(no subject)

[titaniumalloyman]

On your six. Three of them.

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[grayshulk]

[There's a vaguely affirmative sound of appreciation as she takes the car she's picked up as a club and slings it around behind her to take a good swing at anything in reach.]

[titaniumalloyman]

That's never gonna stop being weird to see. [Hulk he'd gotten used to, but he's not sure if he can get used to a second, female Hulk. Tony makes a wide arc overhead, taking out what little air support their current opposition has.] Good job, Hulkette. I mean, the property damage is a bit excessive, but it's not like I'm one to- [One of the things they're facing leaps at him off the side of a building, tackling him through the windows of the building opposite and tumbling ass over head through what appeared to be a floor of cubicles until coming to a stop just in front of a shocked looking woman hiding under her desk.] -judge. [Guh.]

[grayshulk]

[There's a deep, vaguely annoyed sigh that comes from a combination of 'Hulkette' and sound of Tony crashing through a building. She has opinions on the name, but being only slightly more eloquent than her cousin in her current state, she abandons the damaged car with the damaged bodies behind her. She doesn't exactly reduce the dollar figure for the damage as she goes to find Tony and whatever clobbered him, but she's not about the abandon the man in the shiny suit yet.]

[titaniumalloyman]

[Her sense of lotalty is heartwarming. When she finds Tony he's still amongst the cubicles, wrestling with the lizard creature that tackled him. The thing has him pretty effectively grappled.]

I hope the next thing that attacks us is something easy. Like sentient jello.

[grayshulk]

Jello creatures are bad.

[There's a great advantage to be the free moving party in a room with two people wrestling, Jen can pick her time and angle and go for a solid punch to the head of the lizard creature. Most things, after all, tend to stop what they're doing after being hit in the head by a hulk. There is, of course, the risk that the creature will move quickly and she'll hit something else, but leaving Tony to the thing isn't much better.]

They absorb hits. [She keeps words and sentence structure simple these days, but it's still different than full hulk speech.]

[titaniumalloyman]

[He watches the lizard creature disappear through desks and cubicles under the force of her hit, and if it isn't dead he'll be damn impressed. He pulls himself up off the floor, brushing off a bit of rubble clinging to his armor.] I would hope the sentient jello would also absorb people. I'd build Fury a new eye if it meant I got to see Barton stuck inside a giant jello monster while it jiggles through the East Village.

Oh, and thanks for the assist. I mean, a hulky fist isn't the most elegant way to dispatch a lizard creature, but it certainly gets the job done.

do you accept introspective backtags?

[busdriver]

Copy that.

[Her tone betrays no concern, which doesn't mean she expects it to be easy. It never is, for someone of her size and strength up against someone a lot heavier. These guys are equipped with alien weaponry, and they're pretty tough besides. May is only human. Just SHIELD, just discipline plus experience. She's been on a pedestal for what 'only human' can do, but she's not the heavy-hitter she used to be before the world got extra weird. On a good day, she can keep up almost as well as Natasha, but at her age, they're not all good days. Coulson used to say May has more black belts, but May herself knows there's a point of diminishing returns where more doesn't necessarily mean better. Like Natasha, she's typically up against someone bigger and stronger, and she just has to hope not faster and smarter too. She's a technical, opportunistic kind of fighter. It's never easy to win these things, no matter how she makes it look.

She's a team player. She'll ask for help if she needs it, even if it's a bitter pill to swallow. She works with whoever she has to when the situation calls for it. That said, it's never been a goal of hers to work with Tony Stark. She developed a dislike of him, long before this, by reputation, and it persisted even when his tech and tech derived from it became a part of her daily life. She's been known to call him her least favorite Avenger. She can still picture the strained smile on Coulson's face when he'd talk about meeting, or trying to meet with, Tony and Pepper. Phil always tried to avoid negativity, or any remarks he thought might anchor the great Melinda May to her self-imposed exile and desk job, but it was a challenge for him to say something positive about superhero-wrangling or the Avengers Initiative in that fetal stage. She didn't need to see it herself to guess how Stark must've acted around Coulson. It might've had less to do with one unassuming man in a suit and more to with what SHIELD was at the time. She's sure Coulson never really minded, but May takes it personally when people aren't nice to Phil. She always did. If they'd met in high school, she would've been the jock who stuffed people in lockers for being mean to her favorite nerd. She doesn't give out many chances and, at this point, she doesn't warm to people easily. It would be convenient for her if she could find reasons not to like anyone new. Besides, speaking well of someone after they die doesn't really make up for causing them headaches while they're alive, and Stark is a notorious migraine trigger. Her disapproval's only petty, not worth mentioning, but it's the type of thing that informed her earliest opinion. Her opinion hasn't improved in the years since.

The Avengers weren't meant to find out what happened to Coulson after the Battle of New York. She never put it past them, but they weren't supposed to. It's within Nick Fury's power to raise the dead, and some people—Hill and Romanoff, for instance—probably knew that all along. It's just better not to think about it. It's better not to know that it could've been any one of them. If Stark himself had fallen, he would've been resurrected at the same price and gone through the same hell. They have a right to feel lied to, if they want. Phil was prepared for them to be angry with him for keeping them in the dark. It wasn't his choice in the first place, but he would take the blame, because that's the type of guy he is. It should be clear to everyone that SHIELD never closed shop completely. They went underground, but they always existed in some form. Fury made sure of that with his left hand even while he helped Rogers implode the agency with his right. They'd all like to think that what they have now is closer to the principle SHIELD was founded on. Coulson and May turned SHIELD into a real mom-and-pop operation while nobody was looking.]

If it's four, not three, you might have to swing back around.