Ring!
She didn't pick up on the first call, nor did she on the second and third, and at this point, Tony was beginning to feel awkward. Still, he focused on the hologram with the carefully crafted features of one Miss Ajak Hayek. He glared at the phone with a frown, nearly wishing he could use his eyes to make the woman pick up quicker.
The effort was a complete waste, because just like the previous times, the call dropped without an answer, and even without turning his back to face his guest, he knew without a doubt the smirk she had no doubt plastered on her beautiful features. Now for the snarky comment.
"Performance issues, Tony?"
He let out a breath, a hand automatically moving to scratch at his goatee in annoyance. Somehow, even without turning back, Natasha still made sure he knew she was taunting him, judging by the tilt in her voice.
"You won't be the first man, I hear it's pretty common among men of your age."
"I've read your dossier, Nat, even the ones that were redacted to hell and back." He glanced back at her still present smirk. Her trailing red hair framed her face in a way that would've seduced him if he didn't know about just how she got that name, Black Widow. He nearly pitied Banner sometimes. "You should be the last person to rib me about my age."
Natasha let out a laugh in response, a carefully crafted response, just as always, something to make him put his guard down. He wasn't even sure she knew she was doing it. So he shook his head to clear them as he focused on the hologram, wondering if he should try a fifth time or if that would be too nosy.
He shrugged his shoulders a second later. Nosy it was. His hands came up for a redial, but were frozen by a brief burst of static followed by Friday's voice flowing through the speakers.
"Sir, I've news."
"I'm busy right now, Friday..." He trailed off, giving a suspicious look at the speaker the voice came from. "Unless, of course, it involves our resident walking mass of lightning."
"It does, sir."
He let out a sigh. This was not the retirement he planned, at least not the step back he promised Pepper. It was a good thing he had been able to bribe her with that trip to the Maldives, the thought of what she'd say if she found Nat here, or even realized he was again considering the thought of assisting his former teammates... let's just say he was vastly more forgiving than his partner.
"Lay it out on me, Friday."
"Per your orders, sir, I've monitored the area of South Dakota which houses Priority Target: GINGER, and there have been changes."
Tony nodded in understanding.
"Talk to me."
"Approximately ten hours ago, our meteorological monitoring flagged a severe anomalous weather event developing over a roughly thirty square kilometer area in western South Dakota. Coordinates place the epicenter approximately five kilometers northeast of the target's location."
Tony pulled up a secondary hologram with a sharp flick of his wrist, a satellite topographical overlay of the region blooming into blue light in front of him. "By anomalous, I'm going to go out on a not too insignificant limb and assume it's lightning again."
"Yes, sir. Constant monitoring of the area with dedicated satellites ensured we were updated as soon as it happened, but despite being deemed a priority target, danger to the target was deemed too low to disturb your rest with."
Tony frowned. He appreciated the thought and care, but regardless, he should have been updated immediately. Like it could read his mind, the AI replied to his unspoken comment.
"Waking up to the Widow slithering around the building was deemed a higher priority to your direct well-being and has so far been the focus since you were roused."
Touché. Tony admitted to himself with a grumble.
"Slither? Why, with words like that, I would think you don't like me, Friday," Nat said, speaking to the AI.
"Ignore her, Friday. Continue the updates."
"Of course, sir. It began with a brief storm formation that died out in seconds, then minutes later, wind speeds in the region began to escalate from calm to one hundred and eighty kilometers per hour over a period of roughly four minutes. Barometric pressure dropped at a rate that NOAA's own systems flagged as a sensor malfunction before cross-referencing with three independent satellites confirmed it was real. Storm cell formation that by all conventional meteorological modeling should have taken between six and nine hours to develop instead appeared in under eight minutes."
"In layman's terms, for those of us without multiple PhDs, pretty please."
Tony glanced back at Natasha, and replied, "A spontaneous Category 4 storm grew to a Category 5 in less the time it would take to brew a pot of coffee." Then he turned back, taking joy in her split second confusion for a second before he spoke. "Continue, Friday."
"Of course, sir. The storm was localized, despite its strength, and further satellite thermal imaging recorded two hundred and fourteen discrete lightning strikes within the affected area. For reference to those without multiple PhDs, a typical severe thunderstorm of comparable size produces on average between eight and fifteen strikes in the same window."
"Oh, now I'm certain your AI is sassing me. Why is your AI sassing me, Tony? Jarvis never did," Natasha complained as she moved. Tony didn't hear her feet, but he felt it like an itch. She was now standing somewhere just behind his left shoulder.
"Two hundred and fourteen," Tony stated, his thoughts far away as he did the calculations. He knew this Thor was stronger than his Thor already, and yet... just what sort of a monster was this?
