Rowing in Eden (Thor, Avengers) 8/10
They spent three days kicking around Winchester, New Hampshire. Somewhere near the the town, an aurora sighting had been made but the data was elusive. After a day in the historical society's reference room, Jane had some possibilities dug out of local diaries and accounts. She rubbed her eyes, seeking to dispell the exhaustion and strain she felt as she met up with Thor, back from another outing with the Avengers, on the wraparound porch of the old building.
"We need to head out into the park north of town," Jane advised as the walked to where she'd parked the van this morning. "I got a copy of the map and, best as I can tell, the location was probably somewhere in the northern reaches of the park, in some pretty remote land."
Thor nodded happily, clearly energized by the chance to finally get some data from another site. It'd been a week and a half since they'd left Hartford. A few stops in Massachusetts and one in Maine had brought less detailed and useful readings: the heavy rocks of the region didn't retain as many signs of the wormhole's energies as the softer soil around Hartford.
As they made their way into the quiet, nearly deserted parking lot of the state park, Jane shot an assessing look around. "Let's haul our equipment up that trail, there, just far enough to be out of sight if anyone's looking. Then we can-" she made a soaring gesture with her free hand "-zip up thataway."
Thor grinned brightly. "Aye, and from above, we might have a better hope of spotting any visible signs!"
Jane sighed a little bit. "Good thing I don't have a fear of heights but I still don't like all the hovering involved in something like this," she grumbled as they made their way past the trail head.
Within a few minutes, they were airborne and soaring north under the grey skies. Jane kept one arm firmly locked around Thor's neck while the other clutched her portable detector.
"Keep going, let's try just past that lake, there," she directed.
With a shift in his grip on Mjolnir, Thor shifted their flight, gaining speed as they soared high above the wind-whipped waters.
"Here," she shouted just as Thor tilted his hammer down to a stunted section of trees running up from the lakeshore.
In a flash, they were earthbound. Thor dropped the detector bags off of one shoulder while Jane assessed the area with her handheld device.
"This sure looks like the spot," she exclaimed brightly. "Won't be easy to get the readings with the trees and undergrowth, but let's see what we can do."
Thor set up the machines with the ease of long practice. Turning around to eye the lay of the land, he opted to start down near the water's edge. Jane directed him steadily north and east so that, within a few minutes, they were over the pattern which ran almost precisely under the shorter, sickly trees.
"Bingo!" Jane announced and began to correlate the data on her small handheld while Thor dragged first one detector and then the other across the rough terrain.
It was coming on dark when they were both satisfied with the mapping results. A chill wind scudded across the shoreline as they packed up the equipment. Thor hoisted the straps of the larger pieces over his shoulder and Jane tucked her precious handheld device inside her down vest, which she then zipped up.
"Are you ready?" Thor asked, extending one hand to take hers.
Jane smiled at his courtly manner. "Thank you, yes," she replied. "I'm more than ready to see if we have enough information to solve this puzzle. Let's get back to the van, get some dinner and get cracking!"
Pulled close against each other, the pair soared into the darkening sky, following the trail that only Mjolnir could trace.
"That felt so good to sit down somewhere that wasn't moving," Jane groaned as she rolled her shoulders. Her arms were clutching the van's steering wheel as she directed it out of the restaurant's parking lot and down the quiet Virginia road. It was another week since their sojourn in New Hampshire. She had ten data sets recorded but, as of yet, no idea of how to use them.
She groaned again at the sensation of fear and despair roiling her stomach.
"I am sure I could take a turn with the driving, Jane," Thor said, obviously for not the first time.
"No way," she chided, relieved that he hadn't sensed her discomfort came more from worry about their project than the strain of long hours behind the wheel. "Not until you get a license and that means convincing Colonel Fury you should be behind the wheel."
Thor leaned back in the passenger seat and adopted a look of heartfelt hurt. "He is far too cautious for anyone with a true warrior's heart."
"Better watch what you say," Jane advised, pointing toward the dash where she was sure was planted at least one of the monitoring devices SHIELD used to track their activities.
Thor glared at the harmless array of plastic and gauges but quieted his complaint.
"We should be seeing Darcy's car soon," Jane said as she steered off the main road and onto a track carved lightly into the reddish dirt. They slowed to a halt as Jane made out a familiar shape ahead.
The van's engine quit with a knock as Jane shoved open the driver's side door. Darcy smiled as her one-time boss piled out of the van and enveloped her in a hug.
"So good to see you!" Jane exclaimed.
"You, too," Darcy answered. "And you as well, big guy. Heard you made it back in one piece! And it's kind of cool that you're checking things out here, not far from the university. I don't even have to miss a class to help you guys."
Thor swept a bow that went strangely with his favourite wool plaid shirt. "Darcy! At your service," he intoned.
