Who: Kitty and Skye What: Skye does what she does best: Hack into places she shouldn't because she wants to know why Jemma can suddenly shoot like James Bond. When: Day after Warcrafting the Third ended Where: Skye's apartment, then a little trip in the Blackbird Warnings: Pretty family friendly with some language thrown in
Now that the latest round of insanity had stopped, Skye actually had time to sit and wonder what the hell had happened to Jemma. Sweet, innocent, scientist Jemma was suddenly all James Bond and Skye didn’t know what to make of it. Sure, she was definitely happy that Jemma had kept her alive, but it was still highly out of character for her ex-girlfriend.
So instead of being sensible and maybe asking Jemma about her new deadly skills, Skye did the more sensible thing of turning to her computer. She started out innocently enough, just googling Jemma and seeing what came up. Of course, she didn’t expect James Bond mission reports to pop up right away, but digging into the search results enough eventually led her to finding out about something called the Agency.
“Well now, what’s this?” She asked, leaning forward and reading the very limited information on the screen. There wasn’t much actual information to be found there, but there was enough that seemed to suggest it was a top secret organization. Or at least that’s the alarm bells that it set off in Skye’s head. “Alright, so what are you, something like Area 51 or are we talking the Pentagon?”
Skye navigated around the internet a little bit before she found what she was looking for. She smirked a bit and cracked her knuckles as she prepared herself to hack into the Agency and see what her ex was upto. Though while she was going to hack into it to see what had given Jemma a whole new, entirely scary set of skills, a larger part of her was also curious as to what a secret agency was doing right here in Orange County.
“Let’s see what you’re hiding,” she said as she started to hack into the Agency. The security was top notch, but this wasn’t Skye’s first hacking rodeo. She’d hacked into plenty of other things in the past, and she knew what she was doing.
An image popped up on Skye’s screen. That of Dennis Nedry from Jurassic Park, and his ‘Nuh uh uh, you didn’t say the magic word!’ started to play on repeat on her speakers.
Someone had a sense of humor, and that someone just got a notification of unauthorized access.
Kitty trailed her finger through the holographic display of her Shi’ar computer. She’d never seen anyone get this far before.
This could be fun.
Skye’s eyebrows lifted nearly to her hairline and she couldn’t help but to burst out laughing. “Oh my god, whoever coded that is a frickin’ genius,” she commented. She took a breath and punched in some code.
“Please, Dennis, I’d like to see what you’ve got. Or else.” Skye said as the code she put in sent a notification to whomever was on the Agency side of the computer. It was the Dilophosaurus from Jurassic Park, and when it appeared on-screen, its cowl neck expanded and it hissed, spitting its black venom on the screen as she attempted to get deeper, heading for personnel files.
“Totally not accurate to the real dinosaur, but you hit me with Dennis, you get the dilophosaurus back,” she commented with a smirk.
“Cute,” Kitty murmurd, as she set a trap, trying to enclose her opponent in a walled garden. A virtual OS with no connections to the rest of the file system.
On the ‘wall’ of the walled garden was, basically, an Admiral Ackbar ‘it’s a trap’ image.
Skye squinted at the screen, trying to move quickly but also carefully. She was a talented hacker, and she had quite the log of skills in it. As such, she nearly fell into the trap, but she’d managed to back herself out before she got closed off.
“It’s not that easy to catch me when there’s something I want.” Skye thought she’d found what she was looking for, and she bypassed files that most other hackers would actually go for. On any other day she might be interested in learning what the Agency was doing or what they were. But today? She was looking for Jemma’s files.
“Alright, are you going to tell me why my best friend is suddenly James Bond?” Though who was she kidding, Jemma was about her only friend. Or at least the only one she trusted.
Interesting, this person was going for the personnel files. Kitty took the opportunity to seal off some of the more sensitive (and outlandish) files. They didn’t need her time travel experiences and giant monsters exposed. Or the files the Director had collected on everyone in Orange County, saved under the innocent sounding name “Liho”. After her cat, apparently.
“Who are you after?” Kitty had never been this challenged, not in a very long time. She could pull the plug. Literally. It was like three feet to her left.
