Because Thor had returned to Asgard and seemingly vanished from Earth entirely, Jane Foster beca obsessed with studying the Bifrost.
Especially after the Battle of New York.
Thor had returned to Earth during the invasion... yet never ca to see her.
That hurt more than she wanted to admit.
Lately, she'd even started wondering whether she should just find a new boyfriend.
Jane didn't know the full story.
When Loki tried using the Bifrost to destroy Jotunheim, Thor had been forced to destroy the Rainbow Bridge to stop him.
Jotunheim survived.
But the destruction of the bridge also severed Asgard's control over the Nine Realms.
Chaos followed almost imdiately.
Afterward, Odin paid a trendous price just to send Thor briefly back to Earth.
Thor's appearance during the Battle of New York had actually been an accident.
His real objective had been retrieving Loki and recovering the Tesseract.
Only the Tesseract's power could fully repair the Bifrost.
And only with the Bifrost restored could Asgard rapidly travel across the Nine Realms to suppress the growing wars spreading everywhere.
Unfortunately, the Tesseract disappeared afterward.
Heimdall knew it was currently in Drex Valen's possession.
Odin knew too.
Neither of them told Thor.
Mostly because Drex had already beco far too dangerous to provoke casually.
The man had defeated Gladiator, the Shi'ar Empire's strongest warrior.
Even Odin himself wasn't confident he could handle soone like that directly.
So Thor remained trapped dealing with crisis after crisis across the Nine Realms.
That was why he hadn't returned to Earth.
But from Jane's perspective?
He'd simply disappeared for far too long.
Long enough that she finally tried moving on.
Unfortunately for her attempted date night, Darcy Lewis arrived carrying a strange anomaly scanner and a deeply suspicious expression.
"These readings are weird," Darcy said. "Like... Erik Selvig levels of weird."
Darcy knew all about Jane and Thor.
And whether intentionally or not, she absolutely sabotaged the date.
Within minutes, the evening was dead.
So instead of romance, Jane ended up heading out with Darcy and Darcy's intern, Ian, to investigate the gravitational anomaly readings.
On the way, Jane tried calling Dr. Selvig.
No answer.
She could only leave a voicemail.
In reality, Selvig wasn't ignoring her.
The British police had detained him.
After studying the Tesseract, Selvig had developed so unusual theories regarding cosmic space.
To test them, he'd gone to Stonehenge to gather asurents.
For reasons nobody fully understood...
He had also apparently decided clothing was optional during the experint.
Stonehenge, one of the world's most famous prehistoric monunts located on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, was not the ideal place for public nudity.
So his arrest had been swift and predictable.
Jane and Darcy, however, knew none of this.
They simply followed the instrunts toward the anomaly.
The readings led them to an abandoned industrial site.
The sky above the area looked wrong sohow.
Darker.
Heavy clouds pressed low overhead as if a storm was about to break at any mont.
Even the scattered shipping containers felt unnatural.
Many stood vertically balanced in impossible positions.
The abandoned factory grounds were eerily quiet.
And when Jane's group entered deeper inside, they discovered people already there.
Jane imdiately tensed.
"I really don't want my scientific research ending with soone stabbing ."
"Sa," Darcy agreed instantly. "I'm Arican, by the way."
Thankfully, the strangers turned out to be three kids.
Two boys and a girl.
They'd discovered the gravitational anomalies earlier and had basically turned the place into a playground.
After so conversation, the children led them toward a large warehouse.
Inside, they found sothing impossible.
A cent mixer truck weighing over ten tons floated silently in midair.
One of the kids casually pushed it with two fingers, causing the entire vehicle to slowly rotate weightlessly through the air.
Everyone stared.
Darcy blinked several tis.
"That is extrely not normal."
The young black boy grinned.
"That's not even the weirdest part. Co on."
He led everyone up to the fourth floor of a half-finished building nearby.
At the exposed stairwell, he picked up an empty glass bottle and dropped it into the open center shaft.
The bottle fell.
But before hitting the ground...
It vanished.
Like it had subrged into invisible water.
Jane stared in disbelief.
"Where did it go?"
The little girl pointed upward.
A second later, the bottle suddenly reappeared high above them and continued falling again.
Just before impact, it vanished once more.
Then reappeared overhead.
Again.
And again.
Looping repeatedly until the boy finally caught it.
Jane looked genuinely stunned.
"That's incredible."
She grabbed a soda can herself and tossed it downward.
The can vanished imdiately.
Then...
Nothing.
Everyone waited.
And waited.
No reappearance.
Jane frowned upward.
"Okay... what happened to mine?"
The little girl shrugged.
"Sotis things co back."
"Sotis they don't."
While Darcy and the others beca increasingly distracted throwing random objects into spatial anomalies like children discovering a physics-breaking arcade ga, Jane noticed sothing else.
The readings on her device matched the sa energy signatures she'd recorded years ago in New xico.
Back when Thor first appeared.
Realizing that, Jane decided to trace the anomaly to its source herself.
She followed the readings deeper into the structure alone.
Eventually she reached a dark corridor.
The scanner in her hands began emitting rapid warning beeps.
Jane checked the display.
"The readings are peaking..." she murmured.
"Let's see what's ahead."
The corridor was almost completely dark.
She could barely see.
After taking only a few more steps, an icy gust of wind swept across her back.
Then a trendous force seized her body.
The pull was overwhelming.
Completely irresistible.
Before Jane could react, she was dragged forward violently and swallowed whole by the anomaly.
Darkness.
Cold silence.
Jane suddenly found herself standing in a vast abyss-like space illuminated only by faint traces of dim light.
She stood near the edge of a cliff overlooking a bottomless void.
The dead world around her was filled with colossal broken stone pillars.
Closest to her were two massive rectangular columns collapsed tightly together.
And behind them...
Sothing red floated in the darkness.
Tiny crimson crystal particles drifted like liquid mist, swirling in hypnotic motion.
Neither fully solid nor fully fluid.
Dreamlike.
Unreal.
The strange red substance slowly wrapped itself around Jane's body.
Then her consciousness faded away.
Far away in the depths of space...
Massive asteroids drifted around a gigantic black warship.
And then, suddenly...
Small points of crimson light began flickering to life across the vessel's surface.
...
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