Post by lvsphinx on Aug 21, 2024 0:16:26 GMT
General Information
Full Name:
Claire Smith-Martinez
Codename or Alias:
Checkmate
Agent Smith-Martinez
Anonymity
Secret
Gender:
Female
Race:
Human
Age:
28
Place Of Birth:
Washington D.C., U.S.A.
Occupation/Status:
C.I.A. Special Activities Agent, Intelligence Officer
Alignment:
Neutral
Factions:
C.I.A., The Protectorate (formerly)
Canon Or Original?:
OC
Powers/Abilities:
Teleportation: Claire's mother's ability to "timewalk" has mutated into Claire's ability to teleport herself, the clothes she is wearing, and within limits a certain amount of additional mass which is in contact with her. Claire teleports by displacing herself into another dimension, traveling through it, and then returning to her own dimension at a certain distance from her point of departure. She consciously determines her point of return. The entire process occurs so quickly that Claire is unaware of being in another dimension at all. Claire guides herself through another dimension by a subconscious, natural direction-finding sense. Because of her ability's close evolutionary ties to her mother's ability to "timewalk" anywhen in time, Claire's range of teleportation is very vast. She simply needs to have seen an image of a place to be able to teleport to it, having a range of several star systems. As long as the receiving environment is hospitable, Claire can teleport to another planet and back without issue.
Olympian: Claire's father's metagene that granted him hyper-reflexes and coordination has mutated into a metagene that grants Claire her Olympian body. She has the same strength, speed, and coordination as Olympic athletes, instead of having hyper-precision like her father. She also has superhuman endurance and stamina, being able to perform at peak level for hours after even the best athletes must retire for rest.
Multilingual: To be a more effective spy, Claire has learned how to speak and read Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, in addition to her native English.
Master Marksman: Claire's father has taught her how to shoot since she has been able to walk, much to her mother's chagrin. Not only is Claire an expert sharpshooter with a handgun, she can also perform trick shots with ease.
Proficient Martial Artist: To supplement her training, Claire also studies and trains in mixed martial arts and judo, though she is by no means a master in either. At least, not yet.
Experienced Intelligence Officer: Claire has been trained by the C.I.A. in spycraft, intelligence gathering, and reconnaissance, able to infiltrate a city, blend into a crowd, and extract information from a secure site before anyone is the wiser.
C.I.A. Access: Claire enjoys access to the C.I.A.'s servers and uses this access to stay up to date on people of interest to her, using this invasive knowledge and her own sharpened investigative skills to learn almost as much about a person as that person knows themselves. If they don't protect themselves, even other metahuman's online presences are up for Claire's perusal. Claire also has C.I.A. access to federal installations and military sites, provided that she doesn't abuse her access to such secure locations.
Heir of the Institute: Because her mother was one of the founders of the Institute, Claire still enjoys access to some of the Institute's intelligence and technology, even if she is no longer part of them. Claire typically uses this access to augment her personal arsenal, as well as help keep up with events and going-ons in the metahuman community.
Weapons/Items:
Twin Sig Sauer P228: Claire's favorite weapons. The Sig Sauer is commonly used by members of both the Navy Seals and the CIA. It functions well, even when wet, and is compact.
Institute Cryo Grenades: These Institute-designed grenades release a thick cloud of liquid nitrogen upon exploding, flash-freezing everything within 5 feet of the grenade burst, at least temporarily. Repeated exposure to these grenades is enough to freeze someone permanently, and kill them.
ARC-7 Laser SMG: The Institute designed this experimental SMG with top-tier industry cutting lasers in mind, firing a burst of 3 steel-cutting lasers with every trigger pull. Instead of bullets, this SMG relies on a prototype energy cell which must be recharged by the Institute itself.
Shock Gloves: These Protectorate-commissioned combat gloves are made of a carbon nanofiber, and carry experimental high-powered tasers built inside, capable of delivering an electric shock that can drop a bull elephant.
Weaknesses:
Teleportation Fatigue: Teleporting for Claire is like engaging in moderate exercise. While repeatedly teleporting in short bursts within a limited space is no problem for Claire, teleporting to other countries and other star systems require a great deal more physical exertion. Teleporting to a far off point on Earth requires Clair to rest her teleportation ability after only a few "jumps" for at least an hour, rendering her unable to teleport until that time has passed. She typically can only teleport to a faraway country and back once per hour, or around 2-3 international jumps available per hour. For other locations in the greater Milky Way galaxy, teleporting to another star system may require several weeks to a few months to recover her energy, depending on the distance, effectively stranding her at wherever she chose to teleport. It is only with prior preparation and proper gear that Claire has survived these extended trips to other planets.
