"Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild."
-John Keats, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"
Everett awoke in a place he'd never seen before, on a contraption, half computer, half bed, that he was also certain he'd never seen before. The subtly patterned, black-on-black gown he wore completed the strangeness of his situation. And yet his head was clear enough that he remembered Busan and remembered having been shot in the back.
He sat up and stretched, and tried to reach the place where he was sure a wound ought to be. He'd had minor bruises that hurt worse than this. For one disoriented moment, he wondered if he had been placed in suspended animation and had awakened in the future. But when he glanced at his watch, which was still (unaccountably) on his wrist, the date displayed was one day after that on which he had interrogated Ulysses Klaue.
The fine hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, and he shook off a shudder.
Pay attention. Where are you? And is anybody here with you?
He picked up the faint rustling of cloth, the shift of springs in a chair seat, and then a brief bar of a hummed tune. Female. Probably young. He found her easily. She sat at a work table, tinkering with something. Her long braids spilled down from a topknot. She wore red and black, which contrasted with the mostly pristine neutrals of the lab. The white-beaded black armbands around her upper arms looked like shoulder straps that had slipped, and Everett felt a strong impluse to slide them back up to her shoulders. But maybe it was more the desire to run his hands up the soft dark skin of her bare arms.
And where did that come from? Disturbed, he spoke more sharply than he otherwise might have. "All right. Where am I?"
The young woman started and glanced at him disapprovingly over her shoulder. "Don't scare me like that, coloniser!"
"Colo- wh - my name is Everett." When you wake up in a strange place that might be a lab, or might be an art gallery, or might be the lair of a playful and erratic supervillain, you tend to understand that caution won't get you very far and that you might as well be direct.
"Yes, I know." She turned her attention back to the gadget on the table. "Everett Ross. Former Air Force pilot and now CIA."
"Right. Okay." He looked around him. "Is this Wakanda?"
"No," she said. "It's Kansas."
We're not in Kansas anymore. Playful and erratic then. But supervillain?
"How long ago was Korea?"
"Yesterday."
"I don't think so. Bullet wounds don't just magically heal overnight."
She finally turned to fully face him. She smiled, and then she laughed. "They do here. But not by magic. By technology. I healed you myself."
Everett's heart thumped. It wasn't just the woman's beauty that startled him, though she was undeniably beautiful, in a way that was both idiosyncratic and breathtaking. But the fire in her eyes was like nothing he'd ever seen before. It seemed to show him everything he needed to know about her: that her imagination and curiosity knew no bounds; and that she was able to liberate her ideas from her imagination into the physical world the same way Michaelangelo had been able to free David from an innocuous-seeming block of marble.
He was in the presence of genius.
"Thank you," he said, once he found his voice.