Saving Grant Ward

Chapter Twenty-One

A/N: 2,000 reads! Gah!!! Thank you so much!!

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As the elevator descended deeper and deeper into the earth and Grant tried to fix his hair, I decided to try one of the scanners we'd brought with us. It still worked, which made me doubt whether there were actually any orbs here, whatever this place was. But it did give me an idea of just what we were walking into.

"Grant..." I breathed, shaking my head without taking my eyes away from the screen in my hands. "Come look at this."

"If you try to touch my hair again, I- oh. Oh boy. This is big."

He took the screen out of my hands to look for himself, and I kept staring right over his shoulder. We were heading straight for the entrance to apparently miles of tunnels and passageways, spread out below us on multiple levels like a massive person-sized ant hill. We'd stumbled on a secret base, and an absolutely enormous one at that.

"How has all this been hiding down here?" I breathed. "How did they even build it without SHIELD or somebody else noticing?"

Grant just shook his head, although I could see his eyes darting back and forth across the screen. I waited a minute, then as the elevator started to slow, spoke again.

"So... what do we do?"

Grant took a deep breath, then put the scanner away before turning back to me, posture determined.

"We do our jobs. We go down there and observe everything, we avoid getting caught and gather information, and then we decide on the best course of action from there."

"Alright. But it might be kinda hard to do the 'avoid getting caught' piece," I said. Grant raised an eyebrow at me, so I raised my arms and gestured to the massive parkas we both still wore. Beneath it, we both had a bunch of SHIELD-issue tactical gear. Not necessarily great for blending in. Grant sighed.

"We'll deal with it. That's what we were trained to do."

"What if someone's waiting for us when we get off the elevator?"

"Then we'll deal with them too."

I had a few comments about that, but I didn't have the opportunity to make them. The elevator finally came to a stop, leaving Grant and I to prepare for whatever waited for us on the other side.

Fortunately for us, it was an empty hallway. We both scanned for cameras, but neither of us noticed any, which was another relief. We quickly shed our gigantic coats and stashed them in the nearest air vent, along with our guns and other more bulky, obvious tactical gear, then opened a few hall closets until we found one with a handful of spare uniforms. Apparently lab coats were the trend here, which worked out great for us. We could move in them easily, and they fit loosely enough that we wouldn't look too suspicious with all the combat-ready layers we had underneath.

"Alright," started Grant, once we'd gotten everything stashed and prepared, "let's start to the left. I checked the scanner, and it's showing some strange fluctuations coming from that direction."

"Ok Mr. SciTech," I said, taking a few steps down the hallway to the left. Grant just scoffed and rolled his eyes.

The two of us did our best to look confident and absolutely sure we were supposed to be here, blending in reasonably with the other people in lab coats. With this big of a base, no one could reasonably know everyone else, which seriously worked to our advantage. We poked around anything that looked interesting and stopped strategically to listen in on other people's conversations wherever we could, but most of what we found had been taken so far out of context or was written in science-language so far above our understanding that it was functionally useless to us.