Ebony Maw barely spared a glance for Scrapper 142 in the hours he spent in the cell. She might've called the prince a "pampered royal," but she knew that his martial education would have been second to none, and that it would have included training on resisting torture. It would take more than one session to break him. Still, maintaining her apathy towards the idiot prince who had saved her life when he should have run got harder the longer Maw used those crystal needles on him.

Today wasn't the first day she'd seen Prince Loki Odinson. That had been over a thousand years ago, the day the Allfather and Allmother had presented him to Asgard. The entire corps of Valkyrior and Einherjar had taken turns swearing their lives and swords to the second prince. The accompanying celebration lasted for weeks, mingling with revelry over a war finally won.

She'd been so proud to be a Valkyrie of Asgard back then. It had been her dream since she was old enough to understand what it meant, and even when it took her mother to Valhalla, her determination only grew. Not only did she succeed, but she became the youngest commander in the history of the Valkyrior. She proved she deserved it by leading a charge against a Kree incursion in her first decade at her post. Her victory inspired many songs, and an entire gyle of particularly strong ale was brewed in barrels made from the materials salvaged from the wrecked Asgardian ships. She distinguished herself even more in the Aesir-Jotnar war, instrumental both in driving the Frost Giants from Midgard and in capturing Utgard.

Because of her rank, she had been one of the first in the procession to come before Hlidskjalf, where Odin sat, a new golden patch over the eye Laufey had taken and a squirming blond toddler on his knee. Queen Frigga had stood at his side, holding a gold-wrapped bundle with a curly tuft of black hair peeking out. The commander of the Second Wing of the Valkyrior had knelt before that bundle and put fist to heart, and she'd grinned at the awestruck expression on the older prince's round face. "She's a Valkyrie, Pabbi," he'd stage-whispered into Odin's ear, his pronunciation still clumsy. Odin had solemnly agreed, Frigga had laughed, and the bundle had made happy gurgling sounds. Asgard's future had never seemed brighter.

That day felt like a memory from someone else's life now. It had been the last day before it all went wrong. Unbeknownst to her or any of them in that moment, those two little princes had already become the catalysts for a rebellion that would cost her everything before it was crushed. Apparently one prince wasn't enough of a threat for the Hela loyalists to act on, but when the second came along, it put to rest any lingering hopes that Odin might one day restore the bloodthirsty crown princess. The victorious festivities had been the perfect cover for a plot to assassinate the tiny usurpers in their cribs and open a shadow gate to Niflheim.

And now that they were grown, those princes showed up on Sakaar and turned her life upside down again. She shouldn't want anything to do with Loki or his brother, but part of her was curious to see exactly what her shield-sisters had died to protect.

Maw's needles didn't do anything to Loki's armor or even his skin; they seemed to simply have skipped past them and gone straight for the deep tissues. As torture methods went, this one was certainly tidy. At a few of the especially terrible moments, Scrapper 142 made an involuntary move in Loki's direction, only for the needles hovering sentry around her to force her back and her chains to tighten. By the time Maw left them there, visibly irritated at Loki's lack of cooperation, Loki was slumped on the floor, twitching and trembling all over.

The needles departed with Maw, and when the wall sealed behind him, the chains fell into coils on the floor. Scrapper 142 went to Loki's side and crouched down. He gave her a pained shadow of his earlier smirk. She raised an eyebrow. "Is this your new bid for my affections, your highness?" she asked.

"Of course," he said. It came out half a groan. He struggled to push himself into a sitting position, and it looked like it cost him the rest of his strength to manage it. "You should be ready to swoon by now, after watching me scream and writhe on Maw's skewers."

"Oh, very nearly," she said, grimacing. "But I think I liked it better when you were insulting me."

"Well, in that case, you're a dreadful oathbreaker and you'll come to a bad end."

She laughed. "Shut up and hold still." She ran her thumbs to spots along the nerves Maw had targeted in Loki's arms. Like the vast majority of the Aesir, she'd never been able to use her seidr for much besides standard combat enhancement, so healing magic had always been beyond her abilities, but she'd learned a number of effective mundane techniques for reducing pain. Granted, she hadn't employed those techniques since the Aesir-Jotnar war, and trying them when she was this rusty could easily do him more harm than good.

He let out a surprised breath and the trembling in his fingers eased. She moved systematically through the rest of the major nerves.

"Behold my unparalleled powers of seduction," he said dryly. "You can't keep your hands off me."

She applied slightly more force to the femoral nerve than was necessary. He let out a yelp. Just because he was pretty and had a voice that could melt butter didn't mean he could get away with comments like that.

