Nina Stenet
"Great acts are made up of small deeds." - Lao Tzu
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Player: Avalikia ~
Registered On: Nov 4, 2010 0:01:40 GMT -5 ~
Posts: 696
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Post by Nina Stenet on Jun 17, 2011 0:31:55 GMT -5
Stenet Labs is a very small, unimpressive building. It looks nothing like a business that's planning on going toe to toe and even surpass the big research laboratories of the largest mega-corporations, announcing itself with an understated sign merely giving the location's name and address in humble letters. The inside isn't much to look at either: a small lobby with a reception desk but no chairs - visitors will be a rarity and are unlikely to need to wait. There is a single large room full of the familiar laboratory equipment and tables just off of that, and a hallway leads to other, smaller rooms such as Nina's office.
But Nina is currently in the laboratory, alternating between setting up equipment she hasn't had reason to use yet and working on some of the first actual research to be done in the lab. The latter means that she's in a good mood - that month long hiatus from more than simple paperwork and not enough of that was very trying. She's always had a strong inner desire to actually do things with her time, and as much as she wants to tell herself that spending time with Edward counts, her real goals in life tell her differently. Edward is a distraction - a wonderful distraction she would never want out of her life, but a distraction nevertheless.
Meanwhile, her new assistant is at the reception desk, poring over paperwork. She's been noticeably more alert since Nina's unexpected meeting with that faceless vigilante - as both Nina's assistant and her bodyguard, missing seeing him sneak into the building was a definite lapse she's not about to repeat. Not that anyone's likely to try to sneak in during broad daylight. The young, blonde woman's most noticeable feature is her stature - never over five feet while wearing shoes that allow her to actually do her job. But then, she's not one to let her height matter when it comes to protecting her boss.
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Post by azrael on Jun 17, 2011 3:07:42 GMT -5
Well, it wasn't much, even for a starter. Thats for sure.
A few days ago, rumors had popped up that one of WayneTech's former employees was alive and well despite having been offed in her house not to long ago. Most of the people dismissed it as a rumor, as it was highly unlikely that said employee was able to survive, especially considering the apartment surviellence tapes had caught both the Riddler, damn him, and the Ventriloquist on the scene.
However, Jean-Paul hadn't been entirely convinced. The lack of a body was a big indicator. Anyone going through the trouble of removing the body wouldn't have shot up the place, or left it in the state it had been in at all. Something had been up. Alas, Wayne had informed him that he had the investigation covered, and so Jean-Paul never did look into it.
Just the other day, however, the rumors were confirmed. Nina Stenet was indeed very much alive, and had opened up her own little group. Jean-Paul had been both upset and glad at the news. On one hand, there was a person who was supposed to be dead, still living. On the other hand, Wayne had refrained from filling Jean-Paul in, apparently. Knowing him, he had figured out Stenet was alive and well mere days after she was supposedly murderered.
Bastard.
By now, Wayne and Grayson had probably already interrogated her, and so Jean-Paul knew it wouldn't go over well if he did so as well. However, he did want to see how she was doing, and if she would betray anything involving what had happened. He decided he would attempt to get information discreetly, as Valley. However, he needed a reason to march into Stenet Labs and talk to her.
Luckily for him, he was given that oppertunity. Apparently, Stenet had left a number of personal belongings in her office when she dissapeared, and had yet to come collect them. Now that they knew she was alive, the staff at WayneTech finally had somewhere to return the items. Jean-Paul had been passing a a couple of his fellow Security Guards when he overheard them discussing it. Taking his chance, he had volunteered to take the items over to her labs. Taking the stuff, he had left the building and went to his car.
Which resulted in him being outside of Stenet Labs.
Sighing, Jean-Paul stepped onto the sidewalk, and walked to the door, where he opened it. Entering the building, he glanced around, noting the distinct lack of chairs. Either Stenet hadn't had anyone drop by, or most visitors didn't have to wait long at all. He stepped up to the reception desk, before addressing the person behind it.
"I'm looking for Nina Stenet.. is she in right now?"
