After they left, Loki finished his breakfast and set out to find a reasonable means of travel for them. He didn't like the idea of leaving Myrkr in the motel room alone, but he knew she would be more comfortable there with the blasting air conditioner than trolling around the desert heat with him for an undetermined amount of time.
Before leaving, he stressed several times the importance of staying where she was and waiting for him. She just smiled and agreed every time. It wasn't like him to worry like that, but she knew it was a result of being in such a strange place, and there was no way she was going to belittle his concern, even if she did think he was being a bit extreme.
With a kiss passionate enough to have him leave with a blush, she let him go and locked the door behind him.
About an hour later, there was a knock on the door. Myrkr nearly jumped out of her skin before she remembered that it was customary for workers to come check the rented rooms of the motel once a day. She stood and looked at herself in the mirror. She still appeared human, so she ran her fingers through her hair a few times before opening the door.
As soon as she did, she cursed herself for not check the peephole first because standing in front of her was not some middle aged woman with a cart full of cleaning supplies, as she had expected. Rather, it was three men in black suits. She tried to close the door in their faces, but the one in front put his foot out at the last second to keep it from latching.
"W-Who are you?" she asked anxiously.
"Good day, Miss. I'm Agent Culson, and I would like to have a word with you," the man in front greeted.
Agent was not a title she was familiar with, but they still did not appear very friendly in spite of the slight smile the one speaking to her wore. "I'd rather not," she said, peeking through the crack in the door.
"It's very important," he insisted.
"What do you want?" she asked, her anxiety level increasing. She desperately wished Loki was with her. He knew how to handle humans.
"You were part of a very unusual phenomenon last night," he said.
"No, I wasn't. You're mistaken," she said, trying to push the door closed, but to no avail.
"This will be easier if you cooperate. We're not here to cause you any trouble, but we do need to talk with you," he insisted.
"No, I don't know anything. Leave me alone," she said, continuing to push on the door.
"I regret that we are authorized to use force in the event that you are not cooperative," he said, nodding back to the larger men standing behind him. It took a surprising amount of effort for them to push the door open wide enough to enter.
"Go away!" Myrkr shouted as she retreated to the other side of the room.
"Miss, you are overreacting," Culson advised. "If you would just calm down," he tried.
She shook her head, her eyes wide with fear and he nose twitched a couple times. She could tell they weren't being genuine. She had been with Loki long enough to be able to know a lie when she heard it, and she still had enough of her Jotun senses about her to be able to detect the signs of their dishonesty.
Culson sighed. "It's quite chilly in here. Is your air conditioner broken?" he said, casually making his way over to the machine working hard just below the window.
"Don't touch that! Get away from there! Get out!" she yelled. "You have no right to be here," she insisted as she backed away from him.
"Actually, I have authorization to go just about anywhere I need to," he dismissed matter-of-factly. There was no arrogance in his voice, which in itself was actually quite unnerving. "But if you'd prefer I not bother with the air conditioner, that is your prerogative."
"Go away, please," she pleaded.
"Why don't you have a seat, and we can talk about what happened last night?" Culson proposed, motioning to one of the chairs by the bed.
"No, I'm not talking to you about anything. Why won't you just go?" she desperately replied. She felt trapped, and it was starting to show in the ice crystals starting to form on the surfaces of just about everything in the small motel room.
"Did you feel that?" Culson casually asked the other two men, taking a moment to watch his breath form little clouds in front of his face. "It must have dropped twenty degrees in just a few seconds," he marveled, looking back at the wide-eyed woman standing a few feet away. "That's quite a talent."
She shook her head. "I don't want to hurt you," she said in a low, shaky voice.
Culson smiled. "That's good. We don't want to hurt you either."
"Then please leave," she pleaded.
"Where's that man you were with?" Culson asked curiously.
"He's none of your concern," she insisted.
"You're not being very cooperative," he lamented as he returned to the air conditioner. As he turned it off, he said, "I think perhaps we should take this conversation elsewhere." Then, he opened the window, letting some of the outside heat into the room.
"Leave that alone! Stop it!" she nearly screamed. "And if you so much as lay a hand on me, you will deeply regret it!"
Culson chuckled a little. "You're quite good. It's still getting colder. I was sent here to talk to you about the anomaly that you were part of last night, but I'm actually becoming more interested in this temperature control of yours. Is it just cold or do you do heat as well? If that's the case, I can understand why you would pick cold, less collateral damage that way. Does your companion have similar abilities?" he questioned curiously.
Myrkr screamed in frustration and prepared to blast them with every bit of cold she could manage, but before she got the chance to do more than cover them in a dusting of frost, she blacked out. Culson barely caught her before she hit her head on the end table.
He had one of the men with him scoop her up into his arms while the other gathered up the things around the room that didn't belong to the motel. As an afterthought, he left a tip on the table. While they got her and her things loaded up, he paid for the room.