X

Clint, Nat, and Thor left the Valkyrie's apartment early the next morning. Their first order of business was gearing up for the tasks ahead of them. It turned out that futuristic alien appliance shops were an absolute goldmine for espionage and surveillance, so that part was easy. Soon, they all wore interface bracers on their wrists—pretty much the Sakaaran equivalent of smartphones, by the looks of many of the other people walking around.

Thanks to the Grandmaster's plan to add another tower to his palace, the blueprints of the entire building were currently available to the public. They downloaded them onto their bracers, then spent some time studying them in the form of a scale holographic model, with Thor pointing out the areas he had been to, before they split up.

Clint pulled up his map, which showed three glowing yellow pinpricks moving along a network of blue lines. The central one was his own position, and the other two marked the locations of Nat's and Thor's bracers. They could use them to call each other up (which involved tiny, live holographic projections instead of just voices) if they needed to share information before the rendez-vous.

The flow of foot traffic in and out of the palace was steady, just as Thor had said. The Grandmaster's life was one never-ending party, so guests were constantly coming and going, and even though there were at least a dozen fully armored guards standing amid the crowd, there didn't seem to be much in the way of security checkpoints to make sure the guests were who they said they were. So either the Grandmaster was the least paranoid tyrant Clint had ever heard of, or he was so powerful that no amount of public access to his home bothered him.

Finding the army bound for Thanos was simple once he was inside the palace. The main building overlooked a vast paved square with the least amount of trash he'd seen anywhere outside so far. At least ten thousand humanoid creatures stood in ordered rows, all wearing strange armor that looked like it was made of porous stone. Clint quickly found a good position to observe them that kept him out of sight of the guards. Some of the soldiers had their masks off, and he instantly regretted trying out his space binoculars on them. Their faces were gaping, oily crevices with bone jutting out along the jaws and cheeks, and four-part mandibles that moved in very unsettling ways when they talked.

The massive, solid figure of Cull Obsidian stomped between the rows of soldiers, evidently checking the quality of his boss's merchandise. He was even bigger than the Hulk and it looked like his temper was nearly as bad. Most of the soldiers passed muster, but one of them must've looked at him the wrong way, because he lifted him off his feet by the throat and tossed him against a wall thirty yards away. He struck with enough force that he left a large, tar-black spatter on it when he fell to the ground.

Luckier soldiers than that one were filing out of the square in a line. Clint marked the spot on his map and looked for all the routes to it. Navigating started to get trickier as he left the lavish party areas behind, but he'd been doing this kind of thing for his entire adult life. Doing it on a different planet wasn't as different as he might have thought.

All of this was gonna make a hell of a bedtime story for Cooper and Lila.

X

Natasha was very proud of the cover identity she'd crafted for herself with the seemingly infinite funds of the House of Odin's Nova account. Her hair was up in a looping, gravity-defying twist, she'd brushed gold paint in a crescent shape over her eyes and nose, and she wore a dress in eye-watering shades of purple and bronze. It was an ensemble that made her feel like she should be stepping onto a catwalk at a particularly eccentric fashion show, but here at the Grandmaster's palace, it struck the perfect balance of being weird enough to fit in but not so weird that she drew much attention, positive or negative.

Affecting an air of upper-class ennui, she picked up a drink off a table and held it as she wended her way between other psychedelic outfits towards the throne room, nodding her head slightly to the synth-heavy music.

There seemed to be three categories of people present: wealthy partiers, slaves (well-dressed but grim-faced people with those metal disks on their necks), and guards armored head to toe in turquoise plate. The conversations she overheard in passing all sounded about as shallow as you'd expect. A lot of "You have to tell me where you bought your suit" and "Oh, that necklace is stunning!" and "Where did you go to get that bioluminescent hair?"

X

The soldiers led Clint right to Maw and Cull's ship in the massive hangar bay. The ship was bigger than anything he'd ever seen on Earth, including SHIELD's new helicarrier. It was also stranger than any Earth vessel. Its vast, bulbous nose and long, thin fins made it resemble a giant, metallic sea monster.

From his perch at the juncture of two support beams for a bridge, he had a clear view of everything happening around the ship. Based on the number of soldiers he'd seen in the square, it would take more than a day to load them all, which fit the schedule he, Nat, and Thor had estimated. A tall, slender alien emerged from the ship, and Cull Obsidian left the soldiers and walked over to him. Clint pressed a couple of buttons on his space binoculars, and the translated voices of Thanos's lieutenants sounded in his earpiece, as clearly as if they were standing beside him.

"All in order with the troops?" said Ebony Maw.

"Most of them," growled Cull Obsidian. "The prisoners?"

"Uncooperative. But that can be remedied, even if it takes the Mind Stone to do it."

