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Kai is in the kitchen, barely dressed because of the heat, but he's decent. Nominally. He's wearing shorts. It's too damn hot, is the thing, and he's cooking. He's not made for heat! He's a Nordic creature. Currently, he's following a recipe he's found somewhere, checking it twice as he stirs batter in a bowl. It's a rather fluid batter, mostly milk and eggs. In the oven is an iron skillet heating up. Kai is no Lambert, but he's determined to learn how to provide more for Loki than spaghetti with sauce from a jar. He can do this!
.~{:--------------:}~.
Cold means absolutely nothing to the Assets of Soviet Russia. They embrace the chill weather. But when half the year is ruled by the shadow rather than the light, they become unwilling subjects of Lady Summer at the transition of power. Seasons turn and turn. Numbing cold full of blizzards give way to stifling humidity. Not that the immense flat plains of the Motherland fail to know heat or shimmer-wave mirage patterns over steppe one tick of global warming away from desertification. Its denizens endure, as they must, in that place of boggy extremes. The lone concession for the evening will be a t-shirt, or perhaps sleeves rolled up.
Heat added to the kitchen makes it a palatably unwelcome place even in the reasonably dimming twilight. A denouement to the day inside the heat sink of a great city still means the stove adds to the stickiness. For this reason, one of the spitting images of Bucky Barnes aren't trotting through the kitchen. Yes, one of them is steathily conveying something upstairs: a pilfered bucket of ice and other 'cold things' taken from the truck Matvei said was cold. But who is going to see that operative using his top level spycraft? The more important question is why some little four-legged creature, a close and daintier cousin of the satyr, hops out of who knows where to land atop that fridge.
Shorts are the fashion of the day because the two gentlemen that make their way into the kitchen are definitely wearing them. Blowing a quick sigh, Steve grabs up a handful of his loose t-shirt and rubs at his forehead, temples, and gives up at the back of his neck.
"We'd be able to run for longer if we started earlier in the day," he comments back over his shoulder towards Bucky. "Air'd be cleaner too. Ah, Kai." He gives the Elf a jovial if not somewhat tired wave. "What are you making?" He's not so nonplussed about seeing the blond young man anymore these days, especially when food's involved.
He misses the stealthy movements of the Buckling entirely because…because…there's a silvery caprine-esque on the fridge now. He looks from Kai to Bucky and back at the creature. "Who…brought a goat into the manor?"
Buck's in shorts and a t-shirt, and delighted to not have to wear something long-sleeved in public. Pink and sweating and cheerful, heading for the sink. Only to pause at the sight of the goat-thing. "The hell is that?" he asks, blankly. No, he hasn't spotted the Buckling, either. Not with that distraction.
Kai calls toward the stairwell, "Bucky, come here, I want to show you something." Then he looks up and sees… Bucky? Walking into the kitchen with Steve. He glances toward the stairwell again. Before he can address that, though, there's… there's a little goatling. "Now where did you come from?" he coos to the creature. That it just appeared out of nowhere doesn't seem to alarm him too much. Things just happen to and around him, man.
To Steve, he says, "I'm making a Dutch baby. There should be enough to share." He goes to the stove, setting the batter on the counter, and he takes out the hot iron skillet. He drops a pat of butter into it, and it sizzles violently. With a fork, he spreads it around the pan. "I don't know why there's a goat. It just showed up."
The mostly vertical design of the mansion left shoulder to shoulder with other similar fancy Fifth Avenue digs allows for plenty of access points. As far as tactical elements go, the building's many egresses, stairs, and balconies make for an insecure location that the Bucklings exploit as easily as anything. Nothing like darting to another hallway and backtracking to reach the attic where presumably the heat is worst. Though no doubt someone is stopping, footsteps muffled, silent.
Tiny creature isn't much bigger than a cat, and in many ways smaller. Certainly the proportions of the breadbox apply here. Its bright eyes look down on the stove, notably that frying pan. An erect ear swivels sideways. Its tail is short, stubby, and able to wag as happily as any dog's. The difference might be the petite horns, no longer than a child's finger. Oh, and the fact it looks platinum, its fur — hair? — luxurious, thick, and metallic somehow. It bleats.
