"To Hel with them!" Thor roars. Mjolnir crashes down into the table, leaving a gaping dent in the surface. A second blow completely cleaves the table in two. "She should have never been at the conference!" He rages, pointing Mjolnir at Fury. "She would have been safer somewhere else!"

"And where do you propose we put a mind reader?" Fury asks calmly. "We don't understand the extent of her mind or of what she can do. Not to mention the fact that she recently developed telekinesis. What place would hold her?"

"Why do we need to hold her?" Banner asks, crossing his arms. "I thought we were protecting her from Warren Biochemical, not holding her prisoner."

"He has a point," Stark says from across the room, a glass full of ice cubes and something alcoholic pressed to his temple.

They are all gathered in the remains of the conference room on the Helicarrier. Steve's arm is bound up to slow the blood flow from the bullet wound. Stark is nursing a glass of scotch and ice as a sedative to reduce his pounding headache although how scotch does the trick for him, no one knows. Natasha is icing her head the conventional way with Clint at her side, his foot propped up on the remains of a chair. He's kind of out of it from blood loss and the sonic pulses and seems to be dozing occasionally. Banner seems unharmed but is only dressed in the tattered remains of his clothes from previously, a testament to the Hulk. Thor is the only one unharmed and is definitely the most vocal about his anger at Fury right now even though the room is simmering with it.

"She should have been moved out of the reach of those men," Thor growls. He points Mjolnir at Fury accusatorily. "If we had known just to what lengths they would have gone to to get her back we could have moved her far away from their reach. I'd move her to Asgard if it would keep her safe." The look on Stark's face is suddenly calculating but Fury seems unfazed, as if the idea had already occurred to him. His next words confirm it.

"It was considered," he says. "However, we have no idea how to make sure that Asgardian influence has nothing to do with this."

The faces looking back at him are confused. "Asgardian influence?" Thor asks.

"Time for the truth, Nick," Stark says.

Fury sighs again. Every other breath seems to be a sigh lately. Then he begins to tell them a story.

"Jaycee Strong is the daughter of the renowned astrophysicist Mark Strong, one of the pioneers in the field. He studied Rosenberg-Einstein bridges. In fact his research resembled that of Jane Foster."

A look of comprehension dawns on Stark's face as does Thor's but for once the scientist stays quiet and so does the Norse God. "Mark Strong was studying the Rosenberg-Einstein theory and making great headway in intrastellar communications and the theory of interconnected worlds and although the world probably wasn't ready for the idea that there are other intelligent beings in the universe, Strong was charismatic and very popular in the scientific community even if his ideas were a little unorthodox. He was at the peak of his career about nine years ago."

"Then he vanished without a trace."

Fury suddenly looks very tired. "No one knows where he went or what happened to him. The trail ends where it starts, no evidence to follow, nothing to go off of. No a scrap of anything to point us in a direction. We interviewed co-workers, other scientists in the field and came up with nothing. They all say he was acting rather sporadically the last few days he came to work, distracted as if about to reach a major break-through, like a man who knows he is about to do something crazy or life-changing."

"The only clues we ever found were in his personal journal of his studies. He often talked about finding a 'bridge', a pathway back to the stars. Once Thor visited Earth for the first time, it became clear that this bridge was the Bifrost. Before then, it had been interpreted as a fanciful idea of Strong's. The most interesting entry had something different in his bridge theory. He wrote about using the bridge to be reunited with 'her'. Who he was referring to was a mystery but we postulate that Mr. Strong had contact with Asgard, maybe even met someone from there. He became obsessed with finding this bridge to 'save her'."

There are long moments of silence as this information settles in.

"Are… are you suggesting… that Jay's father knew about Asgard and this has something to do with Jay's abilities?" Banner asks hesitantly.

"We can't be sure," Fury replies. "We can't even be sure who Mark Strong was looking for. But the timing is correct. Nine years ago Mark Strong disappears. Nine years ago Jaycee Strong becomes the property of Warren Biochemical."

"Are you suggesting foul play?" Steve asks, worry lines creasing his forehead.

"It isn't out of the question," Fury says. "In fact, it seems the most logical explanation. But we're missing too much information. None of Strong's o-workers ever indicated that they knew that he even had a daughter. They knew he had a wife but she died thirteen years before Mark went missing, supposedly in childbirth. The baby was supposed to have died as well. The impression was that Mark had gone slightly crazy from the grief and he threw himself into his work, feverishly spending extra hours at the telescope station and out in the field in remote locations, star-gazing for hours."

