To Matt, the world was nothing but a series of sounds, flashes of images, and smells so rich that hounds would be jealous of him if they had known. The experience wasn't entirely transferable to the way that normal people viewed the world.
Things like natural color were lost to him, though artificial colors left a mixture of smells and texture that came together with trial and error to reveal themselves to him.
It was those things that made finding people around the Kitchen hard for him, it wasn't like he could spot a person off in the distance. He needed to hear their voice, smell their scents, or literally walk into them in order to find them.
But that didn't mean it was impossible for Matt to find someone, just unlikely.
In fact, his capability to find people meant while it was hard to find someone. It was impossible for him to lose a person.
Running into Octavius while she was shopping in some mall store was such a luck of the draw thing that Matt knew it to be suspicious. So he did the most reasonable thing he could at the moment, he called in back up.
Doyle and he had spent more than a few times over the past few months, exchanging numbers, handing each other burner phones, and talking about the raw danger that this woman presented. Matt wasn't the type of person to hunt such a dangerous person, not usually, but this was in his wheelhouse.
So with backup a phone call away, he was more than willing to keep a metaphorical eye out for Octavius.
But in all the conversations with Pat, with all their talks about the danger of this "Doc Ock's" experiments, what never came up was the idea that Pat could be busy when Matt needed him to help take down the Doctor.
Busy with a Norse God's Scepter? That sounded like it was an innuendo to him, but Matt wasn't the type of Catholic to judge a man for such behavior.
"Call in SHIELD?" Matt was only vaguely aware of the organization from a conversation with the other man, something about them being some secret security organization, a long reach with some high tech toys. And not a group that Matt was interested in interacting with."Well, I've got nothing better to do, better tail her to her current home. Then I'll stand back and keep my distance."
Matt threw his cane into a bin, it wouldn't be collected for another two days so it should be safe there. Then he started a run-up to a fire escape, leaping up and then taking to the roof. It was a good way to keep out of the woman's sight, the rooftops nearby allowed him more than enough space to tail her, and even would give him the vantage point for whenever Octavius crossed streets, where he needed to catch up to her.
And it did all that, let him tail her for a full hour till she entered an alley and disappeared into a wall.
It was only because Matt had been down that alleyway before that he knew something odd was about to happen, the last time he had been here a wall had been at its end. Now, Matt couldn't sense the presence of a solid wall from the echoes in the alley, something that was confirmed to him when the doctor walked through where it had once been. .
His hand reached into his pocket, taking out the burner phone and he dialed.
"Found it."
(Pat Doyle)
"I'll personally lead the team," Morse replied when I explained how an informant, Matt, had managed to find Dr. Octavius's current dwellings."I've studied the way her tech operates in regards to movement and weaponry. Besides you, I'm the most capable person to bring her in."
"I hope SHIELD plans on getting you more than manpower and a few ballistics in regards to backup?"
While I felt that whatever deranged plans Loki was currently up to needed my attention more than Doc Ock's own mad schemes. I'd have trouble sleeping if anything happens to the agents sent to apprehend her while I was off staring at one of the two loons that were locked up.
"Don't worry," Morse smiled, brushing back a strand of blond hair out of her face. "Our techies managed to find an open wireless exploit in the drones that she uses. So we only need to stay our distance to take her out."
"Still, you might want to get her talking," I waved an arm right, for some reason thinking it would emphasize my point. "Once you got her doing that, she will talk your ear off and even I will be distracted if I'm talking your ear off."
"What, do I make a bad science claim?"
"Tell her… something about how wormholes don't work and it's a moron's field."
Morse sighed, shaking her head downwards before raising it back up so our eyes met.
"I'll come up with something better than that," she told me with a sly grin, before turning around and starting to walk away. "Didn't spend half-a-decade in the academy and not pick up some shit."
I couldn't help the slight drift in my own eyes going downwards as she left, but that only lasted a few seconds… only a second. In that second, I wondered about a few things, one of them was who did Morse remind me of?
Some prolific tv actress?
The other thing that I thought about was her ass… but those thoughts didn't linger for long as I heard a loud coughing noise come out from my side as the elevator doors closed on Morse. I turned my head, seeing Black Widow herself smirking up at me with a raised brow.
"Miss Romanoff, you got a bit of a cold?"
"No, I just from a cough that I get up at this altitude," She responded slyly, before throwing a folder at me. "Some of the things that we've gleaned from the further talks between Loki and Thor. You were right, he just can't stop running his mouth."
