Thirty days and counting
Who: Ellen Brandt What: Getting Her Feet Under Her When: Over the weekend Rating/Warnings: Green (Ellen considers her options)
"That's correct," the front desk agent said. "Your reservation is good for up to a month. At that point, you would need to find an alternative source of funding or vacate the room. Is there anything else?"
"No," Ellen said. "Thank you." She hung up. Her laptop was open before her on the writing desk. Numerous pages from a notepad were scattered around it with scribbled phone numbers and notes on them, the end result of a long day of internet searches and phone calls. A certified copy of her birth certificate would be sent to her by registered mail in a day or two. She assumed she'd need it to get her legal status corrected.
Her above-board bank accounts had long since been closed, their contents, her personal vehicle and possessions auctioned off to settle her debts, with the remainder distributed to the Veterans support charities her will stipulated. Her military disability payments had ended when she died, but given that she had two good arms again, it didn't really matter. It had taken hours to finally confirm that even the Cayman Islands-based secret account AIM had created for her was empty. The bank agents had been cagey but reading between the lines, she gathered that the US government had seized it, along with everything owned by AIM. Petty of them, but given that Killian had kidnapped and tried to murder President Ellis, understandable.
"So, to sum up," she said aloud to the empty room, "I have this hotel room for twenty-nine days longer, maximum. A laptop, a phone, plus $6,285 in cash. Oh--and a note letting me know that I can get enough additional cash to cover first and last month's rent on a place of my own." That would useful. She'd never lived in New York, and the average rental prices she'd searched this morning were shocking. In most of the country she could have rented a large house for the price of a one-bedroom here. And those were just the averages--they only went up from there.
"I'm gonna need a job," she told herself. "Momma likes to eat."
She'd searched the want ads, and damn if that wasn't depressing. It was either low-paying menial jobs or jobs requiring extensive schooling or experience she didn't have. She'd always hated job hunting anyhow. One nice thing about the military: you might not like your job, but you never had to go looking for one. They told you were you'd live and what you'd be doing.
She'd even perused the Stark Industries HR website. Even more depressing. It looked like Stark paid better than most even for secretaries and janitors, but she knew herself well enough to know she'd hate a job like that, and wouldn't be able to keep it for long as a result. And given that she knew bupkis about programming, engineering, sales, or the like, she'd never qualify for one of those. It was remotely possible she could get a job in security--if not for the niggling detail that she'd tried to kill the boss once. She didn't imagine that Stark's forgiveness would stretch far enough to trust her with a job like that.
Rejoin the military? That was an option. She had no criminal record; getting killed kinda put the kibosh on the government pressing charges for her actions as an AIM recruit. But she'd done that, and didn't feel the need to do it again. Besides, she didn't want to spend her enlistment acting as a guinea pig, and given her Extremis background, she didn't doubt that that would be the result. As far as she knew, she was the only surviving (for certain values of "surviving") host.
Play superhero? Join the Avengers? That didn't seem likely, given that Stark was one of them and arguably the leader of the team. Aside from the Avengers, there were other metahumans in New York. She'd read up on them, since some of them were on the Avengers Network. Ellen couldn't see herself running around in spandex, but the tabloids she'd studied suggested that most of them didn't either. None of them seemed to make a living at it, either.
Well, then. That left putting her skills and "special abilities" to work in the private sector. Working as a bodyguard, perhaps. She'd worked as muscle for Killian and AIM, but that hadn't worked out so well for her. And besides, he'd turned out to be crazy. So, not so much muscle. But a bodyguard? Yeah, she could do that. There had to be people with lot of money or power who could use a metahuman bodyguard, even if only to show off how much money and power they had.
Ellen wrote it out a notepad. Bodyguard. Yeah, that could work. And probably some of the folks on the Avengers Network could open a few doors for her. She'd have to ask them.