Recruitment Drive: Reaching an Accord
By bissek
Chapter 5
The Quinjet landed in the Playground. Agents Morse and Mackenzie staggered out of the plane, their faces pale and their bodies shaking. They were over a thousand miles from the seemingly sentient island known as Demonreach, and it still didn't feel like they were far enough away to be safe. They hadn't thought it was possible for geography to be capable of anger before that trip, and now that it was, they prayed to never experience anything like that again.
Commander Gonzalez was waiting for them. "Welcome back. How did the mission go?"
"We found it," Morse admitted.
"And we are never going back there again." Mackenzie added.
Gonzalez started to ask for more information but Bobbi just held her hand up.
"Please. Not now. After what happened on that island, I'm not up to a debriefing right now. Hopefully I'll feel more human after some sleep."
"Assuming we can sleep," Mack chimed in, "That island's going to give me nightmares."
Sleep was long in coming, and hardly restful. When morning came, a bleary-eyed Agent Morse forced herself out of bed to face the day. The room was freezing cold, and so was the shower; the furnace must have been filled with fairy ice again. An additional irritation revealed itself when she opened her sock drawer and found it full of coal.
"Trying to tell us that we've been naughty, Lady Winter?" She muttered to herself.
Making her way to the base cafeteria, Bobbi found that breakfast was late. Sitting down, she wondered if all the food had spoiled again. She didn't realize that she'd said that out loud until the Coulson loyalists on the next table answered her.
"No, we shouldn't be suffering spoilage problems for another," Simmons checked some calculations in front of her and her watch, "three hours and twenty-seven minutes."
Bobbi wasn't sure that she wanted to know how Simmons had calculated when the next mass spoilage would occur so precisely.
"What happened is that every single piece of electrical equipment in the kitchen disassembled itself in the middle of the night. Fitz was muttering something about gremlins when he went in there to try to help fix it." May joined in.
"With everything that's going on, I'm not surprised he decided that he was going to leave after breakfast, assuming we ever get breakfast." House said.
Gremlins. Somehow Bobbi had the feeling that they weren't figurative. Moments later, the lights all went out.
An hour later, the Playground was still having electrical difficulties. The conference room Bobbi and Mack met the rest of the Council in was dimly lit by emergency lighting only.
"So the Warden was able to detect your Quinjet despite it being cloaked?" Agent Weaver asked.
"That's right," Mack answered. "He even knew exactly how many people were on board before we turned the cloak off. I haven't the slightest idea how he did that."
"And what were you able to learn while on the island?" Gonzales inquired.
"About what PENTAGRAM is storing there and how, almost nothing. We did learn a great deal more about how badly Calderon messed up in Chicago, though. The girl he injured not only has the resources to cause all the problems we've been having on base – without our being able to catch whoever she's been sending to do it – she also has family connections that can kill SHIELD's reputation in the occult community. She's also the Warden's former protégé, so we can kiss any hope of cooperation from that direction goodbye."
"Again with the theory that we're under attack by fairies?" Agent Oliver scoffed, "Are we to expect Puck to show up soon?"
"You'd better hope not," Morse retorted. "PENTAGRAM has a file on Robin Goodfellow that was included in the data they cross-loaded to the database here, and apparently, he's a homicidal psychopath. We have enough problems as it is.
"The heating system keeps freezing over. Everything with an expiration date that comes into the base spoils rapidly. That includes all our medical supplies, which is why we've had to transfer Calderon to an outside hospital, where he is expected to lose an arm because of the infection that spread due to prematurely expired antibiotics. Now we're randomly losing power and important equipment keeps falling apart. And our people on the Iliad are suffering the same thing, along with the unnatural storm they're stuck in, which means that they're forced to live on raw fish that they have to catch themselves in the middle of a blizzard!"
"And before anyone asks, the coal that appeared everyone's sock drawers this morning can't be used to help with the heating issues," Mack reported. "I already tried, and the moment you ignite it, the stuff promptly turns into more of that funny gloop and evaporates."
"Frankly, I think we're lucky that Miss Carpenter has been willing to settle for making our lives increasingly more difficult without actually harming anyone so far. But there's only so far things can escalate before that's no longer an option."
"Regardless of whether or not fairies are somehow involved in our current difficulties, evidence does suggest that Miss Carpenter is somehow connected to them," Gonzales conceded. "We need to find a way to convince her to stop."