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Nina Stenet
"Great acts are made up of small deeds." - Lao Tzu
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Player: Avalikia ~
Registered On: Nov 4, 2010 0:01:40 GMT -5 ~
Posts: 696
~ Relationship Status: Single
~ Character Profile
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Post by Nina Stenet on Jun 17, 2011 3:45:13 GMT -5
The young woman at the reception desk looks up sharply when the front door opens. She watches the man very carefully as he enters, almost evaluative in her look before she forces a polite smile. "Yes, one moment please," she replies as she gets up and steps just inside the lab. "Dr. Stenet, there's a man here," she can just be heard saying before she returns with Nina a few moments behind her.
These days following her return to the land of the living have been rather stressful ones for Nina. A part of it is simply putting her life back together - or, rather, forging a new one since she's setting things up to be quite different than they were before - but a part of it is knowing that recent events in her life has attracted attention from all sorts of, well, unusual people. Some of them dangerous, some of them not. So her expression is cautious until she sees Jean-Paul's face. She immediately relaxes - anyone from her life before is probably not dangerous, even one of the security guards at WayneTech that she never did take the time to get to know.
The young woman, meanwhile, initially stops casually to one side - a protective position that's confirmed to be intentional with the way she continues to watch both her boss and the man until she sees Nina's reaction to him. If Nina thinks he's not a threat, then she can go back to her paperwork. Still, she's likely to keep giving him wary glances until he leaves.
"Hey, so what brings you here?" Nina asks with a small smile, acting more casual than she feels since she's actually rather curious about the answer. This she can take as a sign that her old colleagues are now aware that she's alive. The only ones she'd informed intentionally about her continued existence was her family. But then, just as she and Edward had argued about, the name of her business was not subtle. But then, like she'd told him, she wasn't about to hide.
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Last Edit: Jun 17, 2011 5:34:23 GMT -5 by azrael
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Post by azrael on Jun 17, 2011 4:31:43 GMT -5
He nodded, and stepped back from the reception desk, glancing around. It was a decent enough place for someone who was dead, Jean-Paul decided. He didn't have long to wait, as the voice of the receptionist woman was heard faintly, further back into the lab. Seconds later, the receptionist returned, this time in the company of the woman Jean-Paul recognized as Nina Stenet. The rumors, and his own personal hunch, were true. Figures.
He was going to have a field day going off on Wayne when he saw him next.
"Hello, ma'am." He nodded at Nina respectfully. "Well, before you died and were ressurected, you left a couple things over at your old office. They cleared it out, but they weren't exactly sure what to do with everything." He nodded towards the messenger bag that was dangeling from his shoulder. "A couple of the docs at the lab had heard you had came back and gone solo, so they wanted me to bring you your things."
As he spoke, Jean-Paul couldn't help but notice the looks on Nina's face. Before she had spotted his face, her expression had been one of apprehension. But when she had seen who he was, her face changed to an expression of calm. Jean-Paul could tell she was definetly being cautious about unknowns. Though, if the signs were all true, and what he thought was right like usual, it would make sense.
One of those signs happened to be the receptionist. Jean-Paul had seen the way she looked at him, seen the way she held herself. She was being even more cautious than Nina was... even suspicious. Her positioning alone tipped off Jean-Paul that 'receptionist' was only part of her job title. This woman was a bodyguard, or at the very least, some form of security, he was sure of it.
And what doctor needed a bodyguard? The kind that was expecting someone to come after them, thats what kind.
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Nina Stenet
"Great acts are made up of small deeds." - Lao Tzu
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Player: Avalikia ~
Registered On: Nov 4, 2010 0:01:40 GMT -5 ~
Posts: 696
~ Relationship Status: Single
~ Character Profile
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Post by Nina Stenet on Jun 17, 2011 5:24:08 GMT -5
"Ah!" Nina says with a sheepish grin at his explanation, "I forgot about the stuff I left there - but my life has been thrown into disarray, to put it mildly. Dying does that to you." And by this point, she has to have a bit of a sense of humor about that. When she'd told her family she was still alive, it had been hard and emotional. When old friends and her extended family contacted her to verify that the news was true, it was easier. And now she's already to the point where she just has smile and shrug off the reactions from the people who knew her before. It's the ones whose attentions have been more recently grabbed that are potentially problematic.