But she was impressed, excited, and curious. She threw up trap after trap, rerouted the intruder like throwing them into a wormhole, and a number of other delaying tactics while her alien computer traced the other end. It was difficult, even for the Shi’ar. This hacker knew how to mask their trail well.
But a little longer and she’d have their location.
“S’s?” Kitty said out loud. “You’re going for the S’s?”
Skye was well aware that she was being traced. Any organization worth their salt traced hacks. She kept herself well hidden behind a ton of firewalls and other failsafes, but she didn’t actually care much if the Agency found out who she was. Mostly because Jemma worked for them, so they couldn’t exactly be all bad.
Or at least that was her hope. Jemma didn’t seem to be a pod person, she just was a hell of a lot more lethal than she had been when they’d been together. As for her location, it would show up as Clara’s apartment, now sublet by Skye. Though any search Kitty might do on Skye herself wouldn’t get her much of anywhere since Skye was not the name on her birth certificate. Though Skye herself didn’t even know what the name on her birth certificate was, she was still trying to find that part out.
The most that would be found was that she worked IT, there was probably something posted by her stalker ex-boyfriend looking for her, and that she’d been in the foster system. Other than that, Skye didn’t exactly exist.
As it was, while she was being delayed, Skye kept getting around the barriers put up. She wasn’t even trying to delay being detected, perhaps proof that she was singularly focused on finding Jemma.
“Ah ha! There you are.” Finding Jemma’s files, she opened the first one and started reading. Basic information such as schooling, place of birth, all the things Skye pretty much knew already. “Okay but seriously, how do you go from adorkable scientist to a highly proficient gun user?” She kept reading.
Okay, now that was unexpected. A tiny relief, being Orange County as the location. But unexpected being Clara’s apartment. Kitty didn’t think this was in Clara’s skill set; and besides with the Tardis she didn’t really need it.
And this person was looking for Jemma. Interesting.
Kitty considered her options, as well as the most dramatic way to handle this. Because dramatic was fun.
First though, she’d give this person a few more seconds before she pulled the power plug. Nat would probably kill her for taking the system offline like that.
Despite knowing she was on a timer, Skye was reading what she could about Jemma and not paying attention to the timer ticking down in her head. She was looking for anything that might tell her how Jemma had become such a skilled fighter and shooter. “Oh wait, what’s this,” she muttered, leaning closer to the screen as she started reading something that might tell her how Jemma learned to shoot so well.
“Three. Two. One.” Kitty kicked away from the desk, rolling her chair over to the power strip, where she hit the power buttons with much more gusto then necessary.
Then she jumped up and ran for the elevator. By the time she got there, the Blackbird would be waiting.
Skye was just getting to the good stuff when the system went down and she lost everything. “No! No no no crap.” Skye quickly shutdown her computer, though she knew if they’d been tracing her, they’d already found her. “Oh, damn it.” She was going to expect a call or visit from Jemma in the near future about it.
She sighed heavily, getting up from her chair and heading to the kitchen to find something to eat. The thought that someone might be coming to knock down her door wasn’t quite crossing her mind. Though of course, if someone did that she’d assume it was the ex-boyfriend that had an obsession with her.
Maybe she should really learn how to shoot a gun in the event her ex found her again.
Kitty hoped that Clara would forgive her, but at least she wasn't going to kick the door down. No, once the Blackbird was in position over the building, Kitty phased out through the floor, and then through the roof. She peeked her head through the ceiling, "Ceiling cat is watching you. You’ve been a naughty girl."
Out of everything that she could possibly expect in this place (which, really, seemed to be anything one could imagine), she hadn’t thought she’d hear some disembodied voice suddenly speak to her. Skye screamed and her bowl of cereal went flying and made quite the mess on the kitchen floor. Skye herself spun around and ended up falling and landing on her ass on the floor.
“What the fuck…” She gasped as she looked up at the ceiling to see someone’s head poking through. “What the fuck???”
“Hi.” Kitty’s hand came out of the ceiling and she waved. Then she floated out of the ceiling, exactly like a ghost, flipping around once before she landed on the ground. She held both her hands up in a gesture of peace. “You know, you’re very good. I can’t think of the last time I was challenged that much online before. So what’s your interest in Jemma Simmons?”
