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[LOCKED & OTA] So the hearts keep breaking, and the heads just roll;

WHO: Jane Foster
WHERE: Bunker & Beyond
WHEN: 19 & 20 December 2018
OPEN TO: Bruce Banner, Thor, OTA
WARNINGS: Infinity War spoilers, maybe? Not from Jane, but it's possible in general conversation.

Bunker - Dec 19

LOCKED To BRUCE & THOR

If there is one single thing Jane Foster is absolutely sure of in life, right now, this very moment, it is this: She really hates Asgardians.

...Okay so, maybe hate is kind of a strong word — Is supremely, intensely irritated and inconvenienced by might be a more accurate fit, but it isn't nearly as easy to say. And maybe it's just semantics, maybe if Thor was in front of her, that irritation would be blunted or at least replaced by irritation at how attractive he is instead, but the fact remains that right now, right this second, sitting in a "safe house" that is seriously not even safe, Jane hates Asgardians.

She was minding her own business — In Shanghai and minding her own business — when the Guys in Suits and Sunglasses turned up and took her gently-but-firmly by the elbow, Dr. Foster, please come with us, yada yada. SHIELD doesn't care that she was in the middle of some very important calculations with Asia's foremost expert on relativistic astrophysics — Wait, is SHIELD even a thing anymore?

Not that it matters, because she's in a safe house now, and the whole point is that Loki dared to enter Earth's atmosphere. Because of course he did, of course he couldn't really be dead. He's the intergalactic version of a bad penny, and the protocol is, when he turns up, she gets shoved into a room somewhere.

And Jane knows better than anyone that there's no sense in arguing about it, but she does it anyway, because they take away everything on her — Her notes, her cell phone, her lip balm — and give her a five-year-old copy of People and think that's appropriate. Thor also apparently dared to enter the atmosphere along with his brother, and how does she know this? His selfie was on Instagram and she saw it over one of her guardian/captor's shoulders while she was yelling.

It's really Too Damn Much, she thinks as she takes a break from railing to slouch into a chair with a huff, having no idea at all that the next time she opens her eyes, she'll have to re-calibrate that barometer altogether.

Behind Town Hall - Dec 20

OTA

Jane has found a telescope. In a place where you're lucky to find a pen and paper, this feels like a major coup, but there had just been this guy like, hey, I got this as a present and I am a botanist, please don't break it. He did not, strangely, seem that concerned about what she might discover with it, but to each their own, right? As long as their own involves Jane never giving this telescope back.

One thing she'll give this place: The light pollution is virtually nil. She's been warned, emphatically in a few cases, that there are Bad Things in the woods that will probably think she is a snack, so it's nice that she can just head out to the fields behind the town hall, cleared and lonely now that winter's arrived, and sit with her new telescope and the pencil and little bit of paper she begged from the same guy, and make observations — Tiny, cramped observations that she has to lean very close to the paper to see because of how dark it is, even here in town. From a distance, she probably looks like a wayward woodland creature balled up against the chill until she swings back up again, telescope lifted to her eye.

Is it cold out here? She hasn't really noticed.

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Bruce did at least three bunker shifts a week now, because even if people don't show up in a tube, he likes investigating the open parts of the underground area. It's a nice quiet place to think too, and there is always a great deal to think about in this place. He had been down in the hall, pacing around while he did some mental math on next steps with Liv and about Eddie, and he almost misses the tube coming into the arrival pod. He stops and looks over at just the right time and immediately runs over. This is his third time so there's no frantic poking at the console, and the tube opens quickly.

Bruce gently takes Jane out of the pod; she's much smaller than Thor and not likely to knock him over. He hadn't noticed the name, focusing on helping instead, but he knows Jane Foster on sight. She's Thor's ex, yes, but she's also one of the brilliant minds on their entire planet. "Dr. Foster?" Oh man, Thor is going to freak out. "Dr. Foster, can you hear me? It's Bruce Banner. Uh, Thor's friend?" Not Dr. Bruce Banner, also one of the most brilliant minds on their planet. He leans on Thor's name, because she might appreciate the reassurance of a familiar source of comfort.

