I knew that there was a reason why I didn't want to write Marvel. It's a nightmare, because now that I have found a way to make the MC not capable of the local type of magic, I keep getting these plotbunnies that I swear to God don't let me sleep.
So, Genryūsai Shigekuni Yamamoto gets killed in Bleach by Ywach after he steals away his Bankai. But the Soul-cutter is also the soul of the Shinigami, or some random shit like that, so what happened to Yamamoto's soul when Ywach gets killed by Kurosaki's usual brand of plot-armour fueled victory?
This question opens up both a rebirth in whichever universe I can imagine (it'd be terrific to see Yamamoto being reborn in the Star Wars universe, where he can freak out the Coruscant Order by being a not-sith-not-jedi pyrokinetic like none before), or, more simply storywise, simply drop his battered and one-armed body off somewhere, and start his first problem by making him human and lacking his sword.
This story sees the latter option, even if I can't quite enjoy the idea of having this old fucker without his katana, having some interdimensional shit going on with Thor, human and exile from Asgard, is just too good to pass up. Besides, it's just a very good parallelism, Thor missing his hammer because he went on a pride-fueled rampage, and Yamamoto missing his sword because he lost to the Quincy out of pride.
"Japanese"
"local tongue"
Anyway, here it is:
Fallen from Grace
During the night, with the endless starlit sky covering the whole world, a single street unfurled away from a one-horse town, set amid endless flat, arid scrubland. A large SUV ran on said street, heading out of town.
Half an hour later, the SUV left the road and braved the rough desert, leaving behind the comfort offered by the artificial lighting created by civilization. There would be no need for that, not on a night like that.
Jane Foster parked quietly the Suv in an apparently random stretch of the desert, and as the vehicle finally came to a halt, with its engine's roar dying down to a tired purring before finally going quiet, a metallic whirring accompanied the unfolding of the roof's panels as if it was some kind of flower. The underside of the panels housed a wide variety of hand-built devices, whose purpose would be unclear to all but a selected few. Namely, Jane Foster and Erik Selvig.
The duo of scientist left the isolated confines of the vehicle and fussed around the electrical devices that were pointed to the starry sky, checking and checking again that everything was to the specification of the young scientist that had brought those machine into the world out of sheer determination and keen wit. Jane Foster was a woman in her late twenties, with long straight brown hair and a pair of brown eyes that didn't manage to hide the sheer sharpness of the inquisitive mind they had behind them.
She moved uncaring of the surprising coldness of the night, ignoring the whisper of a tired wind that older souls would have recognized as foreboding. She put her torso through the roof of the Suv, positioning a magnetometer so that its monitor was calibrated with the constellations above. It appeared to be almost cobbled together from spare parts of other devices.
"Hurry!" Jane half whispered half ordered to both her companions and the world itself. She knew she was right this time, there couldn't be any errors in her calculations, she had been checking those for the past year, she was sure. A loud bang followed by muffled cursing from below made the scientist huff in fond exasperation as she offered a hand down, helping her mentor back to his feet.
Erik Selvig, a man in his sixties with a respectable gut and deep blue eyes that almost shone in the dark, continued his tired muttering while slowly rubbing his head: "It's always the same spot, why do I hit always the same spot?"
"Because you never watch your head." Jane Foster replied with a snort, receiving one in return.
The man finished straightening up: "Thanks for the vote of confidence. So what's this 'anomaly' of yours supposed to look like?"
The female scientist shook her head a little: "It's a little different each time. Once it looked like, I don't know, melted stars, pooling in a corner of the sky. But last week it was a rolling rainbow ribbon..."
"Racing 'round Orion?" her mentor interrupted her with fond exasperation, "I've always said you should have been a poet, nice alliteration, this talk of molten stars pooling... "
Jane ignored her mentor and forced herself to calm down, reigning in her excitement. She could have not bothered, for Erik Selvig, despite having a mind that operated better with hard numbers than people, knew her well enough that he could almost feel her enthusiasm like a wave of heat over his skin.
Jane's voice broke once again the quiet of the night: "Hey, Darcy. Pass up the bubbly and my gloves, will you?"
A disgruntled intern with dark hair and an ample bosom, with an attitude that could have rivalled it, huffed as she handed to her current boss a bottle of Champagne and a pair of gloves through the window. Jane passed the bottle to Selvig to hold while she pulled on the old leather gloves, far too large and masculine for her small hands. He starts to unwrap the foil, and she stops his hand with an excited grin.
"Not until you see it!" her eyes sparkled in the reflection of the machinery's lights.
A fond smile blossomed on Selvig's face as he nodded towards the gloves: "I recognize those. Think how proud he'd be to see you now." he said as he placed the bottle of cheap champagne on the SUV's hood.
