The first day of Thor's quarantine was a study in brooding majesty.
He paced the dusty main street of Puente Antiguo like a caged lion, his regal brow furrowed, his powerful arms crossed over his chest.
He would stare at the sky for hours, shouting challenges at the clouds, demanding his father answer for this injustice.
He projected an aura of divine rage and tragic nobility.
Jane Foster found it poetic. Erik Selvig found it deeply concerning. Darcy Lewis just thought he looked "super hot when he's all angsty."
By the end of the second day, the novelty had worn off. The sky remained stubbornly silent.
His pacing had worn a noticeable groove in the dirt road. The brooding was still majestic, but it was also becoming... well, a little boring.
On the morning of the third day, Darcy, unable to stand another moment of the thunder free silence, decided to take matters into her own hands.
She found Thor sitting on the steps of the local diner, morosely kicking at a loose rock.
"Okay, Your Highness," she said, marching up to him with the unshakeable confidence of a millennial armed with a smartphone. "I can't take another day of this. You look like a sad golden retriever who's been told he can't go for a walk. You need a hobby."
Thor glared up at her. "My 'hobby,' mortal, was defending the Nine Realms from frost giants and fire demons. My current circumstances are somewhat lacking in that regard."
"Yeah, well, we're a little short on fire demons at the moment," Darcy shot back, completely unintimidated. "So, you get this instead."
She held out a impossibly thin rectangle of black glass and metal. It was a top of the line Umbrella One smartphone, requisitioned by Jane from their Illuminati liaison.
Thor stared at it with suspicion. "What is this strange sorcery? A dark mirror?"
"It's a phone," Darcy said with an exasperated sigh, as if explaining gravity to a toddler. "It's for... stuff. Talking to people, looking at pictures of cats, arguing with strangers about politics. Look."
She spent the next hour giving a god the most frustrating tech support lesson of her life.
The concept of a touch screen was, to Thor, an infuriating and dishonorable form of combat.
"I press it, and nothing happens!" he would boom, jabbing at the screen with a force that would have shattered a lesser device.
The Umbrella One's vibranium laced chassis barely registered the impact.
"You don't press it, you tap it," Darcy explained for the tenth time, her patience wearing thin. "It's a gentle tap. A caress. Be nice to it."
"I am the Prince of Asgard! I do not caress my tools!" he thundered, before accidentally swiping the screen, which opened the weather app. A sunny icon appeared. "Ha! See? It obeys my will!"
"You just checked the weather, you big doofus," she muttered.
Finally, after a torturous session that involved Thor nearly throwing the device through a wall when he couldn't figure out how to close an app, she managed to get him to the Umbrella App Store.
"Okay, this is where you find stuff to do," she said, scrolling through the endless icons. "News, books, music... oh, here we go. Games. You like games, right? Smashing things, winning, all that Viking jazz?"
"A worthy contest of skill and strategy is the right of every warrior!" he declared.
"Great. Here's one," she said, her finger hovering over a brightly colored icon. It showed a cartoon viking with a comically large helmet. "It's called 'Clash of Clans'. You build a village and raise an army and attack other people. It's right up your alley."
She tapped the download button. "And this one... my mom is obsessed with this one. 'Candy Crush Saga'. It's a... a puzzle of enchanted gems."
Over the next few hours, a terrifying transformation occurred. Thor, the mighty Prince of Asgard, Son of Odin, the once and future king, discovered mobile gaming.
It started with "Clash of Clans." He was a natural. The strategic mindset of a thousand battles translated surprisingly well to managing digital barbarians and goblins.
His roars of frustration were replaced by bellows of triumph.
"YES!" he would shout, startling Jane and Erik in their makeshift lab. "Their walls have crumbled before my mighty warriors! Their gold is mine! Hahahaha!"
"He's... adapting," Erik noted, peering over his glasses at the sight of a Norse god hunched over a tiny screen, his thumb moving with surprising agility.
