Entry 4 : The Missing Person and a Bet

Entry 4

2008

AFGHANISTAN

“Sir, would it be cool if I take a picture with you?”
“Yes, its very cool.”

Just then a moment later, the front car of the convoy blows up. Before my mind could process what happened infront of me, another bomb dropped just where it landed before, with a loud thud. Everything near my ear rang. The front foreman driver and his commander leaves the humvee to hold the ground. Both of them get shot as soon as they leave the armoured car. The soldier sitting beside me was ordered to stay with me but seeing his fellows being shot at, he also ran out. Within seconds I lost him in all the dust flying around. Feeling like a chicken in an oven getting reading to be turned on for frying, even I left the vehicle, dogging the bullets running towards a rock away from the road. There were still shots being fired behind me and more grenades and bombs were thrown towards the armoured convoys. As easy as it was to understand, this was a terrorist attack. Just as I took out my phone to call Obadiah Stane, a missle landed just where I was hiding. At that moment, it felt like that time has stopped. A lot of memories crossed my mind. Pepper, Dad. I could see all their faces.  

Bomb near me exploded and sent me flying across the ground. I felt a deep pain running through my chest. Only one thought now surrounded my mind, Is this the end of Tony Stark?

HALF WAY ACROSS THE WORLD

It was a start of a gentle morning here in New York. I woke up on time to do my workout sessions in the park. Normal strength training to keep the body ready whenever the situation required to. It had been a long time since I had been on a field mission. Missing all the action made me a bit nervous sitting around holed up either in a bar or doing all the research work back at my apartment. All I used to live up for, was the adrenaline rushing through the veins when I was on a mission or when bullets were fired at me. In a manner of saying, with all these three years of covert mission and job, I missed the bullets the most.

Coming back from the park, I saw Phil standing outside my apartment with his matte black range rover and shades. All he said was there’s a problem back at the base. Someone went missing.

As we entered the SHIELD headquarters, I saw Nick Fury standing there waiting for us. We all entered his office, Nick activated the systems that made the room sound-proof from inside and so no one could hear outside what was being discussed inside the room. Nick used this system a lot as he barely trusted anyone here even in the SHIELD. It was me who recovered this sound-proofing tech from a 19 year old back in Canada when he happened to create it for a college project. Fury had a tense look on his face all this time. As we settled down, he told that Howard Stark’s son Tony Stark, had gone missing. He was in Afghanistan on a job when his convoy was attacked by terrorist and he was taken. It was yet unclear if they had killed him or not, but the latter seemed unlikely. No ransom calls had been made yet and this tensed Fury. Fury had always wanted Stark in his team after Howard’s contribution to the SHIELD and the world. Howard Stark was one of scientist who gave the world its first atomic bomb. Fury believed that Tony Stark had the caliber to live upto his father’s image but his attitude with all the riches he had, every senior member of SHIELD voted against hiring Tony. But Fury looked out for Tony more than anyone ever knew. Tony was never told what his father did in reality.  

After Tony was taken a hostage, Fury called a Board of Director’s meeting asking them to send a search party for Tony, but as decided before, SHIELD didn’t find Tony as an asset so they denied any forces to be deployed finding him. So that’s when Fury decided to do what he does best, going outside the system. Fury wanted me to scan the areas for any radio broadcast while Phil went into the hiding in Afghanistan looking and tracing Stark’s captors footsteps.

BACK IN 2005

It was my 67^th day here in New York with Ted and his friends. I had grown fond of all of them by now. Something told me that this mission was going to be a long one so I decided to start bonding with all of them on a personal level to know them more. The more time I spent with them, the more I got to know about the normal American life.

 I never had the chance to live a normal life. With my dad himself being a SHIELD agent with clearance level 10, my training began from the day I was born. Afterall he wanted his name to be continued in SHIELD after him. My youth was a particular difficult one with all the training hours I had to log in.  

