[hr][center][i][H3][color=00ffff]Shieldmaiden[/color][/h3]Victoria van Dyne[/i][hr][b][Color=00ffff]Location:[/color][/b] Workshop > Gym 
[B][Color=00ffff]Skills: [/color][/b]Machine physique, senses
[B][Color=00ffff]Equipment: [/color][/b]Shieldmaiden armor[/center][hr]As the day progressed, Victoria busied herself working on the side project D&D brought forth in her mind. Initially, she thought of just getting a gun and spending some time at the range, maybe later modifying it with some utilities. However, the more she thought about it, the more of a learning curve she was seeing. She needed something to use now. Trouble was, everything she knew how to use was either locked away by the VEIL protocol, or mounted on her armor.

That was until she realized that the problem would go away if certain things were not mounted to the armor anymore. Thus she found herself designing a pistol body into which she could just plug in a power cell and one of the multi-field projectors from her armor, along with some controls to give her some options. Of course, the selectors would be dummies, there was no point to them as she could as easily send signals to the weapon through the nanites in her skin, and it would fit in nicely with her misuse security theme.

Finally, the hour of her turn was coming up, and she had to start suiting up. Setting down the soldering gun, she walked over to what looked like a bank safe and touched her palm to the door. “IDENTITY CONFIRMED.” boomed a machine voice and several snaps and whirrs could be heard as the case unlocked and folded open, revealing the Shieldmaiden armor.

[code]Room secured.
No observation devices detected.
Lifted VEIL condition satisfied.
Activating combat mode.[/code]

With the magical code purged from her system overnight, and taking a shape it was actually primarily supposed to take, rather than something she made up on the spot, it worked without a hitch. Her surface lost all of its texture, molding itself to a smooth silvery form with golden printed circuit pattern crisscrossing it. The only part that stayed the same was her head, with her irises turning a vibrant red. Reaching for the armor pieces, she started attaching them, the nanites in the skin reaching to meet them almost like a symbiote, plugging in power and control threads and holding them in place.

Victoria had to admit, with her cover present, the clunky suit up was a bit of a nuisance. It took her almost ten minutes just to put the whole thing on, sans the helmet which she clipped to her belt for now as she headed over to the gym.

Right. The gym. Where nothing of what she requested would be installed. It turned out that when Stark sayd ‘almost anything can be made available’, which a couple of buildings she requested definitely could, he actually meant ‘I like my money where it is’. Hence, her own audition would be happening in the Framework. [color=00FFFF][i]Cheap son of a- I can already see it: ‘Hottest tea! Van Dyne auditions on easy mode!’ Whatever. I don’t care what people think.[/i][/color]

Having to pass a few of her classmates on the way to the gym, she briefly thought about giving them a red tinted glare - [color=00FFFF][i]Oh, let them guess? Does she like colored contacts? Is that some sort of a HUD? Is she a robot?[/i][/color] - but the annoying VEIL warnings screaming from the computer part of her mind made her put the helmet on. As she entered the gym, she gave the teachers observing a brief nod and stepped into the framework ‘bubble’ to hook up. Being already suited up worked in her favor here, as she could claim the suit itself could interface with the framework.

As the simulation loaded, the teachers would see a holo of her position and all of her readouts on a couple of flat screens. Finally, she got dropped in, flying over a city. She could try to determine her position, but it wasn’t important for her demonstration. Flying in a wide arc, she pointed the armor’s sensors down, gathering as much data about the situation as she could. [color=00FFFF][i]No bueno. Too much interference. Eeeeverybody in this day and age, when they see a catastrophe, just has to pull out their phone and start fucking streaming rather than helping.[/i][/color]

She decided to patch into the local first response frequency. Listening in, she found out that the site was an aftermath of a recent avenger battle. Typical. Where else would one find [b]multiple[/b] kinds of disasters in one area. [color=00FFFF]“Emergency response central, this is Shieldmaiden. I am sending aerial scans of the area and am at your disposal. Where do you need me?”[/color] she called over.

