THE LAST MIDGARDIAN
EXPLOSION
Jane sat in a nondescript office where an Aesir man in a long purple robe perused a scroll. His grey beard fell almost to his ample belly and, as he read to himself, he chewed on the ends of the beard until they stuck together in a damp curl. She sat uncomfortably on the chair. Her short legs dangled off the too-tall chair as if she were a child in an adult's seat. She was not sure what this Lord Tyre wished of her or why he had summoned her to this illustrious part of Asgard. Heimdall had told her she was required to attend and to answer the man's questions and she would be rewarded for her cooperation.
She had little reason to refuse. It was a break from the monotony of her everyday life -- cleaning the observatory, fetching meals, and delivering messages for Asgard's Gatekeeper. This way, she enjoyed seeing the towering marble structure that housed many of Asgard's vaults and scholars. The gravity-defying water feature and gilded statues of long-dead warriors guarding each corner fascinated her. She must have spent a little too much time trying to figure out how the water flowed the way it did because Lord Tyre sent a servant to hurry her along to his office.
"Lady Jannike," Lord Tyre said as he welcomed in with a slight bow and a flourish of the feathered quill in his hand. "I am grateful for your assistance in furthering the greatest of pursuits, the acquisition of knowledge of our universe."
She shrugged and bit her lip nervously, wondering what sort of "knowledge" he could possibly want from a Midgardian. He invited her to sit and he shuffled through a stack of papers and books. Then he set a recording device on his desk as if it were the crown jewels and not a generic method of capturing sounds and speeches and Jane decided that she liked him. The hunger for knowledge she caught in his eyes echoed her own indomitable curiosity and she felt him to be a kindred scholar.
"Good lady, I have called you here today to record, for all posterity and generations, your extensive knowledge," he told her most gravely.
"My knowledge about what?" she asked. She wondered, for an instant, if she was finally going to have her past work on the Midgardian bifrost put to good use. She chided herself a moment after for such a vain hope.
"Tell me everything you can about Midgard. Everything you remember - your language, your stories, your songs, your holidays, your social structure, your division of labor - everything! I want to know it all!"
She opened and closed her mouth, overwhelmed by such a broad request, until Tyre chuckled and stroked the edge of his beard again.
"Forgive me! I am often chided for my overenthusiasm and unrestrained curiosity! Let us start from the beginning. Tell me, what is the name of the city on Midgard you were born in?" he asked.
She nodded and began to answer his questions.
He called her back. Day after day, she sat in Lord Tyre's office until long after the sun had set, sometimes sharing meals with the zealous old scholar and answering his unending well of questions about the place she once called home. It was cathartic, in a way, to finally have someone care about the place she grew up and loved so very deeply. He listened, laughed, and shed his own tears along with her as she told her stories. For the woman who had, for so many years, gazed up at the stars and longed to study any place but the one on which she stood, she now realized how many years she wasted in not appreciating the land beneath her own two feet. From the vast heavens of the Realm Eternal, Midgard was barely more than a single glowing speck in the strongest of their magical telescopes. She could watch its rotation around the sun and its dance with the other planets in its solar system, but she could not see anything of the lives it contained on its blue, watery surface.
During their final session, Lord Tyre gave her his warmest of thanks for the information she provided him.
"Just out of curiosity," Jane asked. "Why are you asking me all this? I probably am not the best source of information and I definitely don't represent all of Earth. I'm not even the best representative of my hometown. You will want to ask some others for their perspective."
"The king wishes to preserve a record of your culture before it is gone forever," Tyre responded as he rolled up his scroll and turned the recording device off. "We will maintain these recordings in our vaults for as long as Asgard stands so other students of the xenoarchaeology may delight in all you have shared. And you are the only source we have for such precious knowledge."
"What do you mean 'gone forever'?" Jane asked.
"I mean just that. Did not you know? You are the only one left. You are the last of the Midgardians."
oooo
The Keepers furiously scrubbed and cleaned the glass of each cage, their exposed knees gaining callouses and blisters as they knelt to reach the lowest edge of each pane of glass. Jane could just make out their groans and grumbles as the hours bled on and the cages did not end. Floating ladders lifted the Keepers to some of the upper layers of cages suspended from the vaulted ceiling and the central supports around the main exhibit hall. Others were lowered to the ground level by the touch of a button. Buckets of water and scrub brushes lined each walkway as every single exhibit was thoroughly cleaned. No visitors disturbed their work, the doors remained shut, and small automated machines flickered up and down the floors, polishing the metal ramps and vacuuming up dust.
The Collector paced the aisles as well, sometimes pausing to chastise an unfortunate worker, other times investigating the overall appearance of an exhibit, but for the majority of the day, his nose was solidly glued to the pages of a book. Jane was surprised to see a real print and paper book in his hands instead of some sort of projected or digitized copy. She wondered if it came from a planet like her own and how many other material goods she would find on other planets that would be similar to the ones she grew up with. It was comforting to think books were not only to be found on Earth. She wondered what it was about and if the Collector preferred fiction to nonfiction or if it was simply a "how to care for your pet Midgardian" type book...similar to the "proper care and feeding of dragons" she had once stumbled upon in Asgard.
Jane had limited access to books on Asgard, but devoured the ones she could get her hands on. Sne had been furious when the Aesir refused her entry to their central library on Asgard.
"You cannot read our script," they told her. "What can you possibly wish for from the library?"