Out of all, Barney Stinson turned out to be a great guy. He was funny, witty and he did stupid things to impress others but he was a guy good at heart. I could tell. He did a lot of stupid stuff everyday just to prove a point or other and tried to get others also be a part of it. It was yet another one of those days when everyone was hanging around the bar like usual. Barney with another one of his crazy schemes started offering me money to say some words he wanted on tv while I was doing my news coverage. I liked the sound of this game. It was a challenge that Barney offered me and I loved competiting. Barney was a player and he always offered big stakes for a game and that’s what made this game interesting. I never had the chance to fool around or do stupid stuff all together. I accepted the challenge and hence started a few days of fun.

Who said SHIELD agents couldn’t have a bit of fun themselves while undercover. It was during that time I fell in the horse poop while shooting one of the set-up news. It wasn’t intended to happen but when it happened, it stayed on for long. Story being aired on national television, it attracted many viewers around the world. Even SHIELD agents saw it and gave me a smirk whenever I walked through SHIELD headquarters later on for months.

2008

It was very uncanny that Fury called and informed that Stark has been found and will soon be returning back home in a military assisted plane. Tony had somehow escaped from the hands of his captors in Afghanistan after being held prisoner for 3 months. It was a suspicious occurring that a normal man ‘gunned’ his way through terrorist captors unharmed and into the hands of U.S military. Nick Fury decided it was time Tony heard from SHIELD and he asked me to do this. But knowing how similar behavior he had to Barney, womanizer and eccentric, I refused and asked Coulson to go instead of me. He might be able to get more from him than I could.

---------- END OF Episode 4-------

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Entry 3: The First Avenger

Entry 3

Somewhere in Oscorp Tower

I just got off the phone with Coulson asking him to be at Stark Towers to debrief Tony for the AVENGERS initiative and its changed motives. The Stark’s have been related to SHIELD for a long time , with Howard Stark as the best mechanical engineer SHIELD or then known as the STRATEGIC SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH (SSR) ever had, his son, Tony could be on his very way to carry on that name after being initiated as the next AVENGERS member. 

BACK IN 2005

I had been going through the case files SHIELD dropped at my home and after scanning through them for hours, I found no good leads to work on. Very few candidates were of specific interest but something big was needed for AVENGERS. It was then I decided to call up Nick and asked him for the clearance to SSR file records, from the time-way back SHIELD was founded. I had a particular interest in Howard Stark’s records. He was famous in SSR back then to log onto every experience he had with a project so it would help him or others in the future. He had worked on many of the few secret and covert missions back in his days and his records could help me find something of use for the project AVENGERS. 
It was Stark who lead the search party to find the sunken plane of Captain Rogers or famously called as Captain America. He was a successful lab experiment which gave him tremendous powers but died trying to stop Red Skull from blowing up few American cities off the map. He was one of the first superheroes, world had ever known. It was suspected at that time that the super-serum given to him would have still kept him alive after the accident because of the fast regeneration of his cells.

Howard Stark found no clue of the airship Captain crashed in the known area after hours of finding it. All known technology was used to find the ship but it went to a waste. After Stark, no other scientist or SHIELD director took to finding the air plane. It seemed like a dead end to everyone. I wanted to look for myself at the personal records of Stark. If somehow the plane could be found again using SHIELD’s current resources with the Captain’s body inside the cyrostorage sleep his serum had induced him into, SHIELD just might have its first AVENGER ready.       
All this could be done only when the case files arrive from SHIELD after Fury’s clearance orders lands in from Geneva. Till then, I had a few other assignments to work on. 

One of them was my secret identity, Robin and the plunders in her life. Knowing Ted and his friends was a part of my assignment and the moment I got distanced from them, my secret identity was in trouble. Ted proposed to me on the very first date which shocked me to the core. Given to my history, this act made me think again about my secret crush towards him. Him being embarrassed by his act, left soon after and I didn’t see him or heard again from him for days. I couldn’t risk my cover being blown so I tracked around his friends and soon followed his red-head friend to the bar Mclaren’s and acted as if I ran into her. This act got me in face with Ted again and Lily’s fiance Marshal.  With all this, I befriended Lily and found her great. She was a sweet girl who was a teacher in the kindergarten.

