Who: Maria (Narrative/OT SHIELD agents) Where: Helicarrier When: March 25, evening What: Maria writes up her report and briefs everyone on what they'll be doing in Gotham. Rating: G, worksafe The first thing she did after being airlifted back to the Helicarrier was take a shower; a very long, hot shower as if she could scrub off the slime and smell of Gotham, even as she knew that it was something that wasn't physical and couldn't be washed away. Clean clothes, coffee, leaning back in her own ready room just off to her own command central with her own agents, Maria finally felt human again. This was how deployments were supposed to end; she was back where she belonged, doing what she was meant to do, after a successful field mission. At least as far as such things went.
All that was left was the paperwork and the debriefing. The blank report form was on the computer in front of her, and she'd scheduled the briefing. She just needed to get her thoughts together.
Reducing a complex city and situation like Gotham down to a straightforward report, much less provide recommendations for what they were going to do about it, was about as difficult as it sounded. She finally appreciated all the comments that the city was different than anything she'd ever encountered, that SHIELD would need to do what what Fury always talked about and be flexible to win or even make headway.
She picked at it, drank more coffee, paced, stood an hour or so on the command deck, gave the orders to cruise out to the other hotspots on the Eastern seaboard - because contrary to Gotham's opinion of itself, it was not the center of the world or SHIELD's only concern, though it helped they weren't ever going to be far in case things got hot suddenly - and then headed back to hammer out the last few bits.
Then she got more coffee, swept all her papers together, and went to the conference room to brief SHIELD.
It took an hour to say what could be summed up in a few sentences. "Gotham is overrun. Ordinary crime isn't ours to deal with, and it is still overrun. To combat it, we need to remove those causing the problem from the streets, and from Gotham entirely. To do this, we need to coordinate with the vigilantes already in the city, we need our own flexible investigative teams, and we need a place to imprison them that they cannot break out of in a week. And until we can establish that prison, we'll use the one that's already there."