Skye just kept staring at the woman as she waved and then descended from the ceiling. There was a palpable silence after the question about Jemma was asked as Skye was trying to find her brain again. Sure, she knew people with superpowers and magic existed, but that didn’t mean she was yet prepared for one of them popping in like this.
Finally, she actually blinked and shook her head, coming back to her senses a little. Though she didn’t move from where she’d fallen on the floor. “Do you make a habit of dropping in on people like Casper the ghost? Because you could make a serious killing with that at Halloween.”
“I do great party tricks,” Kitty quipped, lowering her hands. And there were those times she went after bad guys like a demon in the night. “I’m Kitty, I’m with the Agency and the one that was playing with you a little bit ago.”
“Kitty. Living up to your name there.” Skye dead-panned. “I’m Skye.” Finally, she picked herself up and started to clean up her cereal. “As for your question, I’m a friend of Jemma’s and basically watched her go all James Bond on those undead things and wondered how the hell she got to be so deadly with a gun. We’ve known each other for a long time, though it had been a while since we’d seen each other before I’d arrived here. And last I’d seen her she definitely didn’t even own a gun.”
So you know, it was logical to just hack into the Agency to find that out instead of, oh, asking Jemma about it.
“Did you consider maybe asking her about it?” Kitty asked, raising an eyebrow. “Or was she being squirrely about it.”
It could go either way, really. Jemma could have chosen to remain mum, when talking to someone who wasn’t a Dreamer.
Or at least hasn’t dreamed just yet.
“Given how she stone-walled me when I asked since when she started carrying a gun, I had to take matters into my own hands.” Besides, Skye knew Jemma all too well, and knew that she most likely wouldn’t get a straight answer from her if Jemma didn’t want to give one.
“Ah. Not unexpected,” Kitty shifted, cocking her hip and putting her hand on it. “I take it you’ve probably figured out there’s more to the Agency than just some random government agency. And there’s more to the county than meets the eye.”
She gestured in the general direction of outside. “We make sure that the rest of the world doesn’t find out people like me exist; and that zombies get taken care of in a prompt manner.”
“More like your security is better than the Pentagon’s, so clearly something was going on. And yeah, I’ve been here about four months already, I know crazy shit happens. I just don’t believe people have ‘dreams’ yet.” Skye actually did air quotes when she said the word dreams for emphasis. “I haven’t experienced any dreams like what people talk about on that network.”
So that basically let Kitty know that Skye used the network. So clearly a Dreamer yet she hadn’t actually started Dreaming yet.
“I just fell through your ceiling, are you really going to dispute dreams of other lives?” Kitty asked, grinning at her. “I’ve dreamed of at least a half dozen versions of myself, each differing in one way or another, as though some key piece of history changed. I’m always a mutant, a type of person with a genetic shift from baseline humans who typically hate my very existence. My mutation always me to walk through walls.”
She held up her right fist and a metallic claw slid out of it. “Another version of me wound up with this, and I woke up with it in my arm.”
The claw retracted and she shook her head. “Anyway I’m mostly here to offer you a job, assuming Jemma vouches for you.”
“Maybe not for you, but for me, definitely.” Skye hadn’t dreamed, so maybe she didn’t have some other life? Though she couldn’t deny that she’d always wished she’d had a different life. She wished she’d grown up with her parents, or just loving foster parents that actually wanted her around. Though who knew, if she had some other dream life, maybe she was a superhero. Or something infinitely cooler than a foster kid with one friend in the world.
“Wait, a job? You’re offering me a job?” She definitely thought that was too good to be true. Skye had never been handed anything like that in her life without serious strings being attached. “What’s the catch?”
“No catch,” Kitty replied, her grin growing. “But I’ll bet you wouldn’t mind state sanctioned attempts at any number of government facilities and computer systems around the world.”
“Offers like that never come without a catch. Especially when you’re dangling the government facilities and computer systems carrot in front of me. I feel like you’re going to ask for my soul or my first-born in return.” Skye was only half-kidding about her soul or first-born being a price. From what she’d seen in this place so far, that was a very real possibility.
Not that she ever planned on having kids because she didn’t. So anyone wanting her first-born would be sorely disappointed on that front.
“Illyana isn’t here, so the soul would be worseless,” Kitty mused, also only half-joking. “And I’ve already got two kids, so I’m good there. Though I don’t think my girlfriend would mind a third.”