"I wish," Darcy said under her breath. At Jane's shocked lock, she rolled her eyes. "Can't blame a girl for looking!"
Before Jane could offer a dissenting opinion, Darcy was heading to the back of the van. "Let's get going here. It's off-season so nobody from the parks service should be around, but I don't want to be here long enough for that to be a problem."
"Agreed," said Jane. Thor unloaded the detectors and they set off on the trail that ran not too far from a rail line.
Darcy pulled a small flashlight out of her bag and shone it ahead. "We just have to get through this wooded area and then we'll be on the edge of Prospect Hill. Near as I could tell from all those accounts, this is where the aurora was brightest so it stands to reason that this is where the landing site was if there was one."
She led them through the last bit of wooded ground to the edge of a field covered with long grass and decorated by a few large park service markers as well as an aged stone pyramid.
"Let's get cracking," Jane said. Soon the three were quietly collecting data on the famed Civil War battlefield. It seemed sacrilegious, Jane felt, to speak loudly as well as a touch dangerous to draw any possible attention to their surreptitious visit, although SHIELD would bail the out if the authorities discovered their trespass.
But the recording went smoothly, except for Darcy's occasional jokes about leaving a crop circle for the park staffers to discover the next day. Their equipment was safely stowed back in the van just a few hours later.
"So what'd that show?" Darcy asked after Thor closed the van doors.
Jane shrugged her shoulders. "I won't know until we review the data on my computer. We'll go back to the hotel and see what's what."
"Expense account a bottle of Jack Daniels while you're at it and have some fun," Darcy suggested. She sighed in clear disappointment at Jane's glare of disapproval. "Want I should come and hang out with you for a bit? I don't have a class tomorrow until 11:30 and it's only a half hour drive back to Culver!"
Thor smiled. "We should do that, Jane!"
"Okay," the beleaguered physicist conceded, "but no alcohol."
A bottle of Jack Daniels and another of Coke sat on the bathroom counter. Three flimsy plastic glasses, mostly drained, sat on the small end table beside the lone chair. Three figures crowded around the laptop occupying the chair while the people were forced to settle on the floor where they helped themselves from the bags of potato chips and pretzels Darcy had insisted they stock up on at the Wawa after grabbing some booze from the local control board's shop..
"So this is what we found at Fredericksburg," Jane announced, letting a slightly grainy image fill almost all of the screen. "This is the best one yet so thanks, Darcy, for finding the site for us!"
"No problem," her assistant cheekily replied, sucking down the last of her Jack and Coke. "That's it for me, by the way. Gotta drive back to campus and don't want to get pulled!"
"A good thing, too," Jane said primly. "Thor can finish the rest. It doesn't seem to have any effect on him."
Her subject levered himself off of the floor. "Your wish is my command, Jane," he explained as he poured himself another mixed drink. "I could grow to like these 'cocktails' as you say?"
"Just avoid the ones with the little umbrellas, big guy," Darcy advised drily. "So, Jane, you've got a good picture. What does it tell you?"
Jane frowned as she considered the screen before them. "Well, all of the sites we've found show incomplete patterns. I think that's part of the issue. If I map them, the missing sections are all in the southwest part of the pattern, like something's interfered or diffused the link so much as to destroy it."
"So," Darcy said dubiously, "you're looking for some secret alien tower over Arizona that's blocking the Einstein-Rosen whatsie?"
Jane shook her head. "No, I'm actually expecting our problem's in the opposite direction. It might make sense that something's interfering with the link between Asgard and Earth, something that started doing this around 1859 and has been a problem on and off, since. Just since no one's been travelling much by wormhole, nobody's noticed. It could be sunspots, a near-earth object or something else, though. That's where I'm stumped."
She sighed deeply and Darcy placed a reassuring hand on the back of her shoulder.
Thor stepped back from the bathroom counter with his freshly filled drink in hand. "Wait," he said suddenly, stepping forward to lean in and examine the pattern they'd recovered from the battlefield survey. "Can you show that with the pattern we first recorded, from the original site?"
"Sure," Jane answered with a hint of confusion in her voice, "what are you looking for?"
She shifted the one image over and beside it, the dusty landscape of New Mexico appeared with the familiar knotwork marking.
"They're mirrors," Thor said, touching the screen lightly with one finger at each image. "See?"
Jane's eyes widened. "You're right! Omigod, that could change everything!"
Pulling the computer down into her lap, Jane opened up a spreadsheet and began to type furiously. An arcane equation unrolled in the top bar of the program. She highlighted some fields and hit "ENTER". In a left-hand column, series of numbers blossomed.
"Omigod, that might be what we need," Jane repeated to herself as she continued to type in at lightning speed.
