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With that she floated down to the ground, moving through the city, touching the stones here and there. Deciding to take Ororo at her word that they were safe, Harry followed her, putting his arm around her waist. The two of them walked on like that, exploring the city. They found several more plinths, but only that one central area had any carvings that looked like Ororo's face, which in both their minds was a good sign of the mental stability of her ancestors.
Eventually they came back, looking at the carving of Ororo's ancestor for a moment. "Would it be a good idea to add more power to the spell, you think?"
Frowning in thought, Harry looked around, once more activating his mage sight as he thought his way through her question. "No, I don't think so. Unless we want to throw a Fidelius up? Do you think this place is that important?"
Now it was Ororo's turn to take a moment to think before answering. Then she shook her head. "Personal, yes, this place could be that. Important, in terms of our lives or future, no. Still, throwing up a Fidelius over the area at least will help keep it hidden until we decide to let the world find it. I would like to come back, however, when the spell is done."
"Me too. The layout of the city is interesting. Maybe come back here every month or so to see how it's getting on and to renew the spell?"
"Agreed. For now, however, I promised we would join Emma and Jean in the tower tonight, so…" Winking at Harry, Ororo once more ascended into the sky. The two of them spent several moments setting the Fidelius up, with Ororo as the secret keeper, before flying away.
By the time they were back over Europe it was around ten at night, but Harry still inveigled Ororo to go driving with him for a bit. At night there wasn't nearly as much traffic on the highways, and Harry could really let his Huayra sing, blasting along at close to one hundred fifty miles per hour, with both of them enjoying the sense of speed, the windows down enough to let in some air.
They zoomed on until they were back in France, then once more pulled over, exited the car, and shrank it before once more taking to the sky. Flying as fast as a jet could, they soon found themselves passing through the area of protective magics that surrounded Camelot and its environs.
As they did Ororo giggled, a sound that made Harry grin in turn as he turned to her. "I just contrasted what coming home feels like to what I felt in that old city. I have to say I much prefer the feel of Camelot."
Harry nodded, making no move to ask how the two feelings differed. After all, he had a hard time describing in words the feel of Camelot these days too, and he was its headmaster. The spells and magic that thrummed through the air here were simply special; there was no other way to put it.
Heading down, the two of them moved to the headmaster's tower. At a wave of Harry's hand, the stones, the granite stones which Harry had transfigured to be clear, opened to let them through.
It was a cold night out, but not cold enough to make the two women sitting in small living area do more than mutter as Ororo and Harry entered. The reason for this, though, wasn't so much the lack of cold in the air, however, as they all had been in a seemingly heated discussion of some sort. A bottle of wine sat between them, and Emma's face was noticeably flushed.
Looking around, Harry spotted Jean asleep, and moved in that direction while Ororo moved to the two other ladies. "I thought we agreed to not drink alcohol as a sign of solidarity with Jean?"
"I wanted to celebrate my day's accomplishments. I was able to snatch up the medical sciences and agricultural sciences division of Ozcorp, and the FBI has already stopped looking at my hostile takeover askance. Why that is, I don't quite know just yet, but I will take it as a win. I also asked Jean if I could indulge before she went to bed. She was utterly exhausted by the time we finished talking with Betsy at dinner and had no problem with Hela and I having some wine."
At Ororo's interrogative look, Emma elaborated. "Ms. Steed is indeed up and about and properly repentant, and rather horrified, by what happened. Betsy recommended that she be left alone for a few weeks, though, before we approach her to offer her a job, and Charles agrees. He wants to have small follow up psychological sessions with her now, but he is raring to follow up on our suggestion that he start work on Banner."
"What tired her out?" Harry asked, before he was interrupted by Hela pointing a finger at him. There was a flare of magic, and Harry found himself sporting a beard for some reason. It wasn't a long one, only coming down to his pecs, or elaborate in coif, but it matched his hair for sheer wildness. "Um…why?"
"Hmm… Yes, much better," Hela purred, standing up and moving over to Harry while Ororo looked on, one eyebrow rising in surprise and amusement. Hela ran her fingers through Harry's beard, which, given it was a conjured item rather than a real part of him, Harry couldn't feel. "None of that boyish look to you now, Harry Potter. You look like a proper Jarl. No man should ever be found so clean-shaven, whatever modern humanity seems to think."
"Ehh, it does add a certain gravity to him, I'll admit. But the whole untamed thing does nothing for me. A nice, well cared-for beard, perhaps," Emma mused, looking at Harry thoughtfully, the wheels in her head blatantly turning as she contemplated the potential PR effects a new beard would cause. It would allow Harry to hide more of his expression for one, always a good thing in her opinion. "Oddly, it seems to bring out his eyes more. I have no idea why, but it does."
"Ahem, don't I get a vote on this?" Harry asked, somewhat amused even if he already knew the incoming answer.
"Why-ever would you?" Hela asked, sounding genuinely quizzical. But her eyes, those expressive violet orbs he had begun to truly adore, were glinting in amusement behind her half mask. Her dark green lips were also starting to twitch upwards into a smile.
Those lips looked imminently kissable, and Harry decided to follow up that thought. Leaning in, he moved to press his lips against Hela's. But she pulled back, putting a hand against his lips as she did, shaking her head and not quite glaring at him.
Harry knew she didn't like public displays of affection like that, but he hardly felt that the headmaster's tower, with only his other two lovers around, constituted being in public.
Hela, for her part, wasn't actually as irritated as she was trying to act. At this point she too wouldn't count being around Harry's other lovers as being in public. However, that didn't mean she wasn't enjoying playing hard to get or teasing him with it. Besides, it's probably good for him, she thought, mock-virtuously, and very, very fondly. He and Ororo hardly had any courtship time before becoming lovers, and Jean and Emma both also knew what they felt for him long before they took the plunge. No, my Seidr man, you might well have my heart already, but I, for certain, am going to make you work for my hand a little longer.
Before she could say anything, Ororo spoke up. "I believe that while Emma has a point about a beard oddly bringing out Harry's eyes for some reason, and I can understand where you are coming from culturally Hela dear, I have to throw up a veto on Harry having a beard right now."