“Yeah well, you’ll have to find someone else. I’m never having kids.” Skye knew she’d be a terrible mother, and she refused to make a kid deal with her. “So souls and first-borns are out. Which seems to leave more unsavory things like a sacrifice on the table.”
“Yeah. Not happening,” Kitty agreed. She could joke about removing Skye’s heart, but she wasn’t here to scare her. Instead, she nodded. “I get your fear. But Jemma works with the Agency too. She’s saved a lot of our butts more than once. You know her, would she actually work with the bad guys?”
“No, she’s the kindest person I’ve ever known. But she also didn’t actually kill things without hesitation the last time I saw her either. So I don’t know what you guys did, but she’s kind of scary now.” Skye wasn’t completely scared of Jemma. But she definitely would do her best to not get on Jemma’s bad side because she really didn’t want to see her be angry with her knowing that she was intensely lethal now.
“Trained her but…” Kitty rubbed the back of her neck. “Sure, a lot of it is the Director’s influence, but Jemma is a Dreamer, like me. And the things she dreamed of are a lot more hardcore than the Jemma you know here. I wasn’t a ninja before. Now I am.”
“Clearly her dreams are hardcore because I think she could kill James Bond himself at this point.” Skye said in all seriousness. Suddenly she wasn’t so certain that she wanted to be associated with the Agency if it meant she’d end up becoming capable of killing James Bond. “But look, I’m a hacker, but I’m all about peaceful resistance. I prefer to keep myself out of trouble as much as possible. And I’m not cut out for what Jemma does with a gun. I just want to live quietly and maybe find answers to questions I have, which I probably won’t ever find.”
Skye was starting to think she should stop looking for her biological parents. Chances were that they were dead anyways. And what would finding them give her anyways, beside a name? Probably nothing good. As much as she liked to think she could be one of those happy endings kind of stories with adopted kids uniting with their biological parents after a couple decades, or more, she was more than losing hope of that. After all, she wasn’t the kind who got happy endings. Perhaps she should’ve had one with Jemma, but life had other ideas, and Jemma was happy with Cosima now.
“I can help,” Kitty said, genuine and honestly. Because it was in her nature to help people, even strangers she just met. “With whatever it is you need answers to. My mainframe isn’t exactly of this world.”
Hell, if she wasn’t seeing Diana she’d consider asking Skye out. Skye was kind of her type in some ways.
Or at least she’d consider setting her up with a friend. Kitty could name a few who needed to get laid.
“Thanks, but no thanks. I can handle it, assuming there’s anything to find.” Skye brushed a hand through her hair and sighed a bit. She’d become a hacker to try and find her parents, but after years and hacking into pretty much everything, she’d found nothing. All her leads had turned out to be busts.
It wasn’t just Kitty, Skye would most likely refuse that offer from Jemma as well. At least at this point in time. She’d just have to live with not having answers and give up the search.
“Offer stands, then.” Kitty stuffed her hands into her pockets, then looked up towards the ceiling. “... Want to see the planet from orbit? I came here in my hypersonic jet.”
Skye looked at Kitty, eyeing her a bit. “A hypersonic jet. Of course you have one of those.” She didn’t think that even the military had those. “You make that offer to just any stranger you meet?”
“Friends of Jemma get an exception,” Kitty said, flashing her teeth in a cheeky smile. “And honestly I just really like showing off the Blackbird.”
“Well, can’t really say no to that. I mean, unless that’s just your way of luring me out so you can kill me or lock me up somewhere.” Skye was very much on her guard. Then again, when a stranger just came through her ceiling uninvited, it tended to put her on guard. That and she was just naturally guarded and suspicious after the whole shitstorm with her ex-boyfriend. For all she knew, he had spies or PIs or something out there looking for her.
“If you want, you can call Jemma and confirm with her I’m legit,” Kitty suggested, knowing Jemma would probably wonder what the fuck she was up to.
“I’d rather not bother her right now. She’s probably busy doing...whatever she does after shit hits the fan here.” And Skye more than knew how Jemma got where work was concerned. So she wasn’t going to interrupt her.
“Well. Want to see what it feels like to phase through the ceiling.” Kitty held out her hand. “I can control the spin of my molecules, essentially pushing them apart and allowing me to pass through solid objects by simply being less dense.”
