What a nice morning to think about Avengers 2.0 attempting an escape room.
I am here for it.
Please consider:
Steve tears a door off a locked cabinet. “Sir, you’re not supposed to use excessive force to open anything.” “He’s not, he’s just like this.”
Wanda doesn’t see why she can’t just use her powers to trip mechanisms. They said she could only use what they brought into the room, AND SHE IS.
Natasha gets excessively competitive because she’s a SPY, clues are what she DOES, yes teamwork she gets it but CLUES LET HER AT THEM.
Related: Sam moves things around just to fuck with her. (He remembers where they were, he’s not a MONSTER, but come on. It’s an escape room. Relax, Romanoff.) He figures out a really hard clue before she does and he’s sure not going to pass up the opportunity to gloat.
Vision is programmed with logic and has all the internet at his fingertips, and ends up frozen with indecision over whether his participating at all counts as cheating after they get the reminder they can’t use cell phones.
Rhodey becomes fascinated with the mechanisms of some aspects- doing X makes Door Y open? How is that wired?- and thus not actually focused on escaping. (After the game they ask if he’s interested in a job fixing their systems because he had ideas they hadn’t thought of.)
Most importantly, there’s a teenager who is running the most stressful game of her life, oh god oh god, why hasn’t her manager called her back, the AVENGERS are HERE on her TUESDAY MORNING SHIFT this was supposed to be a QUIET DAY and instead AVENGERS
Her walkie crackles as she stress eats Twizzlers. “Hi, Debbie,” says Captain America to her, Debbie, a Normal Human Girl who is talking to Captain America. “We could use a hint, over.”
Debbie watches on the monitor as the Black Widow wrestles the walkie out of Captain America’s hand. Captain America does not put up a fight. The Falcon is laughing. “No, we don’t,” the Black Widow says firmly into the walkie talkie.
“Uh,” says Debbie. She has been watching them fiddle with the fourth lock for ten minutes. They do seem to need a clue. The Scarlet Witch keeps offering to just blast open the lock. Debbie is not sure how she will ask the Scarlet Witch not to do that because that is against the rules.
“We’re fine, thank you,” says the Black Widow. And then after a pause, “The solution is in the posters, yes?”
“Actually, the book shelf,” Debbie says.
Faintly, and not through the walkie but through the actual walls of the room, Debbie hears James Rhodes aka War Machine shout, “I KNEW IT,” which is. a lot. for Debbie to process right now. She watches on the monitor as three superheroes sprint to the bookshelves on the west wall where they must solve a series of rhyming couplets related to various runes scattered through the room. The bookshelves are from IKEA. Debbie helped paint them so they’d look ancient and Nordic. She is suddenly very glad Thor is not here.
“I would have looked at the bookshelves,” The Vision says, surprisingly sulkily. He is floating behind Debbie in the control room. He has been kicked out of the escape room because in the first minute of the first attempt, he simply phased through the wall and explained that he had successfully escaped. Which is sort of true, so technically he’s not kicked out so much as he won too quickly. Debbie had said he could go back in. Both the Black Widow and the Scarlet Witch had firmly said no.
Debbie, at a loss for what else to do, offers him a Twizzler. The Vision accepts it solemnly.
#they banned tony bc he solves it in like two seconds
Very true and Tony probably watches everyone (including Debbie and Vision) from his own damn home
Conversely, please consider: Tony is TERRIBLE at escape rooms, for reasons including but not limited to:
Tony is incredible at flashes of genius. Escape rooms require more methodological approaches.
Tony’s strongest skills include long periods of nonstop work and talking his way out of situations. Escape rooms have a specific time frame and cannot be worked around or manipulated no matter what you say.
Tony is a rule breaker. Escape rooms only work when you accept the conceit of the room and recognize aspects are non-negotiable.
Tony gets distracted by something he can build out of the pieces. He ends up building a tiny arc reactor in the escape room, but they do not escape.
Tony is not great at puzzles. He’s a mechanic, and he’s a PROBLEM solver, but he’s not a PUZZLE solver.
Tony does not play well with others. Escape rooms require teamwork with people besides Rhodey and Bruce.
Someone who isn’t Rhodey or Pepper tries to hand Tony a clue. It goes poorly.
To be clear, none of this is a knock on Tony as a character!
But man, I am so much less interested in “my fave is so great that they can outsmart anything and everyone, including the rest of their team” than in “my fave’s talents and strengths, which make them a superhero, are exactly what make them incredibly ill-suited to this task that normal humans can perform with far less issues.“
also? he can’t prehide snacks in an escape room, so he’ll be like a cranky hypoglycemic toddler halfway through.
Bruce and Tony are sharing snacks with Bucky as they watch from Tony’s lab because Tony looked at the escape room and went “no, this is stupid.” Bruce recognized that being locked in a small room with Sam trolling Nat was *not* going to help his blood pressure.
Bucky is not allowed in panic rooms because he once joked that every room is a panic room when you’re the Winter Soldier and it made Steve sad but also because everyone is fully aware that “small locked room full of hidden things and arguing people” is not a good match for Buckaroo.
Nobody noticed but Clint went in with everyone else and immediately climbed out of the vents and is waiting for them in the hallway with a shit-eating grin because Nat is going to be *SO MAD* at him.
-Steve came up with the whole concept. He thought they needed a team building exercise. These escape rooms seemed like a novel and fun event. He regrets his choices.
-Steve is a pretty good puzzle solver. He is refraining from solving most of the puzzles to give everyone a chance to shine.
-Steve is also trying to keep things moving along to curtail this disaster. He’s more than willing to ask for clues despite Nat’s absolute competitive drive only because he’s sure Sam has moved so many things that the room is FUBAR now.
-After they were done, Steve figured Rhodey and he would stay behind to help Debbie set the room back up. Rhodey would want to understand the mechanics. Steve would need to reattach that cabinet door (Wanda had assured him it was unlocked. If she couldn’t destroy the puzzle, she convinced others to try). Maybe he could slip Debbie a twenty as a tip for all their trouble when he shook her hand on the way out….and correct that rune on the left side of cabinet. That was not how you drew “gar.” He should know, Thor was a linguist after all.
-Steve thinks he should have just invited them along to jitterbug night down at the VFW post.