By day four, he was a lost cause. He had forsaken the sky. His brooding was a thing of the past.
His formidable existence was now focused on his upgrade timers and accumulating elixir.
He would sit for hours in the diner, ignoring the excellent mortal food Jane brought him, muttering things like, "The foolish chieftain left his Town Hall outside his walls! He will pay for his hubris!"
Darcy began to regret her decision. He was narrating his every move with the epic grandiosity of a royal herald.
"Heed my words, foul wizard in your pathetic tower!" he yelled at the phone. "Your defenses are like paper against the might of my PEKKAs! FEAR ME!"
"He's talking to the game," Darcy explained to a bewildered Jane. "And I think he's scaring it."
But "Clash of Clans" was merely the appetizer. It was on the evening of the fourth day that he, in a moment of boredom while waiting for his barracks to upgrade, opened the other game.
The one with the enchanted gems. "Candy Crush Saga."
The first few levels were simple, a triviality for a mind that had outsmarted Loki. But then, it began to happen.
The colors. The satisfying pop of a successful match. The disembodied voice that purred "Sweet!" and "Divine!" when he cleared a row.
It was a siren's call, a sorcery more potent than any he had ever faced.
By day five, he was a full blown addict. He had completely abandoned his burgeoning digital village.
The "Clash of Clans" notifications pleading with him that his village was under attack went ignored. His new battlefield was a grid of brightly colored candies.
The majestic roars of a conquering king were replaced by the frustrated grunts of a man one jelly short of clearing a level.
"NORN STONES!" he would bellow, slamming his hand on the table. "This infernal chocolate is spreading! I am beset on all sides!"
Jane and Erik would exchange worried looks.
"What's wrong with him now?" Jane asked Darcy.
"He's on Level 72," Darcy said. "It's a tough one. He's been stuck there for three hours."
His language, once the noble pronouncements of a prince, had devolved into a stream of guttural Asgardian curses directed at a 5 inch screen.
He would wake up in the middle of the night, his face illuminated by the phone's glow, muttering, "Just one more life... I must crush the striped candy... for the glory of Asgard!"
On the sixth day, the situation reached its peak. Wanda Maximoff, in her role as council liaison, arrived in Puente Antiguo to check on their "guest."
She found him in the back of the van, a wild look in his eyes, his hair a furiously swiping at the screen.
"By Odin's missing eye!" he roared, not even looking up at her. "This blasted licorice swirl is the foulest of Loki's tricks! It mocks my every move!"
Wanda stared, utterly bewildered. This was the mighty Thor? The warrior T'Challa had seen in his vision? She looked at Darcy, who just shrugged.
"He ran out of lives an hour ago and refused to pay the ninety nine cents for five more," Darcy explained in a whisper. "He called it 'coward's gold' and is waiting for the timer to reset. It's been a long morning."
Wanda, a being of immense power, who had sat at a table with the secret rulers of the world, approached the pouting god. "Prince Thor?"
"What is it, woman?! Can you not see I am engaged in a battle of wits and wills against a foe of unimaginable cruelty?!" he snapped, furiously tapping a notification that a friend had sent him a new life. "Ah, excellent! The Lady Darcy of Lewis has reinforced my position! The battle is rejoined!"
Wanda was speechless.
She pulled out her own Umbrella One and sent an encrypted message to Aryan at the Sentinel Complex.
It was just a single photo of Thor, hunched over his phone, a look of murderous rage on his face as he swiped at a row of candies, with the caption: "Our god has a gambling problem. I think he's losing."
Back in Geneva, the entire Illuminati council watched the image on their main screen.
After a moment of stunned silence, Tony Stark collapsed onto the table, howling with a laughter so loud it echoed through the entire secured facility.
The quarantine, they all agreed, was going better than they could have possibly imagined. The mighty Thor, the Prince of Asgard, the Son of Odin, had been successfully neutralized.