Location: Mission Briefing Room --> Laboratory Interacting with:The Team
Daphne. Alisa felt her spirit drop to her feet as Martian Manhunter revealed what had become of her friend. What happened? What did her dad do to make her… like this? She could barely bring herself to look at Daphne, entombed in greenery. This next mission would be hard without her. So hard. Her infinite gentleness couldn’t be matched by anyone else on the team. Even with the return of Casper, the team would still be missing something important without her.
Alisa gazed at the ghostly boy for a moment before looking away and furrowing her brow. His return had shocked her- she had thought him dead for sure- yet beyond a few cursory words and an enthusiastic ‘welcome back!’ they hadn’t talked. She doubted that would change too much. The thought of not being friends with one of her new teammates didn’t torture her as much as it had a month ago, now that she had found friends. Not that her friends had been very forthcoming as of late. Viktor had ignored her for most of the past weeks before a heartfelt conversation between them that had led to their friendship being stronger than ever, and Aleen’a was almost completely absent. And everyone else was the same as them. Ja had seemed to bounce back, while Kassy had sequestered herself in her bedroom after the awful way the Atlantis mission had ended. Alisa didn’t blame her. She wasn’t a monster, but having something that personal exposed hurt. Zach was hurt but still as sassy as ever, and Daphne was… well.
In a way, Alisa felt she was the only one who had emerged from these past few weeks unscathed. She had to be the strong one, the steady rock for the rest to lean on. Alisa was coming to understand her purpose on the team more and more as just that- someone who could be counted on to be trusted and to protect the team in crisis. It was something she was suited to.
Five hours was a long time to prep. Alisa headed to the lab after the briefing, sparing a sad glance back for Daphne. There was nothing she could do for her now. She remembered the last Kobra-related mission well- La Hoya, Argentina, where they had lost Casper and Felix. If their plan to pose as bait worked, they’d need some way to recover any information gleaned from their base. That was where Alisa’s new flash-drive technology, uncreatively termed ‘flash drive pinkie’, could come in. Memorizing the entire computer was an awful gambit, but connecting herself directly was a foolish one. Allowing her to download information like a computer while also protecting her core computer was the ideal, and what she was trying to improve.
In the lab, Alisa sat on the stool and booted up the computer, bringing out her tools while she waited for the program to start. She was nearly done. Hopefully she could finish this project in five hours.