"She's already inscribed her demands on every window in the base." Morse pointed out.
"We are not going to turn over a wounded agent," Gonzales insisted, then paused to think. "Coulson had his people in Chicago start looking for that old dagger shortly after you and Calderon passed through. Perhaps the promise of retrieving it is how he's convinced Carpenter's people to leave his loyalists alone.
"Increase our surveillance on PENTAGRAM. We need to secure that dagger for ourselves so we can use as leverage against Carpenter."
Murphy waited as Butters held Bob the Skull over the metal box that had been delivered to her that morning.
"It looks good," The talking skull reported. "This thing should be able to cork enough mordite to drop an elephant. Once we get the knife in here, Nemesis shouldn't be able to harm anyone holding the box."
"Which means we just need to make sure we can get the knife into the box without anyone getting infected," Murphy pointed out. "Thanks, Bob."
Daniel Carpenter came into the room, carrying a folder. "We just got a message from Doctor Petrikov. He just learned about a donation to a museum that might be our missing knife."
Murphy took the folder and looked through it. "This could be the athame, but if it's in a museum exhibit, we also have to worry about how it got from the Winter Court to the museum, and how many people were infected along the way. We can't explain to the museum staff that they've all been contaminated with by an extradimenional monster by handling an exhibit. Not without the world thinking we're insane, anyway."
"We may have lucked out there. The athame was personally donated by someone who matched the description of Maeve, and it was delivered inside a display case. Thanks to the museum's backlog of artifacts to examine and categorize, it's been sitting in that case untouched ever since. But Petrikov learned about it because the curators expect to be getting around to cracking the case and taking a look at it within the next week or two."
"At which point Nemesis comes back into play," Murphy concluded. "Alright, we need to pack up and get to this museum. If the knife in question really is Morgana's Athame, we're going to need to secure it quickly."
In a disused subway station in New York, the world's first and greatest hacker worked at a terminal while he conversed with his colleague in a side room.
"Mr Reese has managed to shut down the Brotherhood's money laundering scheme, but I'm afraid that's only going to slow them down, not neutralize them entirely," Finch stated.
"And even if it did, taking down Dominic wouldn't help us find Sameen or stop Samaritan," Root said from the other room, "Fortunately, our friends from the Playground recently did something that might have gained us a little breathing room."
"What would that be, Miss Groves?"
"Phil somehow managed to cut off half a dozen heads over the course of a week. While HYDRA still has more, it will take them a while to recover. Decima won't be able to call on any of the other cells until that's done. That limits Greer's resources in the short term."
"That's a relief. Still, I wish we could risk contacting Mr Coulson directly. His resources could be useful in helping us figure out what happened to Miss Shaw."
"He's had to go dark himself. My next assignment is doing something to help him out so his people can start working openly again." The woman stepped out of the side room, wearing a formal blouse and skirt combination and carrying a large instrument case.
"How are you going to help bring SHIELD back with a cello?" Finch wondered.
"To be honest, Harry, I'm not sure myself. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to be seen busking in Central Park in twenty-three minutes."
"I didn't even know you could play the cello, Miss Groves."
Root turned back briefly on her way out of the station. "I can't."
A/N: It's been a while since I updated this. I've been distracted by other things. Fortunately, I think there are only going to be 2-3 more chapters after this before it wraps up.
Puck appears in the Dresden Files graphic novel Wild Card, where he is depicted as being a mischievous trickster in the same way that The Joker is. He kills a dozen people and nearly starts a three-way war in the streets of Chicago. In the end, he was never defeated, merely convinced to leave.
This should be the last time Person of Interest shows up in this particular story. I just needed Root to provide better justification for why Gonzales moved when he did, and for something that will happen a couple chapters down the line.
For anyone wondering about extending this to season 4 and/or Doctor Strange (especially since Afalstein implied a connection between Strange and the Gatekeeper back in Brighter Futures, which fits quite well with the overall mission of the Kamar-Taj sorcerers in the MCU), I'm not sure I'll be up to writing another Recruitment Drive story after this. I have an older story that's been in limbo while I've worked on other projects for too long. Ghost Rider, the Darkhold and Kaecilius do sound like things that the Agents of PENTAGRAM should be dealing with, if you can get around the fact that when you cross Dresden Files with Doctor Strange, the likely result is Strange getting executed by a Warden for breaking at least two (and possibly as many as four) of the Laws.