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allthewondersYou play with fire, Toshiko thinks, and inevitably you'll get burned. Or: the longer you spend working on a rift in space and time, the more likely it becomes that you'll find yourself in 1930s New York.
That was about six months ago, and it's not her first time to this particular rodeo, so to speak. She does the best she can in supplying information in a format that can reach her teammates in the late 2000s, so that they can use the Rift Manipulator to bring her home, but she supposes after a couple of months that if it hasn't happened yet it isn't going to. And this time, Jack's promise to look after her holds no value. He isn't here. She's alone.
She lets herself mourn. Drinks more than she ought to, cries herself to sleep at night in the little room she's renting with stolen money. So much of her skill set demands technology that won't exist for half a century - but, she tells herself, that wasn't what got her out of UNIT detention. It was her innate understanding of the information before her that caught the Captain's eye.
She can do it again. Save herself again.
At least it's not too tricky to construct an identity for herself. Short term plans: get a job, save enough money for a ticket back to England, get the fuck out of the States before the war starts. Then - who knows. Find somewhere rural to hide until the late forties. But those are long term plans, and she doesn't have the space in her head for them just yet.
The need for a short term plan brings her to the very, very deep typing pool of Stark Industries. On her first, terrible day she stays late and makes some adjustments to her typewriter so it actually bloody works, and from then she's flying.
It takes two months to get bored. Then she starts using her evenings to make a proper study of the contemporary technology SI has to hand, the resources it has access to. Getting hold of information isn't that difficult; most of it she pieces together from the work that comes out of the typing pool, the near-impenetrable scrawl of the country's finest scientists and engineers being converted into neat black and white type. The women around her simply don't have the education or expertise to understand what they're looking at. For most of them it might as well be a different language. For Toshiko, it's the tongue she's always spoken most fluently.
At first the designs she creates are just a bit of fun. A way of processing what she's learning, feeding her starving mind with pages of neatly drawn technical diagrams and flawless formulae in her small, precise handwriting. She knows that if she sends them to SI, if anyone picks up on them - hasn't she disrupted history enough already, just by being here?
On the other hand, being forcibly separated from everything you know and everything you care about by a random act in an amoral universe can do a lot to short-circuit those concerns, and by the end of those first six months she's sent five of her devices' designs to Stark's R&D department, anonymously, and she doesn't regret it at all.
It's not as if anything will come of it.
That was about six months ago, and it's not her first time to this particular rodeo, so to speak. She does the best she can in supplying information in a format that can reach her teammates in the late 2000s, so that they can use the Rift Manipulator to bring her home, but she supposes after a couple of months that if it hasn't happened yet it isn't going to. And this time, Jack's promise to look after her holds no value. He isn't here. She's alone.
She lets herself mourn. Drinks more than she ought to, cries herself to sleep at night in the little room she's renting with stolen money. So much of her skill set demands technology that won't exist for half a century - but, she tells herself, that wasn't what got her out of UNIT detention. It was her innate understanding of the information before her that caught the Captain's eye.
She can do it again. Save herself again.
At least it's not too tricky to construct an identity for herself. Short term plans: get a job, save enough money for a ticket back to England, get the fuck out of the States before the war starts. Then - who knows. Find somewhere rural to hide until the late forties. But those are long term plans, and she doesn't have the space in her head for them just yet.
The need for a short term plan brings her to the very, very deep typing pool of Stark Industries. On her first, terrible day she stays late and makes some adjustments to her typewriter so it actually bloody works, and from then she's flying.
It takes two months to get bored. Then she starts using her evenings to make a proper study of the contemporary technology SI has to hand, the resources it has access to. Getting hold of information isn't that difficult; most of it she pieces together from the work that comes out of the typing pool, the near-impenetrable scrawl of the country's finest scientists and engineers being converted into neat black and white type. The women around her simply don't have the education or expertise to understand what they're looking at. For most of them it might as well be a different language. For Toshiko, it's the tongue she's always spoken most fluently.
At first the designs she creates are just a bit of fun. A way of processing what she's learning, feeding her starving mind with pages of neatly drawn technical diagrams and flawless formulae in her small, precise handwriting. She knows that if she sends them to SI, if anyone picks up on them - hasn't she disrupted history enough already, just by being here?
On the other hand, being forcibly separated from everything you know and everything you care about by a random act in an amoral universe can do a lot to short-circuit those concerns, and by the end of those first six months she's sent five of her devices' designs to Stark's R&D department, anonymously, and she doesn't regret it at all.
It's not as if anything will come of it.