Unexpected

Status Report

"It just doesn't make sense!" I growled to myself, pushing myself up and away from my computer again and over to my wall where I had printed and pinned up the scrawling's interspersed into the Mandarin's footage.

Once I had returned to D.C. I had ended up spending not only the whole day connected by my fingertips to my computer, but had ended up staying the night working and all through the work day after that. Agent Jenkins had insisted I go home after I gave her a report on all I had or had not found. I was still in my clothes from the plane ride and I had drooping eyes and a weary voice while giving her my information. I went home, but I brought work home with me, falling asleep in my apartment's office room on my foo ton with my laptop pinched between me and the wall. I had showered, dressed and returned to my office by eight o'clock in the morning.

It was on that day at half past one, when I had finally convinced myself to break for a moment for lunch, when the cafeteria's television flashed from whatever channel it had been on to a new interruption by the Mandarin. One of the agents had turned on the volume and we listened as the Mandarin described a bombing at a military base along the border of North and South Korea. He, like many terrorists before him, claimed his handiwork. He and his followers said that America was trying to stick their hands into the business of too many other countries when they should be looking at their own corruption. At the end, he even mentioned the president, though it was hardly even an insinuation that he gave in reference to President Ellis's name.

I had focused through my tired, sore eyes and my worries the last couple days since, determined to figure out the puzzle the Mandarin had handed to me, working almost nonstop and searching for some meaning in the words that I could find in the Mandarin's broadcast. They'd flicker there for just a second, some sort of Asian characters, then some faded writing that was possibly from somewhere in Africa that could be seen in the background of one on the clips, but they just didn't make sense! None of them matched!

Like sure, one banner had the name of one of the places the broadcast signal had bounced off of, but yesterday S.H.I.E.L.D. had sent agents to that part of Idaho and nothing was found there. The rest was unrelated to each other though, like they were each pieces from different puzzles. Even some of the words didn't go together. A stream of what I had discovered to be Vietnamese characters were literally the words 'plum', 'necromancy', 'fire', 'cookie', 'cheat', and 'jester'. They didn't even make a sentence!

He wasn't Asian either, the Mandarin. He never spoke Mandarin Chinese, nor did his voice hold any hint of a Chinese accent. Why would he call himself the Mandarin? He seemed more focused on Middle Eastern terrorist propaganda than anything related to an Asian culture.

Sighing I tried to make something of another translation I had drawn up. Maybe it was in code or something like that one Greek email had been, the one that had led Agent Jenkins to me in the first place. Maybe I just had to go over the footage again. Maybe I'll catch something I hadn't before, but... how many times had I already gone over it? How many times had I used a metaphorical fine-toothed comb to try to find something useful?

The second broadcast was just as cryptic and had left me feeling all the more useless. Why would he dangle words out there if they made no sense, if they weren't conveying some sort of menacing message of their own? I considered that maybe it was just showmanship. The average person wouldn't be able to read the flashes of foreign words and the mystery of it would just add to the frightening aspect he was presenting, but why? Why would he do this? Why would he do any of this? They never truly made demands. He never said why he was fighting this battle, teaching America our 'lesson'. Did he not want the US military in other countries? Was he against political corruption? Who did he have working behind him, making the films? How many followers did he have who would risk their lives and threatened the lives of others for his unknown cause?