Hela and Emma looked at her, and Ororo smiled. It was a slow, sensual, almost sinful thing, that smile, causing Emma to shiver and Hela, the somewhat flirtatious and very self-controlled goddess of Hel, to blush. "Oh, yes. You see, the problem with such things is they can chafe horribly during intimate moments. In particular, one whose ancient name you might recognize more than the modern euphemism, Hela. Do you know the meaning of the phrase, 'the lord's kiss?'"
Blushing now quite hotly, Hela looked over at Harry, who smiled back amiably, his emerald eyes lit up with delight. With Hela's hand still over his mouth, Harry decided to get in on the fun. Picturing a snake in his mind for a brief second, he activated his Parseltongue ability and hissed into her hand. "*It's one of my favorite bedroom activities; I love how the ladies taste.*
Hela shivered, a full body jolt going through her as the vibration touched her hand, and she realized what that could mean for more intimate moments. She pulled her hand back reluctantly, stammering slightly. "Ah, I, I see…" She moved backwards, flicking a finger at the conjured beard, which disappeared. "I knew there had to be some actual reason behind that rather than kowtowing to modern fashion."
"Mmmm. I had actually forgotten that point, Ororo," Emma murmured, staring at Harry through half-lidded eyes. "In fact, I think I might need a…refresher…on that topic."
Ororo chuckled throatily, but made no reply, instead moving forward to gently hug Hela, turning her away while Harry and Emma fell to flirting. "Are you going to spend the night, Hela?"
"You know I will not, sister," Hela replied, smiling at the invitation even so, her face slowly recovering from its earlier rush of blood. It meant a lot to her that now all three of the women already involved with Harry had asked that question at different points. Though the wording, of course, had been different, what the question meant had not changed, nor the underlying tone of welcome.
"I know," Ororo said simply, pulling the two of them to a halt by the bed. She moved one hand over Jean's brow, then down to her stomach, her hand glowing with a light blue color for a moment. Hela and Ororo both smiled as did the sleeping Jean. Then Ororo turned to back to Hela, her smile shifting slightly but still being one of warmth and welcome. "But it was important for me to let you know you were welcome to join us. And if you want to, Emma and I could hold off from…indulging, and we could all simply sleep."
"While the bed is, for certain, large enough for such a thing, I think that would be horribly rude of me to agree to," Hela drawled, having fully regained her balance by this point and her sense of propriety with it. "Don't put yourself out on my behalf, Ororo. I will simply return to my own bed. Besides, Illyana has attempted another magical trap on my door frame, and I would hate to disappoint the poor dear."
Laughing, Ororo led the way back to Emma and Harry, where Harry had somehow shifted from verbally flirting with Emma to tickling her foot as she tried to wriggle to escape. "Harry, Hela is going to leave us for the night."
Turning, Harry gently set Emma's leg back down on the sofa she had been laying out on before turning and cocking an arm towards Hela. "In that case, would the lady like sir to walk her to her chambers?"
"The lady certainly would," Hela replied with a laugh, linking her arm with his.
Emma might have objected to Harry leaving her like that before their game of flirtation and tickling could lead to where she wanted it to, but she then realized that this left her alone with Ororo. Ororo, who until that morning she hadn't seen awake and about for months, at least to her perspective. With that in mind, she leaped up off the sofa and, as Harry and Hela exited the headmaster's chamber, her lips were already pressing against Ororo's, aggressively pushing her back to the bed as their hands began to explore.
Neither Harry nor Hela noticed this at the moment, walking down the spiral staircase, arm in arm at first, then pulling one another closer, Harry's arms around Hela's shoulder and her arm around his waist. "You didn't have to leave, you know. You could have stayed. I promise we wouldn't have tried to do anything that would have made you uncomfortable."
"I know, Harry, but I am not quite ready to join you and your lovers in your bed," Hela replied, amused but also warmed to get the same invitation twice in one evening. "Besides, while you and Ororo might be able to control yourselves to that extent, I am not certain Emma would thank you for it. Besides, are you so eager to simply have me 'sleep' beside you?"
"If it would hasten the day I could call you my lady as well as milady, then yes," Harry said seriously, pulling them to a stop in front of the door leading out into the rest of the castle, his eyes locking on hers and his hands on Hela's shoulders.
That direct pronouncement hovered in the air between them, making the air thick with promise, and Hela replied by leaning in to kiss Harry. The kiss lasted for a while, and Hela felt Harry's hands move down her body to her skirt covered hips, resting there. They made no move to any other area, simply resting there, waiting, not clinging or keeping her, simply waiting with a certain amount of implication to their touch.
But Hela had a plan going forward, and she would stick with it. Even as she kissed back, refusing to deepen the kiss, but, making certain Harry could feel her desire too, she began to pull away, her hands falling from Harry's sides to his hands, pushing them away slightly. "No, my Seidr man. I can honestly say that I can see that time fast approaching, but even simply sleeping beside you is a step I will not take unless or until we are wed. If we eventually move from courting to marriage, I will walk down the aisle pure of mind and body."
She then chuckled, her lips quirking into a wry smile. "Or as pure as my mind can be, anyway, after spending so much time with Emma Frost. That woman's tongue and her flirtations are far more…direct and descriptive than I have ever heard before." Save perhaps my own mother, though thankfully she toned it down after she realized I was uncomfortable. Emma did no such thing, the shameless tart.
"As the lady desires. I won't ever push you to do anything you don't want to, Hela. You know that," Harry replied, and Hela could only nod, watching as he turned to open the door, leading them out into the corridor beyond.
OOOOOOO
The next day Harry, Ororo, and Jean were woken up, as had become almost normal, by a horde of kids led by the double teaming menaces of Illyana and Melody. Considering that Harry and Ororo were both still naked, however, the kids found their heads suddenly wrapped up in conjured cloth, which halted their progress towards the bed where the lovers were sleeping. Jean grumbled and groaned, her telekinetic powers getting away from her and lifting or pushing away at several bits of furniture as she rolled over, trying to go back to sleep.
Ororo, for her part, found one hand questing around in front of where she was laying on her side. She frowned as she realized that Emma wasn't there. "Emma?"
Behind her she felt Harry move from where he had been spooning with her from behind, one hand having just flashed up to conjure the wraps currently blocking the boys and girls from seeing things they weren't ready for. Well, a few of them might be ready for it, but I'm certainly not ready to allow them to, Harry thought before answering Ororo's question. "Emma had to leave early to get back to work. The time difference, remember?"
