"Better three hours too soon than a minute late"
I shook my head; sometimes Luna really was too much. The mainframe and all other assorted documents had finished downloading—two copies, one for my personal files and one for Pirate Leatherbooty, more formally known as Director Nicholas Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D.
I stepped over one of the unconscious guards and removed the two flash drives I'd been using and put them in my pocket. Other people brought weapons on a rescue mission, I brought flash drives, the really ugly plastic figurine kind ones that nobody really liked. The one going to S.H.I.E.L.D. looked like a demented Captain America—I then added a note that read to give the flash drive to the Son of Coul once it had gone through official channels. (Well, at very least, I was amused).
I was even more so amused when I heard Luna’s voice on the other line, getting in a parting shot at the Avengers, "On behalf of the Rescue Aid Society and its entire membership of two, I’d like to thank you for joining us on our trial run. We are looking forward to never needing to save your collective ass from a fire ever again. Have a nice evening!"
While I waited for Luna, I decided I better make myself useful and start piling all the unconscious guards and other assorted personnel into one spot so Luna could start zapping them into S.H.I.E.L.D.’s main lobby. Which meant I needed several really big bows . . . Oh, perfect, those could work, I thought, catching sight of the cartridge belts and things the guards had been wearing. I started weaving the mess of leather and metal together as I began walking back towards the main junction of the compound, unconscious bodies hovering along behind me like a trail of zombie ducklings.
Zombie ducklings seemed a little sad though, so I turned them all right side up and made a zombie conga line! (Well, unconscious conga line, they weren't dead . . . yet). Anyhow, after a few minutes, I had several of those massive bows with the thousands of loops, the ones that look a little like flowers, made out of cartridge cases and gun belts, with conga line of knocked out bodies dancing behind me when I stumbled upon a an open door which led to a trophy room of sorts. “Looks like I found the gift shop, Luna. It’d make an excellent rendezvous point. Don’t forget the gift wrap on your way back.”
I took Falcon’s wings off the wall, broke the glass case around the Captain’s shield, and quite by accident ran into Mjolnir which was sitting on the floor. “What happened to you? Couldn’t get through the barrier to the holding cell and came here to find friends?” I muttered to myself and bent down like an idiot to wrap my fingers around the handle. It twitched in my grip and then I could have sworn the thing hissed at me.
“Okay, okay,” I said, pulling my hand back, “I didn’t mean to offend you.” Because of course, story about the ancient god wielding a hammer of legend wouldn’t be complete if the hammer wasn’t sentient in its own right. “I was hoping you’d let me pick you up so I could get you back to Thor—is that okay?”
I could practically feel Mjolnir grumbling in my head and then a very peculiar set of images/thoughts/feelings that took me a few to sift through and attempt to guess what it (she? he? There’s not a manual for the gendering of sentient hammers!) had ‘said’.
“Thor can wield you?” Vaguely affirmative response. “Odin can wield you?” Same answer. “Family of Thor can wield you?” Non-committal response and how I could tell that, I haven’t the faintest idea. Looking at the etchings on Mjolnir’s sides, something about it looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place why. “Other persons close to Thor can wield you?” It felt like the thing shrugged at me—it’s a hammer! It doesn’t have shoulders! (And I looked like an idiot, talking to a man’s hammer . . . oh God! Could I scrub that sentence from my brain?! Goddamnit!)
“Since I can almost guarantee that I’m not any of those, no dice. Can I pick you up; move you from place to place though? Because otherwise getting you back to Thor isn’t going to be easy.” That earned me another set of thoughts/images/feelings that seemed to take even longer to decipher. “So if I’d tried to pick you up, before you became sentient, I could have . . . but now that you are, you’re playing favorites?” Affirmative, smug feeling. “You just had to be picky, alright; I guess we’ll figure you out later.” I went back to my dancing zombies, dancing unconscious persons to set the wings and shield down when Luna walked in, also with a trail of bodies behind her.
She looked between me and my conga line and said, “Now why didn’t I think of that?”
