I'm pleased to announce that Clarity will not be updated regularly on Fridays starting June 8th, 2018! And, as always, thanks for all the reviews, favourites, and follows!
The ecstasy of victory and the sweetness of home only lasted for so long, and after a few days and several (rather chaotic) trips to IKEA, Vanessa had returned to a somewhat normal routine. Her life felt almost the same as it did before she joined SHIELD ー doting on William's dog, Snowball, and going to the movies in the evening.
Her daytimes were a little different than before, but were very structured and undemanding. She began every morning with a run, before heading to her mundane day job that she had been assigned in order to give her a break from the more intense interrogation and investigation work she usually carried out.
Fury had decided that she would replace Agent Coulson ー who was allegedly off to do some highly classified work ー in overseeing clean-up efforts, but there was really no need for her. The Damage Control workers, along with the few other SHIELD agents assigned to the job, were more than capable of handling things themselves. The only minor scuffle with a group of private contractors was sorted out quickly.
As such, Vanessa used the vast amount of free time to mull over Loki's words, hoping to just think her way through the problem. According to Thor, before he left, Loki's Scepter wasn't something of Asgard. What was its connection to the Tesseract, seeing as they were able to track one with help from the other? Did the Scepter also emit low levels of gamma radiation?
She didn't like the thought, because she had used the Scepter and would've hated to have some sort of strange mutation happen to her.
But how much weirder can it get?
The ringing of her cell phone interrupted her thoughts, and she pulled it out of her pocket to answer the call.
"Vanessa Liang speaking," she said to the unknown caller, expecting it to be someone from the Triskelion with an update on the situation or something along those lines.
Instead, she got Stark's snappy tones. "Come to the tower," he ordered. "Or rather, come into the tower, since you're basically here already."
She looked up from her spot standing amongst the wreckage of a crossroads and at the glistening glass panels of Stark Tower, which was only a short walk away. The genius and billionaire had wasted no time starting repairs on the thing, and half the broken windows had already been changed.
"I'm working, Mr. Stark," she said.
"No, you're not."
She gave a little huff of laughter through her nose. "You're right, I'm not. But I'm paid for this, it's not like I can just up and leave."
"I'm in charge of Damage Control," he informed her loftily. "I'll send someone to replace you."
"Fine, I'm coming," she sighed, amused, her finger moving towards the 'end call' button when Stark added:
"You have a minute. Any longer and you're climbing sixty flights."
He hung up. Vanessa glanced at Agent Cremlow next to her, who had heard the entire exchange. He shrugged.
"Just go," he suggested. "If Fury finds out, 'Tony Stark' is a perfectly viable excuse."
At this, she snickered and sprinted off in the direction of the tower, making her presence in the lobby known at thirty-nine seconds. The elevator made a noise of authorization before permitting her to enter it, the floor already preset to take her straight to Stark's penthouse.
While there was no elevator music to accompany her ascension to the 60th floor, the technology at Tony Stark's disposal made her trip quite fast.
"What do you need me for, Mr. Stark?" Vanessa asked him, stepping out of the elevator into the room where Loki had been pummeled by the Hulk. It was covered in sheets of white plastic, plaster dust, and renovation tools, and a few workers milled about, doing repairs. The place was already mostly fixed, despite the fact that only a little more than week had passed since the battle.
Tony Stark was standing at a counter and studying a holographic blueprint of his tower. "How's this?"
She walked closer to it, scrutinizing the lines of blue light hanging in the air. The tower looked mostly the same as it did now, but bulkier in some places and there was an obvious change of design in the lettering.
"Am I just here to offer my opinion on your tower design?" she asked, tilting her head to one side. "If so, are you sure you don't plan on replacing the rest of your letters?"
Stark rolled his eyes. "Fury told me you're one of his smartest operatives," he quipped. "You can figure this out."
"You could bear to part with your precious tower?" She raised her eyebrows, having come to the correct conclusion.
"I'm not parting with it," he shot. "I'm sharing it."
"'Avengers Tower,'" said Vanessa, savouring the words. "That has a nice ring to it."
Stark grinned. "Not as good as 'Stark Tower,' of course, but I'm willing to take one for the team. Speaking of names… you're 'Sterling,' now, aren't you? 'Creepy-Eyes' suited you better."
In the days since the Battle of New York, as it was now called, she had been getting an unreal level of attention from the media. While it couldn't be compared to the amount of press Steve and Stark were enjoying, them being already established heroes, the idea that her new codename was also widely recognized on the streets felt foreign and somewhat uncomfortable to her.
While few recognized her without her silver irises and a Glock, she'd passed store windows that boasted of figurines bearing her likeness. They didn't sell as well as Iron Man or the Hulk or even her fellow SHIELD operatives, but that didn't change the fact that she was essentially a celebrity.
