(no subject)

[protect_and_survey]

It's very early morning at SHIELD headquarters - or very late, depending, and for Jemma Simmons it's a little bit of both. She did doze off while the spectrometer was running the latest sample, but she hasn't actually gone home yet, so she's breaking out the 'end-of-the-world' coffee brew. Fitz is still down in the lab, half-buried under a slew of schematics and wiring.

Early morning light filters through the cafeteria windows, and Jemma scrubs at her face, wondering if there's time to catch a quick shower downstairs in the gym.

Comments

[redintheledger]

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."

[protect_and_survey]

"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?"

[redintheledger]

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?"

[protect_and_survey]

"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.

[redintheledger]

"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.

[protect_and_survey]

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."