Appearance
Image:
Physical Appearance:
Claire is an attractive slender white woman standing at 5'4", with short blonde hair, pierced ears, expressive light brown eyes, and defined cheekbones.
Clothing and Armor:
Institute-Designed Apparel: While her clothing may appear to just be fashionable and trendy, Claire's clothing is actually custom made with the same secret Institute-manufactured material that they use for their combat lab coats. Because of this arrangement, everything in Claire's wardrobe is bulletproof, fireproof, blastproof, and resistant to blades.
Personality
Sexual Orientation:
Pansexual
General Personality:
Above everything else, Claire is a workaholic, using work and performance as a way to cope with trauma since high school, such as her parents' disappearances. Claire simply does not know how to find life or joy outside of work, and has difficulty finding fulfillment without it. Her coworkers would describe her as upbeat, chipper, energetic and positive. They consistently praise her work ethic, finding her efficient, professional, and quick. Outside of work, she is listless, restless, and bored, even during vacations that she is forced to take. She has few hobbies, instead continuing in her free time what she would do in the office: research metahumans of interest to the agency.
Face/Voice:
Ashley Nicolette Frangipane
Character's History
Mother:
Jane Smith
Father:
Reinol Martinez
History:
Aside from researching the brain and psychics, a private research institute simply named the Institute also heavily researches and experiments with metahumans in general, including in metahuman eugenics. Claire's mother, Jane, was a time-traveling metahuman who helped found the Institute and personally pioneered many of the Institute's early projects. Her father was a metahuman assassin and bodyguard that worked for the Institute, an assassin that her mother crossed paths with often during their work. They would fall in love and marry, and the Institute, wanting to see results from their union, supported the pregnancy with parental leave for both of them.
Claire would quickly demonstrate herself to also be a metahuman, literally blinking in and out of existence minutes after she was born. She would be given a very comfortable but controlled early childhood in the Institute, being heavily sedated through her food most of the time to keep her unpredictable teleportation powers in check. Once old enough, Claire's parents would have her enrolled in the Protectorate's Harry S. Truman Academy, a school specializing in teaching and raising metahumans. At the same time, her mother, a seasoned metahuman, personally trained her during these years in the use of her teleportation powers, helping the girl even reach other Earth-like planets by her 13 birthday.
Life went well for the young Claire, until her 14th year, when both of her parents suddenly disappeared during classified Institute field research somewhere in Asia. She grieved and dealt with the grief by becoming a perfectionist, obsessing in all manner of investigative work and intelligence gathering. She graduated from Harry S. Truman Academy as valedictorian, and like many of her peers, immediately enlisted in the Protectorate after graduating, finding herself stationed in Brockton Bay, home of the Outsiders themselves. While working, she found she had a talent for sneaking around in plain sight, and applied this talent in the field to perform reconnaissance work. It was through this work that she leveraged a position as the Outsider's in-house intelligence officer, though she would find that the team would rather use their intel to merely just keep the crime rate from increasing instead of staying two-steps ahead of their opposition in the city, much to her chagrin. The most notable offense to Claire was when the Outsiders decided not to act on intel that there may be an attack on a police convoy, causing a rookie Protectorate member assigned to the convoy to get killed at the hands of Stormfront.
After four frustrating years as part of the Outsiders, Claire was honorably discharged and applied to work for the C.I.A., trusting the established organization over the agendas of more metahuman-focused agencies and entities. She easily stood apart from other applicants and then her peers at the agency, using her unique talents to infiltrate sites in a matter of minutes as opposed to after months of planning. She also showed talent as an analyst, compiling information and drawing accurate conclusions from a broad swath of information. It was with the C.I.A. that she was able to practice some methods considered too extreme for the Protectorate, most notably "enhanced interrogation", exploring how morally grey she could operate.