"How do you deal with it?" she asked. "The reporters and cameras and the action figures?"
"I don't go outside," he pointed out in a matter-of-fact tone. "It's a foolproof method."
"Genius," she snorted, not completely sarcastic. "If you'll allow it, Mr. Stark, I have to go back to work."
"Yeah," he said dismissively, turning back to his holograph. "You can go now."
She rolled her eyes with mock annoyance. "It was nice to see you too, Mr. Stark," she joked, heading back towards the elevator. Her finger hovered over the button on the wall as an idea occurred to her ー should she tell Stark about Loki's warnings?
"What?" the billionaire asked, before she could even open her mouth.
"If I told you that there was an even greater threat than the Chitauri out there, waiting, would you believe me?"
She turned around, and he didn't even blink. Like Fury, he seemed to have expected it. "Of course."
That evening, she returned to her basement apartment, which had a cozy feeling now that it was well-furnished and cleaned up. Fixing herself a quick dinner, Vanessa showered, changed, and retired to her bedroom. There, she found the entire wall of corkboard waiting for her.
So far, she had only pinned up a few pieces of paper detailing what she knew about the Tesseract, the Scepter, and the Chitauri. A stack of notepaper and a little tub of pushpins lay on the small desk in the corner, waiting.
Vanessa knew it wasn't her place to be conducting study or concocting theories ー she was supposed to leave that to Fury and the team at the Triskelion. But as absurd as it felt to her, she was an Avenger and they were the emergency response team in case Loki's words became reality. As such, she felt a sense of duty that pushed her into starting her quest for answers.
Of course, there isn't much I can do on my own.
After she explained the situation to Stark, she had the same conversation with Banner six floors down, while helping him clean up a lab. He had promised her that once his initial research on the Tesseract and the Scepter got back to him, he would share with her whatever interesting things he found.
The Avengers were going to make themselves ready, because they had wordlessly agreed with each other that Fury wasn't exactly the sharing type. Vanessa herself had plenty of experience with that ー she didn't even know she was a candidate for the Avengers Initiatives until Loki blew up the Helicarrier.
She traced the triangle between the three pieces of paper on her bulletin board absently, staring at the sheets as if that would allow her to suddenly reach an epiphany of some sort. It didn't, and she sat down on her bed, deciding to transition to the final phase of her day.
Vanessa wasn't sure whether she'd call it 'practice' or 'experimentation.'
After the disaster on the Helicarrier, she had resolved to identify the true properties of her abilities. Though she had discovered them shortly after her mother's death a little over four years ago, she hadn't given their limits and full capabilities much thought. She'd used her illusions to hide her activated eye powers in class, and after joining SHIELD, she'd shown Fury her powers and learned to create simple images. Between her physical training and her work, though, she had never explored just what exactly her illusions could accomplish.
But after the Battle of New York, she had the time and the incentive to test things out.
The first thing she established was that her illusions were area-of-effect ー that much should have been obvious to her, but she had made the mistake of thinking otherwise because of the panic of combat. The thought brought an unwelcome wave of guilt that she had to push away with great mental force. Casualties happened often in her line of work, and with a power-hungry Norse god of mischief thrown into the chaos, it was almost inevitable. Or so she told herself.
Regardless, she couldn't turn herself invisible while she was moving, at least not at her present level of expertise. Lesson learned.
The second discovery she made about her powers was that they were only as realistic and effective as she imagined them to be. This fact probably also should have been obvious to her, but she'd only became fully aware of it after unspecifically willing a lion to appear and finding herself face-to-face with a life-sized plush toy of the big cat.
As she struggled to create a detailed image of a coniferous tree, Vanessa found herself envying Loki, who could create perfect duplicates of himself without so much as a snap of his fingers.
He's a god, she chided herself. You're only human.
She let a burst of colour splash onto her wall, a trail of stars form on the ceiling. Pretty, but still useless. Flopping backwards onto her bed and deactivating her abilities, she sighed. Perhaps she would never go beyond simple tricks and light shows, and even those were tiring after too many.
"There is use to be found in everything, Liang," said Fury, folding his hands on the table. "That is the foundation of interrogation, and everything else you will do as an agent of SHIELD."
"Yes, sir."
If she got good enough at them, simple tricks had their own use. She could do more than change her eye colour. She could alter her appearance from top to bottom, pretend she was a tree, anything –she could be a master of disguise, if she practiced enough.
Once they get done with Avengers Tower, I could have some fun playing with Mr. Stark.
The idea was quite enticing.
A few days later, while at work, she received another call from an unknown caller. Hoping that it wasn't Stark calling her up to the tower again for some other nonsensical purpose, she picked up the phone.
