Jemma Simmons

It's too early for her to still be here. Far too early for coffee. Far too early to be reading reports by the light of coffee

Far too early for her to knock the coffee off table when she'd reached for it.

Far, far, far too damn early.

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"Oh dear," Jemma has a bit of a second-sense for disastrous spills, as they tend to mean a bit more than a stain that won't come out of the countertop when it happens in the SHIELD labs. "Here, let me grab some paper towels for you, can't have that setting..."

Her habitual and usually reciprocated babbling suddenly stutters to a stop because holy crap it's Black Widow.

Jemma feels under-dressed, as she pauses, stooped, half-way through mopping up spilled coffee.

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The silence is startling after the babble, so she looks up.

Ah.

"Hi," she says, dryly. "Paper towels are a good idea."

All the girl needs to do is notice that her earrings are a pair of daleks. Rumours of her being able to smell fear never did mesh well with Natasha Romanoff being a geek.

"Sorry if I startled you."

Edited Date: 2013-10-11 03:45 am (UTC)

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"Oh no, I mean, it's fine, hi," The lack of glowering helps (are those Daleks? Those are Daleks, Leo is never going to believe her, not ever) hit the play button. Jemma smiles, a big, friendly smile that she learned a long time ago hides the nerves (or, rather, gives people something else to think about besides the nerves that show still, unabated).

"Sorry, I just, I don't meet many" (living legends) "field agents since were sort of an insulated bunch in the labs and I'm Simmons, from Biochem? Did they work?"

Edited Date: 2013-10-11 03:54 am (UTC)

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It takes a moment for Natasha's mind to piece things together, but when it does, there is an actual smile, albeit briefly.

"The tranqs worked very well," she says. "Nice to meet you, Simmons." Then, a little wry, "I guess I don' need introduction?"

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"Oh, no, I mean, there was one already, sort of, the demonstration for my first-year class before the required physical training." The sort of utterly lying 'and you too can be this deadly' that only the truly stupid and soon-washed-out actually believed.

Leo had mooned for days.

She'd been more subtle. Sorta. Kind-of. Shut up.

"But they worked? I thought that adding a lamba-receptor agonist would speed up the process but there was always the danger of making it too easy to overdose and that'd just be completely useless as a capturing agent and there was some debate of going with a disassociative instead but those are always so unpredictable in clinical studies from subject to subject..."

And no one will let her dart people from her lab space. It's tragic.

Edited Date: 2013-10-11 05:05 am (UTC)

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"Far too unpredictable," she says in the tones of one who has lived through a couple (or...several. Or more then several. Over six, anyway) decades of tech advances and wild ideas cooked up in labs.

"The antidote leads to a bit longer than expected recovery time, if you were still tweaking."

It always pays to be polite to the people who dream up the poisons.

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Jemma's eyes light up with an almost predatory glee - she's being offered raw data. This is so very amazing. The last paper towel is pitched into the nearby bin and she drags her pile of readouts over , flips the top one over to find a blank spot, and pulls one of the pens that had been holding her hair into a sort-of-functional-bun free.

"Longer than expected? What did they tell you was expected, and what did you experience, because they aren't telling us anything yet and it's all a bit ridiculous."

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Melinda walks into the cafeteria. She looks like it could just as easily be the middle of the day.

Melinda pours herself a mug of coffee, and spends nearly a minute picking through the cold pastries, before making her way to Simmons' table.

"Morning," she says, smile at the edge of her mouth. She sets down her coffee and a ginger-lemon scone, sliding in easily across from her. The bear-claw ends up in front of Simmons.

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She lights up, pushing scattered read-outs from various machines into a somewhat sorta not-even-a-little-bit tidy mess of a pile in favor of sugar, because hi, thank you, biochem, sugar is integral to the key biochemical cycle of life and bear claws are the best form of sugar.

Duh.

"Good morning! Do you know if we'll be leaving soon? It's just that there's so much new data from the artifacts retrieved after the Battle of New York and some of it may be useful for things we're doing... for example," She fishes through the pile hastily to pull out a mass-spectrometer reading, already scribbled on in five different inks (in two different hands), all of the notes both in short-hand and in geek-speak (and some of them in actual-facts different languages because sometimes that's useful). "This one, I think if it were combined with the right catalyst the retrograde DNA synthesizers could convert the latent code into a paralytic neurotoxin... or it might explode. A bit."

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Melinda tilts her head, not pausing in dissecting her scone. She pops a piece of it -- slightly too stale -- into her mouth, and chews.

After a sip of coffee: "Wheels-up won't be until 0900. The flight crew's got their hands full right now." She snorts quietly. It's lucky Coulson went and got himself murdered; that sort of thing seems to hold a lot of sway with Fury and Hill.

"You'll need better predictions before bringing it to Coulson," she says, with a slight smile. "You get any sleep last night?"

She leaves off the ', kid," but just barely.

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"Well yes," There's a tone there, a 'I do happen to know proper safety protocols, we're not all Tony Stark' tone that she keeps more on a leash than, say, Fitz. "There's no sense going that far until there is a proper plan in place with usage and drawbacks."

The question about sleep just earns a slightly shifty look, and she avoids answering by eating. Because talking with your mouth full is rude.

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Melinda raises her eyebrows, but says nothing.

Her scone is rapidly disappearing.

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"I did have a nap." She protests, collecting scattered almond flakes and making a neat pile out of them.

"In the lab."

"While the quantitative PCR was finishing, but it's all very important research, and I couldn't just leave Leo down there alone..." At least not until she'd realized she was seeing double and really needed some coffee if she was going to make any sense of these numbers.

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She watches Simmons gather the almond flakes, half-listening to her explanation. There's always something important going on in SHIELD, but field agents don't have the luxury to chase after every lead they see at the expense of their health.

Coulson's the boss. It's not her place to bring them to task. She takes the last drink of her coffee. She'll feel better after tai chi.

"All right." She stands. "Tell Agent Fitz that I expect to see both of you on board by 0830. And," she adds, already at the side of the table. "Simmons?"

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