Thor Odinson did not feel particularly divine when the first Midgardian vehicle hit him.
That alone should have been enough to make him reconsider his choices. His father had stripped him of power, title, armour, and certainty, then cast him down to a world Thor had never thought worth respecting. Any sensible prince would have taken the lesson, shut his mouth, and started with humility.
Thor was not that prince.
He landed in New Mexico like a problem the heavens had thrown away and got the full Midgardian welcome at once with headlights cutting across him, brakes screaming, panic following, and then a woman who managed to hit him.
Jane Foster climbed out first with the stunned expression of someone who had just driven over a man and was not yet willing to accept that reality.
Darcy Lewis got out with a taser already in hand because some people met the unknown with caution, and some with voltage. She was lucky it was Thor she met, not some other man with a tendency to violence.
Erik Selvig, old enough to know this was already going badly, came round the other side of the vehicle and stared down at the broad blond stranger lying in the dirt with more offence than injury in his face.
Thor pushed himself up at once, or tried to. The movement lacked the old authority. The strength was there in human terms, but not in the way he was used to. No easy divine correction. No armour flowing back over him. No answering weight of power in his bones.
That upset him more than the truck.
After a short and utterly pointless exchange, Darcy shot him with the taser.
Thor, God of Thunder, went down into the dirt again with the look of a man being personally insulted by electricity.
Jane stared at Darcy.
"What did you do?"
"He was freaking me out." Darcy held the taser with both hands now, as if ready to negotiate with science through repeated application. "And in my defence, he still is."
They hauled him to the hospital because even Midgardians had some standards when the lunatic on the road turned out to be handsome and built like a siege engine.
Thor improved the situation by waking in a gown, taking offence at confinement after his small episode of attacking the doctors.
That did not help his case.
He threw people aside on instinct, tore through a hallway full of medical staff, and kept talking as if a firm enough tone would force reality to remember who he used to be.
It did not.
A doctor tried to stop him. Darcy watched the whole thing with the vindicated satisfaction of a woman who had already voted for electricity once.
They sedated him.
When he woke again, he escaped.
Then he got hit by the same people one more time because, apparently, royal blood, divine lineage, and millennia of Asgardian prestige still could not protect a fool from a truck when that fool insisted on making himself a recurring traffic event.
Lucius, had he been there, would have called it fitting.
There was something deeply satisfying about watching a prince so proud of his heritage immediately throw himself at a human woman and the whole muddy nonsense of Midgard. Thor had fallen from Asgard, landed in human chaos, and instead of learning dignity, he was already moving towards the sort of attachment that diluted divine and royal blood with alarming enthusiasm. If the man kept choosing with his cock and not his head, then frankly, he deserved every absurd disaster that kept happening to him.
-
Meanwhile, not far from where the former prince was learning the local price of arrogance, Mjolnir landed.
The hammer carved itself into the earth like judgment arriving late and staying to make a point. By morning, it had already turned into a roadside attraction. Townspeople came to look, speculate, photograph, tug, grunt, swear, and fail. Every strongman for a hundred miles suddenly believed destiny might be moved by a better back angle.
It was not.
The reports reached SHIELD fast, as strange objects in the desert were the sort of thing governments liked to mismanage immediately.
Coulson was sent to investigate.
For the first time in weeks, he felt an almost guilty sense of gratitude on the drive out. A mysterious hammer in the desert was still a problem, but it was not Lucius Noctis, which meant the object in question was statistically less likely to insult his superior, extort a transport package, or threaten the world with a new product line over coffee.
That alone made New Mexico feel like a vacation.
--
Far from the banished prince and his very energetic effort to cheapen royal blood with Midgardian romance, Lucius Noctis was celebrating an achievement that mattered.
His first successful human-to-mutant conversion.
It had taken a grotesque amount of work, more patience than the subjects deserved, and enough unpleasant failures to make anyone else question whether science was worth the labour.
The transferred X Gene itself was not impressive. Hair growth control. Hardly the sort of mutation that would inspire terror, envy, or useful policy change. But the gift itself was never the point. The point was the process and a working model.
Sersi's ability could transmute anything, provided he understood the structure well enough to force the change without the whole body collapsing into a lesson. Matter transmutation, biology, mutation pathways, immune tolerance, cell signalling, tissue stability, endocrine response, and the miserable special logic of the X Gene had finally aligned in one direction that counted as victory.
He had done it.
A human had become a mutant because he wanted to see whether it could be done and did not care that the human in question had held other views on the matter.
Lucius stood at Alkali Lake with a satisfied smile and looked over the forest he had improved through long effort and bad manners and infidels. The place was starting to look less like Colorado and more like a botanical argument someone had lost on every continent at once. Pines still stood where they belonged, but now they shared ground with umbrella trees from Yemen, rainbow eucalyptus from New Guinea, ginkgo from China, succulents that had no business towering in mountain cold, palms that existed solely to upset Stryker, and dozens of other foreign intrusions that pleased Lucius every time he saw them.
The latest success did not look like much. The subject sat propped against a tree, alive, terrified, and deeply resistant to gratitude. His scalp hair and the rest of his body hair were growing and receding uncontrollably. Lucius had taken the hair-growth mutation, cleaned up the transfer, stabilised the body's first rejection response, and corrected the endocrine spike that had nearly ruined the whole thing earlier that week.
Lucius nodded with professional satisfaction.
"There we are. I do all this work, and the first one I pull off turns out to be a walking salon miracle."
The man trembled and tried to speak through fear and cold.
Lucius did not care for the tone before the words had even finished forming.
"Do not spoil this for me. You are part of history now."
That was supposed to carry weight. Instead, it only made the man look more frightened.
Philistines, infidels, the world was full of them.
Lucius transmuted the poor man into a fig tree.
"There", he said with a satisfied smile. "Could have been an apple tree, but I like figs more."
He swept the surrounding grove with a pleased look and decided the forest now had the kind of diversity that New York would have called progressive, and Colorado would have called evidence.
Then he vanished back to the St. Regis.
-
Colonel Stryker was beginning to believe a forest god had developed a personal grudge.
He stood with new field photographs spread over his desk and tried to calculate how many separate anomalies a single landscape could contain before it counted as psychological warfare.
Within the last month alone, well over four hundred foreign tree variants had appeared across the surrounding forest. Others simply materialised in places no sane ecologist would ever have planted them. The familiar order of the region had gone to hell. Pines, aspens, and the expected local growth were still there, but now they were interrupted by umbrella crowns from Yemen, broad succulent columns from Madagascar, rainbow trunks from New Guinea, ginkgo fans from China, and palm trees that still looked like somebody had inserted a joke into military land use.
His soldiers had no answer.
They patrolled, logged, and took samples. They doubled watches and found nothing except more impossible trees by dawn.
Stryker had once believed he understood the limits of what counted as a threat. Mutants could kill, infiltrate, deceive, destroy, corrupt, or spread. What they were apparently also capable of doing now was turning his perimeter into a malicious botany exhibit.
He looked at one photograph, then another, then set both down with controlled disgust.
It was not easy to find bunkers like Alkali Lake. The facility had been chosen for a reason. Isolated. Defensible. Remote enough for ugly work and clean enough to hide it. But a hideout stopped being a hideout once the surrounding forest started looking like God's own drunken greenhouse.
He had already begun searching for a new site.
That, more than anything else, told him how seriously he had started taking the mockery.