"Hold up there, One-eye," Stark slurs. "Even inebriated, I can tell you that death of child birth thirteen years ago plus nine years after Strong's disappearance does not add up to the nineteen years Jay claims to have."

Fury nods dejectedly. "Jay Strong is not nineteen years old as she thinks she is. She is twenty-two."

"Don't you think she should know that?" Steve asks angrily.

"With all of the other pressures she has been under that past weeks, I thought it would be wiser to wait until things settled to tell her she is missing three years of her life," Fury bites back and Steve has the good grace to look chagrined.

"If Strong had contacted someone from Asgard, surely we would have known about it," Thor says. "Our borders are heavily guarded; it isn't feasible that a mortal could have crossed the Bifrost without the consent of Heimdall."

"Unless the mortal didn't cross," Stark points out.

Thor frowns, serious furrows forming on his brow. "The only other way that could have happened was if a member of Asgard…" he trails off. Fury finishes his thought.

"Was if an Asgardian crossed to Earth."

"But my father would have known," Thor protests.

"Perhaps the Asgardian didn't take the direct route," Stark suggests, obviously more sober than he acts. "Who's to say there aren't hidden pathways between worlds?"

All eyes turn to Thor, who has suddenly become very quiet. "Thor?" Natasha asks. "Are there ways between Asgard and Earth besides the Bifrost?"

"There are." His tone does not bode good news. "They are only known to a few."

"Well, who would know these pathways?" Banner asks.

Thor looks up, his eyes begging for them to defer judgment. "Magicians and sorcerers. People with the ability to conjure spells. People with a mischievous side."

When you wake up with a headache the size of Texas, a normal person doesn't question the hyperbole they use to describe the pain. Why not Alaska; it's bigger, right? But Jay knows she's not normal and giddily she decides her headache is most definitely the size of Alaska.

Everything hurts, her wrist, her leg but especially her head. Her eyes feel gummy as if glued shut. She tries to lift her eyelids but finds she can't so she resigns herself to figuring out where she is in the dark. The deities know she's done it before. She wiggles her fingers on her good hand and then tries to move the rest of her arm. No luck. Something heavy and metal is pinning her arm to the ground or whatever surface she is on top of. She can feel metal beneath her should blades and hips and when she tries to move her ankles, they won't move either. With a sinking feeling she realizes where she is and panic claws its way up her throat. No, it may not be true, she desperately thinks, maybe it isn't that room. Maybe it isn't the operating table. But with each passing second, she becomes more and more certain that she's back in the same operating room that she basically inhabited for nine years of her life. Terror blinds her momentarily and her breath quickens and her heart rate rockets through the roof.

She can't panic, no; she needs to get ahold of herself. Think, she desperately yells to herself. How can she get out of this? She's not a superhero, she's not intelligent. She's injured and exhausted. What does she have? Then suddenly it comes to her.

Her mind.

She shudders at the thought. She doesn't want to try to use her powers, she really doesn't. She may profess it is because she doesn't want to invade people's privacy or to cause trouble but it really isn't the reason.

She's scared.

Jay is absolutely terrified to use her mind to do anything besides think. But the fact of the matter is it is the only thing she has right now that can get her out of this mess. She won't let Bradlich touch her ever again; she swore that the night she escaped. No more needles, no more injections of burning chemicals that drove her stark raving mad and didn't give her any new powers except a tolerance for migraines. Enough. Time to stop being powerless. When Jared opened fire, she was responding, letting other defend her. The Hawk took a bullet to the foot for her, Natasha saved her life by tackling her and Stark fished her out of the ocean. She's defensive by nature so she knows she wouldn't attack anyone unless someone provokes her to violence. It's okay to use her mind to defend her own well-being, she reasons.

But she's still afraid. Years of being injected with chemicals and experimented on will do that to a person. She doesn't even know what she's capable of. She's not sure she wants to know. That's the main reason she refrains from using her mind to read thoughts. She doesn't want something to develop that she has no control of. She has no idea what they've been injecting her with for years and that makes it difficult to want to use her mind since it furthers Jared's purpose. It kept her alive, she supposes. She never showed them the full extent of what she could do when she realized that something new was now possible to her. It kept her safe, kept her breathing.

