"Thank you."

She puts her weapons away: collapsing the larger ones into travel-size implements as she does so. Her eyes don't leave Grim.

"Anything else?"

"Not unless you had anything to say."

"No."

She's not sure she believes that, but she inclines her head and takes her leave.

Well, that's all five siblings notified.

What's Grim doing next?

-She possibly should've asked one of them about weapons.

But for now, she makes her way back to her room. It's been an exhausting day.

Nobody troubles her on the way back to her room.

No new cryptic notes wait on the desk.

The bed and the carpet are both just as comfortable as when initially encountered.

Sleep: happens.

But she can only sleep for so long, and eventually needs to go in search of food.

Sleep is available. Food is available. Everything picks up again the next morning as though nothing at all had happened. The Chitauri continue their duties around the ship: either unaware of the family drama that played out the day before, or knowing better than to acknowledge it in any way.

They have a lot of preparations to make, after all. The Sanctuary II has dropped out of FTL in the target star system and is gliding in for an unsolicited landing on the system's largest planet.

Vehicles get charged up, weapons get handed out, and the outrider pods prepare to drop. The Sanctuary II's inhabitants will be ready to spring into action the moment their command ship arrives.

Grim recovers, and trains, and prepares as best she can without weapons.

She receives new gear twenty hours before the drop. Tailored body armor, a couple retractable blades, and a rifle in the roughly the same style as the one she arrived with.

No special fanfare accompanies this event. A Chitauri--the one that often escorted Grim in her first days on the Sanctuary II--stays after the equipment delivery to walk the Black Order's newest assassin through some basic calibration routines. The elderly envoy behaves as though handing deadly weapons over to recent enemies were an entirely routine occurrence.

She relaxes some when she's given the weapons, and listens carefully to the calibration instructions. In the remaining hours before they land, she'll make sure she's familiar with the quirks of her new weapons.

She's given coordinates to report to and a time to report to them, and then left to her own devices.

When the time comes: she's there and ready, cradling her new rifle in a familiar manner, shadows clinging to her skin.

The deployment room is situated in the outermost layer of the Sanctuary II's underbelly. There's a glowing platform in the room's center, the edges of which are all clearly marked as Not For Loitering.

Cull waits with Grim on the platform well ahead of their other siblings arriving. Corvus and Proxima report in next. Nebula and Gamora show up only minutes before the launch window.

The room shakes. The ship's just hit atmosphere, and power has to be rerouted from inertial compensation to shielding on account of anti-orbital artillery.

She adjusts her stance to account for that, and she can feel the anticipation. (This might not be a familiar set up, but combat is what she's good at.)

Anticipatory rumble!

Everybody's ready. They take their positions, back to back...

...they crack jokes and jostle each other as the Sanctuary II shrieks through the atmosphere...

...the platform shimmers. The floor opens up and the siblings hurtle groundward in a beam of ethereal light...

...they arrive surrounded, outnumbered and arguably outgunned but the unready enemy doesn't stand a chance. Working in seamless tandem they slice, blast and smash their way through the planetary capital's elite defenders...

...and so, as a family, they open the way for half the world's population to be slaughtered.