Owner	Pose
Skye Johnson	Clint and Skye's Greenwich home was generally open to their friends, and very often ended up being where work was discussed. In fact, right now it looked nothing more than a science lab had puked its guts in their living room (and guest room, and basement..). Fitzsimmons had been haunting the place off and on, in tg team fashion, or in pairs, but trying to stagger things to look ever so innocent, because, well, the whole thing was one huge diversion. Nyx, being Skye's Agent in Training certainly had a lot of access to the woman, but she likely hasn't been invited over before. Take that as she will. She's invited now, though, the casual invitation asking her AiT over for a Thursday meal, Skye calling breezily over her shoulder, "Clint is testing the new grill out for our summer opening party." Yep. The last 'test' had found the barbecue - not new to them - hadn't weathered the winter terribly well (given nobody had tucked it away neatly for the winter, and Skye and Clint hadn't been home in months). "Just bring you. We have everything. Couple of other friends will be there. It's casual." Of course that's all subterfuge too. But it's not like Skye can tell the girl why she's really being invited over, at least not while they're in the Trisk! Cue: barbecue at Skye and Clint's, because there will be food. There is always food.
Nyx	Honestly Samantha was a little surprised, I mean sure she thought she was getting along all right with her Taskmaster.. Handler... Supervisory Agent.. Then again it is a spy agency and aren't most people trained to be nice on the surface and blend in. "Great, I look forward to not having to flip burgers but just eat them for once." yeah she tries to insert some humor and keep it light. Still absolutely any reason to get out of the Triskelion and try food away from the Canteen there. I mean she has no idea how well Clint or Skye can grill or cook in general but really it is a change of pace so that is awesome. Nyx is also content to get out and observe this whole bonding over food business with superheroes, even if they are SHIELD superheroes.. So there Sam finds herself knocking at the door on schedule looking forward to food.. and not a science lab.
Melinda May	The door opens a few seconds after Samantha knocks, but it's not Skye there. It's May. "Come in, Ms. Twining." After closing the door behind the young recruit she gestures toward the living room and the mismatched sofas that are somehow still clear of the 'R&D clutter-explosion' decor going on. "Make yourself at home," May says as she walks past and toward the door that... yup, leads to the back yard. "Skye, Samantha is here."
Skye Johnson	Skye has just run a plate of burgers out to Clint - both meat and meatless. "I don't know," she tells him. "But that's what I was told to cook. Those ones," she points to several lighter burgers, "You're to put on the tin foil to do. And yeah, I know - how do you get grill marks like that. Good question. You're smart. You figure it out." Grinning, she kisses his cheek, wipes her hands on her pants, and makes her way back into the place, grabbing a couple of beer along the way and letting May know, "Kettle has boiled." In the living area, Skye hands Nyx a beer. "So, this is my place. Find it okay?"
Nyx	Sam's eyes widen a bit there as May opens the door. I mean she definitely wasn't expecting the Acting Deputy Director to be the one at a cookout answering the door. Today is an odd day. "Um thanks Ma'am." and then she is in the R&D clutter explosion and looks around very slowly, before heading to the sofa and settling to sit, just staring at everything. Nyx is filing everything and trying to process what it might be used for. When Skye comes in with beers Sam slips back up to her feet "I did.. oh." she accepts the beer and reaches up and twists the top off, and no it is not a twist off, before taking a sip. "I'll admit this wasn't what I was expecting when I pictured your place."
Melinda May	May nods to Skye, and lets her go on ahead toward Nyx while she detours to make herself some tea. "This isn't normal for their place, Samantha. It's usually much messier just before their housekeeping service shows up." She steps lightly around some random object or other and perches on the edge of an ottoman only half covered in bundles of cabling. She looks at Skye to explain further.