I laughed, that was quintessential Luna. “If you’ve got them all, drop them off at S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ—oh, and don’t forget the bows and the flash drive,” I said, holding both out to her.
Now she was laughing at me. “Doing their jobs for them—with a bow on top and everything. Perfect!” She was about to start zapping them out when suddenly remembered, “Oh, the gift wrap, right! Here!” and proceeded to pull rolls of it out of nowhere and hand them to me.
“Go on, I’ll get started here, we’ve got a schedule to keep.” Luna nodded and got to work, as did I.
Part prank, part game, and part making a point, we were giftwrapping all the Avenger’s toys and going to deliver them onto their doorstep, probably sometime tonight. Basically, we were going to be little shits.
I’d wrapped Falcon’s wings, Hawkeye’s bow and quiver, and the Black Widow’s knives when suddenly, Luna started shouting at me, “Rin, look, look, you won’t believe this!”
“Luna, I’m busy, we’re running behind,” I started, turning my head to glance over my shoulder and my eyes went wide. “Holy smokes, you can LIFT it?!”
“Apparently so,” Luna said, her eyes not leaving the legendary hammer in her grip. “He likes me . . . wait, how do I know that?” What else could I do but shrug—what other response is appropriate to finding out the gender of a semi-sentient hammer straight from the realm of mythos?
“Well, he then, is more or less sentient but we can discuss that at length later—schedule to keep and all that.”
Four and half minutes later, we were sitting out beneath the trees surrounded by a peculiar bunch of brightly wrapped packages, watching ground explode, and flames shoot up from the chasm created by the initial explosion.
Once more I was grateful for the deserted location of the base, as I'm sure we looked very odd, what with the oddly shaped parcels surrounding us: Falcon's wings, Cap's shield, Iron Man's suit, and Mjolnir were by far the oddest shaped, though Hawkeye's bow and quiver, Loki's helmet, and the Soldier's rifle came in pretty close. Which left the Black Widow's knives and the Hulk's (well, the doc's) glasses the most ordinary ones, and wasn't that an amusing thought?
Since we had to wait for at least another thirteen minutes to make sure we didn’t cause a forest fire or some kind of chain reaction that would put any civilians in danger, I pulled my tablet back out and hacked into S.H.I.E.L.D.’s security footage and started laughing. Luna scooted over to take a look, and then she too began to giggle. I had juxtaposed two different feeds together, one from just a few minutes earlier when Luna had dumped (neatly) assorted piles of bodies—that sounded more morbid than I wanted, so quantities of unconscious persons—in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s lobby area, topped with bows made of bullets and a tiny, brightly colored Captain America flash drive hanging off the wrist of the person at the top of our sleeping pyramid. Watching the ‘Son of Coul’ pick his way over the assorted arms and legs of our present to S.H.I.E.L.D. just to get to that piece of (ugly) Captain America memorabilia made this whole trip worth it—watching all the baby agents in the background pick up their jaws at their superior’s . . . expression of his obsession was funnier than it ought to be.
And then the other was watching Pirate Leatherbooty yell at the Avengers for getting themselves captured, and then proceeded to have kittens when nobody would tell him how they actually escaped, and subsequently returned home. “If he’s not careful his other eye’s going to pop out, kinda like a Mr. Potatohead doll.”
“What, you slap him upside the head and pop! No more one-eyed pirate look?”
We just looked at each other and kept right on laughing, right up until we heard the faint sounds of a helicopter in the distance. We both looked out and lo and behold, it was a helicopter just coming over the horizon line. “Now where did that come from?” I wondered aloud before I redirected my attention to my tablet, and turned up the volume slightly. The chopper was indeed from some news station—though how they got here so fast I haven’t the faintest idea— and was beginning reports about the explosion that rocked the countryside. (And from where? Considering the complicated relationship between China and the free press, well.)
“If we were hoping for an opportune moment to play Santa,” Luna said, “I don’t think we could time this any better. Shall I drop their presents off right behind them on our way home?”
“Make it so, Number One.”