Pepper Potts opened her eyes to see the sun rising over the New Mexico desert. Fingers of the new day's sun stretched out in colours of burnt orange and brilliant yellow illuminating the harsh barren land. The desert was such an even, flat expanse it was easy to believe that it went all the way to the horizon, that if you followed it you really would reach the end of the earth. Maybe there was some truth in Tony's "Land of Enchantment" jibe at the southern state.
Pepper had always been too intelligent to entertain fantasies for long though. Knowing that another very long day of work was soon to start she closed her eyes for a few more minutes of peace and snuggled up to person next to her.
'He's wearing the aftershave I bought for his birthday,' she thought with a tickle of happiness in her tummy.
"OH MY GOD!"
"What!" Tony Stark woke with a jolt and frantically wondered what he had done to cause the panic.
"Who's driving the car!" The last thing Pepper remembered before dozing off last night was the back of Tony's head as he sat in the driver's seat in front of her.
"Good morning," an unfamiliar voice said cheerfully.
Pepper looked up to see someone smiling at her from the driver's seat but she only got a quick glimpse of the large blue eyes set in a heart shaped face before the driver focused her attention back on the road.
Looking at her Pepper was reminded of the tiny ballerina that had adorned her jewellery box as a child. She was a petite thing of maybe fifty kilos and was keeping her chin high to see the road ahead because she wasn't tall enough to see over the wheel sitting comfortably.
Her smooth hair was nearly brown at the roots then lightened to a creamy gold colour at the tip where it curled. She had it bunched in a pony tail to one side so her hair fell over her shoulder in a gentle cascade and Pepper could tell from her tan that she had been living under the desert sun for a reasonable time. Across her back the words, "How Can I Help You," were emblazoned on a bright purple vest.
"You picked up this stranger?" she accused Tony more than asked.
"My name is Alis," The driver interjected before the accused could defend himself.
"And let her drive?" Pepper hit Tony on the arm with her Ipad then redirected her anger towards the driver. "And what were you doing out on the road so late at night? Do you know how many people are killed each year hitch hiking?"
"I wasn't hitch hiking," the girl called Alis defended herself. "I missed the last bus back to town for the night so I was napping at the bus station when he came up and said 'Hey kid how would you like to make a hundred bucks?'"
"And you agreed?"
"Yeah."
"He," Pepper jammed her finger in Tony's face, "could be anyone! He might be a dangerous sicko for all you know!"
"I'm starting to feel this is getting a little personal here," Tony spoke up. He had tried to be responsible by admitting he was too tired to drive and asked another to step in. This way they were still on schedule, properly rejuvenated and ready for his next round of banter with Fury. And all it had cost him so far was a hundred bucks.
"Nope he's good. I can tell."
Tony crossed his arms with smug satisfaction and flashed Pepper one of his best smiles. Pepper rubbed her temples and wondered what America coming it if teenagers had to hitch hike through the desert in the middle of the night.
"I'm twenty three, not a teenager," Alis corrected and saw Pepper give her a quizzical look in the rear vision mirror.
"Which is why I can hitch hike," she added quickly to cover her blunder.
In nearly ten years of listening to people's thoughts she still got muddled with what people said with their mouths and what they said with their minds.
Pepper decided she was too tired and stressed to worry about that oddity and flopped back in the seat. Beside her Tony was trying his best not to show how entertained he was. From now on he was going to pick up more hitch hikers.
Alis relaxed and blessed the simplicity of the human mind. Whatever it could not immediately comprehend it either ignored or provided a weak solution so it could forget easier. The rare people who did stop to ponder her quirk were dangerous, most of the time they wanted to indentify her ability to persecute. Or exploit.
Pepper flicked on her Ipad to see there was still a couple of battery bars left and got to work. Happy had been all set to fly with them to New Mexico then drive to the SHIELD base to get their work underway with Dr Foster when Pepper had gotten a call from the hospital saying that their chauffer had been admitted with a case of acute appendicitis.
