#strategyandwit

“Mm-hm. You’re just not doing it right.” Lex adds, taking the controls in an impolite manner. He does a few code cuts, then hands it back quickly.

He’s also pretending he’s only talking about the code, but they’ve been falling in-and-out of the important, feeling-filled conversation for a while.

“That’s better.” He doesn’t say I’m better, but he had to internally fight not to.

      Hank bristles, which involves a few plates of metal rippling along their shoulders. He sharply takes the controls back. “I know what I’m doing.”

      Well his code is cleaner than yours, Ultron chimes in, inaudible to Lex for now. Hank just rolls their eyes.

Damien jumps a little bit at the presence suddenly beside him, clutches his camera to him like pearls, blinks a few times before relaxing. Its just some normal person. (Well, maybe not. Something tugs at the back of his mind, but it’s not strong enough for Damien to heed it. Surely a false alarm.)

He puts the camera in his lap for a second and makes speech marks with both hands, shakes them. [SORT OF.] Then picks the camera up again, leans so that the stranger can see what he’s taken.

“…”

Supergirl was so focused on what she was doing that she didn’t even check for other people surrounding her. She was just using a mirror to make her big hair, bigger, using her shapeshifting powers.

“…Ta-da? This can’t be the weirdest think you’d seen a superhero do.”

      Doug blinked a couple times and shrugged. “Didn’t know you were a superhero,” he said. He took a glance at her costume, thinking the ‘S’ logo should be familiar, but not really being able to place its flavor.

“You’re the one who asked for this interview, though I must confess, I’m not really sure what it is you want to talk about.”

“Supergirl.”

The greeting comes from a man whom, according to intel, shouldn’t be present. This area of the docks, and several of the nearby warehouses, had been revealed just that morning to be dealing in probably-illegal amounts of imported weaponry. The tip had been anonymous, but the photographs had been real-looking enough to be worthy of investigation.

It just so happened that a shipment was still being unloaded just as Supergirl arrived. As soon as the voice spoke up, and Noah Kuttler made his presence known to the hero, the workers who’d been transporting the crates from the ship began to rapidly make themselves scarce, knowing full well that the Calculator was a bigger, more important catch than any of them, and that Supergirl being distracted by him gave them the best possible window for escape they would be getting.

Kuttler stood beside a black van that was parked near one of the ship’s gangplanks. He looked as nerdy as any of his dossiers would describe him, and twice as smug. He held a simple clipboard with a number of documents clamped to it, and a hand over his eyes to block the sun as he looked up at Supergirl.

It had been easy to negotiate the relocation of this other Earth’s portal into the basement of this old warehouse, and for Noah to set up shop in the loft. If he was going to facilitate this... whatever this was, between Earths, he was going to have to be nearby at all times.

As Noah removed the freshly-brewed pot from the coffee machine beside his desk, one of his computers pinged, alerting him that the portal was receiving one or more guests. Yawning, he stood, feeling his knees creak, and took a warm mug with him as he descended the first, then second set of stairs into the basement. (Sure, he could have used the lift, but a pencil pusher like him could always use the exercise.)