Groaning, Jean turned in their direction, almost glaring at her two lovers before she noticed both of them were naked. She then saw the kids gathered in a bumbling pile by the door and realized what must have happened. "I suppose I'll take care of the kids, though I think it's time to stop this whole morning attack thing they've got going on, Harry."
Jean paused as she tried to get out of bed, a somewhat laborious process given her stomach but nowhere near the task it would be in the months to come, a memory having struck her. "Oh, and Steve called us late last night. He and Dugan want to talk to you in person. Dugan apparently survived with a number of his people but not uninjured. I didn't get the impression that that was what they wanted to talk to you about, though."
Harry frowned at that as he cuddled into Ororo's naked body, watching Jean move around. A thrill of happiness went through him as he looked at her, seeing her belly and the happiness she seemed to radiate as one hand fell to her stomach. His thoughts, though, were more centered around what she had just said rather than watching her, as lovely a pastime as that was. "Hmm. I think I'll take Hela along to see what he wants, since I thankfully don't have any meetings this morning or afternoon. Steve and Hela got along well enough, and that will leave Ororo to spend time with the kids today as I did yesterday. What're you up to today?"
"Heading up to meet with Admiral Powers for a bit, then checking in with Polaris. Maybe take over from her some of the work she's been doing gathering resources for the robot factory in Fortress Mars. What are our priorities there, by the way?"
Sighing faintly, Harry extricated himself from around Ororo, who didn't seem to want to let him go just yet, mumbling and trying to reclaim control of his arms, but failing. "Ten percent of each batch to go to aiding in creating more, thirty percent to join the efforts to get the derelict fleet back online, ten percent to join Carol and her teams on our latest acquisitions, and ten percent to helping mine out the Ravenspires, though depending on Lorna's work that may not be necessary. The last twenty to be put to work on a project Reed is coming up with out in Jupiter's atmosphere."
"The hydrogen harvester. Yeah, I saw his designs for that. It should help us run the fleet we've already got, but we are still going to build arc reactors into our own ships, right?" Jean asked, moving over to gently but very firmly push the kids back out the door one after another, murmuring about how their timing was bad.
Once in the stairwell, with Ororo now covered by a blanket and Harry wearing pants if not a shirt, she pulled off the wraps over their heads, sending them on their way. She did note that Illyana was looking a little shifty as they went, however, and knew that Harry might have to watch out for a retaliatory prank at some point.
She also spotted that Illyana's hair was streaked with grey, and her eyebrows seemed to be missing. The grey in her hair was equally evident in her clothing.
"That's right. The arc reactors represent a major difference in power levels and will make our home-built ships far tougher than their Kree, Skrull, or Shi'ar counterparts. But the only ship in the current fleet we'll add one to will be the Doom Bringer, since it's lacking a main generator at the moment."
Nodding, Jean pushed the last kid out of the room to let Ororo and Jean get dressed. Below, at the entrance to the stairwell, she found Hela, looking pristine as always and rather amused as she looked at the children. "I warned you all, did I not? You need to choose when to launch these dawn attacks of yours more wisely, lest your targets no longer find them entertaining enough to indulge." Her voice was ripe with smug satisfaction at being able to say 'I told you so' so rightly.
"I'll get you…" Illyana promised, glowering slightly at the Asgardian, her Russian accent thicker than normal. "One of these days I will prank you. You won't know when, you won't know where, but one of these days."
"Hah! Child, I am a goddess, one with the blood of the trickster god Loki in my veins. You will never overcome me, no matter your enthusiasm. You are simply out of your league," Hela replied haughtily, more to egg the child on more than anything else. She truly enjoyed the fire in her Seidr man's little apprentice and thought that Illyana had a bright future ahead of her given how much control she already had over her magic.
"And on that note, I think I am definitely right in saying we need to separate the two of you lest the castle suffer for it. Hela, Jean said Steve called last night, and wants to talk to me about something. I'd like to have you along if that's all right?" Harry asked, stepping in before Illyana's eagerness to prank Hela got the best of her here and now.
Hela nodded agreement, wondering what Steve Rogers had found. The man had impressed her, and she doubted he would ask for aid unless he truly needed it.
Seeing her expression, Jean elaborated on what she had told Harry earlier. "Dugan was part of the conversation, and he said they had something they wanted someone with your unique skill set to help them hunt down."
Both Harry and Hela's eyes narrowed at that, and they glanced at one another, saying as one, "Magic, then."
Thinking about it, Jean had to agree. By this point Ororo had joined them, and all of them and the children moved down to the dining hall, joining a rather raucous breakfast, since most of the other castle's inhabitants were there, including the Custodes, all of them eating an energy-enhancing meal prior to resuming their training after yesterday's day off. Even Garm, hardly one of nature's early risers, was there, and he hurried over from where he had been speaking to Dani and Rahne to nudge his muzzle into his mistress's shoulder. "Mistress."
"Prepare for a bit of an outing, Garm. Harry and I might have need of your nose," Hela said, her lips twitching as she stroked her vassal's neck fur. "You'll have to leave off on teaching young Rahne for the day."
Garm's lips drew back into a truly wolfish smile. "Of course, mistress, and I do not even have to worry about the young puppy backsliding. Young Dani is going to take her out to teach her how to hunt in the human manner today. Coming at the same issue from both sides, as it were."
Behind the giant wolf, Rahne gave Dani the latest in what was no doubt a series of betrayed looks at her friend's complicity in her 'torture.'
"Sound thinking," Ororo said approvingly, moving around them and now leading the way to where the younger children were all sitting down. She would not be going with Harry today, instead heading to the Savage Land to meet with Shanna and Logan. She wanted to make certain that the original inhabitants of the Savage Land understood what would happen when Harry began to bring in groups of workers and settlers. The last thing they needed was a culture clash or argument over settlement zones turning bloody.
About forty minutes after eating, Hedwig returned to Harry's shoulder after having being sent to Steve to get the lay of the land. When Harry held out a hand to Hela, however, she shook her head resolutely. "Garm and I will teleport ourselves after you, thank you very much. Dealing with your apparition method once was more than enough!"
