A/N: I know it's been a long time, and I know that I promised that I would update more during the summer, and I know that that makes me a liar with flaming pants. I also know that I've been spending too much time playing My Sims: Agents and browsing tumblr (my username is bilbo-baggins-official, in case anyone was wondering), and I am sorry for all of these things. But the chapter's here now, right? Right.
So, without further ado:
The Avengers don't belong to me, but this chapter does
Why Tara even had a fully equipped prison cell designed to contain beings of high power was a mystery to Sky. Last time she checked the Tower was supposed to be residential, but she supposed that minor goddesses counted as residents.
It was, admittedly, an impressive cell. Modeled after the one used to contain Loki twenty years earlier, it was made of some kind of reinforced metal and bullet-proof, shatter-proof, and a whole bunch of other-proof glass. Cylindrical and squat, there were no blind spots that a prisoner would be able to hide in. And by prisoner, she meant Hel.
Overall, not bad. If Sky had to pick a cell to be contained in, it would be this one.
Tara and Nik clutched blankets around their shoulders, drinking tea (Nik) and hot chocolate (Tara). Gwen and Michael poured over Hel's mysterious weapon with various science-ey devices, and Sage and Jeremy sat on the stairs, playing rock-paper-scissors. Mary Anne helped Travis color while Xander attempted to interrogate the prisoner, "attempted" being the key word. He had been at it for about an hour and a half now. Sky saw it all from her perch in the rafters.
"Well," began Gwen, setting down some sort of scanner, "We have an idea of what this thing is."
"That's great!" exclaimed Sky, climbing down to the floor. "What's it made of?"
"Human bone," replied Michael with a grin.
Tara choked on her hot chocolate. Nik winced. "Charming," he said.
"That's just what the handle is made out of," continued Gwen. "From what we can tell, Hel somehow manages to create various weapons out of ice, with the handle functioning as a base on which to create."
"That's… Kind of cool, actually," admitted Sky. "I want one of those!"
"That's a shame, because you're not getting one," Xander said, striding out of the cell, the doors sliding shut and latching behind him. "We'd like to have Tara run a few tests on it to see what she can get out of it, then we're taking it to headquarters to lock it up."
"Aye aye, captain," Tara nodded. Xander scowled, like usual.
"She's not really giving us any information. We're no farther along than we were an hour ago," he sighed. "She's pretty—"
"Chilly?" Michael asked innocently. Sky gave him a high five.
"If you wanted to know about Hel, you should have just asked," Jeremy said grimly, rising from his seat. "Hel is one of the fiercest goddesses we've got. Not a lot is known about her—she rarely leaves Helheim. That's where she does her job; governing over the souls that just weren't good enough. Too lazy, not vicious enough, whatever. If you didn't make it to Valhalla, you ended up in Helheim under Hel's control. She's the goddess of Ice and Death. You can't see it now—she's probably glamoured it—but the entire left side of her body is fleshless. Nothing but bone."
"I repeat. Charming," Nik said dryly.
"Yeah, not my favorite deity," Jeremy admitted. "Then, when I was only a few years old—around the same time I started visiting Asgard, actually—she disappeared. No one heard from her for years. Until now, I guess. I've hear tons about her, though."
"Looks like she's been planning this takeover for a while, then," Xander guessed.
"Not the best plan, if you ask me," Michael said, starting to smile. "She should really have just…"
"Michael Joseph Hill, don't you dare—"
"Let it go!" Michael and Sky shouted. They laughed and high fived again. Gwen giggled, and everyone else groaned.
Xander sighed. "We'll be back to pick up the hilt tomorrow," he told Tara. In a few short minutes, the Shield agents were packed up and out the door.
Sky felt a tug on her sleeve and looked down. Travis was standing beside her, holding two coloring books and a pack of crayons. "Sky, do you think it would be okay if I colored with Hel? She looks kind of lonely."
The blond observed their prisoner. She was sitting cross-legged in the middle of her cell, staring directly in front of her like the air could tell her a way to escape. Without her hilt, she couldn't make weapons, so he would probably okay.
"That's fine, as long as you don't let her freeze you to death," Sky approved. The little boy all but squealed with excitement. Mary Anne looked petrified that Sky had allowed her brother to enter a cell with such a criminal, but she seemed to feel better once Sky told her that it was unlikely that anything would happen to her brother if she kept an eye on the situation.
"I'm still freaking freezing. This is unfair!" Tara complained. "I should heat up some soup. I think I have some in the pantry…"
"Canned soup?" Nik asked incredulously. "That's disgusting."
Tara rolled her eyes. "Well, if you're okay with consistent dampness, fine by me."
"Calm down, you guys," Sky mediated. "Isn't there a soup shop down the block? I'll just pick up a few bowls and be back in a jiffy. No problem!"
"Just don't die or anything, alright?" Nik instructed.
"You've got it," Sky smiled, winking. What could possibly go wrong?
Yeah, I probably shouldn't have said that, Sky thought to herself as she stood in line to order. I mean, when's the last time that something bad hasn't happened after someone says that? Probably never.
