Nick Fury's heart was as cold as the weather outside.
Earth, this remote little backwater that didn't even qualify as a "Type I civilization" by any meaningful cosmic standard, had somehow turned into a vacation hotspot for universe-level troublemakers.
Just as Fury was debating whether or not it was time to use the pager and call in the cavalry, a commotion broke out at the dig site ahead.
"Director Fury! We found something big!" An agent came rushing in, voice shaking with excitement.
"What is it? If you've dug up a few frozen HYDRA corpses, don't bother me with it." Fury snapped. He was thinking.
"No, sir. Not corpses. Life signs." The agent pointed back toward the ice-cutting equipment. "Weak ones, but definitely still there. We've got a heartbeat."
Fury hadn't expected it.
They had actually found Captain America.
Howard's theory had been right all along.
He hurried down and saw the body being pulled from the ice.
Inside the translucent crystal, one clear silhouette was already announcing its return to the world.
A man in a star-spangled uniform, eyes closed.
Steve Rogers.
Captain America.
For the first time in what felt like forever, Fury felt something close to relief.
Maybe they didn't need Carol back to hold the line after all.
Though in terms of raw fighting power, one Captain America probably wasn't going to be enough.
"But I still need you, Captain," Fury murmured. "A man with an absolutely unshakable moral core. A real leader. The exact kind of spirit America is missing right now."
He rested one hand against the ice and gave the order without hesitation.
"Get the highest-level medical recovery unit moving. We thaw him out using the safest method possible. I don't care if it burns through S.H.I.E.L.D.'s entire medical budget. I want him awake and unharmed."
At the same time, in Brazil.
In a favela on the edge of the city, Bruce Banner was heading home.
The heart-rate monitor on his wrist buzzed softly, the numbers on the screen creeping higher and higher.
Banner took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and forced himself to remember the meditation techniques he had learned from that master in India. He tried to slow his pulse.
He was tired.
Ever since the gamma accident, he had become a fugitive. He feared the military, yes, but what he feared more was the thing inside him, the Hulk, the monster that could tear everything apart the moment anger slipped loose.
On a television mounted above the street, international news was playing.
"Godlike figure appears on the streets of New York! The superhuman known as 'the S-man' took thousands of bullets with his bare body and destroyed a fully armed criminal strike force at supersonic speed!"
The image on the screen was blurry, but the blue figure with the red S on his chest, standing in front of a crater several stories deep, hit Banner hard.
"Hulk has strength like that too..." he muttered. "What the hell is happening to this world..."
He had once thought the Hulk was the most terrifying creature on the planet.
Now it seemed Earth had picked up yet another being who could tear through a city if he felt like it.
"Hopefully the military lunatics stay focused on him and leave me alone."
Banner pulled his cap lower and disappeared into the street at a faster pace.
But Banner had no idea that the military had never stopped hunting him.
If anything, Superman's appearance had made them even more obsessive.
At a military base somewhere in the United States.
"Bang!"
General Ross slammed his fist onto the desk. On the giant screen in front of him played the same footage again. Clark blasting armed men away with a punch. Crushing a grenade in his hand. Then launching into the air at supersonic speed and sending three military Apaches spinning out of control before catching them and setting them down.
"Can somebody tell me what in God's name that thing is?!" Ross roared.
True to his reputation, anger came easily to him. He pointed at Clark on the screen and turned on the row of senior officers and strategists behind him.
"We spend hundreds of billions in taxpayer money every year developing so-called cutting-edge weapons, and what happens? Right in the middle of New York, under our noses, an entire special ops team gets blown aside by some lunatic in tights like they're flies! The military's dignity got thrown into the Atlantic and fed to sharks!"
"My old friend asked me for support, and this is what you gave me? Pathetic. Since when did the U.S. military become this useless?"
The command center went silent.
No one was stupid enough to say anything while Ross was in full eruption mode.
Ross breathed hard, burning with the disease that lived in his bones, fear of inadequate firepower.
As the military's hardest-line hawk, he refused to let the armed forces get shoved to the sidelines in this incoming age of superhumans. If conventional weapons couldn't handle gods and monsters flying through the sky, then they would answer monsters with monsters.
"General!" An intelligence officer rushed in at that moment, holding a file. "We found him in Brazil!"
"Brazil?" Ross's eyes lit up instantly. "Track Bruce Banner, that coward hiding in the gutters. Finally. We've got him."
"Notify Emil Blonsky. I want his best retrieval team assembled immediately, fully armed. Target is Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I don't care about international law, sovereignty, sanctions, any of it. I want Bruce Banner in hand. If he resists, force the green monster out of him. We need that damn green giant to restart the military's super soldier program!"
None of that had anything to do with Clark and Tony in New Mexico, though.
At the diner table sat three men.
On the left was the Asgardian prince Thor, freshly released from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s interrogation room, drenched from head to toe, blond hair plastered to his face.
He had just suffered the greatest humiliation of his life. He had lost his power. He had been rejected by his hammer. But apparently none of that had any effect on Asgardian appetite.
Or maybe he really was just starving.
"Another five of these meat-and-bread things you call hamburgers!" Thor boomed, slapping the table. "And bring me all the ale you have!"
He ate like a man who had been starved for eight centuries.
Tony stared at him in disbelief and disgust.
This was less a god and more a very large homeless man.
"So let me make sure I have this insane story straight." Tony tapped the table with one finger and turned to Clark. "This blond giant says he's Thor. That Thor. God of Thunder. Then because he led a bunch of people into some war on another planet, his one-eyed father Odin threw him off a rainbow bridge and dumped him on Earth? Then five minutes ago he was crying in a mud pit because he couldn't pull a busted hammer out of the ground?"
Tony spread his hands.
Come on.
Even the lies he told beautiful women before sleeping with them didn't sound this outrageous.
"Clark, are you sure he's not some escaped mental patient with a medieval roleplay fetish? Or has your taste in friends really gotten that specific?"
"Mr. Stark," Clark said, taking a sip of his drink, "the universe is a very large place. Try expanding your worldview."