Bennie and Claire, a down-on-their-luck couple, find a discarded Chitauri gun (“Item 47”) left over from the attack on New York City in The Avengers. The couple use it to rob a few banks, drawing the attention of S.H.I.E.L.D., which assigns agents Jasper Sitwell and Felix Blake to retrieve the weapon and “neutralize” the couple. Agent Sitwell tracks the couple down to a motel room that gets wrecked in the subsequent confrontation, and the stolen money gets destroyed. Instead of killing the couple, Sitwell invites them to join S.H.I.E.L.D., with Bennie assigned to the R&D ‘think-tank’ to reverse engineer the Chitauri technology, and Claire becoming Blake’s assistant.