Pop!

The half-full soda bottle blinks out of sight. Dropped from nearly fifty feet up, the fragile glass simply vanished still twenty feet above the unforgiving concrete below.

Children giggle, and scientists stare. The bottle is simply gone.

"How-" The clearly in-charge scientist lady, Jane foster, is stopped mid-sentence as the group of excited streetkids point up at the distant ceiling.

As abruptly as it had vanished, the soda bottle returned and promptly continued falling. Now somehow even higher in the air than it had been to begin with. The glass hurtles toward the ground once more, swishing past the three wide-eyed scientists.

And then it's gone… again.

All eyes turn to the sky in wonder. Will it come back again? Is it gone? What's happening to it? Where is it going? Can I go too?

Then sure enough, the bottle pops back into existence as if it had never left. Uninterrupted, it continues its rapid descent toward the ground it seems unable to find.

A child's hand slips out and catches the soda bottle as if this was all the most normal thing in the world. With a big grin aimed at the confused adults, the kid takes a big drink of the apparently unharmed soda.

"Holy shit! That's so cool!" The other girl 'scientist' shouts, and her eyes light up as bright as the children's. She looks from one dumbstruck friend to the other, not even trying to contain her excitement. "Give me your shoe!"

Jane looks at Darcy, but it's obvious the physicist didn't even hear her. She's already lost in her own smartness. So with a roll of her eyes, Darcy turns to the still-staring man to her other side. "You. Give me your shoe." Darcy smiles mischievously and points down at Ian's shoes. The young man's goofy smile fades to a look of confusion with just a hint of irritation.

"I don't see why-"

"Intern. Shoe. Now." Darcy's wide grin shrinks with every word. She stares at Ian, waiting, suddenly looking completely serious. A flustered Ian looks anywhere but at Darcy's eyes, those cold piercing eyes.

And thirty-two seconds later…

Ian slips off his sneaker and places it in Darcy's outstretched hand.

The smile is immediately back on Darcy's face, and all is forgiven. A gleeful giggle escapes her as she turns back to the railing separating her from the long fall to the apparently oh-so-hard-to-reach concrete below.

Seeing all hints of seriousness gone from the girl, Ian rolls his eyes at Darcy's back. "I hate it when you do that." Darcy only giggles and holds the captured shoe over the railing. And she lets go.

The shoe plummets toward the ground and blinks out, just like the bottle. Darcy eagerly looks up to watch for it to blink back. Even still-somewhat-bitter-about-losing-his-shoe Ian steps up to the railing to watch the miracle of his shoe falling from the ceiling.

…But nothing happened.

More than double the usual time has passed, and still Ian's shoe remains gone. Darcy and Ian's faces fall, and they turn instead to the children, who not only don't look surprised but apparently find the case of the missing shoe to be quite hilarious.

A young girl leaning on the rail bites her lip to hold back her laughter. "Sometimes they don't come back."

Ian stares blankly at the little girl, but a small smile cracks on Darcy's face. She whirls around, looking for anything else she can throw over the railing. As fun as it had been before, the game had just changed. Now it's a matter of throwing something and seeing if it would even come back at all. The excitement is nearly unbearable.

Darcy settles for a couple of small pieces of scrap metal she finds on the floor behind her. They blinked out and back three times before bumping into each other. Both pieces tumble off track enough that they manage to find their way to the warehouse floor below.

The kids and Ian join in, tossing anything they can over the railing and counting how many times it fell before not coming back.

Darcy keeps her eyes on the rain of trash falling repeatedly from the ceiling, as she sits down on a set of stairs and kicks off her shoes. Moments later as everyone is once again looking for things to throw, Darcy jumps up and tosses both of her socks over the edge. She watches gleefully as they both disappear below and only one reappears above.

Ian tosses something over her shoulder. The object jingles as it sails through the air. The noise vanishes, along with the shiny little metal things.

They don't come back.

Darcy turns to look at Ian, her smile slipping somewhat. "Were those the van keys?"

Ian says nothing. The smile on his face vanishes like the keys, and he just looks down at the ground.

The children snicker, but Darcy only rolls her eyes. The game suddenly isn't so fun now that she's gonna have to walk all the way back to the apartment she's sharing with Jane.

…Speaking of Jane…Where is she?

Jane hadn't joined in the fun of throwing all nonessential (and one essential) possessions into the mysterious-portally-thing. Now that she thought about it… Jane hadn't been there for that at all. The last time Darcy can remember seeing the physicist is when she had asked her for her shoe. She must've wandered off to do more "research" or whatever. Only Jane could make something so cool sound like work. But that's Jane. She had her own weird sense of fun, but at least she usually let Darcy have a bit of fun of her own too.

Darcy doesn't usually make a habit of worrying about following Jane around when she wanders like this (and she wanders a lot), but this time it seems they will have an annoyingly long walk home, and she's getting hungry. So, she lets out a sigh as she glares up at Ian. "Let's just find Jane and get out of here."

Darcy heads upstairs, and Ian heads down. After a few minutes of not finding the physicist, even the gang of kids starts looking for her. They search the entire warehouse, and nobody finds so much as a trace of Jane Foster. Genuine concern blooming in her stomach, Darcy tells everyone to check outside and in the nearby area too. And Jane is still nowhere to be found.

Ian sits down on the rough pavement and leans back against the cool metal of the warehouse. Three streetkids drop down beside him, looking bored and tired. Darcy paces anxiously in front of them all, tugging at her hair as her thoughts race from bad to worse.

"What if she got lost? She could be anywhere right now, wandering hopelessly around in the streets. That woman has NO sense of direction!

"Or what if she wandered down a dark alley somewhere, and some guy grabbed her. She could've been robbed, or killed, or kidnapped!

"Or maybe SHIELD heard about the magic truck and disappeary reappeary bottles, and they came and took her away to some super secret lab or something! …And they didn't take us!

"We have to call the cops!" Darcy's eyes are as wide as saucers by the time she reaches her conclusion. Finally stopping for breath, she looks to Ian, waiting for him to respond. But the intern's only answer is to give her an irritatingly blank look. "Like, right now!"

"Oh, uhh right." Ian fumbles in his pockets for a minute before producing his cell phone. As soon as the phone is in his hand, the kids around him scramble to their feet and take off running. Ian watches them disappear into the shadows before looking at Darcy in confusion. "What's wrong with them? Was it… something I said?"

Darcy rolls her eyes. "Just call already."
Ian nods and calls the police.

Darcy sits down on the cold ground and stares up into the gray sky, hoping her friend is okay, wherever she is.