Jane does not remember falling asleep, or even being close to falling asleep, but here she is, the world tilting and slowly coming into focus, darkness receding as she coughs up a not insignificant quantity of liquid. Right next to Bruce's knees.

Sorry.

On all fours, panting, she looks up, hair hanging in wet clumps across her face as she squints up at Dr. Bruce Banner.

"You're not—" Green, she almost says, but stops herself, and sways back until she lands with a wet slap on her ass on the concrete floor.

"What the—" she begins again, reaching hasty hands up to sweep the hair from her face — A face increasingly screwed up with confused irritation.

"Are we on another planet?" She frowns. Deeply. "I told them. I told them it was pointless, that if Thor or Loki or whoever wanted to swoop in and carry me off to a planet full of trolls or to Honolulu, there wasn't going to be any stopping them. I mean, I have been to Asgard, actual Asgard, okay, they know this. I know what— Wait. Are we underground? Is this SHIELD? What is this?"

Thor coughed up a lot of liquid too when he came out, so Bruce waits it out and tried not to interrupt so she can clear her throat. If anything actually had gone wrong he was one of the best people to be there anyway. His eyes widen when she falls backward, trying to stop her but being too slow. He winces. And sort of blinks a whole lot as she starts talking quickly at him. Any time he starts to answer another question comes in. It's alright. He gets in these frantic spirals too, and she has every right to get it all out of her system. This is only the start of the confusion.

"So, um, yes, I believe we are on another planet, the flora and fauna are distinctly alien to Earth. It's a whoever about the swooping in, we still have no idea why we're here or who did it. They do seem very interested in our world though, I think we may be half of the population or near it." If he counts Kamala, which he does, so. "We are underground, this is not SHIELD, this is ...." Bruce looks around at the bunker. "Honestly my leading theory is that we're part of a scientific experimentation by very powerful beings that can tap into the multiverse, possibly as a potential army or for a particular use. We also might all be clones."

That is really throwing her into the deep end, but he personally wishes this information was given to him pretty quickly upon arrival too. "Um. I know that's a lot. But I would eventually tell all of you that anyway. So I was getting skipping ahead."

That... is a lot of information. And if Jane had been anyone else — Hell, if Jane had been her own self from ten years ago — it might have been difficult to swallow. But, you know, once your body's been taken over by an alien entity via a secret wormhole randomly in the middle of London, your approach to weird shifts a little.

It takes her a tick to reply, her brow creasing and mouth open in an uncertain moue, but it's only because she's sifting through what was said. Bruce tossed it out there almost as fast as she had.

"Wait, so half the population of this planet is from Earth—" She glances down, pulling a face. "What am I wearing?"

So, that ride in the pod from the spooky government bunker up to the lake was no jaunt on a rainbow bridge, that's for sure. It was rickety, it made ominous clacking sounds, and generally felt like it was held together with rubber bands and chewing gum, which— Okay, yeah, Jane can respect that. If you asked Jane whether she had ever used chewing gum as a binding agent, she couldn't actually say no. But nobody was using that as a mode of transportation.

Also, there was the whole get in this flimsy boat and row to shore thing, which seems illogical and unnecessary, and kind of a come down even from the clackety pod. Why isn't there a bridge here? Why does this boat feel like it's about to sink any moment? Why are these oars so tiny?

And now they're walking, apparently miles, and Jane has temporarily exhausted her line of questioning in lieu of piecing together what she's been told, shivering under her coat and wishing she had a notebook in her new backpack along with her soggy clothes.