Flipping through it fast, my keen eyes picked up several details.
"Right, so the attempted murder was a suicide according to Thor," I read off in a rushed voice, my pitch going high as I speed up. It was good to know that my odd fascination with Thor being a brother murder was wrong. "Going to be difficult to estimate what someone like that is planning, it's not like he values his own life."
"People like Loki are easier to figure out than you think," Widow responded as we walked toward the elevator, heading back down to meet with Fury and Rogers. No doubt, the good Captain is giving that man a piece of his mind. "These Would-Be-World-Conquerers aren't that complicated, they want validation, they want control, they want power but most importantly they want to feel safe."
"And what we've got is a man that tried to commit suicide, came back with mind control powers, and to finish that up wants to rule the world through brute force." I rebutted with a smile as the lift went down. "If he wanted control, he's got that all mighty control stick. Nah, we're looking at a human drone strike."
Black Widow glanced at me with an expression that screamed about being both impressed and amused. The elevator door opened, and we started to walk down, we were heading towards the section of the Helicarrier that held those Tesseract weapons.
This was going to be so cool, I wondered if I would hear a Captain America speech.
"The idea behind drones is that they're not manned, no loss of your forces," She started to explain, even as we began to hear a roar from some man. "even if they're shot down, you don't lose a valued member of your forces."
"You're making the mistake in thinking that Loki is valued at all," My ears picked up a second voice talking, not Fury's but instead it was Thor, talking about how the weapons were like a beacon calling out to the rest of the galaxy that Earth was ready for a level of war that they weren't actually prepared for yet. "That's what makes him so dangerous, any disgust, hell any sympathy we feel for him. It'll cause us to underestimate what he's capable of."
"And what do you think he's capable of?"
"When dealing with someone that's willing to kill themselves, the question should always be how many people does he plan to take with him?"
That caught her up short, making her pause mid-step in the hallway so we could face each other probably.
"You think this is just an elaborate suicide attempt," It was almost a whisper that came out of Widow's mouth, I wasn't sure if she was playing up her response, acting as if this shocked her to get me to underestimate her. "Interesting theory, I've got another."
"What's that?" I asked, knowing that this woman while lacking the little bits of meta-knowledge that I had, she also had more experience in dealing with Loki's ilk that I had. It goes without mentioning that she'd far more training in deducing motive as well.
"He's an egomaniac psychopath wanting a bunch of ants to step on."
(Bobbi Morse)
She had the jet stealth land on the roof across the location they had been fed. Two agents surveyed the area themselves, they weren't going to rely purely on some outside source that they couldn't verify personally.
While she had another two hold virgil with sniper rifles from two different locations, and another agent each were working as spotters and guards. Bobbi herself was going to enter the building through the front door with four agents backing her up.
Typically, these sorts of missions were handled by a larger team. Sadly, several members of SHEILD that would normally be part of this operation were needed elsewhere, dealing with missions and assignments that would've otherwise been handled by those like Coulson, Barton, and Romanoff.
Two out of three of those agents were faster and more capable than the majority of teams that SHIELD had, they could do the work at twice that needed to be done at twice the rate. While Coulson and Romanoff were either handling the Avengers or working as an Avenger currently, Barton was busy being brainwashed.
So all this meant that she needed to make the best of the rest. Just taking anybody with her to this mission mightn't have ended well. So she limited the numbers that were going to work with her.
A team of this size, and filled with people that were used to working with each other, would limit any messy miscommunication issues that could pop up.
They didn't enter the building from the entrance that Doyle had informed them off, deep imaging scans revealed that there was a normal access point to that section of the place. It was a standard low rent apartment building, so it had four exits on the ground floor alone that they could consider.
But the front door was the safest.
If they were to sneak in, it was possible that Octavius had set traps that she monitored by the other doors. Given the raw traffic that goes through the building's front door, it would be incredibly unlikely for the woman to bother to trap it.
Too scatterbrained to bother paying attention to everyone that could possibly come from that floor.
So with the exits being watched, and even places that some wouldn't believe to be exits watched, Morse led her team into the building. EMP pulse rifles were their main weapon for this operation, a weapon designed to scramble computers from a distance on espionage missions but the SHIELD techies had managed to boost the power of the weapons so that they should take down the unshielded drones that Doc Ock liked to use.
Perhaps even those tentacles.
They also had more standard arms to use for less mechanical targets.
The Morse lead team managed to get to the midsection of the apartment when there was a loud rumble, then a pair of doors fell down to the floor. Out of the empty doorways, a pair of Doc's signature Ock Bots came stomping out.
