I was idly watching the Avengers movie while I was doing some annoyingly tedious and repetitive work, and my brain-meats made this happen...
"You found it!"
The happy voice, female and chirpy, with an odd accent he couldn't place, made Tony jump, along with the rest of the small group of people, friends, that were gathered around the back of Doctor Erik Selvig's van. He was kneeling on the ground, having just opened a heavily shielded case to reveal the ominously glowing cubical form, alive with shifting internal lights, of the damn thing they called the Tesseract. The energy source that had been the cause of so much destruction over the years, most recently here in New York, which had avoided total devastation by the skin of its teeth and the sacrifice of a lot of people, very nearly including himself.
Thor was holding out the Asgardian containment device that the good doctor was about to put the cube into, so that it could be returned to Asgard where it had originally come from. Bruce was poised with an insulated pair of special tongs, ready to pick the thing up very carefully, as skin contact needed to be avoided at all cost. They'd found that out the hard way.
The rest of the Avengers, in civilian clothing, were standing around watching cautiously, as well as keeping an eye on Loki, who was bound and gagged nearby, looking beaten and rather sorry for himself. Not that Tony trusted him further than he could throw him even so.
Surprised, since the entire area was supposedly blocked off by SHIELD agents at either end of the side road over the park they were in, discreetly out of sight, he turned to find the source of the voice. Everyone else did likewise. Eight pairs of eyes widened.
The figure standing twenty feet away, smiling at them in delight, was… not normal.
Very not normal.
Oh, the long leather trench-coat and fedora were more or less OK, aside from being both somewhat clichéd and also about forty years out of style, but they looked expensive and well made. The tall slender figure inside the trench-coat, on the other hand…
The long blue-scaled tail was certainly odd. So were the lower legs, visible below the coat, that terminated in digitigrade feet with some exceptionally sharp and dangerous looking claws on the three toes. Again, covered in blue scales, light in color and striped with bands of darker blue.
Her hands were somewhat similar but still very human-looking, with long elegant fingers tipped with smaller, but still extremely sharp-appearing claws. And finally, under the hat, which if he wasn't mistaken was sitting on top of fine feathers rather than actual hair, a face that looked like a hyper-evolved lizard was smiling at them, the expression clearly interpretable even if the face was nothing like anything he'd ever encountered outside a zoo.
Although, none of the lizards in the zoos he'd visited wore sunglasses. That was a new one on him.
All eight of them had tensed, Doctor Selvig in amazement, the others in wary and well-honed combat-ready stances. Thor was hefting his hammer, having dropped the containment vessel, while Bruce was still holding the tongs with a peculiar look on his face. Natasha had a hand behind her back which he knew meant she was holding the grip of a pistol, Clint had somehow ended up with a knife in his hand without any visible sign of where it had come from, and Steve was in a position ready to either jump or retreat, his entire body keyed up for action.
The humanoid lizard ignored all this, in favor of inspecting the Tesseract, her expression pleased. "I've been trying to find it for ages. Fantastic. I knew it was around here somewhere, we've tracked it several times to your universe, but it keeps vanishing again. Sneaky little bastard."
Looking around at his friends and team-mates, Tony was the first to speak. Which wasn't unusual, if he was honest. Her comments had sparked a number of questions which even the shock of yet another alien visitor couldn't stop him asking.
"Found it?" he said, more weakly than afterwards he was happy about. It was the shock, he told himself.
"Yep. I've been trying to find my negative energy modulation oscillator for a long time. It's tricky, it tends to sneak off if you don't pay attention to it. Fractional dimensional constructs are like that when you start nesting them too much." She shrugged, smiling at him. "Not quite sentient, but… annoyingly willful." The lizard-thing stared at the cube in the container, then frowned a little.
"Someone's done something to it, though. Destabilized it and tried to store an awful lot of energy in it or something. It shouldn't be glowing like that. The shape's all wrong too." She looked around, a little suspiciously. "Have you lot been poking into things man is not meant to know? That can cause trouble if you don't read the instructions."
They exchanged confused glances. Thor was staring in disbelief, Loki had a look in his eyes like he couldn't figure out whether to laugh or pretend this wasn't happening, and the actual humans were wondering what the fuck was happening.
"Um..." Bruce stood up from the half-crouch he'd been frozen in, still holding the tongs tightly. At least he didn't look like his enormous green friend was about to make an appearance, just more than a little mystified. "Excuse me?" She looked at him. "Who are you?"
