Chapter 17

The materials and the portal structure arrived the next morning, along with soldiers and an agent Fury had assigned for them. Said agent had just returned from Russia, where she had finished an important mission the previous afternoon, though her identity was still a mystery until a small aircraft landed near the ranch. Then a petite, red-headed woman got off the plane along with the other SHIELD staff, which quickly got busy unloading the cargo.

The woman walked straight towards Tony, Loki and Thor, who were waiting for her; she was dressed in the black uniform of the field agents and carried with her a metal case which should have unbalanced her, but she transported it with perfect ease.

"Agent Romanoff," Stark said with mock courtesy. "I thought you grew bored of meddling in my affairs."

"Fury sent me to deliver Dr. Foster this and give her some instructions," she said, lifting the suitcase. Her voice was deep and melodious. "After my last mission, these will be some well-deserved vacations as, for once, my current mission has nothing to do with you," far from feeling offended by Stark's cold welcome, her green eyes twinkled with mischievous delight for a moment, before ignoring the man as a queen would disregard a servant, to address the God of Thunder. "Thor Odinson, I presume. Agent Natasha Romanoff at your service."

"Thank you for your help, Agent," Thor said with a polite smile.

"Where's Dr. Foster?" she asked, seemingly ignoring Loki on purpose.

"She's at the warehouse," Loki answered, forcing her to address him. "I'll take you to her."

Romanoff smiled tersely, but didn't protest and followed him.

"What's with the change of careers?" Loki teased her as soon as they were out of hearing range. "Secretary work doesn't yield as much money as you expected, Miss Robinson?"

"Showing off must be a trait of every Asgardian, for what I've heard," she snorted. "I suppose we misjudged you, Mr. Norwood."

"I have to admit that your resume was impressive, but you never mentioned being an expert at profiling."

"I hope you don't hold any grudge towards us, we were just curious."

"We?"

"I'll be frank: it's not every day that someone comes out of anonymity to claim such a sum of money and doesn't act like a jackass afterwards. You raised some flags for us, and wanted to be sure of your allegiances."

"I had other things in mind."

"I see," she simply stated as they reached the warehouse where Jane was waiting for them. Loki threw a sidelong glance towards Romanoff, and saw the hint of a playful smile on her face that almost made him roll his eyes.

"Dr. Foster," Romanoff shook Jane's hand as soon as they reached the threshold. It was, in fact, the first time she had such courtesy since she arrived. "Agent Natasha Romanoff. I'm here to assist you on your work."

"What's that?" Jane asked, looking at the suitcase.

"Iridium. Doctor Selvig informed us it was necessary to make a stable portal and prevent any further misbehavior from the Cube."

The two women got into the building; Jane wanted Loki to join them and Darcy, but he excused himself, reasoning that Jane would want some time to study the data, and he had urgent matters to attend to.

Namely, the future of his fortune on this planet. Something he had completely forgotten, despite having talked with Stark about it numerous times.

xxxxXX-0-Xxxxxx

Later that day, more ships landed at the ranch's premises. This time it was Selvig who arrived in one of them, to Jane and Darcy's delight. The mind-controlling spell had been broken the moment he had been rendered unconscious, and he woke up at SHIELD's hospital disoriented, but with his mind intact.

His spirits, however, had become troubled. The ordeal felt like a waking nightmare, and seeing himself in the middle of a battlefield, mind-controlled or not, had left a scar.

Even more agents and soldiers arrived with the doctor, until they had a full company setting up camp near the warehouse and establishing a whole perimeter. Stark wasn't happy about it, but he allowed it nonetheless.

Erik had never entirely trusted the man he knew as Robert Norwood, nor he believed Jane's theories about him coming through the Einstein-Rosen Bridge. He firmly believed that the "shadow" her equipment caught was an imperfection on the lenses. He humored the girl not voicing his real concerns since that man moved to England, but he never ceased to keep an eye on her.

During the last month, however, his word had been turned upside down, and not for the last time.

Agents of SHIELD had paid him a visit at his home one afternoon. His panic subsided somewhat when they revealed that they wanted him to work for a joint project with the NASA, to study Dark Energy and its possible applications to worldwide energy grids and defense. Their arguments were pretty convincing, and they could override his lingering resistance with the allure of a field yet to be discovered.

