Template:Featured Articles/5-2018

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Moment of Awesome: Felicia Hardy/Black Cat: An oddly open Felicia discusses with Kevin Sydney just what went wrong on the operation she spent the last year working on.

"Oh, do you have any brilliant tips of profit and chucking the memory of your dead father while utterly failing at avenging his memory? After having accomplished nothing for years and putting in months of work only to be foiled by a safe? You know, the thing you're supposed to be good at?" she snapped back, then paused, and raised her hand in defeat. "Other than collecting free drinks, I've got that part down already."

"Sure. The best thing is to stop wallowing and suck it up." Sydney said, taking a drink. "Yeah, you invested a bunch and it didn't work. So, what the fuck are you going to do now? Because, unless your intention is to say you did your best and walk away, the only real option I see is picking yourself up and starting again."

He paused before going on, his voice lower and slower this time. "I've watched ops which people spent careers setting up fall apart from a detail that they couldn't have possibly factored for. Life is unfair. But you're alive, you have new intel, and there are more chances."

"It was mostly rhetorical, Yoda," Felicia replied, the sarcasm half hearted. "Some of us aren't used to failing and need some time to wallow in our special snowflake booze haze. I mean, do you know how much work it's going to take to get me to my natural hair colour, again?"

She took another heavy sip of her drink. "I... appreciate it, though. That you came out. And this."

"You have a natural hair colour? I doubt that." He knocked back the rest of his drink and waved for another. "Look, the fact that the op came apart wasn't your fault, Felicia. There's no way you would have known about a secret safe. Sometimes, this shit just happens."

"Rude, Sydney. Rude. God meant me to have that hair colour, they just didn't know it at the time. How else will dickholes assume I'm just a pretty face?" Felicia nodded to add her to the second round. "You are being weirdly nice to me. Safes are my thing. Safes and I are occasionally not platonic soul mates. It was a giant safe that somehow got installed while I wasn't looking. It's a giant smack in the face and I'm very self absorbed."

"That's allowed, but put professional pride and arrogance off to one side for a second. How could you have planned differently to account for the new model of safe?" Kevin pointed out. That was how these agencies worked. If you failed, what did you learn for the next time?

Felicia rolled her eyes, finishing her drink with a hard lift of her chin. "Closer monitoring of their finances to notice the money that moved from petty cash, cross referencing it with the cost of the safe and installation, happening to be there when the giant moving truck showed up, any of the above? Look, I'm not saying the odds were ever in my favour here but as I said. Self absorbed daddy issues booze wallowing."

"You're good enough to know that tracking petty transactions was never an option, and you needed an inside source to monitor deliveries, of which they received a half dozen a day." Kevin sighed. "At the CIA, I was part of the best funded, best supported spy agency in the world, and even we couldn't compensate for things like this."

Felicia squinted at him in an exaggerated fashion. "We talked about how I don't fuck coworkers, right?"