For seven years, Claire has continued to shine within the C.I.A., most notably as a field operative, occasionally with an anti-metahuman unit codenamed the Boys. The agency views her as a valuable metahuman asset to have within their ranks, especially when their agency and their mission have gotten overshadowed by the younger metahuman and superhero-focused organizations within the U.S. government. Internally, there is some level of mistrust within the C.I.A. towards these younger agencies, especially since so many of their agendas and targets overlap and will continue to overlap. The C.I.A. itself has tried to remedy this mistrust by engaging in partnership programs with these agencies, most notably Task Force X. Claire has served in two missions with the Suicide Squad, as part of a joint C.I.A./Task Force X program targeting foreign metahuman terrorists, and found the experiences...enlightening, finding herself to be at odds with more serious members of the team.
Role Play Sample:
While most people would justifiably hate it, Claire would admit that she enjoyed being a master at “enhanced interrogation.” Like each innocuous sounding technique, Claire was an innocuous practitioner, whether it was sleep deprivation, cramped confinement, or waterboarding. After enough practice, Claire could fall asleep to chained men at the ceiling, the prisoners naked with music blaring, sometimes for days on end; For cramped confinement, she stuffed people for hours into (at times insect-filled) boxes the size of small dog crates or in the shape of coffins. Waterboarding was her favorite, which was of course, simply drowning without death.
Claire also remembers subjecting detainees to abuses beyond those formally labeled “enhanced interrogation”, including “rectal rehydration” (a form of rape accomplished by pumping fluid, or sometimes food, into a detainee’s rectum through a tube forced into his anus against his will), and dousing detainees with freezing cold water and then blasting the air conditioning and fans.
She would draw on only some of her experience to break the men in front of her.
"So...Dominic, was it?"
She addressed a man in the center of the group of three survivors, walking over to him, tapping her ARC-7 on her hip. "Are you afraid of heights? Do you like the cold?"
The bound man shook, straightening up as she addressed him. This one woman had coldly cleared out the entire warehouse of men, all of them armed to the teeth with...
"Stark tech. Hammer tech. LexCorp tech. Intergang weaponry. All of this in the Juarez Cartel's hands, alongside their usual merchandise. Now, that is weird. Why is that? Any answers?" She looked around expectantly at them, before sighing and grabbing Dominic by the throat, unleashing a million volt discharge from her glove. Her screamed, for a moment, before falling silent to the crackles and crackling of electricity coursing through him. "Am I taking to myself? I feel like I'm talking to myself." "We don't know anything!" shouted another one of the men, wincing as he tried to ignore the bleeding from a gunshot wound.
"Ohhh...buddy...You're on your way out... I shot you in your gut, that means you only have...about an hour and a half before you finish bleeding out on me? At most? Unless...I get you to a hospital." Claire vanishes and reappears five feet in front of him in the same instant, to reinforce her point. "Right now. All you have to tell me is why?" "Why what?"
"Why your boss Alejandra is trafficking all this diverse exotic top-end weaponry? She's based in Mexico. She was happy there. Why is she doing business in the States? With product outside of her expertise?"
The man glared up at her and shook his head. "Lady, I don't know why the fuck our boss is expanding like this. Ask her yourself. You will have gotten her attention with a stunt like this."
Claire sighed aloud, before shoving the barrel of her Sig Sauer under the man's chin. "I guess I'll have to." And she pulled the trigger, ignoring the bang.
"You...I don't remember hearing your name," she said to the last man surviving, ignoring the corpses of the other gang members around them. This man was different; his English wasn't accented, and he had matching Empire 88 tattoos on his shoulders. "Listen, you fuckin' racist. I'm tired, and frankly, don't feel like killing any more than I've already done today. What have your bosses been doing with all of these people from outside of the Cabal? What are they planning?"
"Look, I don't know anything. I was just told to help ship all of this. I don't know why. All I know is that it's headed to New York and Gotham!"
"New York and Gotham...That is a bit of new info, thank you." Claire tapped the side of the man's head with her Sig before suddenly grabbing his shoulder, the two of them blinking from existence.
They reappeared continents away, on the top of an incredibly tall peak, cold frost-adorned wind whipping all around them. "I'll let you live. If you somehow get back to Brockton, tell Stormfront that Checkmate remembers her." Claire then unbound the man, who gave a bewildered look at their surroundings. "Where the fuck am I?" "The Himalayas! Good luck." Claire disappeared in another blink, leaving the man behind on the mountaintop, reappearing in her favorite bar, prompting a surprised yelp from the closest bar patrons and a cheer from the barkeep. "Hey! Agent Smith-Martinez, popping back in! What'll it be? The usual?" Claire merely gave the bartender a look and sat down at her usual spot at the bar. "Yeah, I've had a long day."
