The Asgardians {𝟛} | Marvel √

pilot

On the blackness of Space, it was beautiful and mysterious, strewn with a billion stars.

Atop a building, a wrought iron sign. A hammer wielding blacksmith spinned listlessly in the wind as a swirling breeze kicked up.

Puente Antiguo, New Mexico

A Main street extended before us in a one-horse town, set amid endless flat and arid scrubland. A large SUV slowly moved down the street and headed out of town.

In the desert, the SUV sat parked when suddenly, the roof panels of the SUV folded open. The underside of the panels house a variety of hand-built astronomical devices, which now pointed at the sky. A woman with brown hair and brown eyes, Jane, popped her head through the roof. She positioned a magnetometer, so it's monitor calibrated with the constellations above. It appeared to be cobbled together from spare parts of other devices. "Hurry!" Jane exclaimed then there was a loud bang followed by muffled cursing from below in the van. Jane offered a hand down to an older man, Erik, around 60, who emerged as well, rubbing his head. "Oh-- watch your head," Jane told Erik.

"Thanks. So what's this anomaly of yours supposed to look like?" Erik asked.

"It's a little different each time. Once it looked like, I don't know, melted stars, pooling in a corner of the sky. But last week it was a rolling rainbow ribbon-" Jane started to explain.

"Racing ˜round Orion? I've always said you should have been a poet," Erik said and Jane reigned in her excitement.

"Hey, Darcy. Pass up the bubbly and my gloves, will you?" Jane said to her intern who was still in the SUV. Darcy handed a bottle of Champagne and a pair of gloves through the window. Jane passed it to Erik to hold it while she pulled on the old gloves but they were too large and masculine for her small hands. Erik started to unwrap the foil and Erik stopped his hand with an excited grin. "Not until you see it!" She exclaimed then he looked at the gloves.

"I recognize those. Think how proud he'd be to see you now," Erik said and Jane's grin faded to a sad smile.

"Thank you," she said.

"For what?" Erik asked.

"The benefit of the doubt," Jane said and the two stared out at the sky for a while, waiting, but nothing happened and Jane grew worried. "It's never taken this long before," she said.

"Jane, can I turn on the radio?" Darcy asked from below.

"Sure, if you like rocking out to KFRM, All agriculture, all the time," Jane said then she went back into the van, worried.

The SUV was bathed in the glow of high-tech monitoring equipment and laptops, and some looked like they're held together with duct tape. Jane opened a well-worn notebook of handwritten notes and calculations. Erik watched the frustrated Jane with sympathy. "The anomalies are always precipitated by geomagnetic storms," Jane said as she showed him a complicated chart she drew in the book of tracking occurrences and patterns. "The last seventeen occurrences have been predictable to the minute...I just don't understand," Jane said but then something caught Darcy's eye out on the driver's side mirror. She then adjusted the mirror to see in the distance, an odd glowing cloud formed in the skies over the Northeastern end of the desert.

"Jane?" Darcy asked but Jane shushed her as she leafed through her notes. Then the bottle of champagne began to vibrate.

"There's got to be some new variable...Or an equipment malfunction...," Jane said then the lights and equipment in the SUV began to flicker around them. The computer monitored squelch with static.