“That’s...impressive. Though you can do the same to others? I’m not just going to ram my head against the ceiling and fall to the floor if you try it?” Now that was one thing Skye didn’t mind doing. After all, Jaina had teleported her once. She just hoped that she didn’t fall over after the phasing thing like she had with the teleporting.
“I once phased something the size of New York through the planet, you’ll be fine,” Kitty assured her,deciding being vague was a lot less crazy sounding than ‘giant hollowpoint bullet’. “I don’t think you’ll feel that queasy, its not like we’d be going throug lead or platinum.”
“As long as you’re sure that I won’t explode or something, that’s fine with me.” Skye set her empty bowl in the sink to deal with later. While she’d gotten the spilled cereal all cleaned up, the floor could probably use a good wash later. But that would be after she took this little trip.
Grinning, Kitty took Skye’s hand and then floated them up, through the ceiling and to the roof above. The blackbird hovered overhead, shimmering out of the cloak and into view as the hatch lowered.
Skye pinched her eyes shut and waited for her head to hit the ceiling..but it never did. Though she didn’t dare open her eyes until she felt that they’d stopped floating. And that was when she saw the hypersonic jet. “Damn, that’s impressive,” she commented.
“Thanks.” Kitty flashed her a grin, then led her onto the plane. “There are less seats than it originally came with, but we rarely need to have that many people on board.”
There was a sad note to her voice; Kitty missed the people that would sit in those seats. Four now, instead of eight.
But more room for other purposes.
“Why’d you take the seats out?” Skye asked, looking around the inside of the jet. It certainly didn’t seem to be to make room for anything else of import. Unless they needed to transport vehicles or something of the sort? She didn’t know.
“No need for them, really. If we need to carry more than four plus the pilot they can just hold on because it’s some kind of emergency. Easier to jump out of into a firefight too.” Kitty gestured at the copilot’s seat as she took the conn. “The Blackbird was enhanced by technology acquired from a space-faring empire called the Shi’ar. The Shi’ar were at times both enemies and allies to my people. They...don’t appear to exist in this reality.”
Skye nodded a bit, taking a seat in the copilot chair. She was wondering just how wild this ride was going to be. “So this is partially alien tech. That’s kind of mindblowing,” she said, glancing around. “Please tell me that an Apple computer wasn’t compatible with their tech without there being adjustments and new tech made to allow for that to happen.” Oh yes, that was an Independence Day reference.
It was a good movie, but Skye, being a tech person, kind of hit the fan when Jeff Goldblum’s magically interfaced with the alien ships using an Apple computer. Sure, Apple was amazing, but come on.
“The mainframe at the agency is also based on the same tech,” Kitty explained, glancing at her and trying to see if the prospect was exciting. “We wrote our own OS in the dreams and I did the same here to make sure it would interface with earth-based systems, yes.”
“Thank god for that,” Skye said. And sure, alien tech was intriguing to her, but she wasn’t so certain she wanted to be part of something that gave Jemma a lethal skillset. Skye preferred to be a pacifist and she didn’t want to learn how to shoot guns or fight or anything of the like.
“So you’re basically saying that I hacked into something that wasn’t even completely Earth-tech? That’s actually pretty awesome.” And she may have been proud of herself. And she may have even smiled.
“Yep.” Kitty grabbed the wheel, and the Blackbird, lifted straight up, spinning slowly until it faced the ocean. “So that speaks volumes about your skills and probably the fact I’ve been too lazy on security and need to fix that.”
She flashed Skye a smile and then they took off at mach 4, daylight and atmosphere quickly giving way to the blackness of space and the contours of the Earth.
“Yeah, you might want to get on that. Never know if I’ll try to hack in again.” Skye was teasing. Mostly. Of course, if she were to hack in again, it’d probably be more to keep Kitty on her toes since she’d found out what she’d wanted. Or at least as much as Kitty had let her find.
When the jet took off, Skye held her breath, though she didn’t actually realize she was holding it until it came out in a rush. “Damn,” she commented.
“Damn is right.” Kitty leaned back in the seat, peering out through the cockpit glass at the Earth below. “I try not to abuse this thing, but sometimes it’s really tempting to actually go to France for French Food, or Japan, or China. Or whatever you’re in the mood for. I usually pick Japan since I’m fluent so it’s easier.”
