“Jane, can I borrow this?” Thor asked.
“Yeah, sure,” Jane said without looking up from her files. She jotted down an equation in her notebook here, circled a section in the report and scribbled a question in the margin there, highlighted passages everywhere.
“Jane, can you hold his for a moment?”
Jane held out her hand, again without looking. Thor wrapped her hand around what felt like a lock of hair.
“Thank you. This is harder than it looks when you have to do it yourself.”
“Sure, sure,” Jane said. The latest findings on Stark’s Element implementations were groundbreaking! This was growing far beyond a clean energy revolution. They were going to be able to generate unprecedented amounts of concentrated power. Forget dreams of nuclear engines with all their unsolved theoretical problems; Stark’s Element came damn close, with none of the risks and needing only a tiny engine. If the research continued in the current trend, it might even supersede nuclear output!
“Jane, can you stand up for me?”
Jane stood without looking up from those amazing facts, obediently letting Thor tie back her hair, strip off her clothes and put others on her, and then kiss her cheek.
Goodbye fossil fuel, goodbye cost-ineffective solar, wind, and water power, goodbye ’splode-happy nuclear reactors. In other words, goodbye energy crisis and hello energy-sucking technologies that used to be too uneconomical to pursue. Hello deep space travel, maybe even hello time-space manipulation – meaning, hello Terra Bifrost project!
“Here, Jane, I made you coffee,” Thor said.
“Oh, thank you.” Jane beamed instinctively and without looking held out a hand, in which Thor placed the handle of her mug. “Got it.”
“I’m going to do the laundry now, Jane,” Thor said with an audible smile in his voice. “Don’t lick the ink while I’m away.”
“I won’t,” Jane said, still without looking up. This was some damn good coffee.
An hour or so went by while Thor puttered around doing this chore and that and Jane filled the last few pages of her notebook with the most exciting things it had seen in ages. She’d need to break out a new one soon. Maybe even start a separate one just for the Terra Bifrost project. Just thinking about the possibilities made her giddy.
Then the door flew open – and a good portion of the wall with it. Jane looked up and back down so fast, it hurt the muscles in her eyes.
“Happy Thrymsday, sister!” a cheerful female voice called.
Just a few more paragraphs – just a few more – please let whatever villainess had decided to make a house call today give her those last few paragraphs!
“Hello, John. Where’s that ditz Thoryn at?” The bright voice was by her shoulder now. “Oh, the Stark’s Element findings. Exiting, aren’t they? Give it a few more decades, and Earth will send the power balance in the Nine Realms reeling.”
Done.
Jane looked up. She blinked, from more than just the dust of destruction permeating the air. “Do I know you?”
The dark-haired villainess cocked her head and smiled coyly. There was something achingly familiar about her narrow face, the way her thin lips pinched at the corners, the glint in her pale eyes. “Thank you for the compliment.”
Just then, Thor came rushing into the room, and his face broke out in a wide smile. “Lokk! I knew you’d come!”
His clean-shaven face, with painted lips and accented eyes.
Jane’s mouth fell open.
The villainess and Thor hugged and exchanged kisses on the cheek.
“Happy Thrymsday, sister.”
“Happy Thrymsday to you too, sister.”
The villainess was decked out in distinctly Asgardian armour, fitted to her feminine curves in a way Jane had only ever seen on Sif before. The armour was gold and green, a long cape spilling down her back. A golden spear and a helmet with tiny horns rested on a pile of rubble that had been their wall mere minutes before.
Oh, it’s Loki. Way to miss the obvious, thought Jane, whose brain was still busy switching gears.
Then her eyes were drawn back to Thor. Who was wearing a dress, elegantly cut in the Asgardian style and littered with jewels. Whose long golden hair was in braids curling like a crown around his head. Who had gotten out Jane’s make-up kit and shaved off his beard.
Jane was glad she hadn’t stood up, because that last part was so upsetting as to be dizzying.
“My costume beats yours again, dear sister,” Loki said with a triumphant smile.
“Because you cheated again, dear sister,” Thor shot back, positively beaming.
“What is going on here?” Jane asked.
The men – or drag queens? transvestites? crossplayers? drunken frat boys? – turned to look at her. Loki’s eyebrows rose.
