You can check out anytime you'd like.. [Hotel Corona Mingle]

[thespaceopera]

Who: The Fleet!
Broadcast: If you want
Action: Hotel Corona or Planet Ikke
When: December 7th onward



[After the mystery and isolation of their last destination, the Marsiva seems determined to head to brighter, busier territory. After a long journey through remote, nebula-painted space, speeding along at a brisk pace for the Host ship, the Marsiva brings her Fleet to a sudden and prominent point of traffic.

It seems that the Fleet has happened upon some sort of vacation destination! Maybe Atroma thinks that the passengers deserve some rest and relaxation... or just wants to distract them with something huge and shiny.

Welcome to Hotel Corona! Feel free to enjoy yourselves and enjoy the sites! If a hotel resort isn't your thing, you can head on over to the nearby planet and explore it's icy wonders.

In order words: it's a mingle!! Everyone get in! ]

[>> Plot Post]

Comments

[mucked]

My dear, [ a little familiar, perhaps, but she feels at least as near to friendship with natasha as she did with angie. ] You're leagues off from what I've seen coming out of them.

[ honest enough, then, to suggest her curiousity surrounds how natasha had survived that place with her sanity intact. ]

[outstandingbalance]

[Oh, Peggy. It's flattering you think Natasha came out of it sane, rather than carefully having to put herself together again.]

You didn't see me when I was still working for Russia.

[mucked]

That's fair -- I didn't. [ but she can't shake how unlikely it'll be to rehabilitate dottie underwood. and she can't help but compare the two assets. ] In that case, I imagine you've come a damn far way.

[outstandingbalance]

I like to think so. [Most of the time, she even believes it.] I've had a lot of help with it. SHIELD helped. The Avengers helped.

[No matter how flawed either organization has been or becomes, there is still that. It's part of why the Avengers were important to her; why she didn't want to see Steve and Tony pull them apart.

It's worth letting Peggy know that.]

[mucked]

[ it makes a difference. in truth, it's one of the few decent things she's heard someone say about shield since its existence was first uncovered to her. that it should have provided anything helpful to a formidable creature like natasha?

well. maybe she can begin to forgive herself her missteps with dottie. with others. so what natasha tells her is deeply appreciated, even if she doesn't say so. ]

What will you do now that the latter's disbanded?

[outstandingbalance]

Survive. These things happen. [It's sad, but she would be the first person to tell someone else not to hold onto something too long.] Empires fall. Regimes change. Not much else you can do but move on.

[mucked]

-- That sounds a little like a mercenary's philosophy, doesn't it?

[ if it's an accusation, it's a sympathetic one. ]

[outstandingbalance]

Or a Soviet one. Not the first time for me, what can I say.

I'd be surprised if it were the last.

[mucked]

Far be it from me to throw stones. [ glass houses, after all. ] From what I can tell, allegiance becomes a far trickier beast in the upcoming decades.

[ it's strange to think that she had it easy but -- in effect, hydra was an obvious enemy. they didn't always use obvious methods, perhaps, but they were obviously and unarguably wrong. it lent a righteousness to peggy's career that the following years don't have the luxury of offering.

or so it seems. ]

[outstandingbalance]

Allegiances were always tricky for some people. Sometimes the enemies are easier to pick up than others, though.

[HYDRA did make things easy by being so overtly evil. But some people would say that of Red Room too.]

[mucked]

Things are beginning to look more and more hazy -- back home. Post-war factions within the same government all jockeying for relevance. [ ... ] I've been trying to suss it out, and I suspect that's where SHIELD finds its roots. The days of the SSR are numbered. We all feel it, back home. And seems like any agent with ambition is trying to figure out where the power will be housed when the dust settles.

[outstandingbalance]

The early Cold War was a complicated time. Believe me, I know about that.

[There's just a degree to which Natasha is going to have to accept her past is out now.]

That's part of what made the Red Room. Russian intelligence was restructuring, competing among themselves to be the most effective. The competition makes people sharp.