"What did I leave?" she asks, glancing at the bag as she tries to remember the contents of the lab she worked in while at WayneTech that actually belonged to her. "You can put it on the desk here," she adds, with a vague gesture toward a clear spot on the reception desk. Yet more stuff to sort through. Between all the things that she's recovered, thrown out, replaced, and bought in the past several days, she'd have thought that she'd seen the last of it. Still there's probably a number of knickknacks from her old workspace that she'd like having in her office.
Smiling a little to herself, Nina didn't fail to notice that he said the other docs had sent him - and probably a part of the reason was so that they could grill him for rumor confirmation or denial when he got back. "And yes, I've gone solo," she adds, "I've had a lot of time to think about my life recently, and as much as I loved working for WayneTech I realized that I'd be happier being my own boss." Which, perhaps surprisingly, is the whole truth of that matter. The only way her disappearance resulted in this change in her employment was that she'd had a lot of time to think. But then, she's sure that it doesn't look that way given the timing of everything.
Having said that, Nina goes silent, waiting for the inevitable question about why she'd disappeared in such a spectacular fashion. Because everyone always has to ask the question.
Nina's assistant keeps an eye on the two of them as she works and they talk, though she's good at not being intrusive about it. Indeed she is a bodyguard, among many other duties, even though wouldn't think it to look at her - short people can carry and use a concealed weapon just as easily as anyone else. They can fight well unarmed too - at least, as well as she has to in order to protect Nina. And she's fiercely protective of her boss, which is why she's not about to take Nina's apparent trust of this stranger at full face value.
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Post by azrael on Jun 17, 2011 6:33:37 GMT -5
Jean-Paul smiled and shrugged. "Well, I've never died, but I suppose it would make things hectic for awhile." He lifted the bag up off his shoulder, and stepped over to the desk. Laying the bag on the spot Nina pointed out, he shrugged again. "No idea what you left, I didn't bother looking inside." Okay, maybe he glanced at it once, to see if their were any clues as to why she would fake her death, as she must have.
Turning back to Nina, he leaned against the receptionist desk and put his hands in his pockets. Jean-Paul listened to Nina as she explained how she had gone solo as she wished to be her own boss. Fair enough, Jean-Paul could understand that. He himself often wished he could be his own boss. However, he knew full well that Wayne needed him, even if he was going to keep things from him.
"That makes sense. Going out on your own allows you to work your own hours, at your own pace. I'd do it too if I had the chance."
Jean-Paul noted that Nina had an almost expectant look on her face, as if she was preparing herself for something. For a moment, they stayed there in silence, before he came to the conclusion that she was expecting him to ask why she had dissapeared the way she had. "I know its really not my business, ma'am, but I am curious. What made you go out in such a dramatic fashion? Wouldn't it have been easier to just hand in your resignation and then go from there?" He looked geniuinly curious... and he mostly was.
As he waited for her answer, Jean-Paul kept watching the receptionist in the corner of his eye. She was still eyeing him, giving him that untrusting look he knew so well from experience. She was doing a good job of masking it, but Jean-Paul had spent way to much time on his toes and paranoid to not notice when someone was watching him.
Well, she had nothing to worry about.
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Nina Stenet
"Great acts are made up of small deeds." - Lao Tzu
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Player: Avalikia ~
Registered On: Nov 4, 2010 0:01:40 GMT -5 ~
Posts: 696
~ Relationship Status: Single
~ Character Profile
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Post by Nina Stenet on Jun 17, 2011 7:38:58 GMT -5
Fighting off the temptation to immediately rifle through the bag - she can do that anytime and she knows better than to let herself get that distracted while they're on this particular topic of conversation - Nina instead keeps her attention on Jean-Paul, though unlike her assistant it's out of simply being attentive and not out of worry. She pays her assistant to worry about people for her so she doesn't have to.
