“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----
------ End of Episode 2----
