"You want to borrow the Casket of Ancient Winters?" asked an amused Thor.
Meanwhile, Kelda stared slack-jawed at my apparent audacity.
To backtrack a bit, after leaving the steam room... Which was traditionally followed by lying undressed in the snow of all things, and returning to Kelda's home she informed her parents that she would be accompanying me on my quest, and after saying her goodbyes and making arrangements for dealing with further forging jobs while she was gone I called out to Lady Sif to bring us back to Asgardia.
Her genuine reaction of awe and adoration for all of the, admittedly beautiful, sights of the capital of the Realm Eternal was honestly adorable though it turned to amusing when we got to the palace and she saw how casually I talked to her King.
"Kelda said that we'd need to use magical ice for the cooling in the forging process," I explained. "The totality of all the snow, hail, sleet, and bitter winds of Fimbulwinter sounds like it would do the trick." Codex memories saved my bacon on that one, it really only took thinking over it for a few moments before that bit of information clicked.
"Fair enough," Thor acknowledged. "I take it that she intends to use the juxtaposition of ice and fire to imitate the creation of the realms? I took advantage of the casket under similar circumstances to reforge Mjolnir not that long ago."
"Y-yes, Your Highness," Kelda stammered out.
"A wise young woman you are," Thor complimented with a smile, which caused Kelda to look away.
"I only know what I've been taught, Highness," she insisted.
"Humble, too," Thor continued before turning back to me. "I will have the Casket brought up from the vaults," he said, and gestured for a guard who went off to, presumably, do just that.
"You wouldn't happen to know where I can find an exceptionally pure magical fire, would you?"
"I am afraid that I do not," Thor replied, "and Loki vanished shortly after I chastised him for sending you to find his young descendant without consulting you first so inquiring about his knowledge is not an option." Thor looked contemplative for a moment. "Consider imploring the aid of Doctor Strange? None who I know of are wiser in as many forms of sorcery as Earth's Sorcerer Supreme."
"...Do you think that Lady Sif would be willing to send me back to Earth at this hour?" It was getting pretty late, all things considered. Honestly, I could teleport back to Earth on my own but I wasn't exactly sure I could bring people with me, and it wouldn't be fair to just leave Kelda here. She'd asked to come along and that was more than fair for the advice she'd given and also I wanted to spend more time with her.
"Lady Sif keeps long hours, I am sure she would oblige but are you certain you wish to depart tonight?"
"I don't know when Carnage is coming back," I replied. "For all I know, he could already be back but lying low. I don't know how powerful he is now. I need to be ready, I need to do as much in the time I have as possible. Just, just doing nothing..."I get anxious when I'm not working. Not sure why.
"At least wait until after dinner," Thor insisted gently. "The cook is preparing roast elk with leeks and potatoes as we speak."
"That does sound good," I admitted. "Alright."
Dinner at the palace had become routine for me surprisingly quickly but for Kelda who came from a small village, this was apparently a rather shocking course of events. She remained silent as we ate and I made small talk with some of the other residents of the palace. After dinner, she gasped as my tendrils grappled the Casket of Ancient Winters and pulled it into my symbiotic subspace.
"What are you?" She asked me as we left for Lady Sif's watch post at the end of the Bifrost. "A mortal who speaks so casually with the All-Father?"
"Well, I first met Thor when he and the Avengers fought me back on Midgard..." I started
"And you're still alive!?"
I laughed. "Technically, I won that fight."
"...And now?"
"He agreed to help me become a god as long as I let him teach me how to be a good one."
"You went from fighting him to... You're a madwoman, Maria Marshal of Midgard," Kelda finished.
"From you," I said with a smile, "I'll take that as a compliment." I shifted back into my civilian disguise as we approached Lady Sif. "Lady Sif, would it trouble you to send Kelda and I to the home of Doctor Strange?"
"No trouble at all," she obliged, and in a flash of primatic light Kelda and I were in the heart of Greenwich Village, standing before a two-story townhouse with a rather distinctive circular window on its roof.
Kelda marveled at the tall buildings and streetlights around us. "This is Midgard?"