She begged and pleaded for years but only succeeded in gaining entry to the children's wing. She considered it a victory and spent months captivated by the brilliantly colored, shifting illustrations within each book. They pictures moved when she turned the page, making the illustrations come alive. She did not need to understand the written script to appreciate the pictures. The simpler words and concepts made it easier to begin to teach herself rudimentary information about their language, but the more she thought she learned, the more Heimdall only chuckled and told her she was a "clever mortal."
When he gifted her an entire encyclopedia of Asgardian astronomy, astrology, and constellations, she nearly wept in gratitude. The life-like images on each vellum page could be expanded with the touch of her fingers to whatever magnification she wished for with impeccable details. It described astral phenomena with greater insight than all of Earth's astrophysicists put together could create. She only knew that because Heimdall read her the first three chapters and she sat transfixed, spell-bound at the knowledge she had never even come close to claiming as her own through her lifetime of research.
But then another riot had broken out on Nidavellir's third moon, Heimdall's attention was drawn away, and he never found time to finish reading to her. She tried. On her own, she tried to translate the script into something she could understand, but there was not "English to Aesir" dictionaries around and she had to give it up.
She wondered if Heimdall's vision could see her now, leaning her head against freshly cleaned glass, her eyes half closed and her bare feet pressed against the opposite glass wall. She shuddered at the thought. For him to be able to see her...anywhere and at all times...made her blood run cold.
"I no longer have need of your services," Heimdall had told her on that last day. "You will be transferred to somewhere you will be more useful."
A slight prick on the back of her neck was followed by unconsciousness and she woke to find herself in a cage in a place she had never seen before. She was not immune to the veiled insult of his words. After decades as his "assistant," he dismissed her without any acknowledgement of how hard she had worked or how much she had given. She was simply sent away without a word of good-bye. Now she sat, caged in a museum, "more useful" than when she had tried to study the stars or wrap her mind around planets and galaxies and a glass wall lay between her and the closest book.
The Collector paced and read for hours. The furious cleaning frenzy around her stilled some hours after their meals were served. Then a Keeper escorted a small, eclectic group of visitors into the hall. These did not pause to gawk or ask questions, but walked with a purpose. She could not make out much about them from her perspective a few rows away from their intended route, but she caught enough to know these were most likely not academics or school children or wandering tourists. The Keeper was followed by a woman as green as the Wicked Witch of the West, but armed with plasma cannons instead of a broomstick. Behind her came a giant, walking tree, a grey and pink humanoid, a man that appeared so human that Jane assumed he must be either Aesir or Vanir, and some manner of furry biped whose tiny frame vanished behind the exhibit of embryos before Jane could identify more of the little creature. The visitors vanished into the central hall and only some indistinguishable murmurs of sounds and flashes of projected light could be seen from where Jane sat.
Jane had nearly drifted back to sleep when the entire hall vibrated around her and jolted her awake. A roaring, rushing sound like an out-of-control freight train or the shifting of a storied building during an earthquake engulfed her and her vision was blinded by an explosion of fierce, violet light. She did not have time to blink or react before she felt a pulse of power incinerating cages around her and threatening to overtake her next. Her first instinct was to cover her head with her hands as the hurricane force of devouring energy overtook her. Her last thought, before the darkness came, was relief that it would all finally be over and she would never have to wake again.
ooooo
It was the cold that first roused her back to consciousness. Her entire body shivered uncontrollably as she forced her eyelids open. Even with her eyes open, she did not understand what it was they saw. Warring shades of grey and blue, white and red danced across her vision and she lifted one hand to try to rub her eyes. Her hand was stopped by a wall of ice. She felt her way along the smooth, unblemished barrier and she gasped as a cut on her finger froze to the surface. She pulled her finger off and tried to push against the ice, but it would not budge. She hit her fist against it, pounding against it as if it were a door she could open merely by knocking.
To her surprise, it worked. The entire covering of glass was removed in one piece, as if it were the lid of a sarcophagus and she the interned body within. A cloth-covered hand grabbed her own and helped her to her feet. She stared first into the deep sapphire blue of a familiar chest before craning her head to see wide, frightened red eyes. Sagittarius grunted something in a guttural voice before grabbing her again in the torn piece of fabric covering his hand. He pulled her arm so hard that she cried out before stumbling to follow after him. She realized, as she followed, that the cages which had not been instantaneously incinerated in the blast were now immersed in flames. The entire hall looked as though a bomb had been dropped in the center and the floors and walkways were littered with the grisly aftermath of the blast. Twisted ceiling vents, charred limbs, red-hot metal floor grating, and shattered glass made their frantic path of escape even more of a terror to Jane's soft, shoeless feet.
Sagittarius paid little heed to the many obstacles before them. His long strides more easily cleared the wreckage. He came to a frantic halt when he found a prone figure lying in the shadows of a metal shelving unit. The unruly white hair was spattered with blood and the sightless eyes were fixed on what remained of his beloved Collection. Sagittarius knelt and was about to turn their Owner onto his back when he caught the rise and fall of the chest and the eyes began to blink. Sagittarius frowned and with a sound like rushing water, he encased the Collector's torso and legs in solid ice. He then motioned for Jane to follow him again. When she could not climb over the slippery glacier now barricading the walkway, she attempted to go around. Sagittarius gave an impatient grunt, tore a curtain off a nearby wall, and wrapped Jane up like a human burrito. Without having to wait for her short, clumsy legs to catch up, he fairly sprinted the rest of the way across the museum with Jane held in his long arms. She tried not to think about what became of any of the others as they made their way to the door, which was now shattered and bent into nearly unrecognizable pieces.
The door. The door she had never seen the other side of. The door that led to, or that she hoped would lead to, her freedom.