Sky stifled a yawn as she ordered two to-go bowls of tomato soup. She rubbed her eyes. Her brain felt too fuzzy to remember if she had gotten enough sleep the night before. Had she drank coffee that morning? Sky couldn't seem to recall.
Grasping the paper bag with one hand and paying with the other, Sky blinked furiously in an attempt to clear her vision. Every time her eyes closed—even for a second—her eyelids felt like they wanted to stay down and take a nice little nap.
Her feet felt heavy, and the fastest she could go seemed to be a slight shuffle. Without warning, her knee buckled and she fell hard on the concrete.
This sidewalk is pretty comfy, she thought drowsily. It couldn't hurt to rest here a few minutes.
Someone was shaking her shoulder. Sky fought off the urge to beg for five more minutes of sleep. She blinked open her eyes. There was a worried-looking woman examining her face. She sighed when she saw Sky awake.
"Thank God you're okay!" she exclaimed. She turned to another woman standing nearby. "Andrea, call an ambulance!"
"I'm fine. Really, I'm okay," Sky insisted, brushing the woman away and rubbing sleep out of her eyes. What is happening to me?
The woman tried to help her up, but Sky pushed her away and scrambled to her feet on her own, feeling too urgent to be polite. She snaked through the small crowd that had gathered around the scene of the fall. She must have been out for a few minutes at least.
With grim determination, she set her sights on the tower, the desire to sleep being shoved down by the trouble she saw coming.
Whatever's happening, it's not good she thought, leaving her spilled soup to spread across the pavement.
It was a long elevator ride, longer than she would have liked, to get to the forty-ninth floor. She had pulled her quiver out of her backpack around floor forty, and she had an arrow notched by the time the doors opened. She called upon her years of stealth training and crept across the floor silently, looking for anything unusual.
Of course, none of that training mattered when she tripped over Jeremy, who was lying unconscious on the floor. She landed on the metal tile with a loud thump.
She got to her feet, cursing without attempting to hide it. After all, her cover was blown anyway. She slipped the arrow back into her quiver and knelt next to Jeremy, grabbing his wrist and feeling for a pulse. She let out a breath of relief when she discovered it to be normal. Sky shook his shoulder.
"Jeremy! Yo! Jem! Anyone at home?" she whispered, with no results. The boy was out cold.
Sky glanced around. She could see Sage sleeping (and hopefully not dead) nearby, scowling even in her sleep. Mary Anne was curled into a loose ball, her honey-colored hair spread on the floor around her head. Nik and Tara had fallen asleep slumped against a desk, his head resting on her shoulder, her head resting on his crown. If the situation wasn't so dire, Sky would have grinned and wiggled her eyebrows. She resolved to embarrass her brother later, and refocused her mind on the task at hand; figuring out what was going on.
Sky cautiously approached the cage. Travis was asleep as well, crayons gripped in one hand, sucking the thumb of his other. What really drew Sky's attention was the papers torn from the coloring book, with runes scribbled on their surfaces in crayon. And, of course, the goddess sleeping on the floor.
Marching over to the cell door and typing in the access code, Sky's mind searched for an explanation and didn't have to look far for one. From what she could tell, Hel had taken advantage of the situation and decided to use the crayons and paper to mix up some magic mischief.
The moment the cage doors slid open, Sky strode in and examined the goddess. She looked even paler than usual—if that were possible—and didn't look like she was waking up any time soon. That girl slept like the dead. Hel had probably used up most of her energy to cast some sort of sleeping spell on all of them. It couldn't have been a simple task to knock out seven people using her own energy, but it was a pretty stupid plan overall, since she would have no way out of the cell once everyone was asleep.
Or would she? Sky wondered. She shook her head. Another crisis for another time. She set to work ripping the coloring pages in half, taking mental inventory of the runes before they were destroyed. To her, they looked awfully similar to the runes that they had found at the sites that their parents had disappeared from. As the rune circles were destroyed, they flashed a bright blue before crumbling into heatless ash. Although she couldn't tell for sure, it seemed that her friends were stirring.
Finally, she picked up the last of the pages. Her spine tingled, like she had stuck a fork in an electrical socket (which she had, once. Long story). The swirling pattern of these runes looked almost like actual words. Not the circle, but the runes inside of it. Somehow she knew that this paper was hers.
Sky almost hesitated to destroy it. She still had no idea why she was able to resist the spell's power. What if this paper could help them to figure out why?
Sky sighed. She didn't want to take any chances that the spell might suddenly come into effect. With a satisfying ripping sound, the paper was torn in half. Sky felt like her chest had been set free of tight bonds.
Her friends were definitely awake now, Jeremy and Sage angry that they hadn't been able to stop the situation, and Mary Anne panicking over the fact that she wasn't there to take care of Travis, he could have never woken up, etc.
Nik and Tara were the last to wake, which they did at almost the same time. They took in the situation, glanced at each other, then sprung away, blushing furiously. Sky smiled. They were never going to hear the end of that from her, that was for certain.
Next to her, Hel groaned quietly, reaching for another piece of paper and a crayon.
"I don't think so, your highness," Sky growled, stepping on Hel's chest with her combat boot. "We have a lot to talk about."
A/N: Operation "Nara" is officially underway