Without the source-fusion language perk this side of the portal, Loki's words came too fast and too clipped for her to catch. Thea blinked. "...What did you say?"
The moment Thor heard his brother say something about bloodlust, his old habit of acting before thinking kicked in. "I will not betray my friends, evil goddess!"
He didn't finish the sentence. His right arm swung in a half-circle and Mjolnir, the divine hammer forged in the heart of a dying star, went flying with a sharp hiss.
Oh, come on. Can we just talk? They were two seconds into the conversation and he was already chucking a hammer. What was it with him?
She'd thought maybe he'd matured beyond the reckless brute in her memory. Apparently not.
Thea sighed. Her power was reduced in this universe; her Goddess of Death portfolio was being heavily suppressed in particular. No surprise there: one of Marvel's five great cosmic entities, Death, held dominion over the death aspect of this world.
She couldn't draw much from her Death divinity. But thanks to her Emotion divinity, and the fact that every living thing in any universe had emotion, she could hold roughly seventy percent of her strength.
She put out her right hand. Five slim fingers caught the hammer mid-flight. Thor clenched his jaw and threw his full weight into pulling it free.
But his strength bled into nothing. The hammer stayed locked in Thea's palm.
As they strained against each other, the ground began to tremble.
Thea meant to throw the hammer back to him, but it kept quivering under Thor's frantic pull. Letting go now would only hurt her own hand. They were caught in a stalemate.
"You've miscalculated the timeline. Come back." A clear, commanding voice rang in her ear.
Thor and Loki couldn't tell whose voice that was. Thea's brow drew together. Diana's voice. Their love bridged time and space along the Emotional Spectrum.
"That's not right..." She started running through the calculation, looking for where she'd gone wrong. With her skill, an error was nearly impossible.
"Come back, now. The Grandmaster's grasp of time is loose. You're two years early." Diana's tone was sharp. A few more seconds and she'd have lassoed Thea home herself.
Thea was furious. The Grandmaster, this clown with no sense of time, had thrown her off by two years.
In this alien universe, her Emotion divinity had its own peculiar nature: it surged and fell like a tide, unstable. Her control over her own strength was at an all-time low. Caught up in her frustration, a fraction more force went into her fingers without her noticing.
Crack. Crack—
The hammer in her hand bloomed with a webbing of fractures. Before she could think of a way to undo it, the star-forged core gave way under the pressure and shattered, the rest of the hammer collapsing into so much debris scattered across the ground.
Thor froze. Loki froze. Thea froze. I really didn't put any force into that. She wanted to explain, but one look at Thor's stricken face, and she decided silence was the better option.
Loki was already shouting for the Bifrost. Thea raised both palms. "Sorry, you've mistaken me for someone else. I'm leaving now. I'll come back in a few years!"
She opened the portal. Just before stepping through, she realized that crushing Thor's hammer was hardly the basis for a future alliance. She turned back and gave him a long, considering look from head to toe.
Thor really was weak. Without the hammer, he was even less impressive.
"Here. A little something from my universe about lightning. Call it compensation for the hammer." She pointed at him. A stream of information poured into his soul: a method for wielding lightning she had drawn out of old Shazam, a technique passed down from Zeus's line. It didn't suit her own style.
Now it made a useful gift.
Information transferred, she didn't wait for either of them to respond. She stepped into the portal.
She felt herself brush past someone in transit. The other figure was dressed in black; from the build, she'd guess a woman.
The transit was brief. They passed each other. Another stretch of violent shaking, and she was back where she belonged.
"Are you all right?" Diana asked, taut with worry. The Amazon had grasped that the place on the other side wasn't merely a parallel timeline. It was a fundamentally different universe.
Thea took a breath. Her own universe was easier to breathe in. She fixed the Grandmaster with a flat stare. "What the hell happened?"
"A small mistake. A small one. My lifespan is so vast. I've witnessed the rise and fall of an entire universe, the glory and ruin of empires..."
Thea waved his self-aggrandizement aside and recalibrated the timeline.
She wasn't going alone this time. If Superman had been there earlier, with that upright, heroic face of his, there would have been no fight to start with. Of course, by "fight" she meant whatever Thor and Loki were trying. From her tier, that didn't even register as combat.
Superman's image was unimpeachable. The man was a walking advertisement for moral virtue. No one looked at him and thought villain.
She knew the truth about herself. The way she looked now, she was a long way from "Justice."
Diana insisted on coming. Batman made it clear he was coming too.
Barry and the others started lining up as well. Thea waved them off. "There's probably no Speed Force over there. Earth still needs you. Same reasoning for the Green Lanterns."
She turned them all down. Thea, Diana, Superman, Batman, and the Grandmaster stood at the portal. She would not leave the wily old man behind this time; even if the timing was off, they could correct on the other side, and bouncing between universes was deeply uncomfortable. Plus, with the Grandmaster gone, the Watcher would go home too.
She didn't use Death Godhood to open this portal. That kind of energy ran pitch-black and looked nothing like "Justice."
On top of that, with Marvel's Death entity suppressing her aspect, she used her Emotion Godhood instead. A dazzling spectrum of color. Much better optics.
They stepped through. Aside from the Grandmaster, who looked relieved to be home, everyone, Thea included, needed a moment to acclimate.
Batman was an ordinary human. No universe affected him. He was already scanning the surroundings.
Superman ran through a quick body check, glanced at the sun, found it indistinguishable from the one back home, and relaxed.
The one who took the hit was Diana. Thea had to help her steady the divine power churning inside her. Ten minutes later, she was stable.
"Does this universe not have courage?" Diana asked. Thea had sealed off Diana's courage-based divine power; her Persistence and Protection aspects still worked.
"The Emotional Spectrum may follow different rules here. Emotion itself works. But Courage as its own thing doesn't map onto what we're used to." Thea kept the answer vague. Did Marvel have a green standard-bearer? The Hulk, and the Hulk represented rage, not courage. Rage in their own universe was red. The general bandwidth of "emotion" came through fine, since emotion was an expansive concept. But Diana's specific Courage simply didn't translate here.
With half her strength gone, Diana was less than pleased. Having her own power suppressed while being sent against an enemy stronger than any she'd known: the feeling did not sit well.
"Where are we?" Diana asked Batman.
"Don't know."
His answer left them speechless. Then what have you been staring at so intently?
"That pedestrian in the distance is carrying a copy of the New York Times. Also, someone's approaching from the northwest, flying. Do we want to engage him?" Superman's gaze swept toward the horizon.
Thea looked too. Red metal armor, a glowing Arc Reactor in the chest. They were in New York. The identity wasn't a hard guess.
It was Iron Man. Tony Stark.