The Warling

Chapter Seven

* = See notes at end for a fuller description of events that happened in Agents of SHIELD

Chapter Seven

Mira was as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof as she was entered into the office building, and she prayed that Thor wouldn’t be able to recognise her with altered looks.

The illusion she cast on herself had changed gradually until she now had chestnut hair, a few added inches in height, a fuller, more rounded figure and olive skin. He had known her for thirty years though, so she had to be prepared for the possibility that he could see through her disguise.

She knew it would be a death sentence if he found out the truth, but she had to risk it. She had to know if Loki was okay or if Odin had killed him for his actions on Earth.

The meeting took place in a rather plush but small office in central London, owned by STRIKE, the British sister organisation to SHIELD. The offices were empty now, since STRIKE too had been infiltrated by Hydra, but these offices had never been uncovered as a STRIKE subsidiary, so it was a good meeting place for her to use.

Thor was waiting as she arrived and he smiled as she approached. She almost dropped her files.

“Here, let me help.”

He came over and took the armful of files, notepads and supplies from her, keeping them while she unlocked the main door. They picked the nicest of the three offices inside to work from and Thor placed her belongings on a coffee table in the corner of the office, by some sofas.

He looked very different in human clothing but she seemed frozen to the spot.

“It’s all right, I don’t bite,” he teased her. “Come and sit down.”

She managed to get her legs to work and took a seat on the adjacent sofa.

“My name is Mira,” she said, falling back into her professional persona.

“I know, they told me. You wanted to ask me about our language?”

“Actually, I’ve been trying to decrypt the Dark Elves language. I was hoping you could help with that.”

“Of course. Where should we start?”

Mira shuffled through the folders until she found the pictures of the ship fragments, some of which appeared to have writing on.

“Now, the writing appears to be an isolating language, with a low morpheme to word ratio, similar to some of the Sino-­Tibetan languages on Earth, would you say that’s correct?”

He didn’t understand what she meant but he spent the morning helping her translate the markings she had pictures of.

He seemed very helpful and even quite humble and modest at times, but although she tried to appear friendly towards him, she didn’t let her guard down.

She had brought lunch for them and as they ate, she asked him what Asgard was like.

“They call it the shining city in the sky,” he eagerly explained. “And it is a ray of light in an often dark and unkind universe. It has two suns and…”

Somehow she managed not to scoff when he called it beacon of light. Seriously, could he really believe that crap?

That day she got little more than a description of Asgard from him but they had a week of meetings scheduled, although she was hopeful that if necessary, she could draw it out into more.

The second day she showed him the Kree symbols but he knew even less about them than she did. 

On the third day, Thor began to explain the Aesir language to her and she remembered when she had first been taught it as a child on Vanir, and she asked the same kinds of questions now that she had back then.