When Myrkr came to, she was laying on a thin mat in a small room. The floor, ceiling, and bottom half of the walls of the room were back. The top half of the walls appeared to be a reflective glass. There was one door and a table and two chairs had been pushed across the room to make room for her sleeping mat.
She slowly sat up and tried to adjust to her surroundings. Taking a deep breath, she touched the wall to steady herself. It was cold metal. That made her realize that the room she was in was rather cold. It wasn't as cold as she would prefer, but it definitely wasn't hot.
"H-Hello?" she hesitantly asked. There was no immediate answer. "Anyone?" she tried again. Still nothing. Slowly she stood and began to pace around the room. When being alone like that was starting to get to her, she started speaking again, hoping that someone could hear her. "I'm really sorry that I acted out earlier. I was scared. I've never been in a situation like that before, and I didn't know what to do." She was just about to start yelling and trying to fight her way out of the room when the man from earlier entered.
"I'm sorry we didn't have more comfortable quarters for you," he said. "Mind helping me with the table and chairs?"
She gave him an odd look but did as he asked.
"You aren't quite what you seem, are you?" he asked as they sat down across from each other.
Myrkr paled a bit but didn't say anything.
"You were quite talkative a minute ago," he lamented. "Look, I realize that we've given you no reason to trust us, but for what it's worth, I promise that as long as you don't hurt anyone, no harm will come to you. We're in the information business, and it's been my experience that hurting and threatening people doesn't usually yield the best results.
She gave him a wary look, but she had a hard time not believing him.
"So, let's try this again. What's your name?" he tried.
"Myrkr," she reluctantly answered.
"Myrkr, you're not from around here, are you?" he mused.
"I'm not from a lot of places," she muttered.
"That's a start," he commented. "But you're really a long way from home, aren't you?"
She barely nodded.
"Where did you come from?" he asked curiously
His genuine interest in her made her trust him just a little more. "We came from Asgard."
Culson nodded. "Is that sort of transportation technology common there?"
She shrugged. "I've only seen the one device that does it, but it's not like a big secret or anything."
He nodded again. "And why did you come here to Earth? From what I can tell, you're very much out of your element."
Myrkr scoffed. "We're on holiday. We just wanted somewhere quiet to be alone for a while. He said that there are vast cold regions on this planet where almost no one lives. We hadn't intended to land in the desert."
"So you came to Earth willingly, and you have the means to make a return trip," he verified.
She nodded.
Culson smiled a bit. "Well, tell you what. When this is over, I'll see about getting you dropped off somewhere colder, okay?" he offered.
Her heart skipped a beat at the idea, but she knew better than to trust a promise made so easily from someone she didn't know.
"That's some disguise you've got there. You really do look human. I'm not sure if you're aware, but there are some people on this planet with abilities like yours," he informed.
"I didn't know that," she replied quietly. "What gave me away?"
He smirked. "We took a hair sample."
She didn't like the sound of that.
"How are you keeping that appearance anyway?" he asked curiously.
"Someone else did it for me," she vaguely replied.
"Was it that man you're traveling with?" he pressed.
Myrkr frowned.
"He told the scientists that you met that his name is Loki," he tried.
She nodded.
He cocked an eyebrow. "If you were looking for fake names, you could have picked something more modern," he teased.
Myrkr frowned. "I'm not giving you fake names," she indignantly insisted.
He gave her a placating look. "Asgard and Loki are straight out of Norse mythology, though I'm not familiar with Myrkr. What myth are you from?"
She glared at him. "I am no myth," she asserted. "And it's not my fault that Loki and others from Asgard have been to Earth before. They said they pretty much stopped coming once you all stopped being nice to visitors," she sniped.
Her conviction made him believe her. "So, where is Loki now? We would like to speak with him as well."
Myrkr frowned. "He went to secure transport for us. Because of the unbearable heat, I didn't go with him. I don't know exactly where he is, just that he's going to be very upset when he comes back to that room and I'm not there," she said.
"Is that a threat?" Culson asked.
She tried not to smirk. "No, just a fact. We've never been in a situation quite like this, so I can't say for sure what he'll do," she half-lied. She had a fair idea what sort of actions he would take in that situation. "He might even be in this room waiting for you to finish speaking to me," he theorized, though she knew that wasn't the case.
"You're lying," he dismissed. "You're desperate. I get that. You're trying whatever you can to assert some kind of control over your situation, but we're several thousand feet in the air. I doubt your friend could sneak up here without anyone knowing."
"Is there anything else you'd like to talk about?" she asked impatiently.
Culson stood. "Not at the moment." He started to leave, then looked back at her. She looked frustrated and forlorn. "Are you hungry?" he asked.
Myrkr rolled her eyes. "Yes, but I doubt you have anything I would like," she muttered.