“Thrymsday, of course. Your costume is quite appropriate.”
For the first time, Jane looked down at herself. For a moment her mind drew a blank, and then she remembered how Thor had undressed and redressed her earlier. He had put her in a pair of pressed men’s slacks held up with a belt, a button-up with a waistcoat over it, a tie, and the most stereotypical professor’s jacket she had seen since graduation.
“What?” she blurted out eloquently.
Loki laughed – a sound so melodious and tinkling from his female throat it was startling. “Thoryn, how in the nine worlds did you get him into those clothes without so much as an explanation?”
“John’s been preoccupied with his research report today,” Thor said fondly. Coming around to Jane’s side of the table, he bent down and pressed a kiss to her cheek. “I’m sorry, dear. I thought Lokk would give me a bit more forewarning, so I could explain things to you.”
“Well,” Jane said. “Since nothing else has blown up since he tore the wall out of our living room, I think now is a good time to explain things.”
Thor shot Loki a patented sibling look. “Was the wall really necessary?”
“I am a warrior maiden,” Loki said with a regal toss of his head. “We are inelegant and destructive creatures.”
So. Thrymsday. Asgard’s annual gender role reversal festival. A celebration dating back all the way to the time Mjolnir wasn’t yet enchanted so only its master could pick it up, and a barely-adolescent Thor and Loki had to dress up as Freya and her handmaiden in order to get the hammer back from the giant Thrym. (No, not a Jotunheim giant, an Utgard giant. Close, but not quite.) Which made it all the more ironic that Loki had been barred from the Best Costume competition centuries ago for being a dirty magic-using cheat.
“For what it’s worth, you look really good,” Jane said around a mouthful of Thor’s homemade Asgardian Thrymscake.
Loki – no, Lokk, tradition dictated that they all call each other by their opposite-gender names today – looked pleased. “Thank you.”
“Why are you in armour, though? Aren’t you supposed to be the extreme opposite of your usual self?”
“Oh, but warrior maiden is my extreme opposite,” Lokk explained, taking a sip of tea. “Sorcery is considered a woman’s prerogative, you see, just as combat is a man’s. Surt will probably have pilfered something from my closet, back home.”
“Surt?”
“Sif,” Thoryn whispered.
“Ah.” She looked at him for a long moment. “And you’re the princess today.”
“Indeed.”
“The beardless princess.”
He patted her hand. “It will grow back, dear.”
“This is weird,” she admitted. “Are we just supposed to... sit around and do what we normally do, just switched?”
“It’s more fun with more people, when you can have a true festival, let yourself be lead in a dance where you would usually be the one doing the leading, play games meant for the opposite sex, enter the competitions, or just stroll around admiring other people’s costumes,” Lokk admitted – only for an impish grin to break out on his face. “But just wait until tonight.”
Jane blinked. Thoryn blushed to rival a tomato.
“Oh!” Jane’s colour made a valiant effort at matching her boyfriend’s. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think that’s any of your business.”
“Oh, it isn’t, of course,” Lokk agreed airily. “But just in case, I’ve taken the liberty of depositing some equipment in your bedroom – of the magical variety – and I bespelled it so that only John can dispose of it, if he so chooses.” His eyes were twinkling like mad. “Though if I were him, I wouldn’t pass on this opportunity for a pile of gold. There really is some fantastic magic on that thing, if I do say so myself.”
“That’s quite enough, sister,” Thoryn said uneasily.
“I would cast the spell right here and now if I could, but it’s so hard to pull off a decent transformation on Thoryn against her will.” Lokk daintily dabbed at his mouth with a paper napkin and stood. “All you have to do is put on the harness, and the magic will take care of you both. Please promise me you’ll take some pictures, John. I draw the line at intruding into my sister’s bedroom while she’s in it. Now, I must be off. Can’t keep Nathaniel waiting.”
Thoryn buried his head in his hands and muttered something about pervert brothers and their arbitrary idea of ‘drawing a line’. Lokk patted his head and was gracious enough to fix the wall before departing.
‘John’ stared at a Thoryn, mind reeling and a grin slowly forming on her face, and turned in her seat just as Lokk was stepping through the door. “Deal!”