My secret life was getting a bit hectic. SHIELD had asked me to shoot a few of my news segments before time so they could be used to telecast on TV when I am on a different work assignment somewhere else. Many of the stock-telecast had been shoot at different locations with fake news SHIELD created to be telecasted later on TV. On one of the sets, where I was doing a news about a kid being stuck in the prize machine, Ted walked into and invited me to one of his parties. The set was filled with SHIELD agents. Seeing Ted , everyone went into their positions and tried and hide the fact that this was one of the fake news.

When I was getting ready for the party in the evening , SHIELD’s car parked in front of my apartment and the boxes filled with SSR papers were stacked in my living room one by one. Fury’s order flew in and Coulson sent the files over as per Fury’s order. I decided to not go to the party and instead stay over and look over the files. These files needed Level 10 clearance level to have a look which only Fury and handful of other members had the power to. Being given access by Fury to these files meant Fury expected good results very soon. Going to a party to bring the spark back with Ted could wait for a day. The next moment I got down to going through the files one by one and had a feeling this would go on for hours.

35 Hours Later

It was 2AM in the morning and I had skipped one more of the parties that Ted invited me to. This was the second party I skipped to finish the work SHIELD assigned me . My head was deep inside maps scanning the area Stark had approved to lead the search party. Agent Carter was one of the few people who were overlooking this operation along with Howard Stark. All the maps had huge search areas circled across few spots which were assumed as the crashing site for the plane. One of the circles had one thing which other circles didn’t. One of them had a pool of islands near to the end of one of the search area. Going through the logs given by various crew members, none of them had checked the islands as they were very near to the periphery of the search circles and were inhibited for the past 100 years or so.

The next moment I was dialling Fury’s secret personal number for emergencies and put phone to my ear waiting for him to pick up. The bell rang for few seconds and a deep voice replied.

“Sir, I think I may have found Captain America’s sunken ship…..”

------- END of Episode 3---------

Entry 2

“Have you met Ted? “

That’s what I heard when the blondie tapped on my shoulder. I turned and saw that guy in the brown coat standing there awkwardly as if he wasn’t even prepared for the meeting. Ted had certain charm to him when you saw him standing there all shy and awkwardly moving. He didn't look like your usual player types. He had that serious, almost an academic look about him, unlike his wingman.

Very soon, I felt something for Ted very deep , for the first time in my life. With all the training my dad and SHIELD gave me, I thought I have all the control I will ever need to keep my feelings and emotions in check.  The connection with him was almost an instant one. Just thinking about him brought a smile on my lips. Meeting with Ted was just a coincidence, a good one but this meeting turned out to change the entire plan SHIELD had in mind for my Robin character. 

As it turned out my attachment to Ted grew in days and as clear as it was, his for me too. I was in love with this Ted guy within few days and for the first time in my life I felt this feeling and it felt wonderful. SHIELD agents do not have the liberty to fall in love with normal people and live a normal life for the rest of their days. Instead they have to avoid any such contact and indulge only when the case needs you to. I, anyways overpowered by my crush towards Ted, agreed to go on a date with him the next night and trusted to follow my instincts this time instead of the SHIELD’s rule book. As it turned out, SHIELD didn’t approve of my relations with Ted and a bunch of civilians in the beginning, fearing the risks it might pose and the harm it would do to the cover up story SHIELD had staged for me earlier. But it was Nick Fury himself who thought the opposite and wanted my friendship with civilians to grow deep which would somehow strengthen my story and this would give me a strong cover up background I needed for the project AVENGERS.

After SHIELD approved of my secondary social life and did a thorough background check on each of them, I received the case files for the project AVENGERS the very next day. SHIELD had dropped the classified case files in a dozen boxes in my living room along with the list of names, alias, addreses along with passports I was supposed to use to investigate the best assets SHIELD would ever have in their court side by the end of a decade.