[Peggy has seen just how sharp.]

[mucked]

[ she can't be certain whether the project (or is better approximated as a location?) had touted that name in 1946 -- but it doesn't matter. the tactics are similar enough. the red room may be a kind of evolution of what she saw back in russia. and, in which case, she's alarmed by just how sharp the competition can become. ]

When we came across an empty facility, I almost hoped it marked the end of whatever had been happening there. [ a rueful shake of her head. clearly, that was blind hope. ]

[outstandingbalance]

Sorry to say, it goes on in one form or another for... a long time. And it doesn't get any kinder.

[mucked]

We found a girl left wandering the facility. [ although, she supposes she ought to clarify: ] It wasn't really decommissioned. I doubt it. More like a well-spread table, left for us to find. It's where we located Doctor Fenhoff in the cells. [ right where leviathan wanted him to be found.

but she digresses. ]

She stabbed Dum-Dum Dugan. The girl, I mean. Barely came up to his knee and -- [ a shrug. she's not really surprised by it anymore. ]

[outstandingbalance]

He underestimated her. That's the idea, isn't it?

[She says it as a question when it's anything but. They both know that it is, that Natasha had done as much herself given the opportunity.]

It's not hard to picture exactly how that happened. It was a trap.

[Both the girl, and the facility.]

[mucked]

One that was terribly well set. [ regret stretches into her voice. ] It gave us much of what we needed to start clearing Howard Stark's name -- at the time, he was up on treason charges for selling weapons to the enemy. When, in point of fact, one of the women trained in that facility had infiltrated his vault.

[ -- there's enough heavy suggestion in her voice that she doesn't need to explain how that infiltration happened. ] Stole the whole lot.

[outstandingbalance]

From what I've heard about Howard, he would have been the ideal mark for a Black Widow. As hard as it might be to believe looking at my current resume, but we were always spies first.

And if Howard was anything like Tony, he's not all that hard for a well trained spy to manipulate.

[mucked]

Idealer than ideal. He barely remembered having brought her back to his private hangar. The whole bloody time he could have informed me of our best guess at a suspect, and it had barely registered with him. [ offensive, certainly.

only it gets worse: ] In the end, we tracked her down only because he makes a point of sending out a specially commissioned diamond bracelet to each of his -- companions. To commemorate their time together, apparently.

[outstandingbalance]

That's convenient. And also, possibly worse than Tony.

[As hard as that is to believe, somehow.]

Was that as demeaning as it sounds?

[mucked]

[ oh, he's absolutely worse. and yet somehow also better. it's a strange fine line. but peggy suspects things go south later on in the timeline.

as for how it sounds? ]

Well. I got treated to watching each girl we visited turn around and slap Howard's butler over the whole ordeal so -- yes, I imagine it's precisely as demeaning as it sounds.

[ poor mister jarvis. ]

[outstandingbalance]

[Not that it makes taking advantage of him better somehow, but a person like that was a weak link. Natasha could easily imagine how the Widow who ended up with the job would have viewed it.

And it's hard not to think someone was going to hit him like that eventually.]

At least his insulting habit came in handy in the end. It's just too bad that someone else had to pay for it.

[mucked]

[ don't worry; peggy's socked howard enough times that it shakes out, eventually, karma-wise. as for the man who did take those hits over the bracelets? ]

I wouldn't feel too bad about it. Mister Jarvis would endure that and worse for Howard's sake.

[outstandingbalance]

Must have done something right if he inspires that kind of loyalty.

[A lot like Tony, then.]

So the trap worked, but you were able to identify the agent and stop their plan?

[mucked]

In the nick of time, so to speak. [ she nearly leaves it at that -- the cheery happy ending. but peggy shakes her head. ] And not without loss of life. Howard was innocent of the charges laid against him, but it's hard to argue he quite deserved the depth of defense he got. In the end.

[ howard's a dear friend. truly. but some days, she struggles to justify the lives given so howard could go on turning a profit and living as though the rules never apply to him. ]