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Infinite Consortium, Monday

Liliana looked at the packing slip in her hand, and then down at the artifact in the crate, then back to her hand. Her packing slip stated state Bear-Trap, One (1): Condition - Used. Inside the crate was, in fact, Bear-Trap, One (1): Condition - Used, but she was fairly certain it wasn't supposed to be growling. But, she was pretty sure that was a growling noise she'd heard and that it was coming from the crate. Visually, however, the trap just sat there on the bottom of the crate, yawning wide, waiting for her to come pick it up. "Mmmhmm. I wasn't born yesterday." She could feel the black mana radiating from it, accompanied by a kind of lurking malevolence.

On the (incredibly unlikely) chance she was wrong, she went and fetched the pushbroom from the utilities closet, lowering the handle towards the center of the trap. The tip hadn't even poked the plate before the trap was snapping shut again, over and over until she was able to whack it against the side of the crate hard enough to make it let go. Ruse destroyed, the trap sat there gnashed its metal teeth at her, promising violence.

"An ambush chair is amusing, an ambush bear trap, less so," Liliana informed it. "So no, I don't think so." The clanging started in earnest as she replaced the top on the crate and retreated to her desk to figure out what to do with it. It wasn't a creature, so she couldn't kill it, and she couldn't disenchant the damn thing. That was white mana. "Of all the days to not be my younger self," she muttered, ignoring the muffled clanging from the crate.

Right, she was going to reply to the text from Nikodemus asking a few more clarifying questions about the Chain Veil...and also asking if he wanted an enchanted, semi-sentient, murderous bear trap. Who knew? Maybe he would!

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Don knocked on the doorframe as he entered the Infinite Consortium. "A little bird said you wanted to see me?"

Liliana, your crate seemed angry.

Sometimes crates are just like that. You've never had an amgry crate before?

"A fascinating way to refer to Thor, I'll have to remember it," Liliana teased. "Hello Don, darling, how are you? Can I offer you some coffee?"

Not recently! But then, he hadn't been in Tony's lab lately.

"If it's not too much trouble," he demurred, remembering to give that armchair a wide berth. "Did you have a nice time on Saturday?" He assumed so from how she'd gotten to tease Don's lunk of an other half. "I couldn't make it for obvious reasons."

"You were missed, darling, but don't worry, it was highly entertaining," Liliana said, and if Don thought Liliana specifically meant her date with Thor, he'd be correct. "But, as I mentioned to Thor, I do have something to ask if you. The class I'm teaching this semester focuses on survival in the aftermath of a zombie outbreak the kind you see in the media."

She rolled her eyes since they were very inaccurate, but they were also ubiquitous, so she made due. "I was hoping to convince you to come give a lecture at some point to touch on health and medical topics that someone in that kind of situation would find helpful?" Her grin curved as she handed him a cup of coffee. "I would, of course, make it worth your while."

"I'd be delighted," Don assured her as he took the cup with a, "Thank you. Were you thinking more emergency first aid when professional help isn't going to be coming, or 'boil your damn water' focused? Or both," he allowed.

He was not commenting on Thor's sigh of relief. Surely no one here knew what that might be about.

Liliana knew, Thor. She knew. If she'd been asking Don directly, she probably would have asked more normally, but your nose was just too fun to tweak.

"Both, but with an emphasis on boil your damn water, I think," Liliana said. "A draught of prevention is worth a dram of cure. I would, of course, be willing to teach a class of yours in exchange, but I'm not sure how useful you'd find that."

"Of course, I can do that," Don said. "Did you have a date in mind, or shall we pencil that in as TBD?" He considered the second part. "I don't really know, either. I suspect your home universe's healing system is rather different from the modern American medical-industrial complex. For the better, for all I know." Hopefully they didn't have to deal with insurance companies, at least. Then he said, "Absolutely not."

...and Thor materialized, in his spirit form, in this plane to ask Liliana, Can you do a convincing routine on the humors?

Don sighed the sigh of the longsuffering. "This isn't as funny as you think it is."

Thor would beg to disagree.

"TBD--" Liliana began, only to laugh at Thor's question. "Give me a week to prepare and I'll deliver a flawless lecture on the humors," she assured him, with a grin. "But if Mr. No-Fun here...I apologize, if Doctor No-Fun here, I recognize you have not put in that many hours of No-Fun rounds to be referred to as Mister...vetoes that, I could discuss herbal remedies that might be helpful to people? I learned knife and herb healing next to magical as well."

"You two are very funny," Don said, dry but fond. "Herbal remedies could definitely be useful. I'll admit it's not a field my knowledge is very strong in, and not all of my students are always going to have modern pharmaceuticals available to them. And if it works, it works, right? That would be great."

"We are, aren't we?" she replied, giving him a merry smile complete with dimples. "But excellent. In that case, I'm sure we can find a week to swap off classes."

She had made herself a cup of tea during that, and took a ladylike sip, before asking, "Though, darling, now I must ask. What was it you were trying to say the other night? The date ended before I could be told."

Don didn't answer her at first. Instead, he turned to look at Thor, and the two of them had the kind of silent conversation through microexpressions that only two people who knew each other exceedingly well could manage. If Liliana was paying attention, she might notice how similar those expressions were, for all that they were on quite different faces.

After several moments, Thor disappeared, and Don sighed, disappointed, and took a sip of his coffee to gather his thoughts before he said, "You remind us of someone. The situation is complicated and painful, and Thor, like a lot of people, isn't good at either of those things. More than that I really can't say."

Edited 2025-09-15 19:56 (UTC)

Oh, Liliana was absolutely paying attention, and noted those similarities and filed them away as interesting.