Skye Johnson	May gets a laughing scowl. "Hey! We're getting better at th- No, I can't even say that with a straight face. Total mess until just before Alice comes, but we clean it up for her. Most of it." Skye makes herself comfortable on the couch and takes a swig of beer before getting into meat and potatoes territory. "Yeah, we don't usually look like Fitzsimmons decorated, but we discovered a leak in SHIELD systems and we needed a place where we could work off the books without observation. Clint and I kinda made our house the place to go when we started dating. Who knew it would become a blind for actual work?" She says that like shop talk doesn't come up with alarming frequency here. Then again, the shared meals and relaxed, safe atmosphere had allowed many a difficult project to be dealt with expediently precisely because of the calm, casual atmosphere here. "So, you're wondering now only about the machines, but why you're here. Machines you know now. Why you, and here? Well, I wanted - we wanted to talk to you about an upcoming mission. The one these machines are helping us with, actually. What gets said here, stays here. You don't have to join us - because it will be dangerous - but we'd like you to listen before you decide? And yeah. Between these walls and no further regardless of your decision."
Nyx	Sam will settle back on the couch, scooted bit away from Skye so she can put her back to the arm and face Skye and keep her attention on May. Not paranoid, just conversational. When Skye casually mentions a leak in SHIELD well Sam's eyes widen again and she looks around at all the machines and then back to Skye for the explanation. "Oh." there is a blink and she looks around again. "Not just grilling and dinner.. got it." there is a small pause and she nods. "Okay I can keep a secret... I mean unless this is a test to see if I just go along with off the record black ops and not report it in at work ..." and then she really pauses "Fuck.. spying is hard. I assume this is all for good reason and I am not going to be branded a traitor and locked up in a SuperMax facility for super powers?"
Melinda May	May looks at Samantha squarely. "If you get branded a traitor, then so would both of us. It's not going to happen." She glances at Skye briefly. "Skye is correct, the computer systems at the Triskelion are compromised. I authorized all of this equipment being brought here, because I personally vetted the security of this property." She just didn't think it'd end up being used for this purpose. Her own house is likely almost as secure and moreover less commonly known. Though really, maybe that's why it stays that way. Also, the ficus tree would dump its leaves in stress if things suddenly got overly lively there.
Skye Johnson	Skye takes a moment to ask Nyx, "What do you know about me?" Because Skye really had lived under that spectre of inprisonment when she'd arrived at SHIELD. For much of her first year, even - though much of that as time went on was her own refusal to accept otherwise. "Anyway, no, You're not being tested. I can test you anywhere. I wouldn't put a mission like this on the line to test you. And if I had to test you on that, you wouldn't be here at all, or one of us. You're here because we need you, and while it's not really an agent in training level of mission, you're one of the best options for this." She explains a little, "Long ago, a scientist, Arnim Zola, worked for SHIELD in the area of data storage and consciousness retrieval. He was working on a way to directly interface mind to machine, and somehow figured out how to bypass the need for a body altogether. Only somewhere in the anals of SHIELD history, a lot of this was buried. Likely because we fucked up. Not just in burying it, but in dealing with him. And his family. Bunches of things that are mostly useful in understanding that he is pretty much single minded when it comes to destroying us, and he's getting close to an end game with that."
Nyx	The dual reassurances seem pretty good to Samantha and she nods along with them. She sips her beer and looks between Skye and May as Skye talks about Arnim Zola. "Okay so he was working on .. like the matrix .. and figured out how to ghost in the machine?" if nothing else works, popculture references are definitely a skill Samantha has and in this case it actually is pretty accurate. "I mean I'm not entirely sure I follow on why he both hated SHIELD and managed to get so deep into it but.. okay so he is about to do something horrible and I can help?"
Melinda May	May lets Skye explain about Zola, she's the current expert. But she has to offer her opinion to the end of Nyx's statement. "I can explain why. Zola was HYDRA. From all the way back in World War Two. And HYDRA's modus operandi is to play the extreme long game. Insert people to HYDRA into powerful corporations, law enforcement agencies, governments. Zola managed to do that to SHIELD. Twice." She looks at Skye again, so she can continue from this point on.