As soon as he started working with SHIELD, it was revealed to him that, as Jane claimed, Earth wasn't the only inhabited planet in the Universe, that the Cosmic Cube was an alien creation, and that the world they lived in could be in serious peril should an alien civilization decided to conquer Humanity. That alone made him rethink his opinion of Norwood and, the more he investigated the origins of the Cube and where it was taken from during WW2, the more he suspected Jane could have been right. Then another fear surfaced: Supposing that Robert was indeed an alien, which could his intentions be?

After the Norwood incident had been solved, Erik came back to his job at the university, but never cut contact with Jane, always having a watchful eye in case that man tried something.

But nothing happened. The media in the British Islands covered the news, but nothing more transcended. Norwood led an inconspicuous life, far from the limelight, except for the economics section, where they covered his investments in technology.

And then, SHIELD appeared, Erik saw himself working with the most brilliant minds in the study of wormholes, and discovered that a great part of the foundations for that research was based on the investigation that Jane's father started and that Jane developed.

The night of the accident was something he wanted to forget, and wished they gave him time to do so, but it was an urgent matter, said Fury while sitting by Selvig's bedside, and Jane could be in danger if they made a miscalculation.

Jane was perfectly capable of conducting an activity of such magnitude by herself, but Fury had struck a chord, and Selvig cursed that man for knowing exactly which buttons to push.

For the moment, though, he was more than happy to see the two girls in good health.

Before they led him to the warehouse with the rest of the agents, Jane took Selvig to the house and called all the Asgardians for a formal introduction.

To say that Selvig was baffled would be an understatement. Because of his own ancestry, he grew up with tales from the Edda that his paternal grandmother told him when he was a child. In time he regarded such stories as they were: mere stories that evoked warm memories from his younger years.

It had been a good thing that Jane had urged him to sit down first. Meeting the protagonists of the stories from his childhood almost proved too much for the poor man, and was left speechless when Thor offered to shake his hand. He was a bit puzzled at the existence of the Warriors Three, which were never mentioned in the Norse sagas, but Fandral happily explained that their adventures on Midgard happened after the Norse era, in other parts of the planet, and that they were sadly short-lived until they had to leave to fight wars in other worlds.

Later, when the surprise had subsided and they were working at the warehouse, Selvig took Loki aside.

"So you were telling the truth, after all. At the bar, when I was telling you to go away and leave Jane alone."

"Why do you ask?"

"You were nicknamed The God of Lies for a reason."

Loki rolled his eyes.

"Use a bit of subtlety once in a while instead of cracking skulls and suddenly you are the god of lies," he said. "I use my wits to adapt and survive, nothing more."

But not everything was merriment and reunions. While Loki was at the warehouse, Thor and his friends overview the human agents setting up camp around the ranch while keeping themselves well away from the Asgardians. As much as Fury claimed they were collaborating, Thor saw clearly that the human soldiers were watching them too.

"Humans have changed," Hogun declared, gazing at the humans going to and fro.

"Their History has been convoluted in the last centuries," said Thor. "They know themselves weak, and they try to protect what little they have."

"Yes, but we know that not every human is like those friends Loki made here," said Volstagg.

"Are you sure the Tesseract has to remain here?" Sif, who still didn't trust Loki, asked Thor. "What if it's a trick from Loki?"

"I trust my brother," Thor stated. "I know he's prone to mischief, but I will never question his love for Asgard. It's Fury the one who worries me, and the ones he might serve. He only agreed to help us because that would take us out of here."

Out of curiosity, the Prince of Asgard entered the warehouse by noon. The scene was very different from the other days: The computers the humans had been using the previous days had been pushed to a corner, while the rest of the space had been taken over by two hideous structures of metal that he guessed were the portal and the reactor.

Loki, Jane and Selvig busied over the latter, taking a piece of metal from the case Agent Romanoff had brought with her, and carefully inserted it in one compartment. Curiosity got the better of him; he approached, but before he could ask, his brother smiled at him humorlessly.

"You wouldn't believe what we used to stabilize the portal," he said.

To Thor's quizzical frown, Loki continued.

"They call it iridium. Just a small nugget costs a fortune here."

He tapped one of the computer screens where the molecular structure was displayed and Thor understood. Names could change from planet to planet, but molecules were always the same. What humans held as a precious metal was used in Asgard as an everyday component, being very cheap and accessible. So accessible a child could get his hands on a nugget and melt it to try and craft a pendant, which was exactly what an eleven-year-old Thor tried to make for his mother's birthday.