Full Name:
Claire Smith-Martinez
Codename or Alias:
Checkmate
Agent Smith-Martinez
Anonymity
Secret
Gender:
Female
Race:
Human
Age:
28
Place Of Birth:
Washington D.C., U.S.A.
Occupation/Status:
C.I.A. Special Activities Agent, Intelligence Officer
Alignment:
Neutral
Factions:
C.I.A., The Protectorate (formerly)
Canon Or Original?:
OC
Powers/Abilities:
Teleportation: Claire's mother's ability to "timewalk" has mutated into Claire's ability to teleport herself, the clothes she is wearing, and within limits a certain amount of additional mass which is in contact with her. Claire teleports by displacing herself into another dimension, traveling through it, and then returning to her own dimension at a certain distance from her point of departure. She consciously determines her point of return. The entire process occurs so quickly that Claire is unaware of being in another dimension at all. Claire guides herself through another dimension by a subconscious, natural direction-finding sense. Because of her ability's close evolutionary ties to her mother's ability to "timewalk" anywhen in time, Claire's range of teleportation is very vast. She simply needs to have seen an image of a place to be able to teleport to it, having a range of several star systems. As long as the receiving environment is hospitable, Claire can teleport to another planet and back without issue.
Olympian: Claire's father's metagene that granted him hyper-reflexes and coordination has mutated into a metagene that grants Claire her Olympian body. She has the same strength, speed, and coordination as Olympic athletes, instead of having hyper-precision like her father. She also has superhuman endurance and stamina, being able to perform at peak level for hours after even the best athletes must retire for rest.
Multilingual: To be a more effective spy, Claire has learned how to speak and read Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, in addition to her native English.
Master Marksman: Claire's father has taught her how to shoot since she has been able to walk, much to her mother's chagrin. Not only is Claire an expert sharpshooter with a handgun, she can also perform trick shots with ease.
Proficient Martial Artist: To supplement her training, Claire also studies and trains in mixed martial arts and judo, though she is by no means a master in either. At least, not yet.
Experienced Intelligence Officer: Claire has been trained by the C.I.A. in spycraft, intelligence gathering, and reconnaissance, able to infiltrate a city, blend into a crowd, and extract information from a secure site before anyone is the wiser.
C.I.A. Access: Claire enjoys access to the C.I.A.'s servers and uses this access to stay up to date on people of interest to her, using this invasive knowledge and her own sharpened investigative skills to learn almost as much about a person as that person knows themselves. If they don't protect themselves, even other metahuman's online presences are up for Claire's perusal. Claire also has C.I.A. access to federal installations and military sites, provided that she doesn't abuse her access to such secure locations.
Heir of the Institute: Because her mother was one of the founders of the Institute, Claire still enjoys access to some of the Institute's intelligence and technology, even if she is no longer part of them. Claire typically uses this access to augment her personal arsenal, as well as help keep up with events and going-ons in the metahuman community.
Weapons/Items:
Twin Sig Sauer P228: Claire's favorite weapons. The Sig Sauer is commonly used by members of both the Navy Seals and the CIA. It functions well, even when wet, and is compact.
Institute Cryo Grenades: These Institute-designed grenades release a thick cloud of liquid nitrogen upon exploding, flash-freezing everything within 5 feet of the grenade burst, at least temporarily. Repeated exposure to these grenades is enough to freeze someone permanently, and kill them.
ARC-7 Laser SMG: The Institute designed this experimental SMG with top-tier industry cutting lasers in mind, firing a burst of 3 steel-cutting lasers with every trigger pull. Instead of bullets, this SMG relies on a prototype energy cell which must be recharged by the Institute itself.
Shock Gloves: These Protectorate-commissioned combat gloves are made of a carbon nanofiber, and carry experimental high-powered tasers built inside, capable of delivering an electric shock that can drop a bull elephant.
Weaknesses:
Teleportation Fatigue: Teleporting for Claire is like engaging in moderate exercise. While repeatedly teleporting in short bursts within a limited space is no problem for Claire, teleporting to other countries and other star systems require a great deal more physical exertion. Teleporting to a far off point on Earth requires Clair to rest her teleportation ability after only a few "jumps" for at least an hour, rendering her unable to teleport until that time has passed. She typically can only teleport to a faraway country and back once per hour, or around 2-3 international jumps available per hour. For other locations in the greater Milky Way galaxy, teleporting to another star system may require several weeks to a few months to recover her energy, depending on the distance, effectively stranding her at wherever she chose to teleport. It is only with prior preparation and proper gear that Claire has survived these extended trips to other planets.