What project AVENGERS aimed was to have the world’s gifted men and women in a team coming together to work for a common goal and reunite as and when the world needed them to. In the past many decades of SHIELD’s working, SHIELD witnessed a lot of super beings or men and women from earth with extraordinary minds , having the abilities no other common person could even imagine to possess. These people would turn out to either be, beings from a different galaxies or a lab experiment gone wrong. Some of them had those abilities since birth, lying dormant till some strong event triggered them, usually during pre-teens/teens. This anomaly, was however a double-edged sword. The mere proven fact that super beings have now and then surfaced on earth with time, meant that there are also evil powers lurking out there in different galaxies to which the earth had no means to stop them if the situation required them to. 

That’s what project AVENGERS aimed at. To create the final barrier to protect Earth, by any means if any such situation arised in the coming years. But before the world’s best assembled in a room, there needed to be a lot of screening which the possible “candidates” couldn’t know of. From a pool of candidates and possible selections, only the best had to be selected. The ones with the best of minds,powers and whatever that made them special , would one day be called the TEAM AVENGERS and for people around the world, they would be heroes, for when the time needs them to make the appearance in front of the world.  

But selecting the members for the team wasn’t an easy job. The members SHIELD had in mind for the team, have now and then been popping up on different parts of the world and assumed that very soon more number of them would come up in the coming years. To research them, I was needed to be in different parts of the world and find out every aspect about them without revealing the existence of SHIELD and after a few years submit my report to SHIELD so the most useful/probable/benefiting candidates could be approached by Nick himself. Here my news job coverup was useful. I could go anywhere when I was needed to for the project and coverup as a field job of a news reporter could be used almost anywhere. This wouldn’t make my friends suspicious and would keep my cover intact. Where I couldn’t go or risk exposing myself, I could send in the best agents the SHIELD had given me for my disposal to complete the reports. It was a slow process, but an important one.

FEW YEARS DOWN THE LINE….

Both my personal and professional life had become a complete mess.

SHIELD was at its most vulnerable phase right now. After the recent events in New Mexico involving a demigod from another universe, Nick Fury was anxious to take the Project Avengers to its next stage. He was right to do so.

We had initially rejected Tony Stark for the Avengers initiative and wanted to use him only as a consultant. This was about to change very soon though and for worse.

I had been obsessed with Ted yet again and was still thinking about him while making my way towards the Stark Tower to debrief Stark about the Avengers initiative. Nothing to look forward to, given his profile drawn by agent Romanoff-narcissistic, reckless, arrogant. But it was necessary at the same time and important enough for a high level agent to attend to it.

It was only when I heard the security dragging some intern named Rodrigo Guevara out of the building that I saw the building’s name plate and realised I was in the wrong building. Both of them were equally tall, grand and high tech. Oscorp tower,was indeed a worthy rival.

As I was late, and we had a brief window to catch hold of him, I sent Coulson in place of me…


------ End of Episode 2----

Entry-1(Pilot)

Year 2030

What started as a normal day turned out to be the day I would never forget. It has been months since I took an early retirement from SHIELD and years since I had heard from my friends. The last I talked to them, Barney’s daughter Ellie had all grown up and was turning into a beautiful little lady whereas Ted was still coming over the news of his wife, Tracy’s death. This year was her 6^th year death anniversary. And Lily and Marshal were all busy with the three kids growing up and Marshal’s career as a Judge and then a Mayor.

It was 6’0 clock when I took my dogs for the daily walk in the nearby park and returned in exactly 20 minutes. As soon as I returned, I heard the doorbell ring. Due to some reason the latest ‘Door Monitoring Automated Camera’ installed by SHIELD didn’t work and I had to go over to the window to see who it was. And that’s when I got the shock of my life. There stood Ted with the Blue French Horn that he had stolen from a restaurant quite a few times in the past, raising it up towards me. Does it mean what I think it does? It is as if I have been waiting for years to witness this day and watching him standing down there felt like he had been there just the night before- way back in 2005.