Had he asked the Palace Goldsmith, she would have told him that the fires shouldn't have been so high, and that the waiting time for such a small piece of ore to melt was a few minutes. The whole process resulted in Thor singing his brows and almost causing a fire in the Palace.

Loki's present didn't fare better, for he tried a transmutation spell which would have turned two simple pebbles into emeralds, being the point of the present not the stones' value, but his own achievement in creating them. The spell worked, at first, but since it was well beyond his level, after a few hours the emeralds' molecular structure crumbled and they turned into green goo.

"This is truly a backwater world," Thor murmured, careful no human could heard him. "No wonder Father exiled you here."

"Don't call him that," Loki said, grimacing.

"Are you all right?"

"No," then Loki reconsidered his tone and softened it. "Let's think for now about the matter at hand, shall we? Could you help me later with the portal's calibration? For now call the others to the house, we need to see where we need to land."

xxxxXX-0-Xxxxxx

Asgard didn't sit on a spherical world, like most Realms. Its lands formed a disk formed mostly by mountainous terrain. The capital city sat near the border, where most rivers flowed into their "sea" which, by most planets' standards, was but a mere lake.

According to their own mythos, Asgardians were born with the light, and at first they didn't have a home. They sought where to live but only found dead planets, thus they traveled through the Universe, until they arrived at Yggdrasil. They discovered Nine Realms on its branches and roots, but none of them could host the Asgardians, except for one. This world wasn't round like the others, didn't spin on an axis and didn't revolve around a star: It was a disk of land which sat around a gravitational singularity, created by the same crystals that served as foundations.

The number three is a sacred number for the Asgardians, and so they built three times three fortresses on the new land's mountains. From there they would learn to harness the power of the crystals, and so the Bifrost came to be, constructed in secret, for the Dark Elves hadn't discovered the Asgardians' planet yet.

The story continued with tall tales of Bor's victories over the Dark Elves that would usher the Golden Age of Asgard. But for now the part that was most important was the nine fortresses: Most of them were still usable, and inside each of them there was a teleportation platform, not unlike the Bifrost itself, which connected the garrisons with the Palace. Thor's friends and Sif were the ones with the closest contact with the Einherjar, hence why Loki wanted to hold a council of war with them.

Loki had asked Tony for some privacy for him and his compatriots, and the human gave JARVIS the order to darken all the windows and block any listening device that might be around the house.

Once they were reunited, Loki asked Volstagg for the holographic map he always carried.

A three-dimensional rendition of the asgardian lands floated above the dinner table. It wasn't extremely detailed, but they only needed a rough underline of the geography.

"We know one fortress was at the location where the Palace now stands," said Volstagg, marking it in red.

"These three are in ruins," Falstaff continued, marking the range which ran closest to the city. "Which leaves us with five possible landing sites."

Hogun extended his hand and marked another, close to the rim and the farthest from the city.

"This one's platform started malfunctioning a month ago," he stated. "They were still repairing it."

"Down to four," Sif mused, studying the map. "We can only guess where Tyr has taken the refugees."

"Or if there's only one group of civilians," said Falstaff.

"We cannot be sure just yet," Hogun tapped his chin thoughtfully. "Do Midgardians have the means to pinpoint our landing with precision?"

"No," Loki raised his eyebrows when all eyes were on him. "It's already a miracle that they went from steam power to nuclear fusion in a few of their decades."

"It would be like shooting an arrow in a dark room," Sif said to Thor, her eyes betraying the alarm that her voice managed to conceal.

"Even if we could pinpoint a safe landing site," Loki insisted. "Our enemies will see it. The only thing we can do is move quickly before making any contact with a patrol."

"Running away like cowards…" Sif muttered between clenched teeth.

Thor had presided the improvised council in silence, his powerful arms crossed over his chest. Only when an argument was about to erupt he raised his right hand and Sif grew silent, pursing her lips as she seethed.

"The odds are against us," he said. "That is true, but it's no less true that we are used to that. I've seen first-hand what Midgardians consider their most advanced technology and our children's toys would put it to shame. We will work with what we have, and so we need a plan for when we arrive home. I hate to say this," he smiled wryly, looking at his brother. "But this time we will have to do things as Loki says."