November rolled in.
Baldy's Trojan was successfully seeded into the root servers, and the moles inside the television networks were all in place; some of the agents had already drawn a full month's salary from their TV-station jobs. Now everything waited on her command.
On the other front, under Captain America's supervision, animation development was sailing along; the first six episodes were complete.
Elektra's end was a little more troublesome. After being mistaken several times running for someone looking to break into the adult-film trade herself, she'd been forced to hire a squad of guards, every one of them armed to the teeth and brutish-looking, who finally cowed the swarm of San Fernando Valley "talent scouts."
This advertisement had no fixed air date, no guaranteed results, and no telling whether it might get them targeted by a government. Several of the larger companies turned it down flat. But none of them slammed the door entirely; two of the operators said that if the ad performed, they'd pay, though forking over cash before they'd seen a single thing was out of the question.
Pool all the threads together and you could say everything was ready. The trouble was that the enemy simply refused to show. Even Daisy was starting to scratch her head. Where was this promised World Serpent? Where was the terror that was supposed to blanket the world?
She had no read on the situation in Asgard, except that she could spot Old Man Odin's two ravens from time to time. The pair of them, one to the south and one to the north, circled the Earth all day long, noticeably thinner than before.
Compared to the wasting ravens, Thor had actually filled out quite a bit.
The man had come back to give it another two tries, and each attempt fared worse than the last. After the third failed lift, the blond god gave a self-mocking little laugh, waved a hand at Daisy, and said, "Just keep it here. I won't be coming back..."
He was smiling, yet anyone could see the wound underneath.
Thor soon parted ways with his four companions. Coulson found him a job manning the gate at the school, and there he drank himself stupid day after day, chasing the lost glory of the God of Thunder somewhere at the bottom of a bottle.
Lorna and the others observed him with some curiosity for a couple of days at first, but the man did nothing besides drink and sleep, and there was truly nothing remarkable to see. Bit by bit, the girls stopped paying Thor any mind.
Only Peter Parker still found him interesting. Now and then, during the one or two hours when Thor was sober, the boy would trot over to talk with him.
"Back then, the Frost Giant stood five meters (sixteen feet) tall. He sneered at how small I was, so I cracked him across the jaw with my hammer! Ha-ha—" Seeing that someone actually enjoyed his stories, Thor was only too happy to oblige, embellishing his heroic deeds at length.
"What keeps you going? What's your reason for doing it?" Young Peter only half-believed the boasting; it was the deeper question that he cared about.
"My reason?" Thor kneaded his alcohol-fogged brain. What was his reason, exactly? What had driven him to fling himself forward, heedless of his own safety, charging to the front every single time?
He found he couldn't answer. After a long hesitation he ventured, "My divine power, I suppose?"
Peter's eyebrows shot up. "And without that divine power, you'd amount to nothing?"
Thor badly wanted to say no. But though he opened his mouth several times, it all dissolved in the end into a hollow sigh.
In a car parked not far off, Daisy watched the whole scene and stayed silent a long while. She'd meant to needle Thor into reigniting his divine power. It seemed now she'd needled a little too hard.
There'd been no conversation, but she could more or less guess the state of his mind. It had cracked clean through. A few failed attempts at the hammer, and he'd simply given up. The way Thor saw it, any random woman pulled in off Midgard could heft Mjolnir; whether he was there or not made no real difference.
She recognized that she'd made a small miscalculation, but Daisy would never own up to it out loud. She pinned the blame on someone else.
She rounded on Loki, freshly "descended to the mortal realm" from Asgard, and let the grievances fly. "Your brother is a total write-off now. The prophecy says Thor and the World Serpent will perish together. How's he supposed to take the World Serpent down with him looking like that?"
Loki cut her a sidelong glance. "Asgard can see what happens down on your Earth. Don't imagine I haven't noticed; you rounded up a whole crowd of women to try lifting that hammer." He pressed on. "I saw everything that day. After Thor passed out, you went and found yourself a dark-skinned woman who commands lightning, didn't you? I could tell at a glance: she carries the power of lightning."
Loki flatly refused to take the fall. He also felt a touch of pity for Thor. Too tragic. The man's entire worldview had collapsed. Put in Thor's shoes, Loki figured he'd hold up a little better, but only a little.
Earth's women were terrifying.
Loki was the first Asgardian to concede the name "Earth" rather than insisting on "Midgard."
The two of them had a great deal to attend to and soon drove off from the school. The World Serpent had yet to surface, and Loki lived in dread that a single lapse in attention would find the thing on his doorstep. He hadn't slept in ages. No matter how he scoured the old texts, he couldn't pin down where the Serpent had been sealed, and he was being forced to plan for the worst.
For Loki, pinning the World Serpent down on Earth was all upside and no downside. So, though he and Daisy were hardly close, the two began hashing out a concrete battle plan.
When Fear Itself ignited, eight war hammers would fall from the extradimensional space, and whoever took them up would become the World Serpent's heralds and vanguard. The two of them would split the field down the middle: however many enemies came, half each.
Loki believed Earth could never stop the World Serpent, but it could stall the thing by sheer weight of numbers, and that plan suited him fine. Daisy, for her part, felt acutely short on heavy hitters; if Loki would shoulder half the pressure, her load would lighten considerably.
Each of them was running the angles, and on the surface the harmony was flawless, both secretly hoping the other would be the one to die and buy them time.
Worn down by young Peter's question, Thor downed a good deal more drink and went lurching off toward his lodgings.
"Young man, might I have a word with you?" A middle-aged white man with graying hair and glasses called out to Thor from a short distance away.
The word "young man" didn't register at first. Only when the man called again did Thor point at himself. "Me? You mean me?"
The middle-aged man's face was grave, and the way he furrowed his brow put Thor in mind of Odin. The urge to boast drained away in an instant. Reminded that his age, converted to Earth terms, did in fact make him a young man, Thor gave a small nod and walked to the roadside with him.
"Young man, I'm Ben Parker, Peter's uncle. Peter Parker. Does that name mean anything to you?" Uncle Ben asked.
That pesky kid Peter's question had gnawed at Thor all afternoon; he couldn't have forgotten if he tried.
"I don't know who you are, or what your past is, and I don't care to. I only want to say this: stay away from Peter. If you truly are this hero you claim to be, then stay away from him."
Uncle Ben kept going. "If you have even a shred of a grown man's conscience left, set a decent example. I don't believe a single word of those heroic exploits, because you are a man with no sense of responsibility. You don't even grasp that with great power comes great responsibility!"