Culson nodded and left. A few minutes later, a lower ranking SHIELD agent came to talk to her about what she would like to eat. This person didn't seem to have much a real interest in her, but it was their job to find her something suitable to sustain her during her stay with them. While they worked on that, she was taken on a very brief tour of the helicarrier and asked to wait in one of the more comfortable rooms with a window overlooking the vast desert beneath them.
She leaned against the window with a sigh. She had never felt so lost or disconnected in her life and spent most of her time in that room cursing herself for not being able to handle the Asgardian heatwave better. She mentally berated herself for complaining so much about something she had no control over. If she had handled herself even just a little better, Loki wouldn't have felt compelled to take her somewhere else. If she hadn't been such a coward, they could have just gone to Jotunheim. At least she knew some of the people there and how to react to them when they confronted her. At least there she wasn't an alien.
They did eventually find something that she didn't mind eating. By that time she'd lost her appetite, but she ate it anyway since it seemed as though they had gone through quite a bit of trouble to accommodate her.
A couple hours later, she noticed that the staff of the helicarrier were suddenly moving very quickly. There was a light flashing in the corridor, but when she managed to pull one of them aside, she was asked to stay where she was and given no further information. It was so frustrating that when things didn't immediately settle down, she left the room in search of answers, likewise ignoring anyone who asked what she was doing.
It didn't take her long to find the bridge, where most of the activity seemed to be centered, but she hesitated at the threshold. Even from there, though, she could see out the large windows. There might have been something below them, but at their height, it was hard for her to tell.
"Myrkr," a dark man in a long, black coat said. He was standing a the high point of the room, an easily identifiable position of power where he could oversee those around him.
She started at the sound of her own name. "Hello," she managed as firmly as she could.
"Come here," he bid her, taking a step to the side to make room for her next to him.
She was about to ask what for, but as soon as she got close, she could see her husband on the monitor in front of him. "Loki," she gasped, her eyes darting between the ominous man to her right and the image on the screen.
"So that is your friend. It seems he's been looking for you," the dark man mused.
She gave him a look that said she was not surprised by that fact.
"He's starting to make threats," he informed.
"Take me down there. If you let me go, he won't do anything rash," she advised.
"I've already send someone down to negotiate with him," he replied.
Myrkr glared at him. "You're in charge of all this, right?" she presumed
"I am SHIELD Director Fury," he replied.
That didn't exactly answer her question, but the way he said it assured her enough. "Alright, SHIELD Director Fury, why are you holding me against my will?"
"Your will is of little concern. It is our duty to gather information and investigate the kinds of security threats that average government agencies are not equipped to deal with. A pair of extraterrestrials with undetermined intentions falls into our jurisdiction," he informed.
Her glare didn't lessen. "You are all very rude and very intrusive."
"It's not like either of you have been very upfront about your intentions," he replied.
"So, what's your plan? Agent Culson said something about helping us get where we were going. I suppose that was just a lie to get me to cooperate?" she bitterly theorized.
"Did you really believe him?" Fury countered.
She sighed. "No, but I wanted to."
"As long as your friend doesn't do anything stupid, we should be able to work something out. As I said, our primary priorities are intelligence and security. As long as neither of you threatens our security, then we can potentially exchange information for transportation," Fury told her seriously.
"I've already given you more information that I intended to," she muttered.
"Lucky for you, your friend seems to be quite a bit more talkative," he replied. He knew they were more than friends, but it seemed pointless to make a big deal about the exact nature of their relationship when there were more important things he needed to worry about.
She gave him a critical look for a moment. "You haven't just been watching us, have you? You've been observing those three humans who keep harrassing us too," she accused.
Fury widened the view on the screen in front of them. "Those three?" he asked knowingly.
Myrkr rolled her eyes.
"I'm fairly certain that they are your friend's hostages now," he told her.
"Desperate men do desperate things. It's not in his nature to be cruel, but people do things they normally wouldn't when the ones they care about are in danger," she replied flatly.
"Are you in danger? Do you really feel endangered?" he asked her, a forceful edge cutting into his tone. "In case you haven't noticed, we've gone out of our way to make sure you're comfortable."
"A gilded cage is still a cage. You took me against my will and refuse to let me go," she reminded.
"I don't know if you realize this, but you're lucky it was us that found you. There are many other less scrupulous people who would not have been as considerate." When she paled a bit, he continued. "There are those who would use extreme measures to find out who you are and where you're from. It's common practice for more ignorant individuals to experiment on and dissect aliens, so excuse me for not being more sympathetic to your situation," he tartly replied.
Suddenly, Myrkr felt guilty and even a little grateful for their unusual situation. "Well...thank you for not doing any of those things, I guess," she muttered.
Fury didn't really hear her, he was busy watching the screen because a small fleet of black cars had pulled up near the truck parked in the middle of the desert.