“Shieldmaiden, Central. We have units on the way, but the units heading for these four pockets are more than ten minutes out. See if you can help and update us on the situation, over.”

Some data came back, highlighting the four problematic areas. Victoria came to hover midair, overlaying the data with the layout of the city. From up here, she could see the problems were a mid-rise building on fire, a multi-car crash with a fuel truck involved, a flooded area and a collapsed building. She had to prioritize where to help first.

A data stream would appear at the teacher’s flatscreen, showing summary data from multiple on-line sources about the likelihoods of survival in all of the four situations. Victoria concluded that the fuel truck had to be checked first. Second fire breaking out could lead to a disaster on a whole other scale. Then a quick check of the flooded area for anyone drowning, followed by pulling people out of the flames - whether she liked it or not, given the state of the fire, everyone in danger of burning would be dead before she got there, and the rest who were in danger of smoke poisoning had less of a chance for survival than the people in the flooded area. [color=00FFFF][i]Save who you can.[/i][/color] Lastly, the collapse victims had both the highest chance of survival for prolonged time, and their situation would require more finesse. No one would get to them quickly without risking the ruins collapsing on them in the process.

Boosting over to the car crash area, she landed and had a look inside all of the vehicles. No important heat signatures. That meant no hot engines that could set off the fire. It also meant that no one would be walking away from this one, the bodies long cold. [color=00FFFF]“Central, shieldmaiden. Deprioritize the car crash. All drivers and passengers are casualties.”[/color] Running over to the cistern, she checked it for damage. [color=00FFFF][i]Yep, that is definitely leaking somewhere. Still, this is a city. Road is paved, leading into drainage that feeds into water treatment plants. Lives are at stake here, the environment has to wait.[/i][/color] Victoria reasoned, heading over to the cistern, setting herself up just behind the rear of the truck. Bracing herself, she engaged the suit’s hydraulics and lifted the cistern, before backing it away from the engines, snapped wires and whatever else might cause a fire. Parking it further away and over a drain cover, she called up the environmental situation to Central and jumped into the air, flying over to the flooded area.

Once there, she found thermal and motion sensors useless again, but good old audio revealed several sources of screaming. She and Hope will really have to have a word about the quality of her sensor suite. Recalling the classes, she remembered that if a person is drowning, they are likely to trash and flail around in panic, so the generally accepted way to go about them is to wait for them to drown just enough so that the rescuer is safe and wrangle them out of danger then. [color=00FFFF][i]Ain’t nobody got time fo’ that, nor yer feelings. Or a coupla of bruises.[/i][/color] Vicky thought. Being able to wrestle a locomotive, the people can trash all they want, she was getting them out of there one way or the other if she could not calm them down. She should be able to do that even without armor, grabbing a firm hold of a person and pulling them through water should take but a fraction of her strength and even if they did not hold their breath, she should be able to pull them out fast enough for it not to matter.

Cutting the engines, she splashed down and dove into the building. She used the multifield projectors to shine light around herself, increasing the visibility in the murky water. Combined with listening to the screams, she managed to guide herself to the first victim. A boy, thirteen or so. Two options: The sight of a heavy armor suit would either scare them beyond anything, or elicit a long, loud ‘Coooool!’. Victoria decided to take the middle ground, her helmet flipping open and retracting to at least reveal her face, making her appearance a bit more human. [color=00FFFF]“Hello! I’m going to need you to be brave and hold on to my hands, take and hold a large breath, and I am going to pull you through and outside. ‘Think you can do that?”[/color] she asked, receiving a vigorous nod.

Eventually, she got all the people she could see out with varying degree of effort, and an even ratio of ‘Thank you’s and ‘Fuck you’s for the level of caring for their opinion on the method of their rescue. Biting back an ‘I can also drag you back in there. Enjoy your last breath!’, she was about to leave when her statistical software detected an anomaly in the ambient audio. A dull, but a regular spike on the lower end of the spectrum. Diving again, she followed the sound, soon finding herself at a trapdoor which probably led to the basement.