X

The throne room would have been unmistakable even without the map in her bracer to guide Natasha to it. The architecture might be unlike anything she'd ever seen, but it all leaned towards a single focal point. She kept moving closer until she could see the man from the giant hologram announcement the previous day. He was conferring with a stocky, grumpy-looking woman whose movements were stiff and pained. He looked very indignant about something. Natasha glided past them and loosely attached herself to a cluster of tittering ladies nearby.

"You told Wrinkles he could take Scrapper 142?" said the Grandmaster. "What is this, an abduct two for one special? Why would you do that, Topaz? You know she's my favorite!"

"She was fraternizing with the mage when she should've been doing her job and capturing him," said the woman mulishly. Natasha wondered what it was about her that made the implant give her English dub a Maori accent.

"Well of course she was. Who wouldn't? Lean, tall, and those cheekbones. That's no reason to hand her over. Now I can't get her back unless I make him a concession, and then he'll get all smug."

"Sorry, boss. It won't happen again."

"Well that's obvious! I only had one Scrapper 142. You'll just have to be the one to explain that to my brother the next time he visits."

X

Thor spent the morning walking around various markets near the center of the city. He checked Barton and Romanoff's indicators on his bracer every few minutes, hoping that they were having better success than he was. None of the first hundred or so people he approached had been able to help him.

As that number ticked closer to two hundred, he started to wonder if this part of the plan was too much of a stretch. It relied on variables he had no way to be sure of.

He kept walking with no particular destination in mind. The moment he stepped into the shadow of the arena, a familiar voice reached his ears. He grinned and quickened his pace. Finally.

Korg the Kronan was standing in the middle of the street, gesticulating with a rocky hand that contained a crumpled pamphlet. "The Grandmaster is oppressing us! These battles in the arena are just a distraction. They're obedience disks for our minds! The time for us to rise up is now!"

A few of the people going past him paused in mild interest, but most were giving him a wide berth. "Can I have one of those pamphlets?" said a pink-skinned Krylorian.

"Oh, yes," said Korg brightly. "Only I don't have very many of them, so could you give it back when you're done?"

The girl made a face and walked away. Korg's shoulders slumped a little.

"Hello," said Thor.

"Hey, man," said Korg, turning to face him. "My name is Korg."

"It's an honor to meet you, Korg," said Thor, reaching out to clasp forearms with him. "I'm Thor, son of Odin."

"I don't know an Odin," said Korg, politely apologetic, "but would you be interested in learning about the ways your personal rights and dignity are being crushed in the Grandmaster's fist?"

"You aren't worried you'll be arrested for talking about this right in the open?" said Thor, glancing around the street. There were at least two guards within view of Korg, but they weren't facing his way.

Korg shrugged. "They haven't stopped me so far, but that's their first mistake." He glanced at one of the guards and raised his voice for the second part. The guard didn't turn around, and after a few hopeful seconds, he slumped again.

"How many of those pamphlets do you have?" said Thor.

"Oh, I think I have five or six le—" he turned to the small table next to him, which was empty. "No, wait, just this one now." He tried to smooth out the one he'd been holding. "Funds are a little tight, you know?"

Thor held up the Nova access pad. "I could help with that if you like."

Ragnarok is pretty scant on the details about what went down with Hela in the past, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to fill in all the blanks and establish a rough timeline for all the events we know about. Odin already talked about some of it in the big family discussion chapters, and now here's some more from Valkyrie's side of things. I don't know how long Hela was imprisoned before the big escape attempt happened, but it makes sense to me that she only could have done it with some help from Asgard. And it also makes sense to me that celebrations over new heirs to the throne would galvanize some action, even if things had been quiet for a while. If Hela's supporters tried to assassinate little Thor and Loki at the same time they tried to free Hela, then it would explain what Odin was doing before he made it to Niflheim too late to prevent the slaughter of the Valkyrior.

Ebony Maw, the Other, and the rest of Thanos's minions had a whole year to break Loki in canon. Master torturer or not, there isn't a lot Maw can do in one day, especially when he has other items on his agenda and this Loki isn't an agonized existential wreck who just tried to kill himself. I don't think I've ever enjoyed writing flirting more than this contentious banter Loki and Valkyrie are doing. Oh, and that thing Valkyrie does to relieve the pain in Loki's nerves? It's a real thing. It's the flipside of the jujitsu nerve strikes I based Maw's torture on.

It's also fun to write Clint and Nat actually getting to do spy stuff. Not a lot of opportunities for that in canon's big Avengers operations.

Hi, Korg! :D I was worried it'd be hard to write his dialogue, but much like the Grandmaster, it mostly wrote itself by the time I got to it. Yay!