Kicking tires is, well, a thing. Kicking watchtower posts to make sure they're settling properly and the ground freezing isn't fucking up their stability? Is also a thing. It means winding around not quite on the usual paths to find them, kick them, and take note if any need adjustment. Probably why he doesn't notice Jane at first and even then it takes half a second to really register that it's a person and not a stray peacat.

"...Tell me you've got a coat or something." Otherwise- yeah. Worrying? Worrying.

Bruce is honestly glad that he's so far only met up with people coming in who know enough weird things to roll with the equally strange explanation. He's not very good at explaining from scratch. He tried in a conversation with someone from far back in time, and ended up using too many modern terms to translate well.

"I don't know about the planet, all we've explored is the village we're in and the surrounding areas. Still many miles in between. There are rivers that could lead out to an ocean or not, I don't think people have tried yet." Bruce himself hasn't traveled very far. He doesn't know who has managed to get the farthest out yet, but that's probably a good question to ask. Surely someone has tried. "If there are other lifeforms on the planet, they haven't made direct contact with us that we're aware of yet. But there is fascinating wildlife here. There's kittens that get you drunk on contact, moths that make you forget what you were doing, these tiny deer packs with sharp fangs, and crocodile dogs. It's ... an interesting place."

Every time he thinks he knows how weird this place is, he's reminded that no, he's only starting to get used to it, for someone new this is insane. "We all come in wearing those. There's other clothes in the pack. There's a theory going around that the color of the clothes, matching the color of your wrist band, has greater meaning." Bruce points to her wrist and then to his. "Mine is green, yours is orange, Thor's is yellow."

Out after dark was hardly a thing that Reeve was partial to. Well, no, that was hardly correct. Out after dark with a sufficient coat and a reliable light was not beyond him. At the moment he had something with a passing illusion of being the former, nothing for the latter. Normally it was a time of night he was ill-like to risk, but more and more he found his usual was not necessarily suitable to the new reality of his life.

Part of that new reality included spending longer than he had originally intended evaluating new aspects of the town. It was hardly sufficient to consider how a town was laid out by daylight. One also had to have consideration for it in the dark to best plan changes. For instance we’re were the places the shadows looked most deeply, thereby creating hazards for traversal? Where might it be wise to put up light sources or even small signs to assist navigation in poor weather? We’re the paths as they now stood sufficient for allowing ease of access to all major core buildings in the dark or poor conditions?

So it was that Reeve was wandering. Wandering just enough to catch the briefest glint of light off of the telescope.

Approaching a potential danger without means to defend himself had not occurred to the man yet. He was still new enough that the lack of materia had not truly settled into his mind. That there could be hazards had not really processed. Instead he assumed a person was present.

“Good evening? Are you lost?”

Always a chance. And as he had just finished a basic sketch of the layout of the town earlier that morning, complete with numbering buildings, he could probably guide whoever it was wherever they needed before the returned to the inn for a bit more work with the notes from the small bundle of paper and pencil tucked under his arm.

Thor had received Bruce's message about a particular arrival, and without a moment's hesitation, Thor had been practically sprinting out of the door of his cabin, hastily trying to wrangle with his coat as he went. But nervous energy and excitement got the better of him, causing him to not only slow down his pace (this whole getting fatigued thing is truly one of the most maddening aspects of being mortal) but to also take the time to get his coat on his body.

With a huff and a snap of the fabric to his frame, he makes his way towards the area Bruce had indicated in his electronic letter. Er, would it be a letter? It's shorter than a letter. They call it a "text," but that doesn't make sense; it's all text. The entire thing is made up of text. Thor, focus! He's still learning the geography of the village, but he manages to get near the beach and as he does, he hears the approaching crunch of footsteps in sand.

Perhaps a bit vainly, he runs his fingers through his (pathetically still short) hair, straightens his back, squares his shoulders, and puts on a signature Thor smile. He can't see why, despite their completely mutual parting, they can't still be friendly with each other. She's probably going to be so excited to see him, he thinks. In the village, no less! Yes, this is going to be a wonderful reunion.

