EPISODE 2 -- "Do Touch That Doctor"
The next morning was hard for Darcy. As she had tried to fall asleep she struggled both with the idea that she had seen and heard and, more important, felt what she had in the recording room. At the same time, however, she couldn't deny that her body was still responding to whatever had happened: she had still been turned on. Lying in the bunk in the small private room that they had provided for her as a civilian scientist she began to realize that she was still so turned on that the touch of the blanket, the heat of the room, and even the very movement of the air stimulated her in a way that she had never felt before. She felt so oddly, strangely sexually alive and she couldn't help but find herself succumbing to it as she lay there in the dark, listening to the bustling of the agents around her, diminished as it was for the nighttime shift. Less than half an hour after she'd laid down she found her fingers creeping along her body, slipping down her flat, not-quite-toned stomach to the space between her legs where the very first touch of her body already began to electrify her. If she had considered not giving in that consideration was gone at the moment she made contact with herself. A finger slipped in, then a second, and soon she was gently moving herself toward her second orgasm of the evening, made easier by the fact that she didn't have to be hiding her actions or keeping her clothes on.
Her hips moved up against her fingers as she thrust them into herself again and again, gently stimulating herself but getting much more of a return on her investment than she was used to. The blankets began to shift downward from all the motion and soon slipped off of her breasts, falling to her stomach and exposing her from the ribs up. Her nipples hardened fully and she found her other hand squeezing one breast and then the other before pinching her nipples. That second orgasm that she sought came within ten minutes, then another five after it, and then yet another one an additional five minutes beyond that before she felt her tiredness and horniness trade places in priority and she began to drift off, one hand in her panties and one clutching a breast, their actions still almost feeling more guided by a lover than by herself as they slowly ebbed away into sleep.
But in the morning all of that had seemed so strange. Had she really seen it? Had she really felt compelled to finger herself? She didn't know anymore and without hard evidence it was hard to make a call. So much of her life as a scientist had to do with her ability to interpret and arrange data and ignore feelings and emotions as evidence. Feelings weren't proof of anything. She stirred her coffee and looked at her watch, knowing they had a briefing at 0930 in the conference room to start working on their new tactics toward resolving the anomaly. The top brass was in the room now, talking to each other in a pre-meeting to determine that course of action and how it would play out. Hayward was in there, the leader of S.W.O.R.D. and of the operation, as well as the FBI agent, Jimmy Woo, who was a nice guy as far as Darcy could tell. He seemed like he was a people-first kind of man and that was rare in his position and immediately made him interesting to Darcy since, like what was going on over in Westview, that made him an anomaly.
Finally, 0930 came and she got up and headed to the conference room only to crash into Meech at the doorway, forcing her to take a step back.
"Excuse me, Doctor," he said with a smile as he, too, stepped back, offering her the doorway.
"Hey, man, it's your hallway, too," she quipped back.
"And my doorway, too," Wyatt announced as he stepped between the two of them. His words weren't unkind or even annoyed but Darcy was a bit saddened that they seemed to put a lid on whatever little moment she and Meech were sharing. She wasn't looking to find moments with him, it wasn't like she was looking to find a man on this mission but he was interesting, too. And handsome. And maybe he would be interested in...she stopped herself. Where was that line of thinking coming from? She was a professional and she was on the job and she had hardly been hard up for sex in her life. After Meech entered the room she shook her head to clear it and then sat down at the table, working to finish her coffee as she waited for the meeting to start.
Over the next few minutes, more men and women filed into the room until it was relatively full and then Agent Woo stepped up to the white board to start leading the conversation. Darcy threw a quick look around, wondering where Hayward was but then deciding she was happy enough with the fact that he was gone to not care about exactly where he was gone to. The FBI agent started talking and outlined what they knew from the previous day, giving highlights from the episode, or at least from the version that all of them had seen before the deleted scene that Darcy had enjoyed.
She listened to the briefing, half-distracted by the sounds of various field agents rolling tube TVs into the command post, the conference room, and just about every other available space within the S.W.O.R.D. field base. They'd even replaced the physio-scope in the recording room with a tube TV, though it was significantly smaller than the one at her workstation in the command room.
"First and foremost," Agent Woo said as he transitioned them from a recap to tactics, "our main objective is to get any intel on Captain Rambeau, but originally, this case was a missing person, so we're going to start there. We've successfully identified two individuals inside the Westview anomaly." He turned and placed two photographs up on the board facing the conference table, showing old black-and-white sitcom versions of Wanda Maximoff and Vision, both of them Avengers. "Let's keep going," he said as he turned back to the gathered personnel.
She got up, leaving the conference room to head back to her workstation, hoping that she could prove herself further to the organization by helping to find the identities of some of the people. S.W.O.R.D. was a government organization but she had to have a few tricks up her sleeves that they weren't going to think of, or at least not think of as quickly as her. She sat at her workstation and quickly connected to her offsite toolkit and dug through some things that friends of her had developed over the years. After half an hour she had downloaded and begun to implement the facial recognition software from a friend of hers who had gone on to eventually be arrested for working with the domestic terrorist hacktivist organization The Rising Tide. Still, his work was good and once she had it fully set up it would take any input video and grab captures frame-by-frame that would then be cross-referenced across social media platforms and local databases, eventually spitting out other photos and even public access records like driver's licenses.
