Chapter 100: Chapter 100 - A Civilised Debate
Jane Foster’s love life had become one long clusterfuck.
Dating Thor had been difficult enough when he was the God of Thunder and prince of Asgard. Sleeping with him had complicated matters. Being left behind because his people needed him had transformed the complication into something that could sit across from her at a restaurant and ruin an innocent man’s evening.
The innocent man waited on the other side of the table while Jane held the menu in front of her face.
She had already read it four times. The restaurant offered twelve main courses, three vegetarian options, and no recognised method for escaping a date without climbing through the bathroom window. Lowering the menu would make eye contact possible, and eye contact might lead to questions about former relationships.
Explaining Thor proved to be a poor choice for a first-date activity.
The menu dipped half an inch.
Her date offered a careful smile. "We could order later. There isn’t a deadline."
That was considerate. His patience made the situation worse.
"I’m sorry." Jane lowered the menu far enough to expose her eyes. "This was a mistake, not you. I thought I was ready for one."
Darcy Lewis arrived before Jane had to decide whether to fake a seizure.
She crossed the restaurant with a device pressed to her chest, and the unnamed intern trailed behind her, carrying two equipment cases. Neither wore the expression of someone coming to enjoy a meal.
Jane stood before Darcy reached the table. "What happened?"
Darcy turned the device around. Three lines rose across the display, sank together, and then climbed past the scale Jane had set for the equipment.
"Your old atmospheric model started screaming. The new instruments joined it because apparently panic is contagious."
Jane took the tablet and widened the time window. The curves remained synchronised. They should not have been able to agree with one another that precisely unless the local gravitational field had changed, which was impossible.
Her failed date examined the display without pretending to understand it. "Is this the sort of emergency that requires you to leave?"
"Yes."
"You look much happier."
Jane was already reaching for her coat. That observation stopped her long enough to feel guilty.
"I am sorry."
He lifted his coffee. "Go save science. We can fail at dinner another time."
Darcy leaned towards Jane as they moved away from the table. "You found a functional adult. I didn’t know you were allowed to date those."
"Keep walking."
The readings climbed again.
That gave every step a purpose and spared Jane from answering anything else.
They tried Erik Selvig from the pavement, then from the car, and twice more while crossing London. His phone rang until the network surrendered. Jane sent the data with a priority marker. Darcy searched the news after the fifth unanswered call and found him in less than a minute.
The video showed Selvig at Stonehenge, naked, gesturing at the stones while a collection of tourists recorded his contribution to British archaeology.
Two police officers approached him with a blanket. Selvig rejected the blanket and pointed at something beyond the camera. The officers then discovered that scientific enthusiasm offered no protection against public-indecency laws.
Darcy paused the video as they guided him into a police vehicle. "On the positive side, he finally got people interested in his lecture."
The intern looked from the screen to Jane. "Should we contact the police station?"
"They won’t release him because we have strange readings."
"What if we explain that he’s a respected scientist?"
Darcy looked at the frozen image. "Shame his age is not old enough to qualify as a protected monument. They’ll keep him until he puts on trousers."
Jane returned her attention to the tablet. Selvig was alive, mobile, and currently the responsibility of the British state. The anomaly was growing.
They continued without him.
The source lay inside an abandoned industrial building where broken concrete and open shafts made every step a liability. Darcy entered with a stun gun in one hand and a sensor in the other. Jane chose not to question where the weapon had come from. The intern followed with the cases and the resigned posture of a man whose job description had become irrelevant.
Voices echoed from deeper inside.
Darcy raised the stun gun. "If this is a hideout of a grooming gang, I’m charging hazard pay."
They rounded a concrete wall and found several children dropping objects down an empty stairwell.
The car keys did not reach the floor. They vanished halfway down, then fell from above and passed the same children again.
One of the boys caught them on the third pass. "It does that with everything."
Jane forgot the restaurant, the date, and Selvig’s arrest.
She took the keys, checked the stairwell, and dropped them herself. They vanished below her hand. A scrape of metal came from overhead. She stepped aside before they completed another circuit.
The instruments registered a local change in gravity but disagreed about direction. The field was not merely stronger or weaker. Space inside the building had been folded into paths that did not respect the building around them.
The children led them through the structure. A bottle hung motionless in one corridor until the intern touched it, then shot sideways and vanished through a doorway. A brick dropped from shoulder height slowed before reaching the ground and stopped six inches above the dust.
Outside, an abandoned fire engine rested beside the building. One side lifted when Jane put a finger beneath its bumper.
She withdrew her hand and the vehicle settled back onto its tyres.
"Gravity has taken the day off." Darcy kept several feet between herself and the fire engine. "Can we leave before it remembers its job?"
Jane checked the sensor. The strongest reading came from the far end of the building.
"Not yet."
Each anomaly formed a temporary route, but one point remained stable. Her instruments could not identify what lay beyond it. They could only show that the route consumed every signal directed into it.
Jane moved closer.
A cold pressure settled between her shoulders.
She stopped.
The sensation had nothing to do with the temperature. Something was watching her with the patient concentration of a predator that had already decided where to bite.
Darcy noticed the change in her posture. "What is it?"
Jane searched the bare platforms, the dark openings, and the broken roof above them. Nothing moved.
"I don’t know."
The answer did not make the pressure disappear.
It sharpened.
--
Lucius had been formally removed from Stark Tower.
