Bennie and Claire, a down-on-their-luck couple, find a discarded Chitauri gun referred to as 'Item 47'. The couple uses 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. 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.