"Yep," I confirmed. "Specifically New York City, the City That Never Sleeps, the Big Apple, and a few other names as well. My home sweet home. I'll show you the sights sometimes if you'd like." I immediately started wracking my brain for things to actually do in New York. It's funny, you never think your home town is interesting till you have to show someone around... I wonder how she'd feel about trying some of the food and... Wait, I have no money. Damn, this is hard.
Anyway, I marched up the steps of the manor house and knocked on the door, Kelda following close behind me.
The door opened, seemingly by itself, and we stepped inside.
No one was in sight, and I was starting to have flashbacks. "Okay, if any of the furniture here is a person I'd appreciate you showing it now."
"...What?" came Kelda's voice from behind me.
"Long story," I replied... "Well, not long. I went to a place where the furniture was alive. It's the backstory that's long."
"You should become a skald or something," Kelda replied.
A glowing orange portal tore itself into existence in the entryway and a flamboyantly dressed middle-aged man with black hair, white at his temples, stepped through. His cape flew from his shoulders and hung itself up at the wall.
"Sorry to keep you waiting," Doctor Strange said just as I realized that he was covered in blood. He took note of my started expression. "Don't worry, none of it's mine."
"I feel compelled to ask what happened," I said as stoically as I could manage.
"I was just in a small mountain town in rural Colorado," the good doctor began, "where, as it turned out, almost the entire police force were cultists who worshipped the Black Goat of The Forest With A Thousand Young."
"I can't help but notice that you used the past tense there," I replied.
"You can't have an Elder God cult without an Elder God," he replied before pulling what appeared to be an old glass Coke bottle with something that hurt my eyes to look at jammed tightly inside and setting it down on a shelf that immediately vanished off to who knows where. "Gonna have to thank Spider-Man for that suggestion." He turned back to us, "So, what brings you to my humble home?"
"We are on a quest to perform a forging ritual that will allow Maria to become a god with the power to vanquish a God of Carnage who conspires to slaughter all of Midgard," Kelda explained in one breath. "We require a powerful and pure magical flame with which to light the forge and King Thor advised us to seek your counsel."
"What she said," I confirmed.
Strange looked at us closely for a moment. "Excuse me," he said as the eye-shaped amulet around his neck levitated to his forehead, and then—light! Bright light, suddenly, directly in my eyes like a toddler playing with a flashlight.
Then it passed. "The hell was that!?"
"The Eye of Agamotto," the sorcerer explained. "The light it casts pierces all illusions and it allows me to see through all deceptions to identify your true nature. With a story like that..."
"You needed to divine if we were truly sent by His Highness?" Kelda supplied.
"Let's go with that," Strange accepted. "What I saw was good enough, follow me," he said while opening another portal.
Kelda made several high-pitched noises as we stepped into a massive chamber filled with large machines and exotic materials and a rather industrial-looking forge.
"You like it?" Strange asked her as he led us through the room. Periodically he stopped to pull materials out of containers.
"My dream is to be a Forge Goddess, oh great Sorceror," she replied candidly. "To have but an afternoon in a place like this..."
"A friend of mine, a dwarf, set me up with his place," the Doctor explained. "The truth is I don't use it as often as I should... Tell you what, I'll come find you when I'm having a slow day and let you experiment a bit."
"You honor me, sir," Kelda replied.
Having gathered what he needed, Strange took us to a workbench and began to assemble a device, laying together frames and screwing parts together until he had an old-fashioned hooded lantern roughly the size of a tankard made of a bronze-looking metal.
He then tore open another portal and bade us follow him through it, into a room that seemed to be full of various artifacts before leading us to an old-fashioned furnace.
"This furnace, which I acquired from a Rock Troll named Horgunn, contains within it a channel to a source of energy called the Flames of the Faltine."
That sparked something in my codex memories, "isn't your nemesis a Faltine?"
"Yes, Dormammu is a being of the Faltinian race, but while he's wicked the Flames that power his race and home realm as as pure as magic gets. Sustainable, too," he added. "As long as they're handled properly, of course. Unfortunately, a student at Strange Academy by the name of Emily Bright ended up with a form of the Flames corrupted by Dormammu's dark magic permenantly infused into her own energy, and... We're still trying to figure out where she vanished to. I don't really have all the details, I was dead when she succumbed."
