Psych the Avengers Out

Astrological Revelations

"To Hel with them!" Thor roars. Mjolnir crashes down into the table, leaving a gaping dent in the surface. A second blow completely cleaves the table in two. "She should have never been at the conference!" He rages, pointing Mjolnir at Fury. "She would have been safer somewhere else!"

"And where do you propose we put a mind reader?" Fury asks calmly. "We don't understand the extent of her mind or of what she can do. Not to mention the fact that she recently developed telekinesis. What place would hold her?"

"Why do we need to hold her?" Banner asks, crossing his arms. "I thought we were protecting her from Warren Biochemical, not holding her prisoner."

"He has a point," Stark says from across the room, a glass full of ice cubes and something absolutely alcoholic pressed to his temple.

They are all gathered in the remains of the conference room on the Helicarrier. Steve's arm is bound up to slow the blood flow from the bullet wound. Stark is nursing a glass of scotch and ice as a sedative to reduce his pounding headache although how scotch does the trick for him, no one knows. Natasha is icing her head the conventional way with Clint at her side, his foot propped up on the remains of a chair. He's kind of out of it from blood loss and the sonic pulses and seems to be dozing occasionally. Banner seems unharmed but is only dressed in the tattered remains of his clothes from previously, a testament to the Hulk. Thor is the only one unharmed and is definitely the most vocal about his anger at Fury right now even though the room is simmering.

"She should have been moved out of the reach of those men," Thor growls. He points Mjolnir at Fury accusatorily. "If we had known just to what lengths they would have gone to to get her back we could have moved her far away from their reach. I'd move her to Asgard if it would keep her safe." The look on Stark's face is suddenly calculating but Fury seems unfazed as if the idea had already occurred to him. His next words confirm it.

"It was considered," he says. "However, we have no idea how to make sure that Asgardian influence has nothing to do with this."

The faces looking back at him are confused. "Asgardian influence?" Thor asks.

"Time for the truth, Nick," Stark says.

Fury sighs again. Every other breath seems to be a sigh lately. Then he begins to tell them a story.

"Jaycee Strong is the daughter of the renowned astrophysicist Mark Strong, one of the pioneers in the field. He studied Rosenberg-Einstein bridges. In fact, his research resembled that of Jane Foster and Eric Selvig."

A look of comprehension dawns on Stark's face as does Thor's but for once the scientist stays quiet and so does the Norse God. "Mark Strong was studying the Rosenberg-Einstein theory and making great headway in intrastellar communications and the theory of interconnected worlds and although the world probably wasn't ready for the idea that there are other intelligent beings in the universe, Strong was charismatic and very popular in the scientific community even if his ideas were a little unorthodox. He was at the peak of his career about nine years ago."

"Then he vanished without a trace."

Fury suddenly looks very tired. "No one knows where he went or what happened to him. The trail ends where it starts, no evidence to follow, nothing to go off of. Not a scrap of anything to point us in a direction. We interviewed co-workers, other scientists in the field and came up with nothing. They all say he was acting rather sporadically the last few days he came to work, distracted as if about to reach a major break-through, like a man who knows he is about to do something crazy or life-changing."

"The only clues we ever found were in his personal journal of his studies. He often talked about finding a 'bridge', a pathway back to the stars. Once Thor visited Earth for the first time, it became clear that this bridge was the Bifrost. Before then, it had been interpreted as a fanciful idea of Strong's. The most interesting entry had something different in his bridge theory. He wrote about using the bridge to be reunited with 'her'. Who he was referring to was a mystery but we postulate that Mr. Strong had contact with Asgard, maybe even met someone from there. He became obsessed with finding this bridge to 'save her'."