Strange Arrvials
“I’m all yours big boy…” She said with a smile.
Scott started to subconsciously drool.
She was here….
She was here for him…
She WANTED him…
She was standing there in her birthday suit, trying to look as cute and sexy as possible. Her clothes were in a pile at her feet.
“Well, Mr. Super Spy, let’s see if you can bring the goods…”
He walked towards her, ready…
“In the not too distant future…. Next Sunday AD”
Scott stopped, hearing something familiar.
“There was a guy named Jonah, not to different from you or me…”
“Wait” he said to himself, rubbing his eyes. He looked up, and she was gone. Everything was gone. It was all black.
Scott’s eyes shot opened and he immediately sat up on the couch in his office. He’d nodded off. The theme song to the modern incarnation of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” was playing somewhere nearby.
“crap” He thought to himself. “I must have left Netflix running again.”
He pulled himself off the cushions just as the song reached its crescendo, before Felicia Day’s lines, when a new horror struck him. The song started over.
It wasn’t the TV, but the ring tone on his phone.
He ran over to his desk to answer.
“Agent Riley?” came a voice before he could say anything. A voice he recognized.
Phil Coulson.
“Sir, I’m sorry I…”
“No need to apologize Scott, I know I’m waking you up, it’s 4AM.”
“Oh… Ok then… what’s the matter sir? Is Barty in trouble again?”
“No,” his boss continued, “but this does have something to do with your cousin. He found something of ours in an old MI6 operations base that had been abandoned for decades. It’s being brought in.”
“While that’s great and all sir, what does that have to do with me and the museum? This sounds way more like an 0-8-4 type deal and that’s more your crew’s speed than mine.”
“We don’t have the room at the moment, and your last report mentioned you’d repaired the secure containment system in your receiving bay. It’s just for a few days and besides, you like this stuff. It’s a piece of previously unknown SSR hardware. Mack and Daisy should be along any minute in a quinjet to drop it off. ”
“Sir, I’ve been here for three months, and I’m still processing most of the crap that was already here. I haven’t even gotten to anything moved over from the Lighthouse.”
“It’s just for a few days.” The older man reminded him before he hung up.
“Daisy… here... Oh crap.”
Then Scott’s morning just got worse as his com beeped to life.
“This is SHEILD 84793 requesting landing clearance”
It was Mack’s voice, which meant he was in front with the pilot. Which ment Daisy was probably going to be the one steping off first. He quickly moved a few things, threw out some crap lying on his desk and pulled a clean SHIELD T-shirt out of a draw, almost putting it on over the one he was wearing.
He then slammed a big red button on the wall by the door, and the roof of the landing bay outside began to slide back. The small black transport plane lowered itself into the bay. Once its wheels were on the ground and the engines off, the rear began to lower itself.
There, standing next to a large wooden crate, was probably the most beautiful woman Scott had ever laid eyes on.
Daisy Johnson
This wasn’t a case of some fan meeting their idol. It was worse.
Much worse.
Scott and Daisy had known each other for a few years, having first met face to face at the old SHIELD “Playground” base after Coulson had restarted the organization in the wake of the Hydra take over attempt. She was an Ops agent, possibly the best in years. She was always at the center of whatever was going on, having an all but in name “father-daughter” relationship with Coulson. Scott, on the other hand, had, until recently been tech support and repair. He’d kept the Playground’s complicated computer network running smoothly and fixed things when they broke or got blown up. Their relationship had been quite cordial, sharing an interest in computers, but recently, things had gotten… a bit complicated.
Scott pressed the button to close the roof and walked down to them, a nervous wreck.
“You got this… you got this…” he muttered to himself. “Just pretend it’s like old times.”
“Agent Johnson…” He greeted her, feeling awkward about addressing her with her first name after what happened.
“Sc…Agent Riley” She answered back. The two SHEILD agents stood there awkwardly for a moment before she spoke “So… you’re looking good.”
Scott’s heart stopped and every neuron in his brain fired off at once. “CRAP… What do I say… what do I say…” he screamed internally.
“I… um… Yeah, you too…”
“You two look more awkward than Fitz and Simmons back in the day.” Mack said, walking towards the two from out of the plane.
“Sorry” The two agents said almost in unison.
Scott held up a crowbar he’d brought from the office and handed it to the taller man.