Jane's grin softly faded to a sad smile, and she almost wasn't heard over the quiet of the night as she whispered: "Thank you."
"For what?"
"For the benefit of the doubt."
The two stared out at the sky expectantly, each lost in their own thoughts. A long couple of minutes seemed to stretch themselves beat while the machinery scanned the skies. Nothing.
After the second minute, the scientist started to become worried. A frown marred Jane's elegant brow: "It's never taken this long before."
In that moment, Darcy called up from the front seat with a bored tone: "Can I turn on the radio?"
"Sure, if you like rocking out to KFRM: 'All agriculture, all the time.'," the scientist snarked back with worry clearly written on her features, "it's not like you'll be on the first line to see the most extraordinary event of the last millennium."
The radio was uncaringly turned on, and after a glance exchanged with Erik, Jane headed back into the vehicle, unwilling to recognize the pity in her mentor's eye. The inside of the SUV was bathed in the glow of high-tech monitoring equipment and laptops, some looking like they were held together with duct tape, while others were actually held together with a clever combination of pins and rubber bands.
In the eerily and almost otherworldly light of the screens and less, accompanied by a less than welcome Darcy humming along with a song that would be forgotten within the week, Jane opened a well-worn leather-bound book made of handwritten notes and calculations.
Selvig watched the frustrated Jane with sympathy from the lowered car window: "Jane..." he tried.
"The anomalies are always precipitated by geomagnetic storms." she cut him off, fingering a couple of pages in particular that she turned towards her mentor: "The last seventeen occurrences have been predictable to the minute... I just don't understand." her voice began to sound frustrated then.
On the front seat, something caught Darcy's eye out the driver's side mirror, and as adjusted it, she spotted odd glowing clouds forming in the distance.
"Jane?"
Jane shushed her, still leafing through her notes as the forgotten bottle of champagne began to vibrate. "There's got to be some new variable... Or an equipment malfunction..." As she finished speaking, the lights and equipment in the SUV began to flicker around them, while the computer monitors squelched and died with static.
"I don't think there's anything wrong with your equipment..." Darcy finally managed to catch her attention as the champagne bottle started to rattle noisily now as it shook more violently over the SUV's hood.
Selvig stopped eyeing with worry at his protegé in order to turn towards the bottle, which was suddenly the object of Jane's curiosity too. As they watched it intently, ad Darcy was still transfixed in looking the strange light-play just outside of the scientists' field of view, the pressure built up inside the bottle, until finally, the cork exploded out of it and the cheap champagne rained over the baffled Selvig.
"Jane?" Darcy's voice became suddenly urging.
" What?!" the other woman snapped, still confused by the champagne's behaviour.
"I think you want to see this. Both of you!" Darcy pointed out the window, causing the others to turn: a few kilometres North-East of their position, over the desert, massive clouds of rainbow light churned in the sky, putting to shame whatever episode Jane had hoped to register that night.
"Holy. Shatner..." Jane's brain stuttered still before quickly rebooting.
"That's your 'subtle' aurora?!" Selvig ironically asked as he climbed back in the SUV.
"No, yes, I don't know! Let's go!" she put herself behind the wheel, uncaring of the fact that Selvig had just closed the SUV' doors behind him, and started to drive towards the sheer impossibility that they were witnessing.
The SUV raced towards the strange event with the roof panels still open, Jane, amazed by the sight, ignored the damage that the machinery was undergoing, keeping her torso bent forward over the wheel, as if to will the vehicle to move faster, while Darcy had taken up a camera (which to be truthful Jane had shoved into her hands) and was taking video of the light storm before them.
The bumps that the SUV took were ignored and categorized immediately as acceptable collateral damage while Jane grinned, thrilled, pumped with adrenaline: "Isn't this great?!" she exclaimed as a thought struck her: "You're seeing it too, right? I'm not crazy?"
"That's debatable." came the baffled voice of Selvig, "But you'll be dead if you don't put your seat belt on!"
Without any warning, the SUV lurched sideways, forcing Jane to put all of her weight to keep the wheel from ignoring her will. Just as suddenly, up ahead, spiralling down from out of the clouds came an enormous tornado, suffused with the rainbow light roaring like a thousand freight trains as it touched an impossibly shuddering earth..
While Jane kept pushing forward, her eyes lost in the storm of colour and wind around them, Selvig looked up through the still-open sunroof at the enormous glowing funnel cloud with wonder, while Darcy was still busy taping the storm.
"We've gotta to get closer so I can take a magnetic reading." Jane's voice came out frazzled as she drove, making Darcy laugh historically.
"Yeah, right! Good one!" then, as she realized what her current boss was doing, she paled: "Oh God, you're serious..."
"You want those college credits or not?"
The SUV disturbed two RAVENS perched on a cactus as they race past, making the birds take flight quietly in the not longer dark night, when-
KRAKABOOM!
