reed likes using me as his personal delivery boy at times." Ben says as he releases Nat's hand and pats the roll next to him. "Especially recently, when he's been more focused on some breakthroughs he's makin in his lab and doesn't have any 'exploration' lined up for us for a while, he doesn't have much else for me to do. So when there's not an alien invasion or molemen attack, I don't have much of a day job." He says with a crooked smile, "Anyway it's a fresh batch of Reed's 'unstable molecule' fabric so Tony can use it to make new and or replacement costumes for the avengers and what have you." he looks past Natasha to the case behind her and he asks, "Setting you up with some non-lethal ordinance?"

Natasha listened to him and she smiled faintly once more at his words. She took a moment to look down at the delivery of fabric and then back over her shoulder at the techs who were at the fiddling with the parts that were all laid out there. "Yeah…" She said with a bit of forelorn tone to her voice. She motioned to him and the fabric. "You can set that there on the sofa." She motioned to the large leather sofa sectional that curved around the entire seating area. "I'll have someone come pick it up."
She walked on her heeled shoes toward the bar to retrieve the case with her twin LTL pistols in them and then brought it over to Ben to turn it toward him and show him the guns inside their foam-casing within the box. "Director Carter insists that I have a period of mental relaxation, she thinks lethal force has made me cold." Natasha looked up at Ben with her brilliant green eyes and she gave him another lopsided grin. "I think I've been doing it for the better part of a century now… I'm probably a lost cause."
"I'm not sure a period of LTL-only assignment will do much good for me… But how do you argue with the Director of Shield?"

"Bah, yah ain't cold Nat. You do what needs to be done, so someone else doesn't hafta carry that around." Ben says as he lifts up the role of fabric back to his shoulder and sets it on the indicated couch. "That sounds like something would take someone with a good heart, an' strong shoulders to do." Ben says with a nod, "Just sayin'." Ben smiles as he turns back to the Black Widow and approaches her again, "It sounds like this Director of yours cares alot more about your mental well bein' than Fury did at times. I ran into a guy at Liberty Island that was trying to ask, but was griping about being forced to take a 'day off.' He was all lookin around with 'threat assessment' eyes the whole time." He looks again the LTL pistol and asks, "So does t hat thing actually work?"

"Darts." Natasha replied with a faint smile then as she reached into the case and pulled out one of the weapon magazines, turned it and showed off the two topmost darts that shined a reflective silvery-hue inside the ammunition casing. "They delivery a dose of sleeping fluid, as well as a muscle-seizing shockwave to a person's body. If I can hit them in the right spots. Primarily in the unexposed neck area. Though it can work through light fabric as well, every day clothing and such." She sat the magazine back down quietly inside the case and then walked toward the bar once more to set the box down.
"Director Fury cared about whether or not his people were functional or not. He was… is… all about completing a job. He doesn't want anyone to die, or suffer… but he knows we all signed up with the extensive knowledge that both of those things might happen."
Natasha went behind the bar then and she started to move a few items arounds, she looekd up to Ben. "Rumor has it that delivery men are always thirsty." She said with a faint grin. "Drink?" She offered to prepare for him.

"I will never say no to good drink!" Ben says with a smile. He'd also not say no to a mediocre or a bad drink, because he quite legitimately he /is/ always thirsty. He follows Natasha to the bar and says, "You know what it's been to long since I've done. A good poker game. If I host another one, are you gonna want in on that action?" Ben asks as he looks down at the bar and sighs happily to see there are reinforced stools, "Thank god for chuming around with Asgardians." he says as he settles himself on one of the stools. "How reliable are dart shooters? Do they hold up under live fire conditions?"

"Its… hit or miss." Natasha replied in her ever-dry tone, glancing up to him with a smirk. "Pun intended." She added before returning her attention to the bar and the items she was moving about. She picked up a large beer stein and filled it up from the tap with a dark amber lauger that she sat up on the bar and offered it over to the large beastly Thing. "I've had a fair amount of success with the Sniper Rifle that was created to deliver the darts, leaving me on the outside as a support role… which is fine… for the most part." She prepared herself a glass of white wine then and lifted it up for a drink. "The pistols are still an issue, however. They jam, they're nose-heavy, their sights are unreliable and the darts just don't travel fast enough to penetrate most military-grade clothing, let alone armor."
She exhaled sharply and sat her glass down on the bright white bar top. "And yeah, I would totally go to a poker night. There are several around here who I think would be completely up for that." She said to Ben with a smile.

"Ok then, We're gonna make Poker Night a thing." Ben says and immediatly clears his throat, "I thing, as in a thing you do, not a like.. a pun because I am there…" He reaches out then and takes the stein filled with the dark amber lauger and takes a sip, "Oh man… this is good. Man this place is well stocked." He looks to natash the and says, "Well how about this. You guys got a fancy smancy training room right? Why don't you tell your eggheads to get you like five of the pistols or so, an' I'll come over and you can spend an afternoon discharging them into my rock-orange hide until they fail, and then mabye the tech's can find some of the main points of failure and fix them?"

The two techs who were a few stools down the bar talking quietly together while working with some of the parts on the weapons that they had in their posession, both looked up and over down the bar toward Ben when he referred to them as 'eggheads'.
Natasha listened to Ben and she grinned openly at him. "I'd be okay with that." She said at him. "Thing Poker and Thing Shooting alike." She took another sip of her wine then and shook her head. "But honestly, these sorts of weapons would be utterly useless against a foe with your… features. I would have to use something different if I were to get out of a conflict such as that." She reached out and put her right hand ontop of the matte-black colored box that the pistol was stored in. "These little… gems, are designed for your run-of-the-mill Hydra goon."
"I did manage to drop about twenty of them the other night with the darts, but I fear its going to lead to me getting shot if these things do break on me out in the field." She put her hand back onto her wine glass and looked back over at Ben with a small smile. "And I don't like getting shot." She added the last bit with a quieter tone of voice and a little grin.