"Thank you for making enough to share," says the resident Boy Scout to Kai even as he begins a slow approach of the fridge and the small animal resting atop it. He's not afraid of it, merely marking the thing as an abnormality and something to address more immediately than a shower, for example.
"It looks like…it can't be made of metal?" This is a question for the room at whole even as he reaches a curled hand up towards the thing, fingers kept tucked. Knuckles can heal. Bitten fingers are a bit harder to regenerate.
Something in that creature is piquing old memories. The gleam of that metal….Buck's gone very still, and somewhat paler. "Smells good, Kai," he says, but his tone is abstracted. "It looks like it is. D'you think it was something Tony was working on?" he asks, a questioning lilt in hisvoice.
"It literally wasn't there just a second ago," Kai says. "We don't have anyone who can blip things out of dimensions, do we?" He pours the batter into the skillet, then puts it back in the oven. A timer is set to only a few minutes. With that task done, he turns his attention to the goat. "Aw, it's adorable," he says in a soothing sing-song. "Can we keep it, Steve?"
He sneaks a peek toward that stairwell, and he says succinctly, "All I know, is that I'm going to share a delicious pancake with anyone who is in the kitchen within the next few minutes." To certain ears, it comes through in Russian. "I'm going to put fruit and cream on it."
Certainly its fur resembles fur in every respect, puffed up a little by the denser undercoat. Legs descend into a darker shade of gunmetal rather than the paler, fair hue of its chest and stomach. Caprine shenanigans aside, the thing is ridiculously petite, and its tail flick, flick, flicks at the attention turned on it. The goat has, in no sense, any hint of being especially bothered about standing on the fridge. It sinks down slightly, back-bent legs shrinking its modest height all the more. Another high bleat. Bleats sound like bleats in any language.
It won't contend with being petted, that or Steve compels it to spring. The kitchen is wide, true, and it sails on a low arc to land on four hooves on the counter, where a fork sits discarded, surely. Has Kai done his washing up as he works? If not, the caprine thief daintily tips its head to steal the cutlery. En garde!
A floor away, the simple exchange goes down very simply:
"Gde koza?"
"Koza uvidela yego."
"…"
"Bozhe moi."
"I don't know about keeping it," replies Steve to the Elf. "Maybe in the back if it'll — " He pulls away his hand as quickly as a super-soldier can manage and takes a cursory step in retreat from the arcing pathway of the wee goat. With wide eyes, he watches it land upon the counter and seems completely uncertain as to what to do with it.
"I don't have any experience wrangling goats. Llamas, yes. Goats, no," he informs the audience within hearing range. He references a fiasco in Central Park a few months back, when the long-necked creatures were loose and causing chaos.
"It's something weird," Buck's voice has gone flat, displeased. And without further ado, he lunges for it. Whatever it is, he wants to catch it. If it's one of Tony's toys and he breaks it, well, he can grovel before the engineer later.
Whatever it is, it's armed with a fork, because Kai didn't clean up the fork before putting the pancake in the oven. "Bucky!" he says, "it's just a little goat!" A metalic coat that just showed up out of nowhere, sure, but anything cat-sized is by default adorable, right? Kai looks at Steve. Steve, what the hell?
Then he throws up his hands and says, "This is interrupting my rhythm." His cooking rhythm, that is. He was coming to the fridge to get fruit. Right. He takes a container of strawberries and a carton of whipping cream from the fridge. "Don't let it get into my stuff," Kai tells Bucky, since Bucky has declared himself goat-wrangler. He raises his voice a titch as he says, "Because in about five minutes, we're going to have a pancake."
The little goat chews on the handle of the fork. Those lips curl back to reveal small teeth, broad and good for chewing plants. Plants apparently that include stainless steel straight out of Mexico for all that ails you. Chomping on the fork with dainty little nips takes a fair bit of skill but the goat flicks a happy ear. It's not causing chaos other than by looking shiny. But the caprine creature can spring, exactly like its beige and taupe counterparts, and it darts as fast as it can when Bucky chooses to hurl himself at the counter. The cabinets and the countertop may not survive the impact, but likely the ibex can.