"Oh, sorry, how rude of me," she smiled, walking over with an easy stride, holding out one clawed hand. "My name is Saurial. You probably haven't heard of me, I'm not from around here."
He shook her hand with a bewildered small smile. "No, I can't say I have," he said quietly. "My name is Doctor Bruce Banner." He paused, then added, "Physicist."
"Oh, cool, I like physics a lot. The math is fascinating. Hey, have you guys worked out a unified field theory yet?" She grinned widely, as he stared at her. "You can do all sorts of things when you do."
Stepping back, she bent down and without any hesitation picked the Tesseract up in her hand. Everyone gaped, Natasha whipping her pistol out and pointing it.
"Put that down, you idiot," she ordered.
"Why?" the lizard-girl asked in a reasonable tone. "It's mine."
"By what law do you consider this artifact yours, creature?" Thor asked loudly, sounding annoyed more than anything else. "It is the property of my father, Great Odin, leader of the Asgard."
Saurial turned to look at him, raising an eyebrow quizzically. "You think? It's mine because I made it. Then it snuck off when I wasn't looking and some idiot has been screwing around with it." She looked down at the glowing cube, lifting it to eye level. "It's a mess. Look at that. The eighteenth through twenty-third dimensions are entirely destabilized, the seventh one is all bent..." Trailing off, she stuck her hand into the thing, in an impossible move that made Tony's eyes water as he stared in disbelief. Thor opened his mouth to say something but she shook her head sharply.
"Hold on, I need to fix it, or it's going to leak even more." She reached further into it, her arm disappearing up to the elbow into something about six inches on a side. "What the hell did they do to you?" she said in a softer voice, apparently to the cube. "You're not even the right shape any more, all three dimensional like this. Hold on… Ah, that's got it."
Everyone winced, then looked away, as the cube warped and twisted in her hand when she pulled her arm back, impossibly growing and shrinking at the same time. There was an odd whistling sound followed by a faint thud that sounded like something extremely heavy had fallen over some distance away. When they looked back, the thing in her hand wasn't glowing any more, but it was… extremely disturbing to look at. She held it up and turned it, inspecting it with a smile.
Natasha turned away and vomited. Tony closed his eyes, feeling like he might follow her lead.
"Much better. And all that nasty energy went back to whoever pushed it into you. I hope it gives them indigestion."
The reptilian creature sounded satisfied. "Great. Mission accomplished." She dropped the thing she was holding into her coat pocket and looked around, smiling broadly. "Thanks for finding it for me, guys. You, big blonde one, tell your father that I'm sorry, but it was never his to begin with."
"Hell-beast," he snarled, apparently and abruptly overcome with anger. He wound up and threw his hammer directly at her, while Bruce and Doctor Selvig yelped and dived out of the way.
Mjolnir shot across the twenty feet separating them and hit her directly in the chest, then to everyone's shock, simply dropped to the ground at her feet.
She looked down at it with a puzzled expression, then up at Thor, who was gaping in complete disbelief. "You dropped your hammer," she said, bending down and picking it up. Inspecting the head closely she frowned. "Hey! This is one of mine as well! Are all you Asgardians thieves?"
"What?!" Thor sounded both extremely insulted and very confused. "Yours? It is a sacred artifact of my people, entrusted to me by..."
"Let me guess, your father Great Odin, leader of the Asgard?" she asked rather sarcastically. He nodded.
"Bit of a klepto, isn't he, this Odin of yours," she grumbled. "I wondered where this went. Time in your universe is really weird, every time we interface to it we tend to find we're somewhen we didn't expect. I lost this..." she looked around, stopping on Tony. "What year is this?"
"Two thousand and twelve," he replied in a stunned voice, unable to help it.
"Oh? Closer than I expected to home. Weird. OK, I must have lost this about fifty-three thousand years ago, local time-frame. I put it down after I finished hammering the last nail in and forgot about it until we left. Huh." She tossed the mythical weapon in her hand a couple of times, flipping it end for end and catching it by the handle, then balancing it on her fingertip. "Nice balance. I did a good job for a throw-away tool. I was going through a phase of making my stuff all runey and that sort of thing. Decorative. Dad kept laughing about it."
Shrugging, she tossed it back to the god, who caught it easily, still wearing a look of shock on his face. Loki was standing off to one side, Tony absently noted, apparently giggling like an idiot behind his gag.
"You can keep it. Nice spell on it, that worthiness tester thing. A bit ostentatious but neatly done." She fixed him with a hard look. "But tell your father to stop going around claiming things that aren't his, OK? Or I might have to come and complain."