Skye Johnson	Skye nods to May's words. "Extreme long game player. He wasn't happy with what he saw was our failure to protect his family, and abusing his talent. Thing is, he died. But not before putting his consciousness into one of his projects. The project was deemed a failure and the data buried in our basements. If we'd not done that, we'd have known that Zola and the Benefactor and Karl were all the same person long ago. Instead, we didn't even realize he was in our systems, and helped him stay there." "Now, he's trying to get his hands on the substance that turned me into an Inhuman. He's perfected a formula, but he still needs the base substance. He intends on distributing the formula into the population and seeing who it turns. It would be havoc and chaos, and worse than what we're already seeing with the mutant hate." And with the Sentinels problem on the rise, the timing couldn't be worse. "So, we're going in to stop him. But while we're there, we want to kick him out of our computer systems for good. thing is, he's already in them. Anything we do on SHIELD systems he knows about, so we can't work there. We're trying to create a virus program specific to his engrams, with a dynamic filter to it, but it does us no good if we can't get it into him - and we can't do it on our systems. Too remote from him, plus we need to have our systems wiped while that is going on and the new setup and hardware swapped in." She knows this is alot to take in. "Zola is expecting me to be the one doing the code insertion. I want you to do it with me as your backup. He won't suspect you, and you don't have to touch the computers. It will buy us valuable time. But we'll be deep in a Hydra base, and it's not guaranteed we're going to get out." There. May wanted full disclosure. Skye gave it.
Nyx	Sam curls up a bit more there, sipping her beer until it is empty by the time Skye has relayed all that. I mean it is like an epic level debrief and takes a while to lay it all out like that. Thankfully Sam has pretty darn good retention thanks to the boost from Nyx in that department. "Okay. So.. um.. he is going to release a bioweapon on the world. We need to purge him from the systems. You want me to insert a special virus using my special abilities. We have to do it in a Hydra base and it will be super dangerous." beat pause "Where is the base?" Long pause. "If we pull it off do I get made full agent?" okay Sam can't help it, she has to inject some humor, this is pretty grim.
Melinda May	May is also quiet as Skye puts the whole story out there. It's a LOT, but it needed to be presented like this. There was no other way. Samantha's attempt at humor gets May looking at her a bit flatly. "Yes. And then you'll be assigned a new superior officer." She pauses a moment, both for dramatic effect and to think of who would be an appropriately amusing and terrifying person to have as a superior officer. Ah, she knows just the person. "Agent Romanova."
Skye Johnson	"Ouch, May. That's mean." Skye gives Samantha a 'see what I put up with'? kinda look, and almost immediately sobers. "He knows about you. We have to believe that. So he knows what you can do. But he wants me. Singlemindedly so. To the point of tunnel vision. If I'm there, you are an extreme target as he tries to get to me. But you're also protected by the fact that he wants to get to me - which, if I protect you well enough, means you will have time to do your task while I fight the others off. If thinks I'm the one doing the code insertion, the focus should be away from you." "We won't have other backup. Everyone else on this mission is our diversion. They're going to be after the substance, but ultimately, they are a diversion for what we're doing. This isn't a trainee mission. It's not even close to that, or one even most low levels get out on. Not like this. So the choice is yours. No hard feelings if you say no. Just the facts." She sits back with her beer and doesn't even try to cajole or coerce now that Nyx has it all.
Nyx	Sam will toy with the bottle of beer in her hands, still empty and think about it all. The look she shoots May is wide eyed "Okay so ... got it.. die on the mission or die when we get back from training or more missions." yeah she is kidding, but then May just threatened her with a promotion and putting her under the Black Widow of all people. But yes Samantha is practicing snark, maybe it is because she is in a home atmosphere even if R&D blew up in here and not in the Trisk in uniform. Hard to say. "Well.. I am..." she considers how to phrase this "Pretty durable and all. I get it is dangerous but I would be kidding myself if I thought you all hired me and were helping to learn my abilities just to put me behind a desk instead of leveraging me for the upgrades Nyx has made. I'm a pretty big gun even if I am green?"
Clint Barton	The patio door slides open and in walks Clint holding a tray of burgers, the smell of charred meat and whatever unholy thing they made veggie burgers out of wafting in with him. "Burgers are done, didn't figure out how to put the grill marks on the veggie ones so people will just have to live with it, but otherwise they're looking good." He sets the tray down on some heat pads, by where he laid out the buns and fixings, followed by going back to the door and rolling it closed. "So where are we with things?" he asks as he makes his way over to stand next to Skye, giving her a slight bump hellow as he does.