"Ah," she said, stirring her tea. "I see. Is the comparison less complicated for you, then? Or are you simply better at separating and handling them?"

"I'm..." Don trailed off as he considered his reply carefully. "I'm at a step of remove. It's not as personal for me." ~~Almost~~ every time he'd encountered Loki, Loki and Don both had thought that Loki was talking to Thor.

Liliana was also filing this away, with a little more interest than she had the similarities in their expressions.

"Well, I can't say that I haven't caused my own set of complicated and painful situations," she said, willing to set the topic aside.

Not that she was going to forget it, mind. But Liliana only went for direct confrontations only when she had overwhelming odds on her side. Otherwise, she tended for indirect approaches.

"As shocking as I'm sure that is for you to hear," she added with a smile.

Don gave her a small smile. "Who among us hasn't caused at least one?" he asked, quite rhetorically. "It's part of being alive, I think. But it's...did I tell you about Asgard? And Ragnarok?" He was pretty sure he hadn't, but he was willing to be wrong.

Liliana shook her head. "You haven't, no," she said.

Boy was she going to be shocked heard Don talk about Kaldheim.

"This realm, the realm of men, is to Thor Midgard," he began. "One of the nine realms upon the World Tree. Thor hails from Asgard, the realm of the gods. The Æsir. There was a story, a prophecy, about Ragnarok, when the gods would fall and all things would die, except actually it wasn't a prophecy, it was a cycle. Something that had happened before and would happen again and again...until Thor broke it. He died in the effort, and so did Asgard, but the rest of the universe was spared." And it was only because he had died that Donald Blake had been able to live, but they weren't getting into that right now.

"So they're all dead, you see. All of Thor's people. He's the only one left."

Thor was technically a child of two worlds, but that was new information, and his people in Midgard were either being world-class numpties or also dead at the moment, so.

Liliana looked startled. "A World Tree, you said? And Asgard? Not Axgard? I...huh."

She shook herself slightly. Right. Don had said a sad thing or whatever, pay attention to that and not the potential cosmological implications. "That was quite the choice for him to have made, and moreso the sacrifice. I can see where certain topics would lie heavily on him."

"Axgard? What?" Like with an x? Like an axe? He had concerns. Those concerns were probably irrelevant.

"In theory, Asgard can be resurrected, and her people, or most of her people. We're...working on that. But...well, it is most of her people. Anyone who died before Ragnarok proper can't be brought back." Odin, for instance, was just going to have to stay dead. Don was for sure super torn up about that (not). And Loki was right at the top of the 'maybe we try not to resurrect these people' list. Don shrugged. "It is what it is. Sorry to drop that on you. But I felt you deserved some explanation for why he's being such a pain, even if it's not the full one."

"Yes, Axgard. It's one of the Ten Realms attached to Kaldheim's World Tree, hanging from it like ripe fruit," Liliana explained, then amended. "Well, nine of the Realms hang from it. Istfell is located at the base to protect the Tree's roots from the monsters that roam the Cosmos."

As for his concern, Liliana waved that away. "It's fine, darling. I am no stranger to death or mourning...nor to searching for a way to bring someone back." She hadn't meant to say that out loud and was just going to continue on like she hadn't. "Though, it sounded as if Thor is carrying a measure of guilt for those who cannot be brought back. But if they died before Ragnarok, would they not still have stayed dead? Or is it simply grief he carries for them, as if there is anything so simple in grief."

"This is all sounding very familiar," Don said, wry. "Is there also a rainbow bridge somewhere in there?

"And," he continued with a shrug, "That's Thor for you. He's good at taking responsibility for things, whether he should or shouldn't." Since Don was not about to admit to the existence of the 'maybe we leave these people dead and say we couldn't find them' list. "He feels like he should be able to save everyone. And no one can do that." Don maybe hadn't done the greatest job of teaching him that lesson, if it had been one of the ones he was supposed to learn from him. "Hero complex, you know."

See? And it avoiding that unhealthy mindset that had Liliana choosing to take as little responsibility as possible, thank you.

"I know the type," she said with a very deep sigh. Yeah, not going into that any further, she shook her head. "No. No rainbow bridges. Though the Cosmos, which is the void of space that surrounds the Realms and the World Tree that's filled with a gorgeous rainbow of shifting, scintillating lights like an aurora. It's truly breathtaking to watch."

All expression slipped off Don's face for a moment, and then he said quietly, "I bet."

The sky in the void looked like that. It really was beautiful.

"Axgard. Who would have thought?"

"Very odd," Liliana said with a nod. "Something something typewriters monkeys Shakespeare, I suppose."

"Or maybe we're all more interconnected than we think," Don mused. "Steve and Tony and Jane and I all come from different universes, but they're so alike...mine and Tony's more than Jane and Steve's, but still. It makes sense there would be little similarities, further afield."

Almost like the creators of their universes were all working from the same cultural toolsets.

That didn't sound real. Besides, what were the odds that the makers of comics and the makers of a CCG would have overlapping interests????

"Likely true," Liliana agreed. "Should there be a time when Thor finds himself missing some kind of food or drink from Asgard, I certainly don't mind Planeswalking there and seeing if there's something similar." She wrinkled her nose. "Except to Starnheim. I refuse. Valkyries are angels in better armor and I remain unimpressed."

"I haven't known many angels, but as long as you agree their armor is better the valkyries I've known probably wouldn't be too fussed," Don told her, then corrected himself. "Thor. Thor has known." Messy personhood is messy, news at eleven.

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Infinite Consortium, Monday

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