"Which is, what?" Darcy finally asked after about five minutes of Jane's focused work.
"The key to coming up with an explanation. If all of these other sites are mirrors of the first, that's because something, somewhere, and I think I can start to pinpoint the general location where, is intercepting the bridge energies and reflecting them back to these alternate sites," Jane said.
Thor nodded approvingly but Darcy still appeared shell-shocked. "Explain to me like you would to a fifth-grader," the younger woman demanded, "because I don't get it."
"Thor does," Jane said brightly. When Darcy reached over to the bed to grab a pillow and brandish it threateningly, Jane complied. She pulled out her notebook and sketched out several diagrams while Darcy leaned over her shoulder.
"You see, here," Jane indicated, "how we can take the data and start cross-correlating it with the dates and the energy-readings to get a suggestion of where the interference originates?"
"No," Darcy answered baldly. At Jane's hurt expression, she elaborated, "but that's why I'm a social scientist and not a physicist like you. I trust you, I just don't understand you."
"That's okay," Jane chuckled, "I get that a lot."
Thor leaned over to examine her sketch in the notebook. "Do you have a precise location of where we might look for this source of interference?"
At that question, Jane frowned. "The good news is that it's on earth. The bad news is that I'm still not much more certain than that as to the location. I mean, I can rule out about seven-eighths of the earth's surface but that's still a lot of ground to cover for who knows what's doing this."
Darcy put her head on her knees, trying to picture the magnitude of the task. "That sucks! Anyway to improve your chances?"
Jane shot a glance back at Thor. "The more data points we add, the better the definition will be. Thor and I'll head off to Cleveland tomorrow and there's a site in Chicago, next. But can you go back through some of those old periodicals and see if there are any other sightings we've missed?"
"Sure," Darcy promised, levering herself off the hotel room floor after giving Jane a quick hug. "Speaking of research, I'd better head back to campus. Going to go over some articles on redistricting before tomorrow's seminar on political management."
"Just in time research?" Jane teased. "Drive safe, Darcy!"
"Will do," her friend promised. She grabbed her satchel and stepped toward the hotel room door.
"Farewell, Darcy Lewis," Thor said as he bestowed a chaste kiss on the back of her hand.
"Farewell, Thor Odinsson," Darcy giggled slightly in return. "See you and Mew-mew soon!"
With that, the young woman was gone.
Thor turned to Jane and asked plaintively, "Will she ever learn how to say 'Mjolnir'?"
Jane had to laugh at his pained expression, despite the worry that gripped her heart. "I'll get Erik to coach her pronunciation, I promise."
Accepting his pro-offered hand, she got up from the floor, putting the laptop away in its case before grabbing her small duffel bag. "I'm going to get washed up," she announced.
At Thor's hopeful expression, she snorted. "Have you seen the size of that shower? I'm doing it alone, but last one in bed is a rotten egg!"
Fortunately for Jane's sense of competition, Thor's unfamiliarity with the expression allowed her to get past him and take control of the pint-sized hotel bathroom. But she had to pay by teaching him all the "Midgard slang" he wanted to know the next day as they set off for the Midwest.
Cleveland had been frustrating, they both agreed. They'd gotten some pattern readings but very disturbed since the aurora sighting there had happened near the salt mines. The work since had all but obliterated much of the traces they'd normally uncover. Jane persevered and managed to incorporate some data into her equations, but that only narrowed the target area by a further four percent.
"The aurora here came in 1898, a few years after their World's Fair," Jane explained as they packed up the sensors. "So we're lucky since some of these structures were preserved since the fair and that included our site."
"Aye," Thor agreed as he put first one and then the other in the back of the van. "But is this going to be enough?"
Jane bit her lip as she carefully closed the van's rear door. "We'll see. I think Darcy might be able to find one or two more sites for us-"
"No," Thor interrupted, laying one of his large hands down over her slender wrist. "What I mean is that were almost out of time. Tomorrow will be the full month allotted to me. I can, perhaps, stretch it by one or two days further, but no more without being foresworn."
Jane turned stricken eyes to his. "You think I don't know?" she bit out. "It's all I think about."
Thor wrapped her up, tightly in his arms. "I'm sorry, Jane, I know this weighs on you as well. We will find a way, I know it!"
Jane's arms crept around Thor's waist, prolonging the embrace. "I'm sorry, too, Thor. I'm starting to lose hope. . . ."
Thor levered himself back slightly. "Never give up hope, Jane. It's a powerful force!"
She nodded wordlessly.
"Come, let us retire to our 'Knight's Inn' after finding some place that serves something other than hamburgers or fried chicken," Thor suggested. "Then we will apply ourselves, refreshed, to the task at hand."
Chapter Nine
X-posted from Dreamwidth. (
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