“Soooo….” Scott continued, rubbing his hands together, trying to keep her presence out of his mind “What’s in the box from ‘The Cousin from MI6?”
“We’re not sure” Daisy answered “he wasn’t there when we picked it up. Something about a Somali gun running ring that needed taking out. Seems they’d gotten their hands on some of the last loose Chitari hardware.”
“Yeah, that moron gets the easy stuff…” Scott said “ungrateful bastard. We save his ass and still not so much as a thank you.”
Mac took the crowbar to the side of the crate. It was a rather tall box, nearly six feet. The panel dropped off and reveled what looked like a really old computer terminal, like something out of the orginal Star Trek. It had the words “STARK-ONE” spray painted on the casing. They quickly took off the top and sides.
“Wow” The two younger agents said, again almost in unison.
“Knowing how far ahead of the curve Howard Stark was” Daisy said “this could be one of the first microcomputers”
“Looks like it” Scott agreeded “but what’s that glass thing on top?” He was pointing to a rounded glass bulb mounted to the top of the machine. It had four smaller bulbs sticking out at right angles from the neck and some weird contraption inside
“I don’t know, some sort of monitor?”
“But the parts inside more like a speaker attached to one of those spinning temperature differential things with the black and white panels.” Scott said, spinning his finger as he tried but failed to remember the contraption’s name “I don’t think any of that contains a CRT electron gun.”
“If you two nerds don’t mind, I’ll like to get this unloaded so I can go back to base and get some sleep…” Mack interjected.
“Sure,” Scott said “You want one of us to do it? Or…”
“I can’t be seen letting you two kids do all the work.”
Mack slid the machine off the ramp and onto a large SHIELD logo in the bay floor. MI6 had been nice enough to put the base of the box on wheels. He centered it, relocked the wheels and then returned to the Quinjet.
Scott grabbed a large remote on a heavy cord from a mount on the wall and pressed another button, which caused the logo to lower itself down onto the level below, into a secure holding area. Panels with a new logo slid out to cover the hole.
“Well, we’d better get back to base” Daisy said “It… um… It was great seeing you again…”
“Um yeah… great… great seeing you too…”
“Fitz and Simmons will be here with some lab techs in a few hours.”
“Ok.” Scott nodded “Do me a favor and tell the others I said hi.”
“Will do…”
The two stood there awkwardly again, only to be interrupted by the quinjet starting up. The two scrambled, with Daisy running up the ramp into a jump set and Scott back to the office to reopen the roof. The plane lifted from the ground and off into the pre-dawn sky.
“Damn it” He yelled to himself, punching the wall “She was right there! You just had to tell her. Three simple words…”
Scott, still fuming with himself, typed up a quick email to Coulson confirming the delivery and asking for an ETA on the arrival of the two newlywed British scientists, then switched on the security camera in the containment room.
“Item log: 5456523-89, temporary holding from headquarters” He dictated into his phone. “Item is noted as being five feet, 7 inches tall, four feet wide and two and one half feet deep. Object’s construction appears to be of standard steel and/or aluminum….”
He then noticed the glass bulb thing on top start to glow and the gadget inside start to spin. The suddenly, electrical arcs began to shoot out of it.
“Object appears to have activated itself…” Scott continued to record before the camera feed died. He grabbed his gear belt and ran out of the office and down the stairs.
By the time he got to the door to the containment room, the popping and cracking of the arcs had disappeared. He unlocked the heavy door and stepped in, ICER drawn just to be on the safe side. Whatever the machine had done had an effect on the lights as it was pitch dark.
The room’s lights came back to full brightness and Scott was greeted to a figure standing between him and the machine with their back to him, a young woman in an old style US Army uniform.
The woman spun in place, gun drawn.
“Daisy?” Scott said in complete shock “How’d you get in here?”
It was Daisy, but she was… different.
“Who the hell are you and where the hell am I!?!” She screamed at him. Then suddenly a panicked look entered her face. “Are you CHIMERA? Where’s Jemma? Jemma where are you?” She looked around slightly, gun still trained on Scott.
“Calm down, Daisy, Jemma’s not here yet.” Scott said.
“WHO THE FUCK IS DAISY?!?” She yelled, almost in tears “Where’s my Jemma? Where’s my WIFE?”