Having no time to reschedule she and Tony had flown to the nearest air strip then drive the rest of the way to the remote town in a rental. Now that they were closing in on civilization her computer was picking up enough internet signal to make some proper arrangements.
"Do you want to send fruit or bagels with the flowers?" she asked Tony as she filled out a gift delivery application.
"How about scotch and steak?" Tony suggested.
"Muffins."
"Pardon?" Tony asked the girl driving.
"Send muffins with the flowers," Alis explained and took the turn off for the town. "Muffins have a touch of tenderness to them bagels just can't provide."
"Is that written in the Walmart handbook?" Tony asked with a spurious but entertained expression.
"No," Alis replied unoffended. "My other job is as a waitress at Izzy's diner. Certain moods need to be accompanied by the right foods. A cup of coffee and muffin are perfect for bringing someone out of a low mood and your friend will be feeling pretty miserable after his operation."
"How did you know that?" Pepper asked suspiciously. That was twice now in matter of minutes the stranger had known something without being told.
"Mr Stark said so last night," Alis answered quickly and parked the car in the fuel bay of the petrol station.
"I did?" Tony asked and tried to remember.
"Yeah, you did," she affirmed and Tony shrugged. He probably had and just couldn't remember right now. He had been pretty tired when he'd pulled up at the bus station for a cup of crappy machine coffee.
All three exited the car and stretched. The sun was now higher in the sky but hadn't yet warmed the morning air. Pepper got her jacket off the back seat and performed the usual round of pleasantries with Alis: a hand shake, a thank you and a business card.
Alis put the card and the promised hundred in her wallet and waved goodbye to her travelling companions. She heard Pepper wondering how long it would be before she read the story of this trip in a trashy tabloid magazine willing to pay a silly girl well for a worthless story but Alis didn't turn back. She reminded herself that everyone was allowed their own thoughts however incorrect and she should pretend that they went unheard.
Across town Jane Foster had hardly noticed that a new day had started at her laboratory. She and her fickle but faithful assistant had been working fifteen hours straight on a mathematical complication that was holding up her project.
In the waste bin beside her there was a pile of tissues a foot high stained with whiteboard marker that she had rubbed off furiously then started again. The board was full of numbers and letters and diagrams that didn't make any intelligible sense but Jane didn't stop to make it coherent.
The marker stopped suddenly and she tried to hold her line of thought. It had all been going so well, everything linked together but when she factored in…
The marker fell to the floor with a clatter and Jane pounded her head against the board three times before letting it rest there in defeat. There was no way she would get this right before their meeting with Tony Stark tomorrow.
"Are we taking a break?" Darcy asked.
Jane groaned.
"We're taking a break," Darcy concluded and dumped the books she'd been holding on the table before pulling out a chair. She dropped into it with an exhausted sigh and decided she had liked it better when the scientific community considered Jane a dreamer. They hadn't ever had to pull all nighters before her theories were vindicated.
"Morning scientists," Alis sang as she walked through the door with a cheery smile. Darcy opened her weary eyes to see her best friend and perked up immediately.
"Please tell me you only just got home now because you spent all night with a really hot guy you just picked up," Darcy begged excitedly.
"Sorry no," she admitted and Darcy's enthusiasm deflated. "Walmart isn't exactly a hot spot for dashing bachelors. I missed my bus last night and just got in now. Coffee, newspaper."
Alis put the gifts on the table and Darcy scooped up the cup marked with sugar and milk. Alis took the other out of the cardboard holder to give to Jane but found the scientist with her head still on the board.
"What's the matter with Jane?" she whispered to her friend.
"We're taking a break," Darcy replied and flicked through the paper to the cartoons. In the six months since the Avengers incident in New York the papers had finally returned to reporting the latest tax budget and fuel prices.
As she stepped closer to Jane Alis could feel the frustration and defeated ambition oozing out of her but she didn't heed it. She slipped her arm around Jane's neck and pulled her back into a causal embrace.
"He's coming back Jane," she said softly and held up the hot cup. "It will just take time."
Jane turned her neck to look at Alis with a small frown. Up close Alis could see the fatigue lines and heavy bags under her eyelids.