Appearance
Image:
Physical Appearance:
Claire is an attractive slender white woman standing at 5'4", with short blonde hair, pierced ears, expressive light brown eyes, and defined cheekbones.
Clothing and Armor:
Institute-Designed Apparel: While her clothing may appear to just be fashionable and trendy, Claire's clothing is actually custom made with the same secret Institute-manufactured material that they use for their combat lab coats. Because of this arrangement, everything in Claire's wardrobe is bulletproof, fireproof, blastproof, and resistant to blades.
Personality
Sexual Orientation:
Pansexual
General Personality:
Above everything else, Claire is a workaholic, using work and performance as a way to cope with trauma since high school, such as her parents' disappearances. Claire simply does not know how to find life or joy outside of work, and has difficulty finding fulfillment without it. Her coworkers would describe her as upbeat, chipper, energetic and positive. They consistently praise her work ethic, finding her efficient, professional, and quick. Outside of work, she is listless, restless, and bored, even during vacations that she is forced to take. She has few hobbies, instead continuing in her free time what she would do in the office: research metahumans of interest to the agency.
Face/Voice:
Ashley Nicolette Frangipane
Character's History
Mother:
Jane Smith
Father:
Reinol Martinez
History:
Aside from researching the brain and psychics, a private research institute simply named the Institute also heavily researches and experiments with metahumans in general, including in metahuman eugenics. Claire's mother, Jane, was a time-traveling metahuman who helped found the Institute and personally pioneered many of the Institute's early projects. Her father was a metahuman assassin and bodyguard that worked for the Institute, an assassin that her mother crossed paths with often during their work. They would fall in love and marry, and the Institute, wanting to see results from their union, supported the pregnancy with parental leave for both of them.
Claire would quickly demonstrate herself to also be a metahuman, literally blinking in and out of existence minutes after she was born. She would be given a very comfortable but controlled early childhood in the Institute, being heavily sedated through her food most of the time to keep her unpredictable teleportation powers in check. Once old enough, Claire's parents would have her enrolled in the Protectorate's Harry S. Truman Academy, a school specializing in teaching and raising metahumans. At the same time, her mother, a seasoned metahuman, personally trained her during these years in the use of her teleportation powers, helping the girl even reach other Earth-like planets by her 13 birthday.
Life went well for the young Claire, until her 14th year, when both of her parents suddenly disappeared during classified Institute field research somewhere in Asia. She grieved and dealt with the grief by becoming a perfectionist, obsessing in all manner of investigative work and intelligence gathering. She graduated from Harry S. Truman Academy as valedictorian, and like many of her peers, immediately enlisted in the Protectorate after graduating, finding herself stationed in Brockton Bay, home of the Outsiders themselves. While working, she found she had a talent for sneaking around in plain sight, and applied this talent in the field to perform reconnaissance work. It was through this work that she leveraged a position as the Outsider's in-house intelligence officer, though she would find that the team would rather use their intel to merely just keep the crime rate from increasing instead of staying two-steps ahead of their opposition in the city, much to her chagrin. The most notable offense to Claire was when the Outsiders decided not to act on intel that there may be an attack on a police convoy, causing a rookie Protectorate member assigned to the convoy to get killed at the hands of Stormfront.
After four frustrating years as part of the Outsiders, Claire was honorably discharged and applied to work for the C.I.A., trusting the established organization over the agendas of more metahuman-focused agencies and entities. She easily stood apart from other applicants and then her peers at the agency, using her unique talents to infiltrate sites in a matter of minutes as opposed to after months of planning. She also showed talent as an analyst, compiling information and drawing accurate conclusions from a broad swath of information. It was with the C.I.A. that she was able to practice some methods considered too extreme for the Protectorate, most notably "enhanced interrogation", exploring how morally grey she could operate.
