"Hurry up! I got a mission in 5."
'Maybe if you stopped breaking all your stuff I wouldn't have to hurry up.' Was my I-dare-not-say-it-out-loud thought. This young Agent had been down here more times than I care to remember, which honestly wasn't that many.
Mechanics don't get much respect, so I kept my mouth shut and did what he told me to.
"Here."
"Finally!" He grabbed his stuff and rushed out of my office, slamming my creaky door as he did.
I say office, I mean basement where people drop off their broken supplies and fixed them. It was actually pretty big, as it was the entire basement save for bathrooms.
I had a desk, though. Positioned in the middle of the basement between two support beams. For paperwork, which I luckily didn't have to do much of.
My favorite part was my working desk. Which took up an entire wall, it was where I worked on long term stuff as well as a few personal projects no one cared enough to question. Tools scattered all along it.
An old broken car sat in the back of the basement, from someone very important to me, that I enjoyed tinkering with from time to time.
I went back to messing with whatever the most important Agent on my list broke while daydreaming.
Not much entertainment or guest down in the basement, unless they were here to yell at me or make me fix not even broken tools. Besides my radio on my desk playing some 80s to now station, to the left of me. Worst part of important Agents, they wanted me to write down everything I did to their gear. So I had to sit at my paperwork desk while fixing their stuff. It's my least favorite desk. The chair is nice, though.
You would be surprised of the things people brought for me to fix. For Agents of a secret organization, they could be surprisingly dense. I kept a log of the funniest/worst items brought to me. It was very long. The top of the list was a knife. Just a plain knife. Literally nothing special about it.
So I sat thinking while humming to some tune I probably didn't know well enough to actually be humming and writing down literally everything I did. It was a way to spite the Agents who made me do this.
With a creak the door to my office swung open and in walked Agent Maria Hills. Technically she was my boss. She's very good at being a boss. She's probably why anything gets down, besides the occasional walk throughs Director Fury does.
Agent Hills held a large cardboard box filled with things I knew close to nothing about.
"Here's stuff from the lab, fixed by tomorrow." She dropped the large box in front of me and walked off towards the door, after a looking around my office with a disdainful glare. I don't think she liked it as much as I did. It might have been the smell. It was probably the smell.
"Yes ma'am." Came my unenthusiastic reply to the Agent already halfway through the door.
Lab stuff always took way longer. As I said I knew almost nothing about any of this stuff.
I'm a mechanic, not a scientist.
At least some of the scientist were nice enough to leave whatever manuals they had as well as personal recordings of what the thing did.
I got to work.
Finishing work for the day was a big load of my shoulders. This week had been really heavy, due to the Tesseract being newly in our possession. It sucked, and broke everything. It probably did it just to spite me. In fact, the only reason I knew we had the Tesseract was because Agents have to tell me why their stuff broke.
As I unlocked the door to my very small and dingy apartment my labrador dog began to bark and dance around excitedly.
"Shh, please. Linda will kill me ,Jackson, please." The apartment owners association leader, which wasn't even a real thing, Linda, didn't like how loud my dog was. He's a dog, what can I do but shush him and hope?
He quieted down, then looked at me with his chocolate brown eyes that basically screamed feed me. So I did. I got him some water, too, but he focused on the food. Jackson was a good dog.
I liked the simplicity of my life, I had my tools and my dog. As well as a few random people. The library worker on Saturdays, my next door neighbor, the old lady from the bakery down the street. Those were my kind of people.
I turned the t.v on to some random news channel and got out some sort of left overs.
Yep, the glamorose secret organization life!
It wasn't nearly as entertaining as one would think. For every Field Agent there were three to five non active Agents. You had to have something you liked to do, hobbies.
I liked to read.
Anything, I guess. Nonfiction, but mostly fiction. Science fiction was a favorite of mine.
An entire world created for me to explore, it's a wonderful thing. To be that talented, to be able to create entire world, that was truly a gift from the Gods.
Trips to the library were a sort of tradition for me. I get up Saturday morning, go to the library, look through all the books, pick one, read through some of it, check it out, come back home around dinner.
I recently picked up some classic Sherlock Holmes adventures, so it was interesting going through those and comparing them to the Sherlock we see on t.v shows and movie today.
I got halfway through when Jackson decided to join me, warming my left side from the cold air of my dingy apartment.
Halfway through the book, and all the way through dinner, I put the book down and picked up my journal.
When one works for a secret organization, one should keep a log of everything one does, along with evidence and proof, just in case. Some blackmail and company secrets couldn't hurt, too.
I went through everything I did, glancing at the notes I took during work to make sure I had the times right as well. This was probably one of my favorite thing to do, sadly enough. It made me feel like I did a lot. That's a good feeling.
When I finished and glanced at the clock, it was sometime around 11, which meant it was time for bed. I get tired easily so I really need my sleep. I also just really like sleeping.
So I went to bed, ready to do it all over again tomorrow. Well, sort of.
Tomorrow I get transferred to the Hovercraft to work on the planes.
I liked working on the planes, they were closer to the cars I started out with. Something was broken, so I fixed it. That simple. No super plasma beam with something shiny attached to it. And I got to play around in really high tech planes. Who doesn't like that?
I also got more free time on the Hovercraft, leaving me free to daydream, something tended to do a lot.
"Pip, Pip, Pip!" I shook to attention and glanced up at mom.
"Sorry." She shook her head.
"How are you going to be a great Shield Agent if you keep daydreaming and saying 'sorry'? Focus!" I frowned, but finished whatever it was she wanted me to do. Something to do with exercise, my least favorite thing to do."Very good, next."
This is why I liked spending time with grandma more. She just made me eat cookies and other foods.
Eventually mom had to leave for training, but she told me to stay directly where I was. Under no circumstances was I to move.
But then I saw a man in grease stained jeans and a plain shirt. So naturally I went over to him. He was standing in front of an old looking car, a beautiful red color.
"What are you doing?" The man stood up in shock, banging his head on the top of the engine's hood. Grumbling to himself, he turned towards me, but soon relaxed.
"Hey kid, just fixing an old car."
"Pip." I corrected. He smiled at me.
"Torin." I smiled at him.
"Why? Why fix it? Why not just get a new one?" He smiled, remembering something.
"Because it's your stuff. You gotta keep your stuff. 'Cause there's only so many things you can call your own."
I nodded and listened carefully as he began explaining exactly what he was doing as he did it. I loved it. It was simply cause and effect. I touch this, this happens. Torin even let me help with the engine of his beloved car. Although he cringed every time I did something.
When mom finally found me with the mechanic she freaked out. I wasn't allowed back to the Shield base for a week.
That didn't matter, though. I finally found something I liked doing. And that's more important than whatever lesson mom was trying to teach me.