She tries to give herself a pep talk to catalyze some kind of action. She focuses on the metal cuff holding her good wrist down to the operating table. Her eyes are still closed but that helps her focus. She knows these cuffs well; her wrists have spent a long time held down by them. She pictures the binding, the way the metal hinges closed, the latch that fastens them shut. Then she focuses on moving the latch, on changing it so that instead of locked, it's now opened. Nothing happens. She breathes in, breathes out and tries again. Nothing. Frustrated, she tries to control the racing beat of her heart. She will not let panic take her.

After a few more tries, nothing has happened and she's even more tired than before. Her wounded wrist throbs. Her leg is on fire. She can tell the bullets have at least been removed but there is no dressing that she can feel. Her leg is sticky with blood and it hurts to move it. She won't be able to run even if she manages to undo the manacles. She tries to open her eyes again and this time they respond but she still sees only darkness. It takes her a moment to realize she's blindfolded. She curses Jared Bradlich and Warren Biochemical and everyone she can think of. Blind, wounded, bound to an operating table. Well, crap, guess it really can't get worse, right?

As soon as she has that thought, she regrets it. Of course it can get worse. Bradlich could come through the door with a new concoction or serum and jab her with his needles. No, please not that. The thought give her renewed purpose and she focuses hard on the cuffs. Anger gives her a clear head and a honed edge to her thoughts and she pours her energy into focusing on the cuff.

All of a sudden with a shriek of twisting metal, the cuff blows lose from the table, slicing into her wrist and then clanking down on to the floor. Momentarily shocked, Jay lays there. No way, she did it! Elated she rolls her wrist and feels no metal against it. She really did do it, she thinks in awe. Then, experimentally, she lifts her now free wrist and removes the blindfold. Blinding white light rushes in to greet her and her eyes tear from the sudden brightness. There is a hazy shape on the edge of her vision and a dark laugh suddenly freezes her blood.

"Beautiful," Jared Bradlich laughs menacingly. "Seems you are telekinetic after all, my lovely."

A long span of silence follows Thor's words. The realization of what this means is heavy between them all.

"We need a plan of action," Steve says, taking charge.

"Damn straight," Stark agrees. "I can't wait to get my hands on that lying, conniving, twisted, filthy-"

Steve cuts off his tirade. "We need to find a way to figure out where they took Jay. That's priority one. We can figure out the rest of the situation when she's back with us. The rest is detail until we can reach her and secure her safety." Stark looks slightly chagrined and Thor shoots Steve a grateful glance. Thor knows he is probably the only one of them that has mercy for the person they suspect could behind this whole gnarly situation.

"I'm assuming that we have some way to track her?" Steve asks his voice and demeanor oddly cold. "I assume either S.H.I.E.L.D implanted her with a tracking device or Stark has some inkling of how to find her, am I correct?"

For once Fury, looks put out. "We did put a tracking device in her," he mumbles like a kid who just got in trouble with his mother.

"Perfect," Steve says crisply. "Activate it, home in on the signal, plan out the routes in and out and we go get her. Nothing fancy, a straight up rescue." All the Avengers don't move at first, stone silent in surprise by Steve's forceful manner. "Well, can we get going sometime today?" Steve snaps and suddenly the room is humming with energy again. Fury and Stark are pulling up the tracking device on the screen, Natasha is buckling on her holsters, Clint is blearily trying to get up and mobilize but Natasha pushes him back down. Banner examines Barton's foot and tells him he needs to sit this one out, to which he gets the finger.

Thor pulls Steve aside. "Thank you," he whispers.

Steve gives him a critical look. "Hold that thought," he says. "I care about Jay first and foremost. I know you care about her too, but make sure you remember that if I have to make a decision between helping you with the trickster and protecting Jay, I will choose her. You are my teammate and I trust you above anyone else in battle but just remember that he is wily and shrewd and I don't like this."

Thor nods in understanding. "Thank you for that," he says. "I will protect her with my life as well, you know this. She…. reminds me of him…..before…" He trails off.

Steve rests a hand on Thor's forearm. "I know. Just… let's keep her like that, yes?"

Steve leave to consult with Fury and Stark as the beacon activates and gives them a location. Thor is left to mull over the captains' words in silence. None of this bodes well for any of them. He gets the feeling that a threat lurks somewhere in the shadows, that there is something they are missing that is crucial, but he can't place his finger on it. He hopes they can solve this mystery and soon.