Peggy Carter and OPEN
New York stretched before the woman with the feeling of being so familiar, and yet not recognizing anything at all. The crumbling streets before her had the sensation of an old melody, barely remembered, caught in scraps of a few notes at a time and then lost as quick as they came. Wasn't there supposed to be a statue there? Maybe it was just a shadow. The spider webbed glass on the windows of a bodega hid nothing but rats and chill behind. Peggy stared across the desolation in the numbing shock which had set in since the moment she pulled herself from that pod at her back. She was not home any more. She didn't even know where home was. She took another step forward, testing the cracked ground beneath the sole of her boot. The pavement held, despite the rather heavy indent the pod she came in had left behind her. Nothing seemed real.
She gave herself exactly thirty seconds more to take in the quiet – too quiet – horror around her and the chaos in the distance, then she took a deep breath and straightened her shoulders. Clearly others had crashed, there were some flames, she heard some yelling in the distance. Standing in shock was helping no one, much less herself, and if she was trapped in awful circumstances there was no doubt others were also. She couldn't be alone. With a renewed sense of energy and determination, she turned back on the ball of her boot and returned to the pod which had carried her to this place. She leaned down, errantly pushing a few messy brunette strands of hair out of her eyes, and began to pick through the pieces of supplies that were in her pod. Some food, a blanket, a few other things. She quickly wrapped them all up in the blanket and knotted all the ends into a tight tie so she could shift it across her shoulder and carry everything while leaving her hands free. She then explored what was left of the pod, looking for any technology, weapons, communicators, anything that might help her. Everything seemed rather strongly put together, but she turned her hip and gave the door of the pod several violent, firm kicks. Once, twice, thrice... By the seventh kick, she managed to dislodge the door from the pod. It meant she had a fairly large piece of metal to use as a blunt weapon, or a shield, if she needed. Better safe than sorry.
Armed as best she could be and with her pack of supplies at her back, she released a short exhale and turned brown eyes back to the skyline. She needed to evaluate a direction to travel. Looking for signs of light, habitation, sounds, or even where the buildings were more dense than other places, she began to format a game plan in her head. She would map out the city as best she could, a block at a time. The most dense formation of buildings and trailing smoke lay ahead of her – in fact, behind her seemed very little of anything. Wasteland. Desert. Death. A shiver ran up her spine to look at it too long, a shiver that she had no time to indulge. So she didn't look back, she kept looking forward. She took another breath to steady her pulse in her throat and began the slow march forward into desolate buildings. She hugged the walls as she moved, doing her best to not expose her back to anything and using the door in front of her as a shield. It was the best strategy she had – and strategy seemed about the only thing she had left. That and her name...