1.

"Okay so does everyone understand?" Dr. Charlotte Carlson asked as she turned from the large whiteboard that spanned most of the college lecture hall.

She looked out to her numerous students in the chairs that inclined on a slight hill surrounding her stand. It reminded her of n ancient Greek sound theatre. She frowned slightly as she saw that a good amount of them were staring at her with a vacant expression, slumped across their small desk table. The ones who were listening though, looked so excited it was almost sad.

Charlotte grimaced as the clock ended the class and students bolted out of the lecture room. She knew nuclear physics was not an interesting topic, especially since most of the students in this class wanted to be experimental physicists and were not passionate about nuclear physics.

She ran a hand through her blonde curls and closed her eyes when the door finally clicked. It was Friday, it was Friday. Tomorrow could be spent in her apartment, eating mint chocolate chip ice cream and watching cheesy 80s high school drama-preferably one with a great musical number for no apparent reason. Or, she thought, I could just watch Easy A.

While she was taking off her glasses a man with a brown comb over and a suit strode into her classroom. Charlotte paused in the motion of putting on her laptop bag. So she stood in an awkward position-holding a stack of physics textbooks on her hip, glasses on top of her head and mouth slightly open.

"Hello Dr. Carlson," the man said as he took off a pair of sunglasses he was wearing for some reason.

"Um hello," she replied.

"My name is Agent Phil Coulson from S.H.I.E.L.D.," he said sticking out a hand.

She juggled the books around quickly to shake his hand in return, "S.H.I.E.L.D.? Is that a government agency?"

"To put in laymen's terms it is."

"I don't mean to sound arrogant, but I have two PhD's in Nuclear and Particle Physics, I need a better explanation than laymen's terms," she answered, putting her books and bag down to cross her arms.

She studied him, "You don't work in a government's agency do you?"

"No, we are a separate branch of the government. S.H.I.E.L.D. stands for Strategic Hazard Intervention, Enforcement Logistics Directorate. We deal with other forms of army besides military," Agent Coulson said staring at her intensely,
"We know what you are, Charlotte."

"You mean who you are?" Charlotte asked walking backwards into her desk feeling around for her cell phone. She was panicking.

"No I know who you are," Agent Coulson said with a smirk, "you are Charlotte Carlson, you indeed have two PhDs, a masters in Engineering and Mathematics, you graduated high school when you were twelve and have an IQ of a the very high number of 195 and you almost won a Nobel Prize."

Charlotte grasped her cell phone, sliding the lock feeling genuinely worried.

"But I know that if you remove that cardigan you have a tattoo spanning your entire back- a pair of feathered, bird wings that come out of your back to form actual wings when your heart races," Agent Coulson explained. Charlotte winced.

"You see that's what we do in S.H.I.E.L.D.," he said with a smirk, "We protect the Earth from supernatural, superhuman events."

"So you have a file on me?" she asked and she waited until he nodded, "Does that file say what happens when I feel angry or threatened."

Agent Coulson widened his eyes as Charlotte's hazel eyes flashed a gold color and her nose looked more pointy, more beak-like.

"We are not here to contain you-"

"That's what the last agent said," her voice slowly growing a squawky noise to it, "And I spent three years in a government facility getting plucked and injected. It ruined my

life, I lost the Nobel Prize because my work had one more point to press, an easy point, I could have won."

At the word won, a sound beam blared from Charlotte's mouth and Agent Coulson stumbled backwards as his hair flew askew and his suit jacket blew behind him.

She felt a full body shudder course through her spine and back. She glared at the agent as she took off her cardigan and groaned in pain as ten foot wings shoot out of her shoulder blades.

"What do you want with me?" she asked.

Agent Courlson regained his cool composure, "We know you started working on the gamma bomb after it was abandoned by Doctor Banner."

Charlotte felt her heart pounding, her eye sight grow sharper and her sense of smell intensified. Her wings flapped, it had been years since she lost control like that. Usually a slightly elevated heart rate would not cause her wings to form but when she got extremely angry, threatened, annoyed or aroused they would form.

Yup. It was a lonely four years. But even before that it was worse. She was bitter, lonely and angry at the government for keeping her problem hushed, for keeping human experimentation hushed.

"You know I'm banned from research, of any kind," she spit out, "listen, I escaped this, I'm not going back."

"Well lucky for you , we don't hire based on emotional or physical stability, just your brains."

"Why not just get Dr. Banner?" she asked with a sarcastic grin, "He's the expert."

"We're on that right now, an agent is on an operative for him, we want another who understands."

"You want me to be his baby sitter," Charlotte said folding her wings up behind her back.

"We need him and you, there is a intergalactic threat to Earth. Director Fury wants to proceed with a team of superhumans," Agent Coulson stated, "People like you, products of science-experiments and research."

"I'm not a product of experiment or research," she spat out with a scathing glare, her wings unfolded and flapped menacingly, "I'm an accident, a research malfunction, I wasn't planned."

"That doesn't make you any less important to S.H.I.E.L.D."

Charlotte took a deep breath, forcing her heart to slow down and her wings to mold back into her back. Placing her cardigan back on and collected her books in her arms. Her back began to ache, she would need to ice that or use a heat compress and her eyesight became fuzzy.

Side effects. Problems she had to face now.

She was contained in a prison of her own being. All that knowledge and thought in her head but she would never be able to get it out there. She tried to publish her work under a nom de plume but the government found out. She tried leaving the country but they found her.

"No, it doesn't make me less important," she stated putting on her glasses, "It makes me a threat you want to eradicate."