"Has Darcy been telling you my personal business again?" she asked with irritation.
"No I just pick up on stuff," Alis said with total honesty and held the offered coffee up higher.
There was no denying that statement was true. Jane had been a little unnerved by Alis when she had first arrived with Darcy two years ago. In a matter of days she had already memorized where all the crockery went, Jane's weekly routine and the names of all the townspeople she dealt with regularly.
For a while Jane wondered if Alis took an unhealthy interest in her life but that concern was soon dashed when Alis's natural compassion and friendly demeanor won her over. Jane put her unsettling knack for knowing things down to astute observation and stopped worrying.
The two held a look for a moment longer before Jane sighed and took the coffee with a strained but grateful smile. Alis left her arm around Jane's shoulders and gently guided her to the table and sat her down.
"I think you could do with a long shower and a day off," Alis said as she rubbed the tight muscles around Jane's neck.
"I agree," piped up Darcy.
"No day off!" Jane groaned from behind the hair that had fallen over her face. She could swear that Alis' hands worked miracles.
With the smallest touch pain seemed to run out of her shoulders replacing fatigue and tension with a warm feeling of euphoria. A second later Alis stopped rubbing and Jane was left with a small but rising sense of optimism.
"I'll leave you two to settle it," Alis learned long ago not to come between employer and employee. "I'm going home for a kip and a shower before my shift at Izzy's. Oh, and I picked up another shift at Walmart for tonight so don't expect be back until late."
Now both women wore disapproving looks and both were aimed at her.
"Isn't it about time they put you on the day roster?" Jane asked with irritation.
"Yeah you've been on close for like six months now," Darcy added.
Alis felt the well intended concern and indignation coming from the both of them and she had to smile. It was nice to have someone give a damn when you were being worked to death for minimum wage.
"It seems the only way I'll get on days is if I have two kids that need to be picked up from school or get more intimate with my manager. And I don't see either happening." Alis spoke the reality with a smile to pacify her friends. Life had taught her long ago that to live was to struggle but sometimes Darcy and Jane needed a reminder.
"Well we'll have dinner ready when you get back," Jane said. It was as if Alis' hands had banished her bad mood and left her feeling ready to take on anything.
"We'll try making those bean burgers you cooked last week," Darcy supported the suggestion.
Alis had scrubbed enough scorched pans and put out enough fires to leave her dubious of the pair's cooking abilities but she wasn't about to knock a free meal.
"Ok see you then," she said happily and left the lab to swap her vest for an apron.
Later that night she was back in the ugly vest. Only three customers had screamed at her and the diner had finally gotten its new dishwasher so all up it hadn't been too bad a day of unskilled labour. The bus came to a halt outside the gas station and she said a polite goodnight to the driver before hopping down the stairs.
Suddenly the rubber soul of her shoe slipped sideways and she caught herself on her hands a second before landing face down.
"You ok?" the driver called from his seat.
"Yeah," Alis sprang up. "Just slipped."
Alis had slipped and that had her worried. She was nimble by nature so she was not prone to falling without cause. The bus pulled out and she checked her hands for any scrapes in the dying red glow of its tail lights. Her hands were undamaged but they were cold.
Very carefully Alis crouched down and touched the asphalt with an open hand. The ground was unnaturally cold for bitumen that had soaked up the New Mexico sun all day and she peered closer. Dragging her finger lightly along the ground a small layer of icicles collected under her nail and sent a shiver up her arm.
'This isn't right,' she thought and slowly rose to full height. Rain was rare in this part of the desert and snow even more uncommon. Impossible in fact.
Alis took a look around the main drag with her large eyes and listened hard. There was the hum of the florescent lights in the service station behind her, a car several blocks away screeched as it braked too quickly and a cat ran out of a rubbish bin towards an apartment block in search of better food.
Nothing out the normal.
Alis let out the breath she was holding and it formed a cloud in the cold air. Looking up she couldn't make out a single star for the heavy cloud cover. Jane and Darcy were always driving into the desert to study freak storms and strange lights in the night sky but this weather didn't sit right with Alis.