The notice carried a corporate heading, a date, and enough legal language to prove that someone had enjoyed writing it. A separate paragraph warned him against touching, moving, transmuting, repainting, stealing, or otherwise vandalising the enormous letters fixed to the building.
Lucius read the paragraph twice while floating outside the tower.
"I cannot believe Tony would stoop this low."
The renewed building offered no apology.
Removing the shrapnel and arc reactor had clearly damaged Tony’s already shallow personality. The man had survived terrorists, palladium poisoning, aliens, and Lucius’s friendship, only to become possessive about a few oversized letters. Some lines should not be crossed between men.
Lucius folded the notice and stored it in his Inventory. Evidence mattered when the inevitable property dispute reached arbitration.
He flew over New York while searching his memory for the thought that had been scratching at it since the tower. Tony’s medical reset was complete, Pepper was cured, and the suits were gone. The Nexus worked. SHIELD and X-Men remained irritating, but not urgently so.
Something important still felt overdue.
He returned to the shawarma restaurant for serious thinking required garlic sauce. Halfway through the meal, a piece of lamb reached his mouth and stopped.
The Convergence.
The Aether was becoming available for collection.
Lucius stared at the unfinished shawarma. Remembering five minutes earlier would have saved him the price of extra garlic sauce. Remembering five minutes later would have let Jane Foster put the Aether inside herself and convert a simple acquisition into a medical emergency.
He left the shawarma on the table and vanished.
London appeared beneath him. Lucius remained invisible in the air, extended his senses, and prepared to search the city when a dispute on the road below demanded professional attention.
A pedestrian stood beside a car and spread both arms. "Are you crazy?"
The driver leaned through his open window. "You are fucking."
The pedestrian considered this argument and found it inadequate. "You are fucking. You are fucking."
The driver’s face reddened. "Fucking you bloody, bastard bitch."
Lucius lowered himself several feet to hear better.
Neither man had established a subject, presented evidence, or defined the nature of the alleged fucking, bloody or otherwise. They had nevertheless reached the rebuttal stage with admirable speed. English civilisation had advanced while the rest of the world was distracted.
The pedestrian stepped towards the car. The driver raised one hand with sudden dignity.
"Have a nice day. Bye-bye."
He drove away.
Lucius watched the car turn the corner and felt genuinely educated. A similar disagreement in the United States might have ended with gunfire, broken bones, or suicide by police, with the selection depending on the colour of the participants. London had reduced the entire process to grammar abuse and a courteous farewell.
It was a cradle of civilisation.
His search spread over the city.
Jane Foster’s mind stood out first because he knew what he was looking for. Darcy Lewis was beside her, along with an unfamiliar young man and several children, inside an abandoned industrial site. Space bent around the building in overlapping channels. One of those distortions led where he needed to go.
Lucius teleported above the broken scientist.
Jane stopped below him before he had fully settled into place. Her shoulders tightened, and her eyes searched the empty air.
He approved. Prey that noticed a hunter remained prey, but at least it was not defective.
The stable opening waited several yards ahead of her.
Lucius studied it while he debated how to proceed.
Allowing Jane to reach the Aether would preserve the path he remembered. The substance would enter her, Thor would become involved, and poor Malekith would be drawn towards Asgard. Frigga would die from the consequences. Jane Foster had always possessed a remarkable talent for improving Thor’s luck. This little human was the real Ragnarok of Asgard and her prince.
There was also a possible profit.
If Jane carried the Aether inside a living body, the Sacrificial Array might accept the combined offering. Lucius could sacrifice her to the SMS entity and discover whether the Aether came with her.
The plan was efficient, cruel, and scientifically interesting. It therefore deserved serious consideration.
The opposing side of his mind raised Mjolnir.
He had tried to sacrifice the hammer. The Array had refused it because an enchanted object was not a living, ensouled victim. Putting the Aether inside Jane might solve that category problem, or the entity might consume the Aether plus Jane and reject returning him what he wanted. He could lose the asset, create Malekith’s path to Asgard, and kill Frigga for no return.
That was not a sacrifice. That was poor procurement.
Below him, Jane took one step towards the opening.
Lucius held himself motionless and continued the argument.
Letting events proceed offered foreknowledge. Interfering would destroy the sequence he remembered. On the other hand, foreknowledge was only valuable when it produced control, and watching Jane collect the Aether first would give control to a woman currently walking into an unidentified spatial rupture without armour, support, or the common sense to throw a camera through it before entering.
He disliked competition, but he hated waste.
Jane reached for her sensor.
The acquisitive side of Lucius’s mind presented its final case: the Aether was unattended now.
That settled the matter.
He wished the losing side a nice day and bye-bye.
Jane shivered as he floated past her. The route pulled at his invisible body, trying to decide which direction counted as down. He corrected his position with telekinesis and examined the dark fold ahead.
Somewhere beyond it waited Svartalfheim, the Aether, and a collection problem that had already killed Frigga in the version of events he remembered.
Lucius smiled.
He entered the portal before Jane could reach it.
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A/N
And there we have it, Chapter 100.
Thank you sincerely to everyone who has read, commented, reviewed, or quietly watched Lucius commit increasingly sophisticated crimes against morality and canon. Reaching one hundred Chapters would not have been nearly as enjoyable without you.
If you liked the Chapter, please consider leaving a comment or a review. They are entirely free, mildly addictive, and known to improve an author’s productivity by a scientifically unverifiable percentage.
Here’s to the next hundred.
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