The large S.H.I.E.L.D plane flew through the night sky.

Several armed agents were escorting Loki through the hallway.

    Ⓐ    

Bruce was in his lab. He looked through the windows, seeing the men leading Loki through the hallway.

Loki looked through the windows toward Bruce, smirking.

Bruce rubbed his eyes, looking up, watching the men take Loki away.

    Ⓐ    

The men put Loki into a glass cage.

Nick walked toward the controls. "In case it's unclear, if you try to escape, if you so much as scratch that glass..." A hole in the floor underneath the cage started to open, but it stopped. "It's 30,000 feet straight down in a steel trap. You get how that works?" He closed the floor. He pointed at Loki. "Ant." He pointed at the controls. "Boot."

Loki smiled. "Ah. It's an impressive cage. Not built, I think, for me."

"Built for something a lot stronger than you," Nick told him.

"Oh, I've heard," Loki told him. He looked into a security camera. Ana and Natasha were in an office, watching the security feed. "A mindless beast. Makes his play at being a man." Ana and Natasha looked at Bruce. Bruce didn't seem surprised. Thor, Steve, Bree, Tony and Jax were also in the room, listening. "How desperate are you, that you call on such lost creatures to defend you?"

"How desperate am I?" Nick repeated. He walked toward the cage with Loki. "You threaten my world with war. You steal a force you can't hope to control. You talk about peace, and you kill because it's fun. You have made me very desperate. You might not be glad that you did."

Loki smirked. "Ooh. It burns you to have come so close. To have the Tesseract, to have power, unlimited power. And for what? A warm light for all mankind to share? And then to be reminded what real power is."

Nick smirked sarcastically. "Well, let me know if 'real power' wants a magazine or something."

Nick walked out, leaving.

    Ⓐ    

In the office, the team were talking.

"He really grows on you, doesn't he?" Bruce asked.

"Loki's gonna drag this out," Steve told them.

"So, Thor, what's his play?" Bree asked.

"He has an army called the Chitauri," Thor told them. "They're not of Asgard, nor any world known. He means to lead them against your people. They will win him the Earth, in return, I suspect, for the Tesseract."

"An army from outer space," Jax told them.

"So, he's building another portal," Bruce told them. "That's what he needs Eric Selveig for."

"Selveig?" Thor repeated.

"He's an astrophysicist," Bruce told them.

"He's a friend," Thor told them. 

"Loki has him under some kind of spell, along with two of ours," Natasha told him.

"I want to know why Loki let us take him," Bree told them. "He's not leading an army from here."

"I don't think we should be focusing on Loki," Bruce told them. "That guy's brain is a bag full of cats. You could smell crazy on him."

"Have care how you speak," Thor told him. "Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard. And he is my brother."

"He killed 80 people in two days," Ana told him.

"He's adopted," Thor told them.

"I think it's about the mechanics," Jax told them. "Iridium. What do they need the iridium for?"

Phil walked in. "It's a stabilizing agent."

"It means the portal won't collapse on itself like it did at S.H.I.E.L.D," Tony told them. 

Jax pointed at Thor. "No hard feelings, Point Break. You've got a mean swing."

"Also, it means the portal can open as wide and stay open as long as Loki wants," Tony told them. He looked at a computer expert. "Raise the mizzenmast. Jib the topsails. That man is playing Galaga. He thought we wouldn't notice, but we did." He looked at the hologram screens on either side of him. "How does Fury even see these?"

"He turns," Ana answered.

"Sounds exhausting," Tony told them. "The rest of the raw materials, Clint Barton and Tatiana Romanoff can get their hands on pretty easily."

"The only major component they still need is a power source of high-energy density," Jax told them. "Something to kick-start the cube."

"When did you two become an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics?" Natasha asked.

"Last night," Jax answered. "The packet, Selveig's notes, the extraction theory papers, the information Miss Anastasia Romanoff handed to us. Thank you very much, Ana." Ana smirked. "Are we the only ones who did the reading?"

"Does Loki need any particular kind of power source?" Bree asked.

"He would have to heat the cube to 120-million Kelvin just to break through the Coulomb barrier," Bruce told them.

"Unless Selveig has figured out how to stabilize the quantum tunneling effect," Tony told them.

"Well, if he could do that, he could achieve heavy ion fusion at any reactor on the planet," Bruce told them.

"Finally, someone who speaks English," Jax told them. He shook Bruce's hand. "Is that what just happened?"

Tony shook Bruce's hand. "It's good to meet you, Dr. Banner. Your work on anti electron collisions is unparalleled."

"And I'm a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster," Jax told him.

Bruce pressed his lips together awkwardly. "Thanks."

Nick walked in, looking at Tony and Jax. "Dr. Banner is only here to track the cube. I was hoping you two might join him."

"I would start with that stick of his," Steve told them. "It may be magical, but it works an awful lot like a Hydra weapon."

"I don't know about that, but it is powered by the cube," Nick told them. "And I would like to know how Loki used it to turn three of the sharpest people I know into his personal flying monkeys."

"Monkeys?" Thor repeated. "I do not understand."

"I do," Bree told them. "I understood that reference."

Steve smiled a small smile.

The others smirked.

Jax looked at Bruce. "Shall we play, Doctor?"

Bruce led Tony and Jax toward his lab. "This way, sirs."

The computer guy went back to playing his game.

    Ⓐ    

Bruce, Tony and Jax were researching in Bruce's lab, standing over Loki's scepter.

"The gamma readings are definitely consistent with Selveig's reports of the Tesseract," Bruce told them. "But it's going to take weeks to process."