Garm nodded along with his mistress's declaration. A wolf's stomach was not meant to turn like a pup going down a hill as far as he was concerned.
Harry shrugged. He could have used Ororo's method of teleportation, he supposed, if Steve had been able to give them the name of the place or its exact location in terms of longitude and latitude. But he hadn't been able to. The name of the place was just Installation One, and that wasn't definitive enough even if Steve had been able to tell them what state of America the place was in. So, with a final smile, Harry went ahead, teleporting into a nearly bare office room somewhere.
It looked like the prototypical office cubicle, with the only thing sticking out of place being Steve clad in his Captain America garb. The two men shook hands, and, after telling Steve that Hela would be along in a moment, Harry asked if anything had changed in how SHIELD was being phased out.
"Not much, no. Nick is going to be kept on as a kind of special security advisor to the president, maybe even part of his official cabinet. He might have dropped the ball badly, but he knows where a lot of bodies are buried and is still heavily respected in the espionage world," Steve replied with a grimace, as he still had issues with what his old comrade had been up to. "But it's been decided to not even attempt to build up another agency like SHIELD. Not here in the US, anyway. I understand that the UN security council might be thinking about creating a similar agency, billing it as part of Interpol, to handle super-powered threats. But I haven't been brought into the loop on that, so it looks like me, E, and Natasha, at least, might be going to work for you once the dust settles."
As Steve finished speaking there was a blinding flash, and Hela and Garm appeared, the giant wolf having shrunk himself down by half in order to move around more easily. Steve looked at the scarred wolf, then shrugged his shoulders before bowing formally to Hela. "Lady Hela, I'm happy to see you again, though your companion might be a little off-putting to some of the workers here."
"Captain, you are looking well. I hope to see you working more closely with Guardian in the future now that your prior employers have fallen to the natural end to those who cannot contain their own hubris," Hela replied, smiling at the man.
While Harry sent her a rather wry look, Steve made a noncommittal noise to that, gesturing for them to follow him out the door. "I'm honestly looking forward to that too, though beyond using me as a trainer we haven't talked about my role in his organization. Still, we can have that discussion later. For now, follow me."
The two of them moved through a long simple metal corridor as Steve explained where they were. As Harry had known from Hedwig, they were now somewhere in New Mexico, way and hell away from anything. The whole installation was a secret base of SHIELD's.
"Are we talking some kind of Area 51 concept?" Harry asked suspiciously. "Phoenix has told me about the number of theories behind that name."
"Yes and no. Yes, it is sort of like what popular fiction says Area 51 is like, but it actually isn't all that impressive. Well, not in the main, anyway. SHIELD had a lot of items and things that came from various raids and encounters, but most of it has already been analyzed and taken apart. Nothing that is too different from what you've seen in the past or have access to, I have no doubt. The only thing that is different, the thing that I called you here for, is the exception to that rule, the thing this place was built to house in the first place."
As he spoke, Steve led the way out of the corridor onto a metal walkway that proved to be a gantry that circled around a large, almost empty, warehouse sized room. Harry immediately noticed the number of odd devices scattered throughout the room. Half of them looked like scanners; the other half he didn't recognize offhand.
Hawkeye met them at the stairs leading down to the floor, nodding at the newcomers and bowing, as Steve had told him to Hela, though he didn't quite know why. "Guardian, Lady Hela, um…, giant dog who I haven't been introduced to."
"The name is Garm, human. Call me dog again and I will get to see what your flesh tastes like," Garm growled, sniffing and moving around the room, his hackles rising and not entirely because of Hawkeye's unintended insult.
"It says something disturbing about my life that a talking giant wolf isn't the most unusual thing I've seen. Not even in just the past week. Thank God I'm retiring after this," Hawkeye muttered, shaking his head and gesturing for Hela and Guardian to follow him. "Okay, so this was basically a vault and a lab rolled into one. This place was kept so secret even Steve here didn't know where this installation was until after yesterday. I knew about it because Nick demanded my help in making certain the security on the place was up to stopping anything we could envision. Unfortunately, the work on said security wasn't finished before the ball went up on AIM's assault on us."
"Did AIM suborn someone here like they did on the helicarrier and elsewhere?" Harry asked, frowning and moving over to one of the devices he recognized as a scanner. "And what were you studying?"
Steve and Hawkeye exchanged a glance, and Steve replied. "We have no idea what its real name is, but we've been working under the assumption that it is either a magical device or an artifact from an alien presence left on Earth thousands of years ago. I first ran into it when the Red Skull attempted to use it to create a new form of weapon, including a flying fortress during World War II. The teams that found me also found it."
Now it was Hela and Harry's turn to exchange a look, while Garm continued to sniff around the room, zeroing in quickly on a large square indent on the floor below the series of scanners that Harry had been looking at. It looked as if something had sat there in the concrete and had been held there by iron clamps of some sort. "Okay, that tells me what you were looking into here. So, what did this thing look like?"
"It was a cube about as large as my hands put together to a side, and it glowed a deep blue, and we called it the Tesseract. It seemed to give off limitless energy all the time and was only quiescent when stuck in granite. Then the sides touching the rock would go dormant," Steve replied.
Steve was interrupted then as Garm spoke up. "Mistress, this smells of magic, right enough, but also with the stink of Lord Odin's work." While as ambivalent towards Old One Eye as his mistress, Garm never allowed that to enter his words when speaking about the King of Asgard.
Hela frowned in thought, moving over to join Garm and waving her hands in the air for a few seconds, her fingers flaring orange. "I know little enough about Odin's works beyond their efficacy. Still, let us see…" Long lines of power came from those orange fingers, cascading down into an intricate web as she tried to determine what had been kept here.
Harry knew that having too many sensor-type magics cast on the same area would muddy the issue, so he stayed back and let Hela work. That problem would have only been exacerbated since their magical schools were also very different. Instead he continued to talk to Steve and Hawkeye, getting a feel of the history of the thing and what had happened here.
The Red Skull, it turned out, had developed a way of siphoning off the energy to power the weapons of the first iteration of Hydra, coming up with crude energy weapons of all sizes. They hadn't actually been good enough to be much better than normal weapons, but his plot to create bombers able to reach America from Germany and to drop what Steve called plague bombs on their cities could well have forced America out of the war. Steve had put a stop to that at the expense of his own life, or so he had thought, falling into the far northern ocean and literally being frozen alive.
