Dr. Reed Richards

Skye smiles and heads over to the door. He seemed friendly enough; he didn’t look angry, at least, which is good. Although, it wasn’t as if Skye had been going through his stuff or anything.

First his asset comes across some secret witch-bomb that gives him blue hair for a week. Then he literally get eaten by the not-really-sentient love-baby of The Blob and the Stay-Puft Man. Now he’s got noodle-appendaged scientists falling through his ceiling with  very smug cats.

Reed gave him an uncertain smile, but accepted Phil’s help up. There might have been a joke buried somewhere in Phil’s words, but he couldn’t tell for certain, which left him at rather a loss for how to react properly. Easier by far to remain silent and let Phil carry the conversation back to the matter at hand.

"Reed Richards am I your arm candy?"  It’s incredible to be joking like this and letting the words simply roll off him.  Every once in a while he needs to fold up the Director and just let Nick out for a while.  Lucky for him, Reed’s pretty obliging with things like those.

Skye hits the end of a hallway and sighs, turning around. She’s a little disappointed; the entire floor seems to be labs, and all of the ones she had tried hadn’t been open to her. Onto another floor, then. She’s not stupid enough, or really curious enough, to try to hack into the labs. None of the rooms seem to be computer rooms, so she’s not really interested in them. Skye heads back towards the elevator, thinking about what floor to hit up next.

One thing people don’t really know about Nick Fury: he’s not above playing shit up a little.  Hell everyone who knows his name will first say that he’s a manipulative bastard, if they don’t say ‘paranoid’ instead.  But people seem to think only of his words when they call him manipulative.  In fact, Nick relies heavily on unspoken interaction quite a bit in his line of work.  It means that every once in a while he’ll shed his badass Director of SHIELD persona if it suits him.

Reed isn’t subtle about sizing up the stack on his desk and Nick doesn’t bother to point out that it’s actually worse than it looks.  This is the stack after he’s delegated everything that can be and he’s got an 80 page interagency agreement sitting in his inbox for a line-by-line review.  IMF is being particularly pissy this fiscal year and Nick isn’t looking forward to ferretting out all the shit they hoped to slip into their jurisdiction.

All Who Wander are not Lost || Skye and Reed

Reed still had more or less an entire lab floor to himself, though he's dedicated much of that space to his collaborations with Tony. Several security updates later, and access to the lab was more restricted than ever. He's met most of those with access, even being called upon to give his personal approval. Still, there were a few people he hadn't even met yet who could apparently enter the main hallway and wander around.

He’s not intending to pull another all-nighter but there’s work to be done and not a lot of hands to do it.  He’d decided to stop checking the clock somewhere about 2 and would pack up whenever it was that he got hungry.  This is the type of work that’s important but not nearly as important as dinner and a smoke.

Salem hates tuna. This much had been a revelation to a man who had never even owned a cat, but apparently cats that hate tuna exist. No wonder baiting him with tuna bits and bribing him with extra in his food dish hadn’t done anything. The first time Phil thought to switch his bribing medium? The damn thing had come trotting right up like he hadn’t spent a week sulking on top of the entertainment center.

Reed released Quark, setting her down near Salem on the assumption that even if Salem wasn't somehow the cause for their impromptu trip through the vents, the older cat's presence would still set Quark at ease. He glanced over his shoulder at Phil, who was lying parallel to him, with his feet opposite Reed's head and gun slowly lowering. Well. This was an awkward situation, though Phil's slight laugh prompted Reed to give him a small, if embarrassed, smile.

Hello Pot, lovely to meet you.

Ben was with me.

By now all of Nick’s work had  been forgotten.  It’s probably not the best sign that a single text from Reed, even one completely innocuous, has veto power over the rest of Nick’s schedule.  Nick, honestly, doesn’t much care.

Yes, I am.

Nick sits back in his chair, already grinning a little from actually getting a response.  He taps out a reply then immediately deleted it before he embarrasses himself.