A huge bolt of lightning struck down through the centre of the funnel cloud in front of the SUV with a terrifying intensity, making it rack from the blast.
Moved by an instinct for survival that few humans would ever need to call upon, Darcy forcefully grabbed the wheel, turning it and trying to head away as she could already smell ashes and fire around them: "Keep the credits! I'll intern at Burger King!"
Jane pushed the intern back as strongly as she could: "What are you doing?!"
"Saving our lives!"
The women struggled for control of the wheel, when suddenly the headlights fell on a human figure in front of them.
The man was directly in their path, stumbling through the winds. Darcy slammed on the brakes, squishing Jane's foot while the scientist turned the wheel hard enough to hear the SUV cry in protest.
Giving proof of how far humanity has actually come, the SUV swerved, but just too late: the side of the vehicle slammed into the man with a loud THUD, sending him flying while the car skidded to a stop.
Inside the SUV, Jane, Darcy, and Selvig traded shocked looks, breathing hard before peering through the dust clouds, unable to see through. After a paralyzed moment, they all leapt out of the SUV.
The three raced from the SUV with flashlights searching around them. Jane spots the man lying on the ground. He's dressed in tattered clothing, charred and blackened.
"I think that was legally your fault!" Darcy quickly spoke.
Jane raced back to the SUV to the first aid kit. with Darcy heading back with her, stopping only when she spotted Selvig bent over, puking his guts out.
She grimaced and still moved to the SUV, unwilling to get close to the man in that particular moment while she took up her trusty taser.
Soon after the women left the SUV, reaching the knocked out man where Jane knelt down, pulling out the medkit.
Selvig hollered: "Girls! I need help with him!"
"Him?" Jane and Darcy said together, before Darcy made a sign to Jane to go to Selvig, the image of the man puking still fresh in her mind. She wasn't going to poke that with a ten-foot pole, thank you very much.
Jane soon enough joined Erik, who was still, looking at the charred form of a one-armed man unconscious on the cold ground. The elderly man, because that amount of wrinkles and classical wizardry beard couldn't hint to anything but, was a mess: besides the deep gouges in his skin, which looked like they had been cauterized, the man's skin was of an angry read in the places where it wasn't torn, likely suffering of a burn of some degree. While his modesty, along with his left thigh, was covered by the burnt remains of what could have once been some sort of kimono (and thank God for small mercies), Jane'kept unknowingly tracking the unending amount of scars that littered the body, grimacing where the skin was lucid and bumpy when compared to its surroundings.
She took in all of that with a single glance, her acute mind managing to put together those details with a stark clarity under the light offered by the SUV's lights, which were fortunately or not, pointed in the right direction. Then her stomach caught up with her mind, and it was only thanks to Selvig's actions that she didn't puke over the heavily wounded man.
"Maybe that lighting hit him..." Selvig weakly offered as Jane freed her stomach: "We need to bring him to the hospital Jane, he's still breathing."
While Jane was otherwise occupied, Darcy looked down at the admittedly handsome hulk of a man, unsure about what to do. She hovered around, mentally warring with herself: Jane had taken with her the medkit, so she should have gone and retrieved it, but she didn't know the first thing about first-aid, and the man looked fine, even if he the SUV smashing him probably didn't agree with him.
Darcy opted to ignore Jane and Erik' voices as the blonde at her feet suddenly groaned, slowly regaining his senses as his eyes fluttered open. She looked deep into his confused, azure eyes, which at last focused on her form. Then the man frowned.
Less than a dozen meters from there, the two scientists were trying to keep their wits about them: "Jane we need to go, bring here the SUV and clear some space in the back, the less we move him, the better." Selvig's voice broke her out from her musings.
Jane didn't think to stop to get a reading on the storm, clearly seeing the extreme conditions in which the man was, but still regretfully watching the storm evaporate from above their heads.
In that moment, she heard a startled scream from Darcy: "Thake this!" and the telltale snapping of her trusty taser.
As they rode back, Jane had only one thought in her mind: Where did they come from?
The SUV sits parked before the emergency room entrance.
After a gaggle of nurses and medics pushed the one-armed, charred, scarred elderly in Intensive Care and another couple of orderlies set the blonde man on a gurney, Jane and Darcy stood before a sweet, ditzy Admission nurse.
"Names?" the woman asked in a bored tone.
"The blond one said it was 'Thor.'" Jane answered, her mind battling between the options in her head. Was it better to reason about the storm, about the man they hit with the SUV, or the positively ancient one that appeared as if charred by that terrifying burst of lighting that almost hit their vehicle? The Nurse painstakingly typed it into the computer, one key at a time while Thor was wheeled out of the room.
"We have no idea about the other one, we just found them together." Selvig answered before the nurse could ask them about the older man.
