date: don't judge me wait weren't we talking about this before PR even came out? I'm ahead of my time okay. I WAS THINKING maybe very little interaction with actual aliens at this first point, and more they find the ship and go investigate and the ship like HAL's them into a corner. So it'll be less of a alien/sci-fi and more survival/horror. We could come up with all kinds of weird alien technology to totally trip the whole experience out-- my actual non-PR anchor point for this whole thing is Sphere if you've seen it and that helps frame this up for you. So as to the aliens, maybe from this weird encounter, alien life somewhere is alerted to the disturbance, and we can sort of suss it out from there without having to pre-emptively map out a whole potential plot just to play ours. YA FEEL? does any of this make sense. OTHER LONG TERM EFFECTS involve the initial hook for this IRT Tony's inventing an underwater city. That could be a thing. sadly whispers Namor....
OKAY Rhodey and Pepper: I kind of peppered (haha) the post that went up right before Rhodey and Pepper's with all of the visual data there is to gather from Tony's workshop, so you can ask me about these things as you go if anything seems important. What you actually need to find is this whole catalogue of encoded video data, which you pretty much can't do anything with yet because then you could just solve the case and smoke your pipe and have a nap. Between now and when-Alex-is-killed, Pepper and Rhodey can be butting up against Tony's security, so involving other people might be the reasonable way to suddenly be able to handle it. I'd actually recommend Kitty since that's pretty neat, and she's more of a codemonkey than Bruce is, but that's up to you and them. The videos, when you figure it out, are Tony's record of what happens when he's doing things for or around Hammer. He's gone super neurotic since he figured out that Justin could just ask him to forget stuff, so he's making back ups. He live-records through Extremis, so during the fight where USAgent eventually kills Alex, the goal is to broadcast it so everyone knows that Hammer's team is full of baby-murdering crazies, and are thus dismantled. Is that everything? More than you asked for? idk
Coulson's input would really be helpful though! there's a lot of possible denial, there's going to be a lack of trust for people like Thor, Tony and Jess who just want to be good people, and a character witness like this might smooth all of this over. Coulson is how everything goes back to normal, as ever.
HOPEFULLY WE CAN END THIS REALLY SOON. I'm trying, I am. I just...someone needs to lay claim to that final post. I mean, it's probably Devon because she has ninety characters who's fates are at risk in it, but I think she needs to know how who gets where.