She nods and smiles at his comment on her reasons for going solo, "I'm sure that most people would rather work for themselves - it's just that most people aren't in a position to be able to." She's happy that, once she decided that it's what she wanted, she was able to accomplish it for herself. The reason that comes to Nina's mind at the moment about why she might not have been able to is that starting Stenet Labs has not been cheap at all; if she was any ordinary person she'd have probably only been able to do it by going into severe debt. It's probably a good thing that her finances aren't public knowledge.
When he asks the expected question she smiles a little, but though she anticipated the question doesn't mean that she's prepared to really answer it. The only one not directly involved who knows the full story now is Batman - everyone else only got a minimal version that didn't really explain much. Not that Nina has ever lied to anyone, only handing out selected portions of the truth. To Jean-Paul she's willing to say, "Well, to put it bluntly, someone tried to kill me." Which shouldn't be too surprising given the details she knew made the papers. And to judge by the matter-of-fact way that she says this, that fact doesn't seem to bother her overly much. She's always been one to cope well when bad things happen.
"More than that I can't really say, though of course I wouldn't have come back if it wasn't safe," she adds, though perhaps that first look of caution on her face and the fact that she has a bodyguard would cast doubt on that last part. But it's not a lie, really - Nina doesn't think that she can let herself think in terms of actually being safe anymore - there's only relative safety for her now. And, relatively speaking, she's quite safe at the moment. At least, if what Edward said about things being resolved between him and Lex Luthor has any truth to it - something she trusts, but only with extreme caution.
Fortunately for Jean-Paul, Nina doesn't seem to be at all bothered to give that answer to that question. People are curious, and she understands that, so she's happy to indulge it as much as she feels that she's able to. And it doesn't really hurt anyone for the world to know that an attempt was made on her life - not when that so adequately explains her absence, return, and refusal to give details. And anyone who looked at what had happened to her carefully enough would probably come to that conclusion anyway.
And at least he's not some vigilante demanding answers as if he has the right to know simply because he knows something is going on. The only reasons why she told Batman, really, was because he already knew the most sensitive detail of the situation, she's certain that if any of Gotham's masked heroes can figure out some way to actually do something about all of it then he'd be the one, and she doubts that she could have gotten out of this without telling the whole truth to someone. That faceless man who'd come demanding answers only a few days ago may very well not have accepted her refusals to answer if she hadn't been able to say that the story had already been told. And, giving how understanding Batman had been, she doesn't regret telling him.
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Post by azrael on Jun 20, 2011 5:19:31 GMT -5
Jean-Paul nodded in agreement. "I bet they would too. I mean, I would myself, if freelancing as a security guard was easier." Well, that and the fact that Wayne himself had set him up with the job.. and had him payed through the roof for it too. Then again, that was one of the perks of being an unofficial partner of the premier crime fighter in the entirety of Gotham City, he supposed.
His eyes widened in response to her answer about why she had dissapeared, a completely fabricated response, given he wasn't remotely surprised. He was pretty sure someone had been after her anyways, judging by the fact that two criminals had been on the security footage. However, feigned surprise was neccessary lest he get pegged as suspicious by Nina and her bodyguard. "Woah, kill you? Why would anyone want to kill you?" He laughed slightly, to hint at astonishment. "Actually, forget I asked. Gotta be a pretty personal question now that I think about it."
With a shrug, he spoke again. "Well, good to hear that you're pretty much safe from that. There's enough garbage that happens around this town. Yet another murder is far from what Gotham City needs." Safe huh? Considering he hadn't heard anything about attempted murderers being captured by Gotham Police, that hinted at alternative methods of disposing of enemies. Revenge killings, of course, were one option, but he doubted Nina would do that, let alone hire someone to do it for her. Another option, the most obvious, was that Batman had already dealt with it. He'd have to speak with Wayne about it.. he was curious.