It was the happiest moment for me in years. My marriage with Barney has ended after running its course for 3 years and that has left me shattered from within. I had told Barney the truth about my real life and my involvement with SHIELD all these past years and he supported me to the end with it. But as days passed, we got new locations every week , new identities , and moreover risky missions exposed Barney more to the dangerous world out there and had had anything happened to him, I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself. It was further made even harder due to Barney’s insistence on how he was capable of handling the risk, even reminding me of PLEASE. That was no where as dangerous as my missions. After 3 years we both decided to end the relationship for the better, though Barney still wasn’t completely sure. I had to be firm. Sometimes, you have to make certain sacrifices when in love. We agreed not to tell anyone from the group the real reason behind the split.

All this took me back to the first time I came to New York City. I was working in the SHIELD’s Canada Department overlooking covert missions in the so called ‘ The Great White North’  and as a promotion I had been transferred to New York for the project code named ‘AVENGERS’. SHIELD had been working on this project for a long time now and wanted someone who could work undercover to keep this research a covert mission. When I landed in New York, I was immediately taken to the SHIELD headquarters by an agent named Coulson and was briefed about the project by Nick Fury himself. At that time my birth name was Maria Hill and I was Agent Hill for everyone in SHIELD. But for the AVENGERS project, I was given a new identity by the name ROBIN SCHERBATSKY , a girl who came from Canada in search for a news anchor job in New York and started working with the ‘Metro News 1’ as an anchor that does those late night shows that nobody anyway sees. An ideal cover for a secret agent. This thing was to my advantage. The secret identity was necessary because very few people in SHIELD knew about the project and Nick Fury suspected there to be a mole inside of SHIELD and didn’t want to jeopardize the project.A lot of important people were in the circle of investigation regarding the project and if they somehow got the wiff of the news that an agency known as SHIELD was investigating in them,this couldn’t be allowed. Along with the AVENGERS , SHIELD was working on the helicarrier, an airborne mobile work station for SHIELD with advance capabilities. The Helicarrier was hundred years ahead of its time and technology and minds that created it had created a masterpiece that had no competition to it.

My work with the project AVENGERS was simple. I was to be a normal, beer drinking, football fanatic Canadian, living in America and working in Metro News 1 as a late night special news reporter. My fake profile and background family had been created to back my story up. I had to live a normal life, make a few friends to solidify my story and just spend time with them while working on the project. It was a slow mission so I had to settle myself in the secondary life but falling in love and starting a family was not on the list. Fraternising with people and bringing them close to heart was out of question. Down the line , fake boyfriends had been lined up for me to portray me as a normal girl with normal likings and disliking and so I couldnt be questioned by anyone. Everything was set up perfectly, the story background was strong, all the necessary documents were furnished, my apartment had been bought and all payed for, in the name of Robin Sherbatsky and I was ready to start my work researching about the few most important assets SHIELD could ever have in its history.

But all went awry when I went to a bar named ‘ McLaren’s ‘ for celebrating the start of a new mission here in New York.

There I was standing near my booth talking to an old-time friend from Canada with whom I was in the SHIELD academy reminiscing about the past when I saw a medium height guy wearing a brown blazer looking at me. For a moment it felt like he was staring at me but just then we made eye contact. It almost made me smile when I saw the look on this guy’s face, it was as if he was in awe after looking at me. The guy looked cute standing there staring at me with complete wonder in his eyes. He then turned and started talking to his blond haired friend standing behind in a three-piece suit in slow whispers about something I couldn’t  hear when I walked past them near the bar. It was force of habit that I wanted to hear what they were talking about, if they somehow had identified me from some of my last missions and were planning on taking me out as soon as possible. Just then this blond guy tapped on my shoulders and said … “ Hi, Have you met Ted? “

------------END of EPISODE 1--------------------------