"Two hundred and fourteen confirmed," FRIDAY repeated evenly. "With an additional caveat. The final sixty seconds of the active weather event recorded a single discharge that our thermal satellite logged as, and I want to be precise here, sir, approximately four hundred times the average energy output of a standard lightning bolt. The discharge lasted 0.8 seconds. The crater left in the terrain is estimated at between four and six kilometers in diameter based on post-event imaging. The surrounding area shows complete vegetation incineration, surface vitrification consistent with extreme localized heat, and what appear to be secondary fissures suggesting subsurface thermal activity."
Nat's breath hitched very visibly as they both stared at the satellite image FRIDAY had already pulled up alongside the weather data. The crater was dark and raw against the surrounding landscape, a perfect ugly circle punched into the earth like something had simply decided the ground no longer deserved to be there.
The damned thing was visible from space.
"Tell me there were no casualties, Friday?" he said, his voice low.
"None detected, sir. The region is sufficiently remote. Structural damage has only been logged on the environment, no human fatalities have been identified in post-event imaging."
He let out a breath he did not know he had been holding. "And GINGER?"
"Nothing, sir. Heat signature readings noted multiple people present, but inaccuracy defeats further inquiry."
Tony nodded in understanding as his hand came up and he zoomed in on the crater image, turning it slowly in the holographic display.
Behind him, Natasha's voice was careful, measured, doing the thing it always did where it gave nothing away. "Four hundred times, Tony. Look at that crater. Is this... Thor?"
"Not the Thor that you or I know," Tony said, already too tired to explain further. He let out a long breath through his nose and pulled at his goatee once. "Friday, prepare the jet. It seems like we're returning to South Dakota after all, and I don't think Nat would like to fly Air Iron Man."
"Already prepared, sir."
He finally turned to face Natasha. She was standing exactly where he had guessed, arms loosely crossed, her expression doing that thing where it was perfectly neutral in a way that told him she was doing a great deal of thinking very quickly.
"Still want to rib me about my performance issue?" he asked.
She didn't smile. "What the hell is happening, Tony?"
He shrugged at the question. "That's what I'm going to find out. In the meantime, you've my go ahead. Get Vision here, and I can assure you I won't immediately try to blow up the traitorous synthezoid on sight."
__
Stephen Strange
The town of Harlan, Montana, had a population of approximately eight hundred people, a grain silo, a diner that closed at seven, and, as of three days ago, a tribe of stone trolls living in the rocky hillside two kilometers to the north. A rocky hillside that had not been there two months ago, according to the locals.
Strange's portal spat him out at the edge of town just as the sun was beginning to make its mind up about setting. He let out a tired sigh as he stretched and flexed his fingers. The digits were beginning to cramp up and shake from the strenuous effort it took to create as many portals as he had been creating recently.
"Why does it have to be cold?" he muttered to himself as a frigid wind blew in, and automatically, his cloak shifted to wrap him snugly. He let out a sigh and whispered a quick thank you to the semi-sentient garment before he began to walk. He could have teleported directly into his location, but against the new residents of Earth, Strange was finding that it paid to keep a few cards close to his chest. Apparently, teleporting without the Bifrost or World Tree was not something these new people were very used to.
He had read the report twice before coming. A tribe of stone trolls, which by the fragmented accounts Cho's monitoring network had pieced together from trail cameras and one very shaken park ranger, numbered somewhere between twelve and twenty individuals.
Strange had never fought a troll before. Prior to the convergence, they were a rare and near extinct breed. The few that remained were content to remain in isolated locations like the Amazon forest, the mountainous peaks of mountains too frigid for explorers to climb, and the Black Forest of Germany. Yet since the convergence, he had faced trolls three times. Each one more troublesome than the other. He had made do with teleporting them to the aforementioned places whenever they found themselves too close to population centers, and the ones that proved too stubborn, he had killed after great effort and planning.
Yet each of those occasions had been isolated. To be faced with a whole tribe this close to a city. He exhaled slowly as he got closer, his feet taking him to the location highlighted on the map Cho had shown him. Now more than ever, he wondered why he didn't just give up the position of Sorcerer Supreme to Kaecilius, then he remembered the older sorcerer had decided to turn evil.
He wondered what his old rival would think about this sudden convergence. This had been his goal, somewhat at least, the converging of dimensions which should have theoretically allowed him to meet his wife and children. What would Kaecilius have thought about their very sudden real and possible travel to Niflheim?
The smell reached him before anything else, distracting him from his train of thought, and then he crested the rise and saw them.
They were gathered in the shallow bowl of a natural depression between three hillsides, which in retrospect was almost considerate of them. The location, much like many he had seen recently, looked like it had been scooped by a giant hand and simply dumped there. The largest troll sat at the center, easily four meters at the shoulder, its body a layered architecture of dark granite threaded with what looked like quartz. Runes were carved into its chest, deep and deliberate, and it held a stone pillar across its knees the way an old man might rest a walking stick.