When she's in sight, he puts a hand up and waves like an excited little kid, seeing their BFF for the first time in ages.

"JANE! HI!" he shouts, using his other hand to act as a half-megaphone for his mouth. "IT'S ME! THOR! YOUR EX! IT'S SO NICE TO SEE YOU!"

"Haven't tried like they don't have a way to try, or haven't tried for other reas—" Jane's voice screeches to a halt, an elongated S-sound that then abruptly stops as she blinks back at Bruce.

You kinda buried the lede there, Dr. Banner. Don't think she didn't notice how you oh-so-casually slid it in there at the end.

"Of course he is," she blurts after a lengthy pause, more in answer to her own internal wondering whether Thor is tied to all of this than Bruce's statement, although that applies, too. Yellow's the color of sunshine and obliviousness and beer.

A noise of irritation rumbles up Jane's throat as she pushes herself to her feet, realizing for the first time she is, in fact, wearing a backpack, which she pulls around and unzips to discover that inside is, in fact, other clothes. Dry clothes.

"Where can I change?"

Jane thinks it's pretty safe to say that Thor is simultaneously the best and worst person to have as an ex ever.

Her face snaps up, a brief stutter in her step, before she slides a narrow-eyed look Bruce's way. She definitely wasn't the one to let Thor know she was here, and it seems pretty unlikely he'd randomly be out here, alone, without some kind of monster to fight or at least a tiki bar.

Great. Just great. She knew this was coming, of course, but that doesn't make it any easier, it doesn't make seeing Thor in all of his pee-yellow, sunshiney glory any easier, when it had been hard enough to put her foot down and say NO MORE, NO WAY, before he finally slunk off. That had been the worst part, seeing him sad. Because he can't really help how he is, right?

NO, WRONG. He absolutely can, he has before, and he should have known better.

And of course, here he is now, acting like they're best friends. If he had a tail, it would wag right off.

Jane pulls in a breath and huffs it decisively out. Okay, right. Onward. No big deal. Just channel Darcy. One step in front of the other, patently ignoring the pectoral region, and—

"What happened to your hair?"

"Sitting on it," Jane absently replies, not shifting her gaze, the slim brass length of the telescope still held up to her eye. A moment later she lowers it, hunching forward again to jot down a note against her knee, and then flicks a glance over her shoulder. It takes a tick to make out the familiar features in the darkness.

Familiar because there is no one who doesn't know what Tony Stark looks like.

"Oh," she says, not unpleasantly, with an arch of an eyebrow. "I heard you were here."

Still here, more importantly, which is definitely significant with the whole legacy of in a cave with scraps and all that.

"No more than everybody else here," Jane distractedly replies, the brass telescope still lifted to her eye. It isn't the sort of equipment she'd hope to have, but it's definitely a place to start.

When she lowers it, she looks up, free hand pressed over the pieces of paper against her cross-legged thigh so that they don't blow away. The face isn't one she recognizes, but that doesn't mean much.

"Lost in an unknown part of the universe, but not lost here, in the village. Are you? Because I am not a good person to ask for directions, I'll just say that right now."

Lost in the village? The very idea amused Reeve. He could recreate a map of the village, to roughly accurate scale, from memory at this time. Just one of the hazards of the job.

"Only those without purpose are lost. But I admit, I don't know where exactly I am in the universe. I know I'm not on Gaia. But it is good to know you're not lost here. If I might ask, young lady, what exactly are you up to.

Reeve actually wasn't too much older than her, but Jane had aged well, so he couldn't help but mark her down some in his estimations.

"Huh?" Thor asks, reaching up to touch his head as though he's forgotten. So much has happened in the last six months that he'd forgotten about the traumatizing chopping of his golden locks. "Oh. Some weird, old man cut it while I was tied to a chair." He says this as though he's explaining how to hammer a nail into a piece of wood. He makes a face and shrugs a shoulder to dismiss it all.