'If something is not right leave. Fast.'
Thinking of those two and the dinner they had promised snapped Alis out of her thoughts and she very carefully walked to the laboratory. She loved her bright red converse shoes down to their non-animal product lining but she had to admit that they did not grip well in icy conditions.
As she got closer she saw her friends hunched over a desk working and some of the eerie feeling she'd been carrying on her walk lifted.
"How'd the bean burgers go?" she asked as she came through the office doors.
Jane and Darcy looked up from their work station to share a worried look.
"Well…"
"Umm…"
"We got you noodles," Darcy sidestepped the question and held out a box of take out noodles like a peace offering.
Alis sighed running a hand through her messy hair and found it damp. 'Is it really that cold out?' she wondered with a frown and rubbed the moisture between her fingers.
"We really did try," Darcy's defense almost sounded like pleading as she took that expression to be disappointment. "We soaked the beans for ages and mashed them up like you did last time but they wouldn't stick together. So we went to put them down the dispenser and now the dispenser is clogged so we then-"
"Noodles are great, thank you so much," Alis took the box with enough enthusiasm to stop Darcy's panic. "I'll get to work on the sink."
Alis smelled the noodles on her way to the kitchen and was dismayed to find that they were soaked in oyster sauce. Part of the reason she was in charge of cooking duties was because Darcy had trouble remembering the finer details of vegetarianism. Refusing to let her disappointment cancel out the goodness of her friend's gesture Alis very quietly pulled two slices off the bread loaf and plugged the kettle in. She would be extra noisy plunging the sink to cover throwing the noodles in the bin.
At their desk Darcy and Jane flicked back and forth between two computer monitors, one displayed their storm readings and the other the National Meteorology website. They had been refreshing the webpage every five minutes for the past two hours but still nothing matched up to what they were detecting on their scanners.
"The temperature is still falling," Darcy ran her finger along the red line crashing to the bottom of the screen. "And the experts are still saying we should be at a steady twelve degrees."
"This makes no sense," Jane sounded flustered as she double checked that their equipment was working properly.
"Are we going to take the truck out?" Darcy asked sounding like she really didn't want to.
"Maybe," Jane thought for a moment then shook her head. "No, we've still got everything packed up in there."
The truck had been packed for nearly three months now. With SHIELD's help the blue print of Jane's device had grown from a drawing to a reality. However it was still waiting to be tested.
Every time SHIELD got in touch about running a simulation she always found a reason to stall. The first time she said she wanted to go over the mathematic formulas again before turning it on. The second time she said she wanted to modify the device further. The third time she blamed the weather for not meeting the requirements of their testing.
They were all excuses though. What was really holding the project back was Jane's consuming self doubt. She was positive her math was right-it always was-but she was rendered inert by the terrifying possibility that somehow their attempt to recreate the bi-frost would cause something irreversibly catastrophic and destroy her chances of ever seeing Thor again.
For months she'd felt spilt in two. One part of her wanted to push forward and bridge the worlds and usher in a new chapter of science. The other part was terrified that their plan would fail and she would have to resign herself to a limited life of scratching together sums and dreaming of the stars. Whenever she opened her e-mail to find a message from the SHIELD scientists her stomach knotted.
"Don't shake the table," Darcy said without looking up from the computer.
"What?" Jane said absently and looked at her assistant.
"You're shaking the table," Darcy accused and steadied the monitor that was slowly rattling across the desk.
"I'm not touching it," Jane held up both her hands to prove her innocence and the whole table jerked violently.
Both women stopped and looked at one another, each hoping the other would offer an explanation. Suddenly the desk fell backwards scattering their equipment and Darcy leaped out of her seat with a squeal. The whole building had started shaking around them and they grabbed a hold of each other to steady themselves.
"Where's it coming from?" Darcy yelled over the rumbling and looked at the floor as if she expected something to rip through the ground beneath them.
"I don't know!" Jane yelled back and looked around the office for something that could explain it.