The others ranged in size around it, most half its height, but a few nearly matching it. They had noticed him, of course. Small as he was, the creatures he had learned were very perceptive, even if they didn't seem it. Every eye followed him as he made his way down the shallow depression, with his palms raised in the universal gesture of surrender.
"I come in peace," he called out, in Old Norse.
The largest one did not move. That was either a good sign or bad. He was not certain yet. In fact, none of them had moved from the moment they laid eyes on him.
He stopped at a distance he judged to be conversational without being presumptuous. "I am not here to fight," he continued, in Old Norse, feeling the spell he had layered into his memory months ago settle into place like a key in a lock. It was one of the first spells he had forced himself to learn the moment he realized the nature of this convergence. "I came to speak only."
The large troll's head shifted, a grinding sound. When it spoke, the voice came from somewhere deep in its chest, reverberating through the stone of its body before escaping as words. "The small one speaks the old tongue."
"This small one has made an effort to learn," Strange replied. Diplomacy, he learned, did not do well with his pride, but he had learned to navigate such regardless. He had bargained with the likes of Dormammu and Bast. A few overgrown rocks should be no problem.
Something moved through the gathered tribe. There was a rumbling, and Strange simply hoped that was their version of laughter.
"You come from the little ones' town," the large one said.
"I come here because of the town," Strange clarified carefully. "The people there are frightened. I wanted to understand if their fear was warranted, if yes, how such things can be mitigated." Not said was the fact that so far, the trolls had yet to attack the town, which spoke to a level of understanding the previous lone trolls he had encountered had lacked.
The troll was quiet for a moment before it finally spoke. "We do not want their town," it said finally. "We want the stone. These hills are old stone. Good stone." One massive hand pressed flat against the ground beside it, almost gently. "We will stay in the hills. The soft ones can keep their flat ground and their noise."
"And if the people come to you? Out of curiosity, or fear, or foolishness?"
"Then we will be still and wait for them to leave." The troll's head tilted. "We are old. We have waited out worse than curious soft ones."
Strange looked at the troll for a long moment, then at the tribe arranged behind it, reading stillness and patience in every line of them. They were reclusive, a far cry from what he had thought. Did that have to do with their element? So far, he had faced two forest trolls and one ice troll. All three had been alone and nearly feral. What made these stone trolls different? A question he was going to delegate to Cho as soon as he got back.
"Then I will take you at your word," he said with a sigh of relief. "My name is Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme, and Guardian of Earth, and I will do what I can to ensure the people of the town extend you the same courtesy."
The large troll said nothing further. The conversation, apparently, was concluded.
Strange turned and began walking back up the rise, without turning his back, of course. It wasn't until he was a fair distance away that he did. That had gone way better than he thought or expected. He had been expecting a fight and had left with a pact of truce; if only all the new tenants were as peaceful and understanding.
He was exhausted in a way that had stopped being interesting weeks ago and had settled into something chronic and gray. He had been running without a proper break since the convergence, and it was beginning to show in small ways. In the slight lag before his reactions. In the way his concentration required more deliberate effort to maintain. He had not even had the time to enjoy his hobbies or focus on the little curiosity in Norway.
He reached the flat ground at the edge of town and stopped, rolling his neck once, his fingers twitching as he began to wave them, creating the geometric architecture powered by the sling ring's output while his mind did the heavier lifting. A portal began to open.
He was thinking about Cho. The Asian man was swamped, but he would have to inform him about the agreement he had come to with the surprisingly peaceful trolls. With luck, the other man's liaison with the town should result in them ensuring that nobody does something catastrophically stupid in the direction of those hills. The portal was halfway open when everything blurred.
There had been no hesitation or consultation. The Cloak of Levitation seized the back of his collar and wrenched him backward with a violence that snapped his head forward on the recoil, and Strange had exactly enough time to produce one short, sharp sound of pure shock before the blade came through the space his neck had occupied a quarter second earlier.
He felt the fingers go before he processed what had happened.
The index and the fourth finger of his right hand, taken cleanly, just as the pain arrived a half step behind the fact of it. He had no time to respond to it. The portal flickered off, just as a staff came next, flying from the side of the hill. It was four-pronged, trailing something that crackled with electric light, and aimed squarely at his chest. His left hand came up on pure instinct, a shield construct blooming a second later, deflecting the staff and sending it clattering behind him, but that was not the true threat.
He was already turning, already trying to get his bearings, already reaching for something, when he saw the first attacker close the distance. With a burst of speed, the figure was a near blur to his fatigued senses. He barely had time to take in the alien features as the camouflage the figure wore flickered off due to its speed, then the blade took him in the side, puncturing a lung and leaving Strange to wonder if this was how he was going to die.
A/N: Proxima and Corvus on the hunt.