Skye just stared down at the Earth, a look of complete awe on her face. “That totally would make it easy if you wanted actual sushi or something like that. Or just cutting down on travel time. How long would it take for this thing to fly around the world?”
“At cruising speed we can make it to Japan from the OC in about an hour,” Kitty explained, studying Skye’s face with a knowing smile. “But this thing can hit Mach 10, so circling the planet is about four hours.”
“Damn, that really does cut down on travel time around the world.” Four hours to go around the world completely was certainly impressive. “I assume that you take great pains to keep this kind of technology out of the hands of the military.”
“Yes. This isn’t even the most advanced vehicle out there, and that’s before magic or superpowers.” Kitty shook her head. “We have our hands full enough with dream versions of groups like Cerberus and Hydra. If the US government, or China, or any number of business conglomerates got their hands on this? Or that starship?”
She pointed out the window as sunlight gleamed off of a distant object. It was close enough to tell it was manmade, and not a satellite or the ISS. “Yeah no, that would be bad.”
Skye had intended to ask about Cerberus and Hydra because clearly they meant something more than the mythical creatures that went by those names, but then she got distracted by the starship Kitty pointed out. At first, she didn’t quite know what she was looking at, just that it clearly wasn’t a satellite or the ISS or something. But then, it hit her like a ton of bricks.
“Holy shit, is that the freaking Enterprise??”
“Technically,” Kitty said, hedging. She knew exactly how crazy that looked and sounded and not everyone in the OC was even capable of knowing when something seemed to exist as a movie or book. But it looked like Skye did. “Really pretty just hanging there isn’t it.”
It definitely looked and sounded crazy, but after the things she’d seen over the past four months in Orange County? This seemed to be par for the course. “It really is. Damn. Never thought I’d see the actual Enterprise. I mean, the actual space-faring one. I’d thought the closest I’d get would be either a replica or seeing the prop used for it before CGI was a thing.”
“I’ll put in a good word with the Captain. He always does like giving people tours.” And some personal tours, if Skye was into that. Kitty had taken advantage of that tour once, before she’d met Diana. She’d needed that kind of lay at the time.
“Which Captain?” Because that was important. There more than one Captain of the Enterprise. Though she wasn’t exactly one to pick between Kirk or Picard normally because when it came down to it, both were good and Star Trek wouldn’t have been what it was without either of them.
“Kirk,” Kitty said. “I can’t get us closer to see anything but the profile, but that’s the old school Enterprise. Not even the refit or the A. Sometimes our dreams give us some really fun gifts.”
“Cool, cool.” Skye responded. So Captain Kirk was around. She’d have to keep her eyes open, then. “I was going to say it looked like the old school Enterprise.” Which she liked. Sometimes old school was awesome.
“It’s really cool,” Kitty agreed, finally tearing her eyes from it. “Always wondered if some day we’d get a Star Destroyer or a Blockade Runner.”
Reaching for the controls, she changed the course of the Blackbird, causing it to slowly turn as she brought it around to head back to California before they actually did end up in Japan.
“I guess only time will tell on that front.” Skye responded. She was a little disappointed when Kitty started turning the jet, but seeing Earth like this with her own eyes and not through watching a show on TV or something.
“Is there any place you wanted to go?” Kitty asked, glancing at her. “I’ve got all day.”
Was there anywhere that Skye wanted to go? She really couldn’t think of any place at the moment. She never did get bitten by the travel bug, though she wouldn’t object to going anywhere. “Not really? I’ve never really had anywhere I’ve specifically wanted to visit.” Most of her focus had been on trying to track down her biological parents and following whatever leads she could get as opposed to wanting to see the world.
Kitty looked thoughtful, then programmed in a course. “There’s this place I ate once, in San Paulo. I think I have a card with some Brazilian currency on it in one of the compartments on board. How does some genuine South American cuisine sound?”
“I’m totally down for that. Can’t say I’ve ever had genuine South American cuisine before.” Skye was never one to turn down new experiences. And hey, it was also food. She was a fan of food.
Kitty laughed, “Great! I always enjoy adding illegal entry to a new country to my list.”