As everyone stared at her, then each other, still not sure whether this was a threat, a joke, or a shared hallucination, she turned and cupped her hands around her muzzle, shouting something in a hissing language that made everyone uneasy. A call in the same language came back immediately from somewhere in the park. "Sorry, just telling my cousin I found it. We can get back now, there's a party at the Mayor's house I don't want to miss. This has already taken longer than I expected."
"Who the fuck are you?" Tony finally asked, exasperation overcoming worry and shock.
"I told you. Saurial, of the Family." She smiled at him, apparently entirely unoffended. "Just visiting from a different universe. We get around a bit. Things are pretty quiet at home at the moment, so we started to get bored and were looking for something to do. Then when we detected my negative energy modulation oscillator had popped up again, we decided to come and grab it before the damn thing disappeared again."
There was a long pause. No one could really think what to say after that. Loki was still making muffled giggling noises. Saurial looked at him quizzically.
"Is there a reason that man has a gag on? Or is this just some weird sex thing you mammals are into?"
Loki fell over, rolling around on the road surface, while Thor went slightly pink.
"He's a terrorist and prisoner," Clint said, still holding the knife he'd been clutching the entire time.
"Oh. OK, fair enough. Your business, I guess."
They became aware that they were being watched, everyone looking around to see another, even larger, reptilian creature inspecting them curiously from beside the van. It was black, in much the same way a black cat down a coal mine at night with the lights out is black. When it moved, ripples of a deep scarlet went across it in the afternoon sunlight. The thing was at least a foot taller than Saurial and much more heavily built, looking extremely dangerous. The glowing green eyes were peering at them with interest and intelligence.
"This is my cousin Metis," Saurial said mildly.
"Hi," the thing said in a deep female voice. "Nice to meet you all." She looked at the hammer in Thor's hand, which had dropped to hang beside his leg as he gaped.
"Isn't that one of yours?"
"Yep. His father is a bit acquisitive and might be a little full of himself. They call him the Great Odin."
"The Amy will be amused by that," Metis chuckled.
"The Amy?" Natasha queried, sounding like she couldn't believe what she was hearing.
"Friend of the Family. You don't want to upset The Amy," Metis explained, shuddering. "She can… Well, let's say that she can and leave it at that."
"It's been nice meeting you all," Saurial said cheerfully, pushing her hat back on her head and grinning. "We have to go now. Have a nice day and all that."
There was a clicking sound like someone running a stick along a fence and Metis was abruptly covered in some sort of metallic armor, her head bare, the stuff apparently growing in less than two seconds out of the necklace at the base of her long neck. Tony stared in shock, instantly insanely jealous. The giant lizard reached into the compartment that opened in her chest-plate, sticking an arm far deeper into it than was even vaguely possible, then rooted around with a reptilian expression of concentration. "Ah, got it," she said. Pulling her hand out she held up what looked like a more or less normal cell-phone.
Prodding it a couple of times, she held it to the side of her head. "All done. Wormhole me, please. Radiation protection protocol." She pressed the screen, then dropped the thing back into the impossible hole in her chest, which closed up seamlessly before the armor clicked out of existence again.
About three seconds later, an orange-bordered hole in space some eight feet high appeared a few feet away, a gray metallic tunnel sliding out of it silently and a rim opening out to cover the edges, the glow disappearing. The center of the tunnel was a perfectly ordinary looking, if large, door, with a lever handle. Metis reached out and pulled the door open. Everyone watched as she waved then walked through the doorway.
"See you around, guys," Saurial said cheerily, following her. The door closed, the tunnel retracted, and the hole in the world disappeared as silently as it had appeared.
Several minutes passed in total silence, broken only by muffled laughter from Loki, who seemed on the verge of passing out from his hilarity. The little group exchanged glances, went back to staring at the place where a door to another universe wasn't, then looked at each other again.
"Well, that happened," Tony announced. "I think."
Erik nodded, kneeling down and closing the case, then putting it into the back of his van. He closed the rear door, looked around at them, opened his mouth and raised a hand, paused, shook his head, then got into the van and drove off without a word.
Eventually Thor sighed heavily, heaved his brother to his feet, and did whatever it was that he did to call the thing he termed the Bifrost, both gods disappearing in a rainbow flash.
The remaining people exchanged glances, then mutually decided that they'd had enough weird shit for today and they were done. Soon the road was empty, only the runic pattern the Bifrost had left behind in the surface showing anything out of the ordinary had happened.