Being the highly trained agents of SHIELD, it only took them a moment to start firing at them.
They dropped like flies being hit by a swatter.
When a keen sense of awareness, the agents continued down the hall, now with increased guard for any new threats that could be set against them. But instead, they faced nothing, there weren't any defenses showing up after that drones to stop their progress.
When they arrived at the door of Doc's apartment, Bobbi set the charges herself.
But the door burst open the second she took a step back, a deadly claw erupting from the wood. It was only the instincts of years of training that let Morse fall back, ducking under the claw and rolling away from the rest of the tentacles that came for her position.
"Open fire!" Bobbi barked orders to the rest of the men, taking her pistol out its holder after being forced to drop the rifle. The EMP blasts did nothing to the cybernetic limbs of the doctor as she stepped out of the apartment.
Revealing in turn that it wouldn't be easy to hit her with standard rounds either as Octavius appeared to be wearing some sort of purple body armor. Not exactly Iron Man grade armor but it appeared to be more advanced than what SHIELD had managed to supply Captain America with currently.
"So… ants are sent after me," Octavius's voice spoke, full of clear glee but distorted by virtue of a helmet. "Do you think so highly of yourselves that you could complete a task that took a god before?"
"Phrenology is the only correct science!" The agent yelled out, causing a rant to erupted from the other woman's mouth automatically.
But Octavius's rant didn't get far, Bobbi's pistol shot out four rounds, expertly hitting the visor of the helmet. It didn't break through, but it did leave a rather sizeable series of marks that blocked the woman's view of the outside world.
"Oh no," Came the rather understated reaction from the woman, even as the other agents dropped their EMP guns and swapped to their own pistols. Something that put Morse on edge, so she reached into her pocket and grabbed a gadget. "Do you know how long it took to create this helmet, this will take hours to fix."
One of the agents was grabbed by a claw, picked out, and thrown into another. While the claw that once more went for Bobbi herself was quickly dodged, after which Morse threw a gadget out into the air.
A burst from some sort of miniature rocket erupted from the back a small disc, threads exploding out, and capturing two of the tentacles in a tight grip of titanium make. Before the final two could make their way back to defend their master, Bobbi had already drawn her gun to the gap in Octavius's armor, right below her helmet and above her collar bone.
"Don't move," Bobbi warned her. "It only takes a nanosecond to take you out."
Octavius didn't say a word, so Bobbi pressed on her comm unit, opening the channel to the men waiting outside.
"I'm going to need backup," The SHIELD agent growled. "I've got agents down, but I've acquired the target, but I repeat, agents are down."
There wasn't a response.
"I repeat, agents are down," Bobbi held the gun to Octavius's neck harder when the woman started to giggle. "I'm ordering you to abandon your posts and back me up."
Suddenly… Morse fell to the ground as if she was a puppet with her strings dropped. Bobbi didn't even feel the arrow stabbed into her back. Though she could still hear the world around her.
"I'm sorry Bobbi, ain't going to any backup, I've dealt with it," Barton's voice spoke up, his feet clacking against the floor was the only thing that the agent could use to tell that the man was coming closer. "But Octavius is needed for my mission to be completed. Doctor, if you're now willing to join us?"
"Of course, Mr. Barton," Came the sweet, almost sinister voice of the Mad Scientist. "I'm always ready to join a cause in the pursuit of scientific progress."
There was the sound of scaping, then nothing but silence for a few moments before Octavius spoke up once more.
"What about the leftovers?" She asked Barton. "They could constitute a problem."
"Not part of the plan, we leave them be," he countered her. "There's nothing that they can do now. We have everything we need in place."
"Well… still," Octavius started, one of her claws picking up Bobbi's motionless form. "We can at least keep them for hostages, less likely to shoot first and ask questions never if we've got some bodies in front of us."
Author's Note: Now I don't know about you but... I think it's important to point out that certain characters are very good at what they do. Even better than some aliens, in fact, so don't take their observations as a guaranteed truth about the other.
Thankfully, I managed to squeeze out another chapter before too long this time. Hopefully, we can see the speeds that I once reached had again, just this time with a greater quality of writing behind them.
I'm going to try and continue to focus on this story for the foreseeable future. Since this is the middle of arc here, and I don't like leaving people with nothing but dead ends that don't lead to anywhere as a story.
Also...Hawkeye has the longest reach here... no question.
... Because of the bow&arrow thing.