The Briefing (pt. 2)

The elevator came to a stop once they reached the very bottom of the ride, which was about fifty floors down from the ground level and twenty-five floors down from the uppermost floor in the building.

Joanette loved coming down to the subterraneous arsenal. No matter how many times she went down there, there would always be something new to see.

"Skade!" Alistair called out as he strolled into the arsenal with his hands in his pockets. Joanette couldn't help but think that her father looked like a very imposing figure every time he walked into a room like he owned it. In this case, he did, but he had a tendency of marking his territory wherever he went. Maybe he was a sociopath.

A man wearing goggles, a thick mask, head cover, and a laboratory coat wobbled out from behind a wall with latex gloves on his hands. Joanette had to smile at the sight. Skade was always up to something insane in his experiment room.

"Hey boss!" Came the muffled response. Skade removed his gloves and threw them onto a nearby table. The rest of his equipment followed almost immediately, revealing his freckles and fire truck red hair. "You're here early. I was not expecting you until eight!" He pushed his lab coat sleeve up and looked down at his watch.

"My daughter wanted to take a look at what you've got for her and Ken so far," Alistair responded dutifully, as if Joanette couldn't speak for herself. This annoyed her, but then again, she'd been annoyed about three times already and it was barely seven thirty in the morning.

"Ah, the masks." Skade waved an arm at them. "Follow me."

The deeper into the arsenal they went, the more items came into their view. On one rack, there was an assortment of pens in different fashions, and on another rack, something akin to stress balls were on display. Knowing what she knew, Joanette immediately assumed that the pens were small switchblades or glass breakers, and the stress balls were latex netting.

Towards the back was the more impressive weaponry, with explosives masked as jewellery, or poison hidden in common accessories. Beside the dangerous weaponry was the section where the disguises were.

This was the section that Joanette and Ken knew best. There was no way Joanette would be able to complete missions and look like herself, and it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out, so Skade made her second-skin silicone masks that she would wear whenever she was on the field. Each mask came back down to the subterranean arsenal upon the end of the mission so that it could be stored with the others.

"Here we are, my latest creation. She is beautiful, is she not?" Skade held up a display head, upon which was a lifeless face that was just waiting for her to put it on.

"She's stunning," Joanette was staring intently at the face. Every part of it was calling to her. The 'skin' was bare in order for her to customise its look whenever she felt like adding makeup to it. Skade handed her the mask so that he could show Ken his prosthetics.

"I have made customs for your nose and chin, mister Ken." Skade pulled out another display head, this one reminiscent of Ken's prominent facial features, but with individual prosthetics stuck onto it. "I have also created new custom lenses for you both!" He gave Joanette a pair a glasses, and he gave Ken a pair of contact lenses.

To the common eye, they looked like regular glasses and contact lenses, but to their trained eye, the true nature of the items was made plain. Like how the nose support in Joanette's glasses had little black dots that looked like black glitter, or how the iris in Ken's contact lenses had little gold specks in them.

They were transmitters for information review, and sensors for x-ray vision and heat sensing. There was probably more to these items than what they could just notice from their years of training.

Skade was a mad scientist, and the biggest mistake anyone could commit would be to underestimate him. He would have random ideas while indulging in his psychedelic habit, and find a way to turn them into a reality, no matter how far fetched. So far the only thing he had failed to engineer was an invisibility cloaking device.

For now. Joanette had no doubt that he'd end up successfully creating one at some point. He was a genius like that.

Genius or heavy drug addict, both terms were interchangeable in her book. Joanette herself had been struck by the muse of inspiration during a few trips on psychedelics. Drug use was more than common in the modelling world. There was almost no backstage to any fashion show that didn't have a bag of cocaine strewn about somewhere for the models to snort once they'd made their rounds on the catwalk.

They'd come off the ramp and snort a few lines between outfit changes. One time Joanette was walking the runway after another model who'd dropped to the floor on an overdose with a severe nosebleed. That had been the ruin of that designer.

At the very least, she considered herself to be impartial to drugs. She'd partaken in her lifetime to be familiar with them, but her job as an agent required her to be sober. These days, Joanette didn't so much as touch hard lemonade.

Such was the dedication of a Bordeaux. She couldn't say she was happy with how much she had to sacrifice for her family's legacy, but she also knew that she wouldn't have it any other way. If Alyssa was the only one of the two to be an agent, she'd feel like the black sheep. Besides, she liked the action and the danger.

Having Ken around helped as well, in it's own special way. He was annoying as all hell but he kept her company and he understood some of her plights when no one else would. At the very least she could find comfort in that.