"If we bypass their mainframe and direct route to the Homer cluster, we can clock this at around 600 teraflops," Tony told them.

"All I packed was a toothbrush," Bruce told them. 

"You know, you should come by Stark Tower sometime," Jax told him. "Top ten floors, all R&D. You'd love it. It's Candy Land."

"Thanks, but the last time I was in New York, I kind of broke Harlem," Bruce told them.

"Well, I promise, a stress-free environment," Jax told him. "No tensions, no surprises."

Jax zapped Bruce with a pen.

"Ow!" Bruce told him. "Hey."

"Nothing?" Jax asked.

Steve walked closer. "Are you nuts?"

"Jury's out," Tony told him.

Jax looked at Bruce. "You really have got a lid on it, haven't you? What's your secret? Mellow jazz, bongo drums, huge bag of weed?"

"Is everything a joke to you?" Steve asked.

"Funny things are," Jax answered.

"Threatening the safety of everyone on this ship isn't funny," Steve told them. He looked at Bruce. "No offence, Doc."

"It's all right," Bruce told him. "I wouldn't have come aboard if I couldn't handle pointy things."

"You're tip-toeing, big man," Jax told him. "You need to strut."

"And you need to focus on the problem, Jackson," Steve told him.

"It's Jax," Jax told him. "And do you think I'm not?"

"Why did Fury call us in?" Tony asked. "Why now? Why not before? What isn't he telling us? We can't do the equation unless we have all the variables."

"You think Fury's hiding something?" Steve asked.

"He's a spy," Tony told him. "Captain, he's 'the' spy. His secrets have secrets." 

Jax pointed at Bruce. "It's bugging him, too." He looked at Bruce. "Isn't it?"

"Uh..." Bruce trailed off, shaking his head, gesturing around them. "I just want to finish my work here, and..."

"Doctor?" Steve asked.

Bruce looked up, hesitating, taking off his glasses, recalling Loki's words to Nick. "'A warm light for all mankind'. Loki's jab at Fury about the cube."

Steve nodded. "I heard it."

Bruce pointed at Tony and Jax. "I think that was meant for you. Even if Clint and Tatiana didn't tell Loki about the tower, it was still all over the news."

"The Stark Tower?" Steve asked. "That big, ugly..." Tony and Jax looked at Steve. "Building in New York?"

"It's powered by an arc reactor, a self-sustaining energy source," Tony told them. 

"That building will run itself for, what, a year?" Bruce asked.

Jax shrugged. "It's just the prototype." He looked at Steve. "We're kind of the only name in clean energy right now."

Bruce looked at Steve. "That's what he's getting at. So, why didn't S.H.I.E.L.D bring them in on the Tesseract project? What are they doing in the energy business in the first place?"

"We should probably look into that once my decryption program finishes breaking into all of the S.H.I.E.L.D's secure files," Tony told them, taking out his phone, walking around the table to stand next to Steve.

"I'm sorry," Steve told him. "Did you say..."

"Jarvis has been running it since I hit the bridge," Tony told them. "In a few hours, I'll know every dirty secret S.H.I.E.L.D has ever tried to hide."

Jax held his snacks toward Steve. "Blueberry?"

Steve looked at Tony. "Yet you're confused about why they didn't want you around."

"An intelligence organization that fears intelligence?" Jax asked. "Historically, not awesome."

"I think Loki's trying to wind us up," Steve told them. "This is a man who means to start a war, and if we don't stay focused, he'll succeed. We have orders. We should follow them."

"Following's not really my style," Tony told him.

"And you're all about style, aren't you?" Steve asked.

"Of the people in this room, which one is, A, wearing a spangly outfit, and, B, not of use?" Tony asked.

"Steve, tell me none of this smells a little funky to you," Jax told him.

Steve looked between them. "Just find the cube."

Steve walked away.

Bree was standing outside the door of the lab, listening. She walked away.

Tony turned to Jax and Bruce. "That's the guy my dad never shut up about? He used to go on and on about Captain America and Star Mistress. Bree Rogers, I can understand. She's hot and quirky, and according to him, she's funny."

"She doesn't seem that funny anymore," Jax told them.

"That's because of a tragedy before she sunk the plane in the ocean," Tony told him. "Something that wasn't in the S.H.I.E.L.D files that we read last night that my dad told me about. She watched her fiance and Steve's best friend fall down a cliff."

Jax was surprised, seeming sympathetic. "Wow."

"Steve's not wrong about Loki," Bruce told them. "He does have the jump on us."

"What he's got is an Acme dynamite kit," Jax told them. "It's going to blow up in his face. And I'm going to be there when it does."

"Yeah?" Bruce asked. "Well, I'll read all about it."

"Or you'll be suiting up with the rest of us," Jax told him.

"You see, I don't get a suit of armor," Bruce told them. "I'm exposed. Like a nerve. It's a nightmare."

"I've got a cluster of shrapnel trying every second to crawl its way into my heart," Tony told him. He tapped the arc reactor in his chest. "This stops it." He walked toward Bruce, standing on the other side of the hologram screen. "This little circle of light? It's part of me now. Not just armor. It's a terrible privilege."

"But you can control it," Bruce told him.

"Because I learned how," Tony told him.

Bruce shook his head. "It's different."

"Hey, I read all about your accident," Jax told him. "That much gamma exposure should have killed you."

"So, you're saying that the Hulk..." Bruce trailed off. "The other guy saved my life? That's nice. It's a nice sentiment. Saved it for what?"

"I guess we'll find out," Jax told him.

"You may not enjoy that," Bruce told them.

"And you just might," Jax told him.

They continued to work to see what they could find.