Hawkeye, however, maintained that the weapon concept was one SHIELD actually hadn't been interested in. They had numerous other ways to get weapons just like the ones HYDRA had created, after all, and many even better. No, it was the energy the cube gave off and the odd effects it could have that they were most interested in. For example, many of the scientists working on the project had discovered that if you passed the light from the object through a series of filters, you could produce different effects. Some of them were intensely interesting scientifically, though why sort of went over Harry's head. Other aspects of letting the energy of the cube out through similar controlled experiments, however, he understood easily.
From there Hawkeye explained what had happened here. According to him, the base had been attacked by someone matching the description of Mysterio, a super-powered villain who specialized in creating illusions and manipulating the senses. They had been aided by someone Hawkeye had recognized as a former SHIELD agent, who had been assigned to this base before he had begun to exhibit an almost manic interest in the Tesseract. He had been transferred and kept under watch, but apparently not close enough, or he had suborned his watchers. The man had shown up here dressed in an AIM uniform minus the helmet and leading the group of AIM soldiers.
The Avengers' sharpshooter shook his head irritably. "Even with MODOK gone, Aim must still have bases somewhere out there, and, in the confusion of yesterday, they got in, escaped with the Tesseract, and were gone before anyone knew it."
"Tell me more about this Mysterio character," Hela ordered, moving back towards the stair up to the gantry. "And do you have video recordings of the attack?"
"Yes, but it's not very helpful. Mysterio and the traitor somehow blocked the cameras from recording his progress through the facility, and none of the workers elsewhere in the facility saw anything," Hawkeye replied grumpily. "We only know what went on in this chamber because there were several carefully hidden cameras no one but Fury and I knew about."
Still, Hawkeye was able to give Harry a summary of Mysterio's powers and his history, though nothing in that indicated any connection to AIM. Harry wondered if MODOK had somehow suborned him like he had several SHIELD agents throughout the organization.
The three men retreated to a small corner of the hanger, and Hawkeye brought up the images from the security cameras. Harry watched in silence as Mysterio, a man of medium height and build dressed in a large opaque helmet, green tights, and a purple cape, walked into the room. There were a series of multi-colored flashes from his hands as the various technicians and scientists noticed his arrival.
The few guards in the actual hanger quickly brought up their weapons. There was no warning, no shout of halt, they simply opened fire. But not on him, but on each other, while the scientists and the others seemed to just be unable to see, holding their hands up to their eyes and crying aloud in distress as they went to their knees. Then the SHIELD traitor came in followed by a few more AIM troopers.
A second later Harry grit his teeth as the Aim troopers moved in, killing the few remaining guards. After that they proved they weren't interested in taking any prisoners or even creating converts. They systematically moved around the room, putting bullets in each of the technicians and scientists. "How many dead?"
"Everyone that was in the room at the time. They also removed the bodies and cleaned up after themselves. If not for the two hidden cameras we wouldn't have discovered anything was wrong until whoever the government decided would take over here arrived, since the exterior guards don't have any interaction with the techs once they are inside this room," Hawkeye replied, looking away. He had seen this recording more than enough times already; he didn't need to watch it again. "As it is, we found out about the attack far too late to trail them. All the research on the Tesseract itself is gone, both from the computers here and on the helicarrier."
Frowning, Harry pushed away from the table where the video had been playing, moving over to join Hela as he considered the idea that AIM would have tossed MODOK and who knows how much of their dwindling resources away as a diversion. Thinking that unlikely, he considered how they were going to find the Tesseract in question. Steve was right to call us in on this. If it's something magical and something connected to the Asgardians, then I sure as hell don't want to leave it in AIM's hands. But how to find the bloody thing is the question of the hour.
Looking around, Harry held out a hand in front of him so the others behind him couldn't see, conjuring a small needle. "Point me Tesseract." As Harry had expected, the spell didn't work, the needle simply going in circles. So, either magically protected, out of range, or the name alone isn't enough for me to use. Darn it. Wish there was a way to tell which it was, but there are other ways to go about this.
By the time Harry reached her, Hela had finished her work and looked like she was mad enough to spit nails. "Garm was right. There was an Asgardian and, more importantly, the Old One's magical signature on the object, whatever it was. Further, I think it is a container of some kind. I don't know what it contains, but it must contain an item of some power."
Looking around and seeing that only Steve and Hawkeye were close enough to overhear, Harry whispered, "Like the belt?"
Hela twitched, then slowly nodded as she canceled her magical spells, the orange web disappearing as she stepped back. "Something of that nature, though I think more powerful. Yet that is even more of a guess than the idea it contains something at all. Your turn, my Seidr man," she finished, bowing and waving her hand sardonically towards the area she had been examining.
Before he began his own magical investigation, however, Harry looked at Garm. "Anything you can tell us?"
"Would you like to know what everyone here had for their last meals?" Garm asked archly, lips curling back to reveal his fangs. "I can tell you how many people were here—I can pick out individual scents. I can tell how old they were, what they ate and drank, even their health in some cases. Yet I cannot tell you which scent is whose. The scent of the dead has permeated the other scents too much."
"Hela, if you could go with Garm and start looking around the facility, maybe he can find something to narrow it down?" As Garm nodded, Harry went on, his eyes lighting up with mage sight. "I'll meet you outside."
About ten minutes later Harry walked out of the complex, finding the sun almost directly above them by this point. Around the small complex was desert in every direction. Nothing else: no landmark, no road, no nothing. SHIELD had put the complex here to hide it and had brought in teams of workmen via helicopter to set it up, with none of them even knowing how long it would take them to get here, let alone having anything remotely like a starting point. Only the ten helicopter pilots had known where it was, so how the traitor had figured out how to find it again after being transferred away was a mystery for now.
Hela looked over at him from where she was standing beside the small, if heavily guarded, gate leading to the helicopter pad which should have been the only way in or out. "Any luck?"
