Control | S. Rogers [2]

TWENTY TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

      FILES UPON FILES WERE SCATTERED around the lab, paper copies being the only thing Ultron didn't touch. Laurel groaned, slamming the one she had shut and throwing it to the side. This was not how she expected to spend that morning.

Meanwhile, as the others were tortured by the piles of reading they had to endure, Melissa was smart and used her speed. Laurel leant back in the chair behind one of the smaller desk, flicking her feet up and watching as a blur (that was Melissa) sped through a pile of roughly twenty files on Hydra related things.

"Can we just let her do it?" Laurel spoke up, pointing to the Superhuman. None of the Avengers paid attention but Steve chuckled under his breath, Reyna even cracking a smile. They both remembered the time they discovered Melissa's speed, one of their first thoughts being how quickly could she read and sustain the information a book would give her.

"Strucker has a lot of friends!" Melissa announced, stopping and simply scanning through another. "And all of these people are terrible," she chucked it over Bruce's head, it slamming open against a table.

The doctor went to push it aside when Tony stopped him, pointing at the photo. "Wait. I know that guy." Bruce slid the photo across, Tony picking it up and getting a better look at the photograph.  "From back in the day, he operates off the African coast, black market arms."

At the mention of the 'black market', Steve gave Tony a disappointed look, the one a parent would give a child if they were told the same thing.

"There are conventions, alright? You meet people, I didn't sell him anything," Tony defended himself, passing the photograph to Thor, who held it between himself and Steve. "He was talking about finding something new, a game-changer, it was all very Ahab."

Thor continued to examine the photo, Reyna even curiously stepping over. "This?" he pointed to a symbol the man had decorating his skin.

"Ah, it's a tattoo, I don't think he had it-"

"No," Reyna stated sternly, gently taking the photo from Thor's grasp. She pointed at the black ink that was shaped in a certain way. "Those are tattoos, these..." she pointed to the picture of the man's side profile, a red mark standing out to her. "This is... Some type of branding."

The photo was passed again, Bruce looking curiously at the branding. Laurel expected him to pass it to her, her being the main person that'd be able to find it quickly, but Bruce shook his head, walking towards one of the desktop computers.

He dumped the photo next to it, searching through Avengers Tower's databases, eventually finding a match.

"Oh, yeah. It's a word in African dialect meaning 'thief', in a much less friendly way," Bruce explained to them.

"What dialect?"

"Wakanada... Wa-Wa-Wakanda," Bruce stammered, struggling to get the correct pronunciation.