"T-H-O-R." the nurse spelled, "And your relationship to him?"
"I've never met him before"
"Until she hit him with the car." Darcy helpfully added.
"Grazed him, actually." Jane grimaced while looking around in the small room, "But Darcy tasered him, too."
Unbidded, a snort came out of the nurse, who seemed to be delighted by that detail: "Must have been quite the spat."
"I told you, I don't know him." Jane frowned, "I just want to make sure he's okay."
"I'm going to need a name and contact number, with the kind of wounds the old man had on him, you should really wait here, the police will want to take your version of the story." the nurse unsympathetically spoke, "And there are cameras that have already your face, along with the car you came here with, so running away will be a hassle for everyone, especially because I'll have to give a statement too in that case."
"There was no crime involved!" Jane protested, crossing her arm and taking a step back in outrage.
The nurse returned to slowly typing on the keyboard, one key at time: "You called her D...A...R...C...Y...".
"Oh, for God's sake..." Selvig reached over Jane's shoulder and handed to the nurse his business card: "We'll wait for the police in the hall."
While Jane, Darcy and Erik gave her statements to the police, which had been called because of the wounds on the elderly patient the three had brought in, and while said patient was attended by a gaggle of nurses and medics trying to figure out how could someone in such bad conditions breath so steadily, in the room number 43, Thor, disgraced son of Odin, slowly came to his senses.
Thor, wearing nothing but a hospital gown, winced in pain as he awakened on a gurney to find a brunette standing over him with a syringe in his arm.
"Hi." a brunette nurse smiled calmly, "Just taking a little blood."
Thor slapped the syringe away with an angry movement of his arm as he sat up, pushing the nurse towards the door while he wildly looked around: "How dare you attack the son of Odin!"
The trained reactions of the nurse allowed her to immediately push the 'help' button secured on the side of the door: "I need some help here!" causing two orderlies to race over, attempting to hold Thor down.
"We're trying to help you!" one of the two attempted to calm the clearly confused patient.
"Then bring me a healing stone, you savages!" the extremely awake man rose from his bed, hurling one of the orderlies off and smashing the other against a wall as a third and a fourth entered the room, accompanied by a male nurse who had joined the commotion.
"What the hell is this guy on?" the male nurse yelled while his group struggled to keep the blond man down.
"Nothing yet." the first nurse, now with a bloodied lip, pulled out a syringe while the others managed to force him back down onto the gurney. And as the nurse injected him with the sedative, Thor appeared both shocked and amazed that he had actually been overpowered by such a small group.
The blond man roared in outrage: "You're no match for the Mighty..." Thor struggled to spoke those words, stilling for a beat before passing out.
Outside of room 45, where the heavily wounded man had been placed after his wounds had been addressed and an oxygen mask placed over his mouth when it appeared clear that he was perfectly capable of breathing on his own, two policemen leaned against the wall, shifting their weight occasionally while they tried to understand what exactly was going on.
"We've looked over the van that they used to bring him here, the blood there is his, the dogs agree, but the owners aren't the type of people to do that, besides, why and how?" asked the first.
"Dunno? A flamethrower?" the second man tried to guess. He was on his twenties, with brown hair and eyes, and, given the kind of stuff he had always had to deal with in such a backwater small city, was feeling out of his depth.
"Where the fuck would have they picked up a flamethrower?"
"I said I don't know!"
After a condescending grunt, his superior spoke out loud his thoughts: "In any case, the old man is some sort of soldier, no doubt. Besides the whole one-arm thing, the doctors say they've never seen so many scars. Stab wounds, scorching, electrification, something that the surgeon swears are bite marks the size of my chest, we've no idea of who that man is, but considering the state in which the Stormchasers found him, I'd say he wouldn't want to be found by those that he was with before." the older man adjusted his trousers, feeling the pull a bit against his respectable gut.
"They've got degrees." the younger man objected.
"What?"
"The Stormchasers have got degrees." the man clarified, bashfully scratching the back of his head and not looking his superior in the eye.
So?
"So they're not Stormchasers, those are the freaks, when people with degrees do something strange is 'an innovative and original contribution to the world'."
"I'm understanding that your nephew is still convinced about college?"
"She is," the man sighed, "it's a good thing, and we're all proud of her, don't get me wrong, but sometimes it gets really heavy, you know? When I get home, I don't need to hear all about her ambitions, do I?
The older policeman shrugged unhelpfully before scratching his nose: "Congratulations? Condolences?"
"Thanks for both man." the younger man replied tiredly, "So... now we wait for him to wake up?"
A grunt and a nod was an answer that he would have preferred to not receive, it was going to be a long night.
AN
Not many news here, I have to admit, but I tried for a build-up scene with a classic style of storytelling, at least for the first part, how did it go? Let me know!