Melinda May	May acknowledges Skye calling out her joke by calling it mean with a nod, but then she's back to serious mode as well. "I'll be honest as well here. Skye's assessment is entirely accurate. There is practically the entirety of SHIELD riding on the success of this mission. And you'll be our ace card, the one thing we're hoping Zola won't be able to anticipate." She looks over as the patio door opens, then tells Clint, "We're just laying the entirety of this mission on Ms. Twining's shoulders now. Have any more to add while we're at it?"
Skye Johnson	"Well, now we all know which ones to avoid." Which covers both burgers with grill marks - and those without. Her chin tilted upwards to Clint for a kiss, informing then, "She nkows the background now to what we're planning. Why it's important." Her glance flicks over to Nyx. "It's a lot. I mean, I used to joke about this shit, too. I don't even know when it happened for me, the realization that most of us don't get to walk away from this job. We get taken out feet first. It's kinda one of those thankless things. We do it right, everyone grumps and complains about us. We do do it wrong, innocent people die. But us? We die here, Nyx. You're right. You're not a desk jockey. I was for a bit. Then I kinda made that one of their stupidest decisions - or mine depending on how you look at it." "If you're staying, that's what you're buying into. You don't get old at this job. But you do get to know you saved people. Best thing they can do is complain about having to support us and pay our salaries. What the hell do we do all day anyway Ain't never needed SHIELD less things are so quiet." A wry grin for the young almost-agent.
Nyx	"Yup.. what Deputy Director May said.. absolutely no pressure." which is directed from Sam to Clint. She shakes her head a little bit. "Also why didn't you just get impossible burgers for the vegetarians?" curious really. Then back to the serious matters. She considers what Skye says "I dunno... some of the senior agents do look pretty old. What is Director Fury.. a bajillion." yeah she is still reacting to the grimdark tidings with humor. Then again she isn't entirely wrong about Fury.. Coulson.. May... it isn't like all of them die young around here. "I figured this is what I was signing up for Skye.." she looks to everyone else. "I'm a weapon. I'm not totally naive. Also I like the idea of helping people. Who knows maybe I can be an avenger one day and kick it up to 11."
Clint Barton	"Hmm, what else to add? Sounds like it's all covered," Clint says as he drops off the burgers then slides over to Skye to collect that kiss. Skye's speech is met with a nod, it seemed somehow both a long time and no time at all since she was needing to be told that stuff by him and May. Weird how the mind worked like that, regardless she'd come a long way. "Pretty close," Clint quips about Fury's age. "But regardless of how old we get in this job, once you're in it changes you and there's no real going back, but after awhile, trust me you won't want to, there's no better job in the world, everyone here, has made a real difference in the world, everyone," he gives a shrug. "Not a lot of people get to say that. As for being a weapon, I was one of those for a bit, don't recommend it, weapons get moved by other people, be an agent instead, start calling your own plays. God knows your SO does," he says with a grin to Skye. "And later on if you want to go Avenger, let me know, I can probably help." There's a beat, then Clint asks, "What the heck is an impossible burger?"
Melinda May	May nods toward Clint. "I think he about has the gist of it." Not surprising, Clint was on the extreme end of field agent work for a very long time and somehow managed to not only live to tell about it, but to keep his sanity and sense of humor intact as well. That's something almost no other field agent of his caliber can boast. "Okay, now I also need to know what an impossible burger is."
Skye Johnson	Skye smiles over at Clint, and signs at him, ~Glad you didn't die out there. I'd have missed you.~ She might not have known what she was missing, but she believed she'd have missed him anyway. And unlike the others, she's not waiting to find out what an impossible burger is - she's taking a full on meat one. Now. While they're still hot.
Nyx	Well to be fair Sam is leaning to get a real meat hamburger Clint grilled up and adds cheese and toppings like a seasoned fast food cook. She could probably do this with her eyes closed. "Okay so the impossible burger.. is vegetarian.. made in a lab.. it greases.. grill marks.. cooks.. looks.. bleeds like a meat burger... tastes like one too. They isolated like all the compounds that go into a meat burger and made it from plant compounds at a molecular level or something.. it's wild."
Clint Barton	~Likewise~ Clint signs back to Skye. He was glad he made it too, and not just because he liked life, he liked /this/ life. "And huh? For real?" Clint asks Sam as he too goes for a meat burger. "Wild. I am going ot have to give one a try sometime." "So, what's next?"