The creepy old man had been the least of his problems.

"How are things? How's Darcy? How's .. that .. other guy? The intern?" Thor's asking these questions while awkwardly trying to figure out what to do with his arms/hands. He goes to cross them across his chest, then decides to let them hang by his sides, but then that feels weird, so he goes to shove his hands into his pockets, but he's worried it'll seem defensive, and he ultimately decides on putting them around his waist, casually shifting his weight to one foot.

So suave.

Jane does not ask for further explanation. Jane knows better, and would rather just sidestep the long ramble about the events leading up to his shearing and its lengthy, affable asides about every person he met along the way and at least one story about some "very friendly" snakes that have nothing to do with anything except that Thor really loves snakes and they were around at some point.

"It's weird," she says, because it is, but it occurs to her belatedly that this is a good thing. He could almost be a whole other guy who just happens to look like Thor. A guy whose hair she never pulled in a fit of ecstasy.

Yeah, she can work with this.

"They're probably still making out in the broom closet where I left them before SHIELD— Or, whoever it is now, picked me up and put me on lock down because you and your conveniently still-alive brother decided to randomly pop over to Earth," she answers of Darcy and what's-his-name. Yes, she is still annoyed. It was annoying.

"Also it's cold, so I'm going to keep walking now," she adds, pulling her new coat tighter as she does exactly that, following along after Bruce, who had the good sense to go on without them.

"Right." He huffs, shrugging off his own peacoat and offering it. He runs hot, he'll be back at the forge before the end of the night, he'll manage. Jane may or may not be bothered but you don't just let a fellow scientist catch their death of cold. Even if they're doing important star charting. "I've been working on that. We're sort of at a tech bottleneck that's a bitch to get around."

Production has stalled out hardcore on more than a few of his projects. It's frustrating.

"I'm fine—" Jane begins, but forgoes further protests and lets Tony drape the coat over her shoulders. "Is that an all Avengers thing, the chivalry?" Because Tony Stark had never, as long as she's been aware of him existing, struck her as the chivalrous type. Maybe he's evolved into the nobility of his station.

"And yeah," she adds, sliding the telescope closed with a soft chunk of metal nesting inside metal, "I kind of noticed the lack of, oh, anything— Except that weird underground compound, where they are obviously keeping people in stasis somehow, so there's got to be more going on—" She squints up at him. "Have you guys, like, assembled on this? I heard there's no Hulk."

"I—" Jane begins, stops, blinks rapidly at the 'young lady' bit, and then charges on. She used to date a guy who's thousands of years old; youth is relative.

"Gaia?" That's an odd sort of coincidence, a planet named after an Earth goddess, but maybe it's an alternate universe. Jane sets her telescope aside so she can hunch forward and jot the name down on the corner of her paper. It may seem silly or strange, collecting all these names, but all science starts with data.

"And my wild guess is that you don't recognize any of the stars here," she says, glancing back up to him. It was the only answer she'd gotten from anyone so far.

"I do not," Reeve agreed. "However I'm a poor choice of someone to speak to on that matter. I dare say I can't identify many stars at all back home. You're an astronomer?"

Such is a reasonable conclusion between the telescope and the star focus. What could she be seeking to conclude from stars?

"I think haven't tried as in no one's gone on a scouting party that far yet, and there might be some concern about being able to come back from it. The wilderness is dangerous. It's possible we could get a group together who is willing to go out that far, but it hasn't happened yet." Bruce does wonder a little why it hasn't come up recently, as they got more people and many of them scouts. But going into the unknown is asking a lot of strangers. It might be weeks or months before they get back. "It's also winter here, so long trips might be a better idea in the spring."

Okay so maybe he slid that in there casually. No big deal. Thor was yellow! Also, there, in the village, no doubt going to be thrilled (???) to see her. His smile is slightly apologetic, like he knew he tried to sneak it. "There's several people from the Avengers here. What is the last thing you remember from our world? We have different timelines going." Not to mention Bruce lost years on an alien planet.