Shaking his head, Harry moved over to her, once more whispering and covering them with a Muffilatio. "I found some overtones of earth magic when I used a spell Ororo taught me from Gaea, but nothing conclusive about what the Tesseract was. I saw some of what you talked about: the magical signature the Tesseract left behind does match some of what I saw in Thor's cave. I can tell you, though, that Mysterio, at least, didn't use magic. He used some kind of air-based assault to go with his light show. The light show was a feint to cover whatever agent he placed in the air circulation system. There was no other magical signature in there, and Hawkeye's people found a small canister hidden in the air ducts. But, regardless, I can't track him or the Tesseract. He's out of range of any spells I could use to do so."
Garm nosed his way into the conversation quite literally, placing his snout on his mistress's shoulder. "I can't make out any scents out here. Whoever it was somehow hid their smell after leaving the building. There is a scent of rubber leading off into the desert, but it too ends abruptly and then is replaced by the smell of steel and oil for a bit. One of your flying machines, I'd wager."
"Damn it…" Harry thought hard for a few minutes, then shook his head. "I can't think of any way to track them, not without some kind of starting point. If we had come in right after the attack, I think they'd still be in range of my spells, but point-me and other tracking spells can't cover a lot of terrain."
"Ghigau, perhaps?" Hela asked, using Dani's code name here in public, despite the spell covering them. Never hurt to be too careful, after all. "From what I understand her blood gifts could show us what occurred here easily. As for the Tesseract itself, I might be able to divine a ritual that could point me in the direction of the nearest Asgardian artifact, but it would take days, perhaps, to set up."
"Not if they left by the air… Ghigau could, perhaps, give us a direction, though." With that idea in mind, Harry called in the young Cheyenne. After arriving via house-elf express, she was indeed able to use her powers to replay what happened here, using the emotional imprint left by the attackers and replaying the image using her mutant powers like it was a 3-D video.
To no one's surprise, the helicopter seemed to head out over the border into Mexico. Assuming they wouldn't deviate from their nape of the earth escape path, the Custodes and the two Avengers took one of Harry's magic carpets after them, to the shock of even the jaundiced Hawkeye. He couldn't stop staring over the side of the carpet, shaking his head and muttering under his breath about 'physics getting a middle finger' to the others' amusement.
Every few minutes Harry and Hela would stop the carpet and recast any sensor spells they could, one after another, but it was the ones Harry had learned from Ororo which eventually began to get a response. "I've got something," he reported, several hours after they had left. They had passed through all of Mexico now and had moved into Venezuela and beyond, but Harry began to turn them away from the straight route they had been following. They eventually began to head out into the Pacific ocean, where, after another hour, he pointed them down to an innocuous oil tanker or some kind moving over the water away from South America.
"How are they not seeing us?" Hawkeye asked, scowling as he readied his bow.
"I've covered us with several spells to hide us from detection, and we haven't been moving fast enough to dispel them. Think of them as a 'somebody else's problem field' if you have good taste in books," Harry muttered, then looked over at the others. "I'll head down first and disable any lifeboats I see so they can't get away, but once we are all moving around and actually attacking them the spells I've covered us with will dissipate. Hawkeye, you stay up here and provide overhead cover."
As Hawkeye grunted in affirmation of his orders, Harry turned to the other members of the party. "Cap, Ghigau, you start from the front of the ship. Hela and Garm, if you could start at the back. Keep in mind, everyone, we need to watch out for Mysterio's powers. We don't know enough about them for me to prepare any protective spells, but I would recommend falling back and letting me or Hela deal with him just in case there is a magical or supernatural element to his repertoire."
Harry moved the carpet around the ship, letting off Steve and Dani at the front. Once they were hidden there, he moved to the back, where he, Hela, and Garm got off, before ordering the carpet to hover over the ship.
Almost immediately as he landed onto the ship, Garm took a deep sniff and nodded sharply. "Most of the smells of those who left the hanger-place are here, including one whose scent is very odd. It is an almost overpowering one, something like wolfsbane trying to warp my senses."
"That would be Mysterio. I think I will handle him. I would like to show him what true magic and trickery can do instead of his little toys," Hela said, sneering in disdain for her future foe's parlor tricks. Illusions were all well and good, but the sheer posturing the knave seemed to perform as he worked sat ill with her. Hmm… I wonder which parent I have to thank for my disdain for such?
"Only if you get to him first, milady," Harry rejoined, then quickly stole a kiss before moving deeper through the ship as Hela spluttered behind him, both from Harry's stolen kiss and the outright challenge.
Garm huffed in amusement at the continued mating ritual between his lady and the Seidr man, but stopped as she slapped him lightly on his side and gave him a not so insincere glare. "None of that, my wolf. I get enough of that from my friends to put up with it from you." In response Garm bowed his head for a moment in obedience, but his lips spread in an unrepentant lupine grin at seeing his normally poised mistress so flustered.
Leaving the others behind, Harry moved unseen along the deck to the four visible lifeboats, noting things that stood out of place in comparison to the rest. Most of the ship's deck and outer hull seemed as if it was meant to look like a normal tanker, but there were places that differed. The biggest being the fact that several doors leading into the tanker were out of place, and there weren't any crewmen out on deck. As he pushed forward toward the front, he spotted two men on the bridge, but neither were facing in his direction.
Once he had disabled the four lifeboats by simply using a cutting spell to gouge out their sides, Harry moved toward one of the doors, looking inside the round window at head height. Directly inside there was a large guard room, but there were only two men there, both of them helmetless but wearing the rest of a usual AIM trooper's uniform. They sat behind heavy weapons, facing the door, but that was no real threat to Harry. Still, he knew they were as ready as they could ever be, so he sent up a flare into the sky, letting the others know they could attack now.
At the front of the ship Captain America exploded into action so quickly Ghigau could only blink behind her mask in shock. He launched himself up, grabbing the edge of the bridge's view-ports. She came back online fast enough to shoot out the windows right before he smashed into them, thrusting through the glass and trusting to his shield and suit to protect himself from cuts.
Inside the bridge were not two people, as Harry had seen, but five. All of them were armed with pistols, but Steve dealt with two of them by throwing his shield so that it quickly ricocheted between them, then was in among the other three before they could bring up their weapons. By the time Ghigau had used her anti-grav boots to join him, Steve had put all five of them down and unconscious. "Damn…"
Steve ignored the young woman for the moment, moving over to the bodies. "None of these people have the electronics surgically inserted in them that our traitors did. These are either true believer AIM troops or mercenaries. Hopefully they will be able to help us with our inquiries."
