Issue Nine: Cornered Prey/Ominous Realm

Benni turns to the police and walks up to the person in charge, "Can we keep MODOK and his lts sedated and unconscious?" Benni looks over where officers of the law are loading the prisoners into police vans, "They have a missile remote controlled and we do not know how to stop it yet. MODOK and any of the cyborgs might be able to set it off with a thought," she informs the officer in charge.

After she finished talking to the officer she goes back to Radical, Motya and Centennial as Blackbird zips off to get a Quinjet, "We have three bases to search for the missile. What I saw from the base was a live feed and the military was in process of loading missiles into silos. We can get in touch with the base commanders and find out if 12 missiles were loaded into silos today." Benni is deep in thought as she works out a plan, allowing her teammates to hear her thought processes.

"Most likely the remote control is electronic. A signal will be relayed to it from some other location and then it will send a signal to the missile. It is on an unknown frequency, so if we wanted to jam it, it will have to be a broadband, much harder to do, but we can ask the base commanders if it is feasible." Benni muses.

Benni bites her lip in thought, "If the missile does get launched, the military will have time to send a self destruct code with proper advance warning, but the codes might be disabled too, so we can't depend on that."

"The hardest problem is still to identify the missile that was tampered with. If I get access to maintenance records, that could help identify which missile, or at least eliminate possibilities," Benni thinks aloud, "unfortunately we do not have a good time frame to search the records in."

Benni looks back at the destroyed base and sighs, no way they can find additional clues in time, in all that rubble. She reviews the elaborate plans that she found, focusing on remembering dates, names and numbers.

"hmm..there is a computer system controlling the missile launch, if we can find that, we can definitely shut the launch down."

Benni clicks the radio on, "Oh Weezi, can you contact someone High up in Shield, higher then a regional director? Because MODOK has a spy that is a regional director. And he is on the Heli-carrier??" Benni sounds a little unsure about the heli-carrier she saw in the video feed, the physics should make that nigh impossible, although this world has .. bent .. physics a bit.

Centennial Man funnels his hands in front of his mouth and whispers, "Tell Weezi to call Fantastic Four, Inc. and Iron Man too. Heck, Captain America himself. We need someone who has done this before to help."

Probably not, actually, as one team's messages are not automatically conveyed to the others. You can definitely try to contact them if you wish, but information is not automatically conveyed between teams (except for shared crime files, after the fact).

By the time Blackbird gets to Avengers tower, Weezi, with Blue Marvel's help, pretty much has all personnel evacuated. By choosing to take the team's van (much easier for your average driver to navigate), Weezi leaves the quinjet available for Blackbird, who is quickly able to commandeer the vessel upon his arrival at HQ.

The officers look at Benni a little strangely before she finishes her explanation. After a few awkward moments of silence once she finishes, one of the officers comments "I got a taser" before another adds "we got a tranq gun in the van". A third officer asks "how long are we talkin'?"

Benni works out a fairly logical plan for dealing with the missile crisis; the only component they are currently lacking is a military contact to quickly get the word out...the team's military contact just headed off to retrieve a quinjet...

At the time of Benni's message, Weezi is in the process of evacuating Avengers' Tower. With her trademark calm and motherly demeanor, however, she assures Benni she will do so "right away, dear", showing just how professional she can be in a crisis situation.

After a few tense minutes and multiple communications via Avengers commcard, Blackbird is able to use his military contact to reach the base commanders to do a recheck of their missile stock (averting one crisis) and Weezi is able to contact someone higher than a regional director aboard the helicarrier: Nick Fury, director of SHIELD, who just happens to be in the company of several of your teammates (EnergyStar, Jericho Tesla, and Agent X), on their way to a special mission in Asia. Nick manages to handle the situation in his own, special way (which you are sure probably involved some form of physical violence - second crisis averted).

Only one more issue (Project Pegasus) to deal with...

"oh, doesn't look like long, maybe another hour at most," Benni reassures the officers, "And I think the tranq gun would be best."

Benni turns to Blackbird as he finishes talking to the base commander and averting the missile crisis, "Who do we get in touch with to talk to this Pegasus Project?" She glances between Blackbird and Motya, figuring those two are the most likely to know or know how to find out.

"I don't think Carl would know much about government projects such as that," Motya said. "He's just a local police detective."

Centennial Man scratches his head and thinks. When he isn't fumbling over his identity as a coprorate-sponsored crimefighter and getting on the nerves of other superheroes, he typically can be found in New Jersey as college slacker Lenny Wilson. Like most slackers, Lenny avoids school as much as possible, educating himself in the truisms found in first-person roleplaying games and on blogs over the Internet. This has given him quite the knack for knowing tidbits on world events, pop culture and general trivia.

Centennial Man scratches his head, his brain working overtime, as he tries to recall anything he may have uncovered on Project Pegasus.

The problem is, even though Project Pegasus is a government facility, it is not connected with the department of defense, so those of you with Military contacts would not find them very useful for you. It could very well take a long period of time to drill through your Avengers' government contacts to find out who needs to know as well and you may not have that much time available.

As the team muses over their next step, Centennial Man points out that the recently appointed security chief for Project Pegasus is the hero Darkhawk who, although none of you have personally met him, is a reserve member of the West Coast Avengers. So, CM theorizes, he likely has an Avengers comm card on him as well, meaning the letting the Project Pegasus chief of security know about a potential jail break situation may be as simple as tapping a few button on the comm card Benni has in her pocket.

Sometimes, trivia can be anything but trivial.

Benni looks at Centennial Man and smiles, "Fantastic!" She pulls out her comm card and calls up Darkhawk, "Hello, Mr Darkhawk, this is Benni from the AEF. I have come across plans for a jail break at the Project Pegasus. It was being planned by a MODOK." Benni then relays all the info she has to Darkhawk.

Chris Powell, currently enjoying pizza with several friends, hears a ringing and instinctively retrieves his phone from his left pocket. As the ringing continues, Chris realizes his phone is off and the ringing continues to emanate from his right pocket. His friends cast a curious eye at Chris and ask why he would carry two phones...

Chris awkwardly and hastily excuses himself from the booth and ducks into the men's room as he retrieves his comm card and recieves Benni's call...

Although Benni did not gain any specific information about the breakout attempt, Chris is thankful for the tip and can put his security team on heightened alert. After finishing the call with Benni, Chris places to call his superiors at Project Pegasus.

There's a knock on the men's room door. "Hey!", one of Chris' friends calls from outside, "are you all right in there?"

Crisis averted!

Next issue: Wakanda! A Party ! Heroes In Swimwear!