"Uhhh. Oh! Here?" He glances around and then back to her. "Not with me, obviously, in the room. I am leaving the room!" Bruce does just that, wincing at his own unbearable awkwardness.

That Bruce is a little awkward barely registers for Jane; she is frequently awkward herself, often without the self-awareness to know it. Plus, there's way more important stuff to be worried about rather than whether the Hulk is blushing thinking about her naked butt.

Jane steps aside to a drier section of the room and immediately begins stripping, flinging her damp clothes aside, where they land one after another with a slap on the concrete. "Oh, these are fun," she mutters as she holds up the underwear and then tosses them over to join their compatriots.

"Last thing I remember was being shoved into a room by SHIELD," Jane calls back over her shoulder, "or not-SHIELD, whatever they're called now, because Thor— Well, Loki was why they shoved me into a room, but Thor was with him. They were back and it was annoying. And..." She falters, casting for something less personal. "It's like, May? And Captain America is a fugitive? Ringing any bells— Hang on, where are we going?"

She's pulled on dry underwear and bra and is squinting down at the remaining items in the bag. "Is it cold?" It's probably cold, because that would just figure. "And like, how cold? How many layers are we talking for a regular person?"

"I am," Jane confirms, and shifts the paper so that it's tucked between the underside of her thigh and the coat she's sitting on. "An astrophysicist, specifically."

She sighs, pushing the hair from her forehead as she slides her gaze up to the sky and its dusting of stars. "Obviously I can't say definitively, but I think we're all very, very far from anyplace we might recognize," she admits, and then flicks a glance back to him. "If I can get just one point, one object that makes sense to a single person, I can work from there, string things together to figure out where we might be in the universe." It's frustrating, looking down a timeline that already seems painfully long, but god knows it's not the first time.

"I think I'm going to have to leave the village," she decides as she looks back to the sky, more to herself than her companion. "Get a better data set."

Edited 2019-01-02 23:48 (UTC)

"Ah, a very serious distinction. Not just the study of the stars, but the forces behind them. Orbital cycles, mass, gravitational fluxuations, all that," he observed. Educated enough to recognize what the term meant. Not enough to get any useful conversation beyond that point regarding her field specifically.

"It can be dangerous outside of the village from my understanding. You should look into a travel companion with combat abilities. Which I will be quick to admit I do not possess."

Bruce can hear her, he didn't go that far, just gave her privacy. He tries to make sense of that, because he doesn't remember Loki coming back to earth when he was there. It must have been after, but before Thanos. And her mentioning Captain America being a fugitive connected the timeline. "I know that Loki faked his death, and that Thor lost his hammer and his father at the same time. Loki must have been there at the time." So it could very well have been on earth, for some reason. He only got told a few things when they were off Asgard and some holes were being filled in. The Hulk after all did things without him on Sakaar.

"Yes, that does ring bells. Cap's here and a few others of the Avengers. I wasn't on earth during that time, but people explained some things." It was very, very good he wasn't there, but it also was hard to know so many things went horribly wrong and he couldn't fix it.

"It's cold. Winter. You should have a winter jacket, but I didn't bring one with me." His done is apologetic, because that seems like an obvious thing to have on hand. Blankets and warm clothes should be stashed in some places just in case of newcomers. He's an idiot. "Here, you can have mine." He has it draped nearby, and it would definitely fit on her. "We'll get you back to the inn, there's a fire. Oh! And...."

He almost looks behind him just to tell her, but then stops, because he has no way of knowing if she's dress. He looks ahead. "There are records in the inn of information people have been gathering this entire time. All the information we have available. I also have my own notebooks you can look through."

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[LOCKED & OTA] So the hearts keep breaking, and the heads just roll;

Bunker - Dec 19

Behind Town Hall - Dec 20

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