"Vanessa," came Banner's voice. She almost breathed a sigh of relief ー the doctor wouldn't call her unless he had a legitimate reason, and he probably wouldn't force her to immediately leave work. "I have some results that you might want to see."
"When should I come over?" she asked.
"Just come when you get off work," he replied as expected, before adding, "I'm not him, so I'm not going to make you come right now."
She grinned. "Alright, I'll be there at around five. Should I pick up food?"
"Don't, I want to waste some of Tony's money and order Thai food," he said good-naturedly. "See you, then."
He hung up and Vanessa tucked her cell phone back into her pocket, turning her attention (or some little part of it) to the clean up site.
Two weeks of hard work made Manhattan a good deal more tolerable to look at, but Damage Control worked much too slowly, in Vanessa's opinion. There just weren't enough people on the ground, working enough hours to get the area fully functional again. That, or Stark has been sneakily concentrating efforts at his tower. She wouldn't put it past him, especially considering that her visit to Stark Tower proved that the place was in remarkably good shape, despite having been the epicentre of the battle.
The rest of the afternoon passed with little further incident, unless one counted the time a passing worker nearly spilled coffee on her blazer. Vanessa used the time to try and guess what exactly Banner had found. Perhaps he had received the data from the Helicarrier that Fury had promised to send?
At five o'clock sharp, she clocked in her hours and left the clean-up site, heading straight for Stark Tower and riding the elevator up to the 54th floor, as per Banner's text instructions. The doors slid apart to reveal the scientist opening up a box of pad thai in a pristine, white lab, the fragrance wafting into the air. Stark was sitting on a nearby stool, indistinctly complaining about not ordering pizza instead.
"Hey," said Banner, passing her a paper box and a pair of chopsticks, which she took with a quiet thanks. "Come look at this."
She followed him to a screen, which displayed a map of the world. It was decorated with four little colourful, blinking dots.
"Radiation sites," Stark revealed, sounding surly (presumably due to the lack of pizza). "Don't know what Banner wants to show you, exactly."
"All of these sites emit a similar level of gamma radiation as the Tesseract did," Banner took over. "I thought that you might be interested in this. I doubt that all of these mark a magical cosmic entity, but some of them might be worth a look."
She swiped her finger across the screen, landing on a red blip in western China. She tapped the dot and it expanded into coordinates.
"Not this one," Vanessa muttered, crossing it out with a line tool she found in one corner of the display. "That's a Chinese generation plant. And not this one, either ー it's another SHIELD Dark Energy project."
She struck out a possibility in Texas. That left her with two remaining ー one in Africa and another in Nepal. Banner looked on, appearing to be both intrigued and impressed.
The African site caught her attention and she tapped on it, revealing its coordinates and the extra label 'Wakanda.'
"Wakanda," she mused. "We have no idea what's going on in there."
"Wakanda?" Stark repeated. He sat up straighter, quickly swallowing his mouthful of noodles. "You're telling me that there's some sort of Tesseract-like thing in there? Of course."
Banner was perplexed, and he made it obvious in his knit brows. "Sorry, I don't follow."
"Wakanda is an isolationist African nation," Vanessa explained. "From what the world knows of them, they're quite poor but peaceful, they keep to themselves, and-"
"And they are somehow the world's only source of vibranium, the strongest metal to ever known to mankind," Stark interrupted her. He appeared almost bitter about it, as if it was his greatest regret not being able to make a suit out of the stuff (it probably was). "It's what made the old man's shield."
"You think they could be harbouring something like the cube?" the doctor asked, raising an eyebrow.
Vanessa snorted. "From what we can see, they only have shepherds, but no one's really been inside. If they do have something like the Tesseract, there's nothing we can really do about it." Stark gave a grunt of assent. "Let's just look at this one, then."
She opened the information bubble for the last remaining point ー a green blip. Along with the coordinates, it also gave her 'Kathmandu, Nepal.'
"What could possibly be there? Is Nepal doing dark energy now, too?" Banner opened up another computer and entered the coordinates into a map software. He was given an aerial view of the location ー a fancy building that combined the country's traditional architecture with the shiny metals that were the trend in the modernized world. It was a little out of place amongst the more run-down structures around it, but nothing particularly noteworthy.
Stark studied the image in scrutiny, zooming in on a small pagoda until the picture was grainy. "Doesn't look like a place where you'd find a space portal or similar."
Vanessa finally opened up her take-out box, pleased to find thin rice noodles. After a quick bite, savoring the tangy spice, she said, "We'll know once we check it out, right?"
Both men stared at her like she was crazy, and Stark was the first to ask, "You're going to Kathmandu?"
"I'm on 'break,'" she replied with a shrug, stirring at her food with the unevenly broken disposable chopsticks. "Why not travel a little?"