AN: Hey all! Sorry it's been forever since I've updated! I'm trying to kick my butt into gear with writing, but it's hard to motivate myself! Anyways, life is good... Lots of work, but I had the other day off and wound up getting my full driver's license, so that's pretty cool, and I went to a museum exhibit opening tonight, also cool... Anyways, I need to write, you need to read, here is the chapter, Beach.

When Leo and Jemma arrived at the beach, they immediately set up a large black tent in which to set up their mobile lab. It took about half an hour just to get everything set up, but the tent had the added advantage of protecting them from the sun (which was good, since they both got sunburned very easily). Once all their equipment was in place, they set about collecting samples of the water. Jemma got a few samples from the shoreline and began testing it immediately, while Fitz went out in a small motor boat and brought back some jugs of water from about 750 yards out. When he brought back the samples, Jemma jumped on them and quickly grabbed a vial of the liquid which she immediately placed in the mass spectrometer and ran tests on.

"I need to see if these samples match those that I took from the shoreline" she cried. "I found abnormally high levels of carbon in the water. And I mean abnormally high. I mean, these quantities are literally off the charts! And seeing as how the majority of life forms are carbon based-"

"-the carbon levels could be a result of whatever's changing the creature's behaviors! We still have to figure out what's causing the levels to rise but-"

"-if we take samples from multiple sources in the area then we can-"

"-analyze the varying carbon densities to pinpoint a central location!"

Jemma laughed triumphantly. "Yes! Now you GPS tagged the location of the sample you just got, yes?" Fitz nodded. "Good. Then why don't you go out and fetch some more samples from the area. Try and spread them out a bit, but do it systematically. And make quite sure that you get the co-ordinates for all of them and keep them straight!"

"I know, I know!" Fitz retorted as he backed out of the tent. Simmons smiled at her friend's antics as he left, and then turned back to her work a moment later. She started running some more detailed tests on the samples. The sample from the deeper water had proven to contain an even higher level of carbon than the shoreline sample had, but she had expected that.

What she didn't expect was for the seismograph (which came standard in all S.H.E.I.L.D. mobile lab units) to start going off about a quarter hour after Fitz left. The readings started out small, but as they grew she looked out at the ocean and saw a large cloud forming overhead. She could see Leo's boat out on the waves, but he was moving still farther away. Biting her lip, Simmons pulled out her phone and called her partner.

'The customer you are trying to reach is not in service. Please hang up and try the number again' the voice on the other end of the line chimed. Jemma groaned but shoved her phone back in her pocket and went back in the tent to keep an eye on the device. Wind was starting to buffer the sides of the tent now, and she hoped that Fitz would have the sense to come back to shore soon. She tried his phone again but received the same message.

The seismograph was beeping louder and louder every minute, but she forced herself to ignore it as she looked over the results from the mass spectrometer. Besides the carbon which had immediately drawn her eye, the water contained other irregularities as well. A slightly elevated presence of iron atoms, and more osmium than normal… there was even a slight presence of an unidentifiable compound! Simmons couldn't believe that she had missed that the first time, but the quantities were so slight that she hadn't even looked that far down the list before. Still, it was bizarre.

Finally she couldn't ignore the incessant beeping of the machine anymore. She looked out and could easily see the effect that the shaking was having on the water; some of the waves were nearly her height, and the entire sky had gone dark. Fortunately, she also saw Fitz driving the boat back to shore as fast as he could. With that in mind, she began packing up the lab and loading the equipment back into their SUV- she wanted to get off that beach the moment that Fitz was back on it.

She had very nearly packed everything up when he got there. They loaded the last of the things into the trunk and took off. They had left just in time, because as they drove off they looked in the rear view mirror and could see an enormous wave crashing onto the beach, obliterating the spot where their base had been. Something was rising out of the depths of the water, but it was so far out that they couldn't see any detail on it. The two scientists silently agreed that neither of them had any desire to get close enough to examine the thing at that moment in time, so Jemma simply floored the gas pedal and drove as fast as she could to get back to the Bus.

Meanwhile, back at the bus, Coulson and Ward were both chugging coffee. The files they were sorting through were pretty dull, and the fact that neither of them knew how to operate the holotable beyond the essential basics (which FitzSimmons had taught them after their last incident with the infernal thing) wasn't helping much either.

Finally, after his fifth cup of coffee, Ward pulled up a new file and started skimming through it. At first it seemed like nothing, but then a picture caught his eye.

"Hey Coulson, can you bring up the picture we have of these things again?" Ward asked.

Coulson nodded and pulled up the image, while Ward sent his file over to the main screen and pulled up the picture that he had found. While the two images were clearly of different creatures, there were a lot of similar traits between them. Their overall form was the first thing that jumped out. Both species were tall and thin, and had similar proportions.

"Look at their skin" Coulson pointed out, zooming in on the pictures.

"It's… barbed."

They went on, finding more and more similarities for several more minutes.

"So, these things that we have now… They're somehow related to frost giants?" Coulson mused. That was, after all, what the file that Ward had pulled was about.

"I guess so, sir. I mean, there are clearly a lot of differences, but I'd say that that's the closest thing we've got so far."

"Damn, I didn't even know they'd been to Earth before. I mean, I knew of them, but not that they'd actually been here…"

"This file was clearance level 9, back when S.H.E.I.L.D. and clearance levels still existed…"

Coulson chuckled, but was cut off as FitzSimmons ran in and pulled up satellite footage on the monitor while yelling at one another and at him and Ward. Coulson was about to tell them to calm down, but the words died in his throat as he saw what exactly they were going on about.

The four of them stared in silent awe as not one but two of the creatures made their way out of the massive waves and vanished into the nearby woods.

AN: Please Please Please review! Whenever I get an email saying that I have a review, it reminds me to write more and when I finish writing a new chapter I always post a new chapter so reminding me to write is a good thing! And giving me ideas is a good thing! I've actually just started writing a plot element based off of a review I got back on chapter 1 or 2, so it does make an impact! And it gives me warm fuzzies inside :) Anyways, Mwah! 3