This was a bit of a pickle. The second she lifted that door, the water that was so far dripping in would rush in, taking with it who knows what debris, endangering the person inside even further. Running long on time, Victoria decided to take a bit of a drastic measure. Surfacing again to check the rest of the previous inhabitants were out in a safe distance, she returned to the trapdoor, dialed all of her multifield projectors up and blasted the building away to all sides with a spherical repulsor field. Well... Good news was that the debris really cleared out. Bad news was that in her hurry, Vicky failed to account for the spherical field also pointing [i]down[/i]. Seeing the cracked floor and the telltale signs of water rushing in and air rushing out, she stormed over to the trapdoor, ripping it off of it's hinges and throwing it aside, descending into the basement and heading straight for the last person as the water level rose quickly. Reaching them and grabbing them under their shoulder, she pointed a palm up to blast a hole in the ceiling, ready to cover the refugee with her own bulk if any debris came down, and then promptly taking them out and towards the rest of the victims, enjoying about the same ratio of ‘Thank you, my baby!’s and ‘Bitch, that was my house!’s. Ignoring the lot of them, she hurried over to the burning mid-rise, reporting to Central the five people needing care and shelter.

If her sensors were having trouble before, they wouldn’t be able to detect anything inside of the raging inferno of a building. Deciding to eyeball it, she flew around the building in a spiral, finding a woman and a child huddling on a balcony the fire had not yet encroached on. Approaching them with a wave and a hello, she hovered behind them and asked them to hold on. Grabbing each around their waist, she flew them down and away to safety. Then it was time to see if anyone else was on the inside. Tearing the main door off of its hinges, she carefully walked inside, the nanites in her skin working to absorb the heat and replenish her power reserves somewhat. Going room by room, she found no one at the ground floor, while constantly checking the building for any sign it was about to come down on her.

Reaching the staircase, she saw it had already collapsed, so she took a running leap, boosting off of the far wall and landing on the next floor. The story was the same, and rinse and repeat on the third floor. On the final floor, she found another person who managed to block the door and save themselves from getting poisoned too much, but had no way out. [color=00FFFF]“Get on my back and hold tight!”[/color] She said. Since the immediate area was empty and this was the last person in the building, she could make their way out. Charging her chest projector, she directed a slashing repulsor beam to cut a hole in the wall and fly out from there. [color=00FFFF]“Stay here and wait for the firemen.”[/color] she instructed, before patching to the emergency channel again, [color=00FFFF]“Central, the burning building is completely evacuated, though the fire is not contained. Proceeding to the collapse.”[/color]

Arriving at the final site, she had a bad feeling this situation would be quite hopeless. Walking around the site, she scanned as much of the debris as she could see and tried to run several simulations.

- Digging into the debris? No luck. The whole thing was a jenga tower endgame, one wrong move and the whole thing could come down.
- Generating a large enough graviton field to put the area into zero-g and gently moving the debris away? Nerp, she could not put up a field this large fast enough without introducing any motion and torque into the structure, and she could not scan deeply enough into it to eliminate any possibility of the structure collapsing again.

Almost giving up and just waiting for the professionals, she recalled what led her to her targets in the flooded area. No one was screaming for help here, but that could have been for lack of trying, or simply being buried too deep. But, she could try to reach them and instruct them to make a larger noise. Dialling up the speakers on her suit as far as they would go, she shouted at the pile of rubble: [color=00FFFF]“If you can hear me, can you make a noise? Bang on something hard with a piece of rebar, or something?”[/color] 

There was no response, which pretty much meant she was at the end of what she could do without assistance. With calling up the situation to central, the simulation ended. She unhooked from the framework setup, mumbling a 'That could have gone better...'. She said her farewells to the teachers and left, wondering whether to spend the next minutes de-suiting or is she should take a flight to chill out while she was all dressed up.