"You're a Terry Pratchett fan?" Ghigau asked, now having thrown off her shock. She moved to the door, opening it carefully and then firing down the thin stairwell at a trio of men coming up at them. From that position they had no room to dodge and no cover, and so went down one after another to her plasma rifle with almost casual ease. Pulling out Sigyn's gift, she moved down the stairwell as Captain America fell in behind her.
"Who's Terry Pratchett?" the super-soldier asked quizzically, his eyes never straying from their task of sweeping the area for hostiles.
"Eh, tell you later," she replied before she went into a forward roll as two more men came out from a doorway halfway down the stairwell. Behind her Steve smashed into them shield first, taking them out within seconds while she speared a man coming up from further into the ship. Pulling the mystical spear out, she felt it morph in her hand into a bow and flipped up an arrow, firing into the larger hallway the stairwell had led to towards a new batch of foes.
At the back of the ship Garm and Hela had disdained looking for an entrance. Instead the dread wolf of Niflheim had simply torn open a section of the hull before leaping down into the deck below with his mistress following. They found themselves in the center of four slowly activating Hulkbusters, all of which looked badly damaged but still operational. Or they were until Garm and Hela finished them off with almost casual disdain.
Looking around, Hela frowned, one hand glowing orange for a moment before her frown turned into a smile of satisfaction. "I have it now. It is actually further back than our current position. Follow me."
Above them Harry had dealt with the two guards facing him, moving deeper into the ship while leaving the heavy weapons they had been holding on the ground with the bodies of their former wielders. Neither of them were of any interest to him, and he wanted to keep moving. Surprisingly, however, he didn't run into any more opposition until he found the doorway leading into the room where Ghigau and Cap had just dealt with the few remaining attackers.
Several men had tried to move through the emergency escape nearer the center of the ship, but Hawkeye had cut them down from on high using his bow and arrows. Despite that, for all but Hela and Garm the battle had been rather anti-climactic, and even then the latter pair would have argued that their part had been equally lackluster up to this point if asked. Yet, for the two of them, it became fraught rather quickly when they entered the hallway leading further back from the room with the four Hulkbusters.
Several steps into the hallway the lights in the ceiling went out, and smog began to seep up from air ducts set low on the walls. "Back, Garm!" Hela barked, knowing that his heightened senses would make him more susceptible to Mysterio's 'powers' then she was, even offset by his supernatural endurance. Garm obeyed instantly, leaping back only to stare in shock as the door they had just come through closed, separating them.
At the same time, however, Hela touched her mask lightly, and the mask, a thing which looked like simple cloth, flowed under her touch, transfiguring on her command. It covered her mouth and nose now, protecting them from whatever might be in the smog. Of course, it did this by not letting in anything, but as an Asgardian deity, Hela didn't actually have to breathe, so that hardly mattered.
A pompous voice came out of nowhere, hidden in the darkness of the hallway and the smog. "I am afraid I do not know your name, milady, yet it hardly matters. You are obviously one of the fools attacking my ship, and, as such, I will have to deal with you as an enemy. Take heart, however. At least it will be quick, and you will never see it coming."
Hela sneered, her fingers moving while she stepped soundlessly to one side. For those with eyes to see it, they might have noticed the brief flare of magic there as Hela wove a spell of illusion, but Mysterio had no such eyes. Ironic, rather, for one that depended on disrupting his opponents' senses so much.
A second later small glowing balls of energy of some kind Hela had not seen before passed through her former position. Hela frowned at that, wondering what they were. They hadn't looked very dangerous, but why take wounds one didn't have to?
"You seem to prefer illusions and mist shapes, 'Mysterio.' I must wonder though, will you like mine?" Hela said with a pensive tone, her voice muffled by her mask. As she spoke she also projected her voice so that it seemed to come from several different directions, filling the passage and further muddying her foe's ability to pinpoint her position by sound.
Mysterio was standing by the far end of the passage, but he immediately began to move back into the room he had just exited, surprisingly taking her threats seriously from the get go, which Hela hadn't been expecting from him. The illusionist launched several small devices into the air which began to emit loud disorienting sounds, barely discernible to a human's hearing range, but which would have made a normal human wince under the sensations of vertigo or migraine pains.
As if that wasn't enough of an onslaught, small vents in his suit began to disgorge more gas, this time containing a far more powerful hallucinogenic compound mixed in then what he'd previously used. It would have had any human who breathed it under the equivalent of an intense LSD trip within seconds of exposure. As a finale to his array of attacks, Mysterio fired off a series of flares designed to make flashbangs green with envy.
While the gas and much of the sound-based attacks were worthless against Hela, the strobing lights invading her vision after the dark of the passage were a bit more successful, blinding her for a few seconds. Fortunately for Hela, she was already hidden under a set of illusions, and so the disadvantage was countered before it had even existed. She let her spells cover her advance even as she tried to ignore her stomach's attempt to come up her mouth like she'd just smelled the breath of a man eating Troll.
But Mysterio quickly saw through the illusionary 'Hela,' said mirage not casting a shadow, and the villain leaped away in a rather amusingly impressive turn of speed. Again he activated several more auditory attacks while remotely starting a fog device, filling the now dark room with smoke that added to the still present gas to further block his enemy's line of sight. Sounds of footsteps echoed through the room, along with the actual attacks, and he used it all to cover his steps.
Circling through the chaos he had caused, Mysterio inched closer to the image of someone moving through the smoke until he was coming up from behind with a stinger of some kind coming out of his suit's wrist. With a sharp thrust it impacted the neck of the woman who was attempting to fight him, and he pulled back his arm as he watched her stagger to her knees.
Then he gasped as the woman suddenly dissipated into a thousand shrikes, flying every which way and blocking his view. "Wh, how!?"
Hands seemed to grab at him from below, and he quickly pulled back to get a better view of this new development. Looking down he nearly screamed in fear and utterly failed to resist a start of horror, because there, on the floor, was a body of a woman. But, unlike the rather elegant if deadly woman he had been fighting, this one looked like she had been dead for decades as her pale, nearly fleshless hands reached for him with jagged nails to scratch. "What is this!?" Mysterio shouted in panic while checking his helmet's integrity, fearing that he had been injected with something like his own concoction in turn.