"That kind of sucks," I replied. "Poor girl."
"But," he said as a gout of flame from the furnace flew into the lantern he crafted, "this is untainted and so should be safe as long as you don't channel more of it than you can handle in one go and burn out your organs or something," he said as he closed and sealed the lantern. "And it's not particularly likely that you could do that, while this lantern should be able to generate the Flame sustainably, they're not likely to generate that much at a time" he finished as he handed it to me.
"Thank you, Doctor Strange," I said as I jammed the now-sealed lantern into my symbiotic subspace.
"Is there anything else I can help you with?" the Sorcerer asked.
"You wouldn't happen to have any Olympian ambrosia lying around, would you?" I asked without expecting a serious answer.
"I'm afraid not," Strange replied, "I believe that the only one who knows how to make nectar and ambrosia these days is Hebe and she's unlikely to part with it without an order from a higher Olympian. And most of them are currently missing, dead, or MIA. I think Aphrodite is in charge right now, mostly by default. Though... She mostly means well," Strange continued, "so asking her nicely might work if you have the means to get to Olympus."
"Yeah, we can get there from Hades and we have to go there anyway," I didn't explain how I knew that I'd be able to get there from Hades, 'I literally stabbed Valkyrie in the back and got her knowledge and a portion of her power' wasn't exactly something that I think would endear me to him and... Seriously, I needed to make the time to apologize for that.
Strange looked at me sternly. "Do you know how to get to Hades?"
"I'm still figuring that part out," I admitted.
"The current location of Erebus, the border between the lands of the living and Hades, is via a casino of the same name in—"
"Atlantic City," I finished. I'd popped up just outside of there when I was first trying to get to Asgard. Now wasn't that a weird coincidence?
"Yes," the sorcerer confirmed. "Now... Charon's prices for being ferried across Styx have increased significantly so—"
"That won't be a problem," I interrupted. "I need to bathe in the Styx for the ritual and I'm telekinetic so I can lift Kelda across once I'm on the other side."
"It doesn't work like that," Strange insisted. "Styx is implacable, invioloble. The most severe and holiest river of the Olympians. She can't be crossed without her consent."
"Well fuck me then," I replied. My language seemed to have startled Kelda but I paid it no mind. "I'm going to need to get some cash then and... She?"
"Well, yes, she. Styx isn't just a river," Strange replied. "she's an Oceanid, one of the Nymphs born from the union of Oceanus, Titan of the Oceans, and Tethys the Titan of the Seas. The Oceanids were all very powerful by the standards of nymphs, all full-fledged goddess in their own right rather than mere nature spirits or minor divinities, and Styx was the oldest and strongest of them all. The whole reason Styx has such an important role, serving as the boundary between life and death and the keeper of the oaths of the gods is because Zeus wished to honor her after she elected to side with him in his war against the Titans."
"...Did not know that," I replied.
"It's not exactly common knowledge," Strange admitted.
I wracked my brain for a bit... "But if I got her permission, we might be able to bypass Charon entirely?"
"Well, yes, but you'd almost certainly need an offering," Strang confirmed. "And you'd need to ask properly. You know, kneel on her banks and supplicate yourself to her. But, that would probably help with the 'bathing in her waters' part of your plan as well."
"So... What kind of offerings do the Olympians prefer? I know about animal sacrifices and I know that Demeter had a thing about mint and barley tea."
"Food, mostly," Strange confirmed. "And drink. Wine in particular and, you know what," he opened a small portal and reached into it, pulling out an opaque glass bottle. "A thankful patient recently gifted me a large case of well-aged Pinot Noir from Burgundy," he said while handing me the bottle. The label looked fancy but for the life of me, I couldn't read it. "It's a good vintage and it's more than I'm likely to use so I'm willing to part with some for a good cause."
"Thank you, Doctor Strange," I replied.
The doctor pulled an old-fashioned pocket watch out of his, well, pocket. "The Erebus casino should be open around this time. If you want to leave now, I can probably get you through the door."
I looked to Kelda, "are you up for finishing this tonight?"
She flashed a smile that made my heart sing, "of course."