For seven years, Claire has continued to shine within the C.I.A., most notably as a field operative, occasionally with an anti-metahuman unit codenamed the Boys. The agency views her as a valuable metahuman asset to have within their ranks, especially when their agency and their mission have gotten overshadowed by the younger metahuman and superhero-focused organizations within the U.S. government. Internally, there is some level of mistrust within the C.I.A. towards these younger agencies, especially since so many of their agendas and targets overlap and will continue to overlap. The C.I.A. itself has tried to remedy this mistrust by engaging in partnership programs with these agencies, most notably Task Force X. Claire has served in two missions with the Suicide Squad, as part of a joint C.I.A./Task Force X program targeting foreign metahuman terrorists, and found the experiences...enlightening, finding herself to be at odds with more serious members of the team.
Role Play Sample:
While most people would justifiably hate it, Claire would admit that she enjoyed being a master at “enhanced interrogation.” Like each innocuous sounding technique, Claire was an innocuous practitioner, whether it was sleep deprivation, cramped confinement, or waterboarding. After enough practice, Claire could fall asleep to chained men at the ceiling, the prisoners naked with music blaring, sometimes for days on end; For cramped confinement, she stuffed people for hours into (at times insect-filled) boxes the size of small dog crates or in the shape of coffins. Waterboarding was her favorite, which was of course, simply drowning without death.
Claire also remembers subjecting detainees to abuses beyond those formally labeled “enhanced interrogation”, including “rectal rehydration” (a form of rape accomplished by pumping fluid, or sometimes food, into a detainee’s rectum through a tube forced into his anus against his will), and dousing detainees with freezing cold water and then blasting the air conditioning and fans.
She would draw on only some of her experience to break the men in front of her.
"So...Dominic, was it?"
She addressed a man in the center of the group of three survivors, walking over to him, tapping her ARC-7 on her hip. "Are you afraid of heights? Do you like the cold?"
The bound man shook, straightening up as she addressed him. This one woman had coldly cleared out the entire warehouse of men, all of them armed to the teeth with...
"Stark tech. Hammer tech. LexCorp tech. Intergang weaponry. All of this in the Juarez Cartel's hands, alongside their usual merchandise. Now, that is weird. Why is that? Any answers?" She looked around expectantly at them, before sighing and grabbing Dominic by the throat, unleashing a million volt discharge from her glove. Her screamed, for a moment, before falling silent to the crackles and crackling of electricity coursing through him. "Am I taking to myself? I feel like I'm talking to myself." "We don't know anything!" shouted another one of the men, wincing as he tried to ignore the bleeding from a gunshot wound.
"Ohhh...buddy...You're on your way out... I shot you in your gut, that means you only have...about an hour and a half before you finish bleeding out on me? At most? Unless...I get you to a hospital." Claire vanishes and reappears five feet in front of him in the same instant, to reinforce her point. "Right now. All you have to tell me is why?" "Why what?"
"Why your boss Alejandra is trafficking all this diverse exotic top-end weaponry? She's based in Mexico. She was happy there. Why is she doing business in the States? With product outside of her expertise?"
The man glared up at her and shook his head. "Lady, I don't know why the fuck our boss is expanding like this. Ask her yourself. You will have gotten her attention with a stunt like this."
Claire sighed aloud, before shoving the barrel of her Sig Sauer under the man's chin. "I guess I'll have to." And she pulled the trigger, ignoring the bang.
"You...I don't remember hearing your name," she said to the last man surviving, ignoring the corpses of the other gang members around them. This man was different; his English wasn't accented, and he had matching Empire 88 tattoos on his shoulders. "Listen, you fuckin' racist. I'm tired, and frankly, don't feel like killing any more than I've already done today. What have your bosses been doing with all of these people from outside of the Cabal? What are they planning?"
"Look, I don't know anything. I was just told to help ship all of this. I don't know why. All I know is that it's headed to New York and Gotham!"
"New York and Gotham...That is a bit of new info, thank you." Claire tapped the side of the man's head with her Sig before suddenly grabbing his shoulder, the two of them blinking from existence.
They reappeared continents away, on the top of an incredibly tall peak, cold frost-adorned wind whipping all around them. "I'll let you live. If you somehow get back to Brockton, tell Stormfront that Checkmate remembers her." Claire then unbound the man, who gave a bewildered look at their surroundings. "Where the fuck am I?" "The Himalayas! Good luck." Claire disappeared in another blink, leaving the man behind on the mountaintop, reappearing in her favorite bar, prompting a surprised yelp from the closest bar patrons and a cheer from the barkeep. "Hey! Agent Smith-Martinez, popping back in! What'll it be? The usual?" Claire merely gave the bartender a look and sat down at her usual spot at the bar. "Yeah, I've had a long day."