Darcy prepped the program and then set the playback from the previous night's episode of the sitcom to run through it. As she watched the episode she couldn't help but think back to the previous night and remember the scene that she had watched privately in the recording room: the scene with Wanda and Vision having sex in their marriage bed. She remembered what had come after that, too, her sudden compulsion to pleasure herself as she watched. As she sat at the computer in the very public command center she suddenly felt the same impulse, as though the very memory of the previous night had the power to push her to slip her fingers into her pussy once again. She felt herself getting aroused, her pussy growing wet and her nipples hardening slightly before she leaned forward, slapping herself on the cheek to try and get herself to calm back down. She stood up, stretched a second, and then headed for the coffee station in the mess hall near the entrance to the structure. As she passed the conference room she saw Jimmy writing on the white board, 'Why hexagonal shape?'
It was a good question, and one that she had wondered herself. The coffee maker rumbled to life as she punched the buttons on it and a minute or so later she had a hot drink in her hands. Darcy leaned back against the wall of the corridor and watched the various people going by, none of them paying her the slightest mind until she saw Meech walking past. He smiled and raised his hand and she waved back, taking a sip of her drink as he stepped outside. Satisfied that she had done enough to calm down her out-of-control loins, Darcy headed back to her workstation only to find that the screen showed that enough of the video had been digested for the software to have spit out a response. The program had more than enough footage of the boss and his wife from the dinner episode to find them online. Smiling, she printed the results and then headed to the conference room.
"Mr. and Mrs. Hart. Played by Todd and Sharon Davis," Darcy called out. As Jimmy turned to face her she held up two S.W.O.R.D. forms with their attached photos, copies of their drivers' licenses, and as much information as the program had gleaned so far. She added them to the board next to the photos of Wanda and Vision, finding herself avoiding eye contact with the female Avenger's image as though even just her image was going to be enough to arouse Darcy again.
She headed back out to the workstation and saw that the facial recognition software was still going and decided not to slow it down by trying to run anything else on that equipment at the moment. Time to try and follow one of her other hunches. She walked to the front of the building again and grabbed another cup of coffee before she called over an officer.
"What can I do for you, Doctor?" he asked.
"Yeah, I have a working theory on how to make contact with the inside of the anomaly and try to communicate with Wanda Maximoff. I need you to get me a few things so I can make that happen, okay, buddy?" she asked him, sipping her drink.
"What do you need, Doctor?"
She pulled a slip of paper from her pocket and handed it to him. "I need you to get one of those nice pickup trucky thingies that you guys have and park it with the bed facing the anomaly and then I need all of those pieces of tech in the back of it so that I can get the right signal modulation to get through the Kirby barrier of the anomaly's cosmic radiation matrix."
He looked at her blankly and then lifted an eyebrow.
She tapped the paper in his hand. "Fetch!"
The man rolled his eyes but then stepped out the door of the building and headed off, she assumed, to go get the things that she had asked for. Satisfied that the ball was now rolling she headed back to the command center, where Agent Woo was now standing watching the various stations where members of the team were working. She was barely seated back at her station before Meech came back into the room with a pile of papers in his hand and tapped the FBI agent on the shoulder.
"Agent Woo."
Jimmy took the pile of papers and flipped through it quickly before looking up and addressing the room. "Abhilash Tandon is Norm."
Darcy looked at Meech as he went to walk out and smiled at him to let him know she thought he did a good job. He winked back at her just before disappearing into the corridor and once again she felt that schoolgirl-esque swirl of excitement move through her. She took a hefty swig of her coffee and nearly made herself splutter as some of went down the wrong pipe as she tried to get herself completely back in line for the task at hand. What was wrong with her?
Agent Woo had gone back into the conference room and put Abhilash Tandon's info on the board and was writing on the whiteboard again. 'Why sitcoms?' 'Same time & space?' 'Is Vision alive?' She couldn't help but think how alive he looked the night before but in seriousness that was one of her most pressing questions, too. Was Vision alive? Was Wanda okay? Were the other people actors, prisoners, or something else? Was the anomaly dangerous? The recognition software blinked at her again and she saw another completed connection.
"Harold Copter is Jones," Darcy called out from her workstation. She printed the information out and then took it into the conference room and put it up on the board for Agent Woo before starting to head back. As she entered the corridor, though, she saw the officer from before heading toward her and she stopped to talk to him.
"Doctor, I've arranged for what you requested and it's waiting outside."
"Rad," she answered him and then offered a high five, which he declined to give. She shrugged and stepped past him and then went out the door and down the hill toward a pickup truck that was parked roughly where she had wanted it. Closer would've been better for signal penetration but it was certainly close enough to have a reasonable expectation of success.
Once she was at the vehicle she could see that while they had gotten her everything that she requested, they had put it into the bed of the pickup haphazardly and hadn't connected anything. Luddites. She got to work assembling the system the way she wanted it and then had another grunt help her run over power from one of the nearby generators that was keeping lights shining on both the field base and the anomaly itself. All told it took her about half an hour to get it all in place and ready for later in the evening during the broadcast that she assumed would give them a second episode.
Darcy stepped back inside of the base just in time to hear Agent Woo call out, "We got Isabel Matsueida cast as Beverly!"