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Nina Stenet
"Great acts are made up of small deeds." - Lao Tzu
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Player: Avalikia ~
Registered On: Nov 4, 2010 0:01:40 GMT -5 ~
Posts: 696
~ Relationship Status: Single
~ Character Profile
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Post by Nina Stenet on Jun 20, 2011 8:25:03 GMT -5
His questions actually strike a small nerve. "No, actually that's the most troubling part of it - it wasn't personal. Didn't really have anything to do with me at all," Nina says suddenly, unable to stop herself from venting just a little, "Just men with big egos who talk with bullets. And I got caught in the middle of it for awhile." She sighs and shakes her head, stopping herself before she starts ranting on anything that isn't vague. If she's going to get killed for something, she'd at least like it to be over something remotely to do with her. She and Edward weren't even 'together' when it happened!
Taking a second to calm herself she adds, "Sorry, it's a bit frustrating." Obviously one of the great understatements of the century, right there. Then again, it did result in a rather long list of positive outcomes, though that hardly changes things as far as Nina's feelings about the actual incident are concerned. Even if the attack wasn't personal, she's all to eager to take it that way. While she may be an exceptionally forgiving person, she's not about to forgive being treated like a pawn even by someone who didn't know any better at the time. While she'd be the first to argue that nobody deserves to be treated that way, she'd also be quick to support the idea that it especially applies to herself.
His last comment gets a small smile as Nina responds, "Yes, I'm looking forward to getting this place fully up and running and being able to forget about all of that. It may do nothing for murders, but Gotham could use a few more medical advancements. It's good to be doing lab work again." Which, given how hard she worked at WayneTech, is one statement that Jean-Paul has no reason to doubt. She just hopes that the work can continue on uninterrupted now that Edward has settled things with Lex as far as she is concerned. She hopes, anyway. Let's just say that she's not about to lay off her assistant any time soon.
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Post by azrael on Jun 24, 2011 7:44:09 GMT -5
Jean gave her a look of sympathy, and nodded in understanding. "I understand. Getting caught up in something that really has nothing to do with you at all tends to suck, especially when that something ends up making people hunt you." Something in the back of his mind said that really, there had been personal motivations behind it. Whether or not she knew that or he was right was another thing entirely. He'd have to think about that for a little bit.
At her apology, Jean-Paul raised his hands in protest. "Hey, don't worry about it. You're taking being almost murdered better than I would have, thats for sure! You've deserved the right to vent." He believed this, obviously, but he also said this in the hopes that maybe she would vent somemore, and maybe let something slip.
He gave her a warm smile in response to her own. "Well, I'm glad to hear it. And hey, you never know, any medical advances you make could lessen fatalities. Maybe you would be helping to lessen the murders." Shrugging, Jean-Paul leaned back against the receptionist desk and crossed his arms. "Hopefully lab work will help you forget about it."
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Nina Stenet
"Great acts are made up of small deeds." - Lao Tzu
~
Player: Avalikia ~
Registered On: Nov 4, 2010 0:01:40 GMT -5 ~
Posts: 696
~ Relationship Status: Single
~ Character Profile
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Post by Nina Stenet on Jun 24, 2011 9:11:21 GMT -5
"Yes, well, I wouldn't say I was 'almost murdered' - didn't even come close, actually," Nina admits, "Still, he tried. But I've also had a month to think about it. And it was a very long month." And Nina's always has been the type of person who can handle difficult situations with an abnormally large degree of mental fortitude - if you're around Edward that's pretty much a requirement.
But if he thinks she's handling that situation well, he'd probably be shocked if he knew she'd been nearly killed about two weeks ago in an unrelated incident and is a lot less upset about that now than she still is about this. But then, she can't imagine Lex ever being as sorry about trying to kill her as Edward was.
His last few comments cause her smile to grow and she says, "And I've always held the philosophy that it's the people who hurt the most that cause the most hurt to others. I know what I do makes that difference. That's why I do it." And though she's always believed that, it's been more on the forefront of her mind since learning about Edward's past. That man has been hurt in so many ways, but she has to wonder how much things may have been different for him if the technology to fix his leg had already been around at the time he'd needed it. How much less angry might he be at humanity if there was that one change to his life? It's one of the things that she hopes to discover through her research - even if he never decides that he wants it, other people definitely will.
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