"Look!" Darcy tugged Jane's arm and pointed to the glass doors that enclosed their building.
Being so engrossed in their work neither had noticed that the glass had frosted over blinding them to the outside world. The temperature must have gone below freezing in a matter of minutes.
"How did…"
Jane's question was cut off by a deafening boom and the door missed her by only a meter as the entire front of the building blew away. She threw her arms around Darcy protectively and looked up to see what stood before them.
It was the size of a rhino and the colour of sapphire. A man of some kind, or at least she through it a man with its body structure and almost human face twisted into an aggressive expression. Its tiny red eyes flicked around the room before settling on the women. It let out a heavy puff of air like a bull ready to charge and flexed its fingers, knuckles cracking like melting ice.
Jane wasn't sure if it was Darcy or her screaming then as the monster lumbered towards them with its ground shaking strides. She knew to run but disbelief had rooted the both of them to the spot.
A hand reached out to grab them when something whooshed through the air.
The kettle flew up in a high arc before hitting the creature in the face. The impact popped the lid open and the boiling water sprayed all over the blue mountain. There was sizzling sound and the creature grabbed its face and bellowed as its skin burned away.
"Run!" Alis roared from behind them and pushed her friends as hard as she could towards the gaping hole the giant had torn in the building.
The physical encouragement made the two of them sprint to safety with Alis keeping a close tail.
"Get to the truck!" Alis ordered as the giant roared in agony and stomped around blindly, knocking over furniture and crushing computers beneath its feet.
"What is that thing?" Jane screamed hysterically as she jumped into the driver's seat of her truck and fumbled in her jacket for the keys. It was hard to make her hands stop shaking long enough to get the key in the ignition. Nothing was making sense, this wasn't real was it?
"Frost Giant!" Alis puffed. "Get out of here and call for help! You'll have to turn this machine of yours on!"
"How do you know-"
"NOT NOW JANE!" Alis roared over the giant's pained howls. This was not a good time to explain that she had been playing dumb about SHIELD, the bi-frost and gods visiting the earth. One bane of telepathy was that nothing could stay secret for too long.
"Alis get in!" Darcy screamed from the passenger seat. She was clutching the dashboard so hard her nails were leaving marks in the plastic and all colour had drained from her face.
Alis looked inside her head and saw she was verging on complete hysteria. Darcy couldn't understand how one minute life had been totally normal and next she was running from a creature that belonged in fairy tales. That thing wanted to kill her and she didn't want to die, she wanted to live longer and do more, see more, have more. She couldn't die now, why was this happening? She had to run, escape, drive Jane, Alis, go, go, GO!
"Go!" Alis said to Jane and thumped the truck door to empower her order.
"Get in!" Darcy screamed.
"Come on!" Jane opened the door to pull Alis in but she was already backing away with her eyes fixed on the Frost Giant looking for the one who'd burned him.
Darcy's thoughts told Alis that she was reaching melting point and was impossible to rely on now. Without help Jane's device would take hours to set up so she would have to reach the SHIELD base if there was any hope of turning it on. Chances were that the agents there were already mobilizing troops for combat but Alis knew the odds of stopping the Frost Giants without help from the other worlds were not favorable.
Not that she really expected help from the other worlds. They had done nothing last time.
"JANE GO NOW!" she screamed and waved her arms at the injured beast. "COME AND GET ME!"
With its clouded vision the Frost Giant made out the figure taunting him and charged towards it. Alis turned and darted into the night like a rabbit racing to its burrow and Jane slammed her foot on the accelerator. The open door flapped wildly as she took the corner too fast and sped into the desert. The tyres spat up chunks of sand that had turned slushy from the snow and they bounded violently in their seats as they crashed over rocks and shrubs.
"Alis," Darcy wailed beside her. "We have to go back for Alis."
Jane looked in the rear view mirror to see only the shrinking light of their laboratory, the Frost Giant and girl gone in the darkness.
"She will be ok," Jane didn't believe the words she pushed out between heavy breaths. "We will get help."
Beside her Darcy started to cry.