Nothing answered him, but the undead woman at his feet wasn't alone for long. Backing away from her, Mysterio nearly stumbled into another. He lashed out, knocking the undead thing's head off, and shouted as more undead zombies came out of the smoke. "How are you doing this!?"
Soon there were too many zombies around him for Mysterio to move, and he found his hands and feet locked in grips of bone tipped iron. Mouths filled with yellowed and jagged teeth opened as Mysterio shouted and screamed, trying to beg for mercy, for the woman to call her creatures off, for anything to come and save him. Only silence answered him as the zombies began to bite through his suit.
Yet Mysterio did receive mercy of a sort. Just as the fact that he felt no pain from the bites began to register, a sword punched through his back and out of his chest in a spray of blood, killing him nearly instantly.
"Little fool. True magic can always overcome such cheap parlor tricks," Hela said scornfully, the slick sound of metal through flesh the only noise in the room as Hela pulled her blade from Mysterio's body.
With Mysterio dealt with, Hela used her magic to dissipate the smog filling the room and hall before she opened the door to let her vassal assure himself of her good health. Once that was done, the goddess ordered Garm to remain where he was for now and guard against potential ambush as she began to investigate the room Mysterio had been in. To one side she found a brace of beds with a dead body sprawled atop one of them, the hole in the corpse's head and the burned flesh around it evidence of a plasma pistol shot.
Looking at what remained of his face, Hela decided he must have been the traitor who had led AIM to the installation that had housed the Tesseract. A falling out amongst thieves, I suppose. A warrior dies once, but a traitor dies a thousand deaths, to use a phrase of old. Rather poetic considering the fraud I dealt with outside, Hela thought. She then moved on without further thought on the fate of either man's soul. As Emma was so fond of saying, 'It was not Hela's problem.'
In the far corner of the room there was a simple box made of cold iron about waist high. After casting a series of scanning spells to possibly ascertain the contents of the container, Hela concluded it was safe to open. As Hela pulled the lid up, she found the Tesseract before her and paused, staring down into the now exposed blue light of the strange object.
It was indeed a cube about as large on a side as her two hands held together and seemed to be made of some clear crystal, or would appear so to anyone but a magic user. To Hela, however, the thing practically thrummed with magic of several different types which had merged into one distinctly odd, bizarre mystical amalgamation.
"Very, very strange…" she murmured her, voice echoing loud in the room.
Suddenly an incredible urge to touch the object befell her, to hold it in her hands, to reach out with her magic, even. Acting on the impulse, Hela began to extend a hand forward, only to rear back, fury etching her features as a purple glow appeared around her outstretched hand. Hela had recognized the subtle touch on her mind there, the vile taint that even now attempted to reestablish their loathsome dominance over her mind and self. The Shadows! Is this some artifice of theirs? But then, what could it be!?
Behind her she could hear Garm and others enter, so she whirled around to face them with her eyes wild and her hand still encased in a purple light, spell ready to cast. "Hold!" she bellowed, her power echoing in her words and halting the party in its tracks. "Do not come any closer to this thing! It has some kind of compulsion on it. The spell was even strong enough to entice me. If I had not recognized the foul touch I might have succumbed."
Harry, who had just entered the room with Garm ahead of the others, frowned in concern for Hela, but he nodded to everyone to heed Hela's warning as he moved forward. As Harry stepped forward cautiously he didn't feel the compulsion Hela had warned them of, but he still stopped where she stood, placing a gentle hand on Hela's shoulder as she turned back to glare at the thing in question. "The Shadows again?"
"Aye. I recognized it, Harry! I felt their foul touch in my mind again, in my very mind!" Hela snapped, still looking very jittery on top of her understandable fury. The jittery, almost jumpy look was one he hadn't seen on her before, and one he didn't like to see there in the slightest, to put it mildly.
"I can't sense anything like that, which could be down to my unique method of defense combined with the fact that this is a magical spell rather than a sentient attack. But I will certainly take your word for it being there where you are concerned, milady," Harry said soothingly, letting his fingers gently stroke up her neck. It was a sign of how strong her distress was that Hela didn't object to this touch despite being in a somewhat public setting.
"Thank you," she murmured, leaning into the touch for a moment. "Before the trap sprung I could tell it was something like a container, and then there is what Garm said, that it had the smell of Odin's magic to it."
"This could be another example of something Odin left behind. Something he hid which the Shadows found later on and hid even further. But instead of defending it physically and magically in a very direct manner, they decided on subtlety this time."
"That, that makes sense," Hela replied decisively, then straightened her back, deliberately moving away from Harry's soothing of her neck. But even as she did so, Hela reached down to take his hand in hers, as much to retain his supportive contact as to negate the sting of her ending the moment. "I'm guessing it is a spell to force any Asgardian to touch it, but to what end, do you think?"
"A curse of some kind with a compulsion element, possibly," Harry said, activating his mage sight to more deeply examine the cube as he stared at the Tesseract. "The energy it's giving off seems to be a byproduct, I think, of several spells working together. And…I think that it is acting like a, a portable ley line, somehow? Or something in it is calling upon a portion of Gaea's magic."
"Something inside it, yes." Now fully recovered, Hela backed away, letting her own magic sight cover her physical senses. "And I can see numerous layers of runes there."
"Yes. The more I look at it, the more it resembles a puzzle box, a magical Rubik's cube, almost. You have to manipulate each layer of the magic in a set way to unlock them and get to the next plane, while still manipulating and controlling the first. And now that I know what to look for, I can see that there are a lot of what I call Shadow runes, though I hesitate to say it's a truly separate runic language from what you've been able to explain," Harry said, straining his mage sight to see the incredibly tiny runes worked into the Tesseract.
"Yes, and numerous twisted Blessings too, warped and skewed most maliciously. I think getting to the bottom of this is an issue we need to work on, Harry Potter," Hela said, her voice ringing with certainty. "Whatever is within that thing is something we absolutely must get a hold of."
"I…agree," Harry replied cautiously, meeting her piercing gaze evenly. "Though that doesn't mean we have to be hasty about it. I think we'll take it up to the time chamber and work on it, just the two of us, for as long as it takes to do it safely."