Thing nods to Natasha, "Well I was talking more about testing the firing mechanism in them and all that." He leans over and lowers his voice (though it's still loud enough for everyone in ear shot to hear), "I don't wanna sound cocky but I don't think they'd really work on me either." he says with a conspiratorial tone, "An' no one likes it when hot red heads get shot Nat." Ben says with a smile as he takes another drink of his lauger. "Speaking o' Hydra Goons. Have we heard much out of the Hitler-Youth recently or are they finally gettin' their panties unbunched and being smart enough to lie low and quietly die?"

The big Thing's words made Natasha smile as she held her wine glass whilst standing there behind the bar. She listened to all he said and seemed flattered by his statement, but not in that overly-giggly irritating way, more in the… she's-a-spy-and-has-been-alive-for-90-years sort of way.
"It seems that all the worst things in this world are coming together at the same time, in the past six months." She said then. "Hydra is operating bases throughout North America and we've already taken out a handful of them. They're experimenting on people… and we're not precisely sure why." She tells the man, not that it was anything overly classified, or something that Ben wasn't capable of greatly assisting Shield with if they needed him.
She shook her head gently from side to side. "Couple that with the presence of anti-Mutant sentinel raids happening at unpredictable times, and unpredictable locations… its like trying to juggle a collection of flaming live-hand-grenades." She gave him another lopsided smirk then.

Thing nods and sighs, "Yeah.. I'm probably gonna end up on a government list, or having to turn myself in or somethin' because I really ain't liking the way those Nazi-bots are picking up Mutants. I'm likely to turn one in to scrap if I'm close enough when one of those 'round ups' happens an' so… maybe tell them you don't know me if that happens." He sighs and shakes his head, "ALways seems there's a storm brewing somewhere doesn't it? At least we don't live in a boring times. Do you know what SHIELD's official stance on all these sentinel round ups is?"

Natasha nodded her head softly once at his last words then and she sat her wine glass down on the bartop again. "Officially. Shield is supposed to attempt to preserve order alongside the machines. If they suddenly appear on the streets and start abudcting mutants, we're told its for… 'good reason' that they're doing it. And we're to play along." She softly shook her head from side to side one time then. "They attacked a mall in upstate New York two days ago. There was a collection of mutants there, I am told. It resulted in a lot of collatoral damage, the mall is looking to sue for property damage…" She released a light exhale then and there.
"Backing mutants up into a corner… its not going to end well." She looked back up and over at Ben then. "The mutants are going to do what a cornered animal does. STart biting, viciously hard."

"I can sympathize with them. I mean I know what it's like to have people fear you because your a freak." Ben says with sigh. "But you are right. This isn't going to be ending well. Though I am glad the Mall is suing for damages. Hit the powers that be in the pocket book will get them back off long before moral outrage does." You know for a man that plays the part of a big dumb lumox, that's a pretty insightful thing to say. "Well sadly that's kinda always been SHIELDS burden to bear. People talk about you like you are a bogey man but at the end of the day, you're usually the one's putting it all back together after we all break our toys."

"But, it doesnt' help that Shield is outnumbered and over-spread due to all the other issues throughout North America, let alone the rest of the world that we dip our fingers into." Natasha said with a small smirk. "Director Carter, however, doesn't like this Sentinel thing one bit. She's… having a hard time following protocols in regards to them. But she's a woman of loyalty and strict dedication to her authority, so I don't see her straying from her orders." Natasha picked up her wine glass and took another sip of the liquid from within it.
"So, whats going on for you?" She asked him then, smiling toward him. "You mentioned your employer being rather busy, but you're not? Thats not good." She grinned at him. "We might end up offering you a job here."

Thing nods, "Well… to be honestly not alot is going on for me right now. Reed is close to some 'big breakthrooughs' in the lab so that's where he spends most of her time, an' Sue well she's busy handling the business side of the Baxter Building and working with all the charitable organizations we help. Johnny is.. well he's off jet setting and doing Johnny things. I wanna say he's in Prague right now dating one or several models. So yeah I could use something ta fill up my day." He nods, "You ever need back up Nat, you know who to call right?" He considers that for a moment, "But.. well.. even before sublte wasn't really my strength but now that's pretty much right out, so maybe that's not nessecarily a good idea…"

Natasha listened to the man and she smiled through his words while taking another sip of her wine. "These teams that we form, of miraculously talented people and their extraordinary powered gifts… Come with a lot of baggage and sometimes over-bearing personality types." Johnny, she'd met him… she wasn't a fan. "Its the ones with the good personalities that I tend to be most likely to rely on." She added, following those words with a simple chin-dip of a nod.
"I'd be more than happy to call for you if the going-gets-tough." She said with a little bit of a grin. "I'll put in a word with Director Carter as well. Our last mission, we really could've used your assistance with it. A lot of new blood, even James Rhodes' first run with us in his own… Stark Suit." She smirked. "It was a little sloppy. Definitely could've used a big shield like you for that Shield mission." She said with a faint smirk to the corner of her red painted lips

"Likewise." Natasha said back to him with a smile before she added. "I'll definitely mention it to the Director that we have a bored mega-awesome-man looking to help us smash evil." The Black Widow said before reaching out to pull that LTL-pistol case back toward her. "Take care, and thank you for that fabric bolt. I look forward to seeing what the Tech Nerds come up with with all of that." The two techs looked up again from their chairs toward Natasha as she waved to Ben and then walked toward them, smirking at them and apologizing to the two young men. They were just happy to get to work with her either way!

< END >

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License