Chapter Text
Jane’s Manual presents as a thick black notebook, its pages overflowing with notes and scribbled calculations. If there are more pages than should logically be inside it, nobody really questions it, least of all Darcy the Intern. She feels a small pang about not telling Darcy about the wizardry. They’re fast becoming friends, and Jane likes being honest with her friends more often than not.
At least it keeps her research methods honest. She can’t just cheat and check her manual for atmospheric data, she has to actually document it. That will keep the review board at Culver satisfied, at least.
It does mean lugging around a lot more equipment, though. Darcy, overburdened with heavy equipment, huffs as she lifts it into the van. Jane pulls it into place and velcroes it down tight.
“After this summer, I am going to be so built,” Darcy says, shaking her head. “I thought interning would just be playing solitaire and making coffee occasionally, not doing backbreaking labor.”
Jane purses her lips, thinking. “Coffee’s a good idea,” she says. “We might be out there awhile. There’s mugs in—umm—“ She searches for where she last put them, comes up blank.
“They’re in the dishwasher, cause they looked kinda grody,” Darcy says. She salutes Jane casually. “One pot o’ joe coming right up, boss.” She turns on her heel and strolls into the lab’s little kitchenette.
“Thank you!” Jane remembers to call to her intern. She really is grateful for Darcy, who does a lot more work than any intern probably should for no pay. Really, she’s grateful to have any applicants at all. She opens her manual/notebook to the back section, where it stores her notes for her, and runs down her list of equipment to make sure she has everything. It’s just a formality—she and Darcy ran down the list while loading the van—but she doesn’t want to be out in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert and realize she forgot a spectrometer.
The list checks out. Jane is about to close the book when her pinky catches the edge of a page, and she flips to it idly.
It’s the listings. Jane’s name is somewhere in the middle, sandwiched between FORRESTER, Zenia L, and FOX, David M.
FOSTER, Jane C
1001 Main St
Puente Antiguo, NM 87540
On active status:
Assignment location:
Lamy, NM
“Shit,” Jane says, succinctly. Up until this morning the status had said: On research assignment. The manual tended to update itself randomly, changing sometimes second to second, adding a few pages here and there with useful information. Her status hadn’t changed in months, not since she’d moved out here to start her research.
Something was about to happen, and it was up to her to deal with it. She’d sworn an Oath, after all, to serve Life and all that went with it. She couldn’t refuse Errantry when it showed up in her backyard.
“Darcy!” she calls to the kitchen. “Do you know where I put the GPS monitor?”
--
Dr. Erik Selvig wasn’t a wizard, but he knew about Jane’s wizardry. She’d told him sheepishly one day in his office, shortly before her father had succumbed to his cancer. “Erik,” she’d said, smoothing her hands over her skirt and talking like she had rehearsed the words. “I don’t like lying to my friends, even by omission, and you’re like a second dad to me, so there’s something you should know about me.”
At first he hadn’t believed her. The idea of wizardry was too farfetched, let alone the idea of Jane being a wizard. He’d known Jane since she was fourteen years old and already obsessed with astronomy. He’d helped her to set up her second telescope.
She offered to show him.
For as long as he lived, Erik would never forget the sight of the earth as a burning ball of blue-green-white fire just off the horizon of the moon. He’d been dreaming of that sight since he was seventeen years old and the first images from the Apollo 8 mission appeared. Jane had brought that vista to him.
He believed in her research absolutely, and had flown down here to the middle-of-nowhere New Mexico to assist her only a few days after her call. He’d barely had time to stow his things in Jane’s trailer and say hello before she and her intern drove him out to the middle of the desert.
Three hours later and he is acutely feeling the fact that 1am in New Mexico was 3am in Virginia. The desert is uncomfortably cold at night, and his legs ache from sitting in a cramped van for hours. Darcy, Jane’s intern, is clearly getting bored. “Perhaps we should come back another night.”
“No,” Jane says, stubborn. “No—the last seventeen occurrences have been predictable down to the second. I wouldn’t have asked you to fly out here if I wasn’t absolutely sure.” Her eyes flicker to Darcy, at the front of the truck. “Plus there’s—one other thing.”
Erik’s eyebrows rise. ‘One other thing’ means she’s on wizardly assignment. He can feel the hairs raise on his arm, an omen of what’s to come.
“Jane,” Darcy says from the front of the vehicle, and they both turn to look. “I think you wanna see this.”
Jane and Erik lever themselves up through the van’s open roof and look. The night sky has lit up with color, an aurora so bright that it blots out the Milky Way. Erik gapes, calculations running haphazard through his brain. “I thought you said it was a subtle aurora—“
“Go!” Jane shrieks.
Darcy puts the van in gear and guns it. Erik jolts back, nearly knocking his head on the edge of the van’s roof, and they are careening towards the storm. Storm clouds bloom out of empty night, quicker than Erik would have thought possible, spiraling like water down a drain and Jane is laughing in wild exhilaration. He’s not sure if the wind is from the storm or the frankly surprising speed of the van. The funnel cloud touches down, and they’re too close—too fast—to stop. Darcy swerves, and Jane fights her. Lightning strikes. They swerve and a man is standing in the center of the storm. Darcy and Jane both spin the wheel at the same time, and the van stops with a dreadful thunk!
The storm is gone as quick as it began. Erik can’t breathe for a moment in shock, and he’s not the only one. He can see the prone figure in the dust, and thinks it probably isn’t good that the man isn’t moving.
Erik, Darcy and Jane all startle into movement, scrambling out of the van with the urgency of three people who may or may not have just committed vehicular manslaughter. “I think that was legally your fault,” Darcy calls.
Jane admonishes her intern to get first aid and rolls the man onto his side. He’s broad and blond and unmoving, and for a moment Erik swears his heart stops.
“Do me a favor and don’t be dead,” Jane breathes Erik’s secret hope, and the man gasps and rolls over. Erik breathes a sigh of relief—he’s not dead, just stunned. The man’s eyes settle on Jane. She just stares.
--
Jane Foster is not a stupid woman. She knows Errantry when it falls directly out of a temporally-spatially erratic high-energy worldgate. Her eyes lock with the—man’s. (If he’s actually a man, her brain supplies, complete with a helpful list of all the humanoid aliens she’s ever encountered.) A jolt that feel like lightning runs up her fingers.
He lurches to his feet, quicker than she can get her wits about her. He staggers, almost drunkenly, shouting about a hammer in the Speech. It’s the base language of the universe—the language of wizardry, that all things understand on a base level. Even in that ancient tongue, his words make no sense.
“Dai’stiho!” she calls back in the same language, the more-or-less standard greeting to any unknown being whilst on assignment, if a little less friendly than she would normally make it. “I am on Errantry, and I greet you.”
She doesn’t have time for Darcy’s confused stare. His blue eyes zero in on her. In her head, Jane says nine words of a ten-word shield spell, just in case. “You! You speak the Allspeech. What realm is this? Alfheim? Nornheim?”
“New Mexico?” Darcy says, and a little red dot lands right in the middle of their guest’s chest. Darcy's finger is poised on the trigger of something that looks plastic and dangerous
Oh no, Jane thinks, and she just has enough time to throw the shield spell up over the tall man before the Taser goes off.