It's made to escape foxes, griffins, superpowered vultures — and maybe supersoldiers. Maybe. A high sound of alarm radiates through the kitchen. Its initial intention is height, springing off a light fixture, the top of a cabinet, anything with a fingerprint of space. Maybe.
That alarmed noise causes an equal slowdown upstairs. They don't make much sound ever, and one of them… He never makes noise when he doesn't want to. That necessitates hauling on the taller man's arm, and Kyr grits his teeth as they go practically flowing down the stairs like a doomed waterfall.
With back now against the edge of the centrally-placed island countertop, Steve watches the antics of his friend and the now-skittering and leaping goatling. If there was a soundtrack, it'd be Yackity Sax. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, that's playing.
At this angle, it grants him a view of the staircase and movement in his peripheral drags his attention away from the madness in the kitchen. Eyebrows shoot high and his mouth hangs open for a second before he slides over to the doorway. In his best Brooklyn-accented Russian, he says to the Bucklings, "Hello. You might need to wait for a minute. There is a goat in the kitchen. Bucky is trying to catch it."
How Kai has managed to remain so unflustered should be a super-power in itself.
"Goddamn it," Buck's grinding his teeth, irritable. "Close the doors. I don't know what it is or how it got in here, but….it doesn't get to leave." He's angling himself for another attempt at a catch, though not before turning to close the door that leads down into the basement.
"Bucky Barnes, if this pancake gets ruined…" Kai might as well have 'chill' as a super power, it's true. He seems more irritated by the prospect of a stray hoof in his strawberries than the fact that there is a tiny goat. He tries his best to work around the situation, finding a bit of counter to work on next to the sink. These strawberries aren't going to wash and slice themselves. "What's so wrong with it anyway?" he asks. "It's just a metal goat."
Long sleeves for the elder of the two, the one with those cold, frozen-over eyes that belong to the Asset. Rolled up sleeves for the other, who could and very much is a dead ringer for the young man who marched off for enrollment for his country, proudly wearing the olive drab uniform of the day. About the only difference might be the length of the hair — past finger-length, not acceptable for the military conventions. It's the younger of the two hauling on the arm of the taller, the elder, for all that will do. They barely talk even confronted by the blond man. They've excellent eyesight, at least to identify the chaos inside the kitchen and the man addressing them.
"Stop that," Kyr says in a none-too-sunny voice. Because he's not sunny.
The ibex springs with its fork to try and escape those reaching fingers. Bucky is fast, without fail, but he also happens to be after something standing on a drawer knob. Only for a moment. The animal hops in a staggering arc after its hooves strike on the counter for the sink. Caprine hooves, tiny as thimbles at the cloven break, glint. They leave an impressive gouge on the steel when scrabbling. At least it's not after the strawberries.
"Stop what?" Steve slips into English unintentionally when addressing the Bucklings, only to be distracted by the caprine escape artist darting about the kitchen. He sees the impact damage on the interior of the sink after hearing the small animal's resounding clang of impact and shouts, "HEY!!!"
Apparently, manor vandalism is enough to bring him into the fray. He angles his approach in an almost pack-like manner to Bucky and attempts to cut off the majority angle of springing escape. Hands are held up, arms somewhat wide, and he fearlessly await the creature's next attempt to jump. "It's destroying the kitchen!" he says to Kai in particular. "Outside! It needs to go outside!" Apparently, the new rule is no more goats in the manor.
Bucky gives the kids an exasperated look. "We can't let it run loose," he says to them, in Russian, as if that were self-evident. And then he's falling into sync with Steve, angling off to the side. Pack tactics, indeed. These two've hunted together for so many years. "Careful, Kai," he admonishes, still in Russian.
"Try luring it with another fork," Kai advises as he slices berries, "it's probably hungry." He glances aside to the dent in the sink, and his brows lift. All right, that's worth taking note of. He stops slicing berries, sets the knife aside, and pulls a fork from the drawer of utinsels. "Here," he says. He waggles it at the goat, who is probably more preoccupied with being chased, alas, but he's giving it the old Elvish try. "Come here little one," he says lightly. "Come get the nice, tasty fork!"
He casts a glance at Bucky and Steve. "I wonder if it poops ball bearings." If he has to live with thinking it, they have to live with hearing it.