Corner
The Hammer and the Con
Looking back, it started out as a pretty good day.
"You look completely ridiculous."
"I think neon green and yellow are absolutely my colours," I say, stooping slightly to check myself in the mirror for the thousandth time. Checking details, you know, not out of vanity. I already know I look fabulous. "Do you think I should go with the ponytail or not?" It's a weighty question that has been bothering me for hours. Plus I'm not sure if I've got the colour the exact right shade of gold. Not to mention it feels decidedly odd to see myself with blond hair.
"I think you should've gone with the whole evil goat skull look from Earth X, personally," Sigmund answers, sitting on the edge of the bed.
"That's far too Death Knight." I decide to keep the ponytail. "I don't want anyone thinking I'd come as Arthas or something." No, the classic look is definitely best. Besides, I've already had the helmet made -- it arrived in the other day. It was a right bitch dealing with the dwarves again, but I think it was worth it. I can't wear it inside; I'm almost seven foot as it is, and with the horns on that thing I'd go through the ceiling.
I do one final double-check against the painting nailed to the wall next to the mirror -- framed and signed, of course; I paid an absolute mint for it back in the early 90s -- and decide that I'm as done as can be inhumanly possible. I'm a little bit taller and don't quite have the beefy supervillain physique, though I've already decided against changing that.
I'm still me, after all, even if I am in a comic book.
I turn with my best melodramatic, cape-twirling flourish and grin cheezily at Sigmund. "Ta-da! How do I look?"
He just hides his head in his hand. "Like you're ready to hatch a cunning plan to turn all the cars in the world to candy," he says, and I stick my tongue out at him.
"This coming from the great 'Arry Pot'ah?"
"I was given no option!" He pushes his glasses up his nose self-consciously. And he's right, of course; the girls all-but threatened him with physical violence. They had a point; the resemblance is a little bit disturbing.
"But you're so-oo cu-uu-ute looking!" I go to ruffle his hair and he slaps me away with his wand.
"Avada Kedavra, fiend!" he announces as the doorbell rings. "Let's get out of this place."
I grab my helmet off the bedside table, and follow Sigmund out into the living area, where he opens the door onto Death and Delirium.
"I thought you were coming as Devi and Tenna," Sigmund says.
Dee just shrugs. "Figured people wouldn't recognise us. So we decided to go for the classic look."
"A-hah, see!"
Dee and Wayne take one look at me. "You look ridiculous," they announce together.
By the time we arrive at the convention centre there's already a large rogues' gallery assembled outside. Luckily for us, we get a park right at the door -- of all the luck, who would have thought! -- and I stick my helmet on as we jump out.
The kids think I'm mad to dress up as me, of course. Well, mad or extremely self-centred, which is fine. Truthfully, the thought of dressing up as someone else -- of assuming the personality of another -- is not just a little bit creepy in a way I guess humans can't understand. I walk on a knife-edge of self-awareness as it is; pretending to be someone else, even if it's just as a joke at a stupid comic convention, might just be one step too far. Maybe the whole thing with Ragnarökk freaked me out more than I'm willing to admit... maybe.
Or maybe I'm just self-centred after all.
"Jesus, what is it with fat chicks and cosplay?" Dee asks the universe. I look around; there do seem to be an oddly large number of somewhat larger ladies spilling out of skimpy outfits. They seem to float in boisterous, self-assured groups around shy, horse-faced girls and weedy, pimple-faced boys. I know what it is with fat chicks and cosplay, of course. And I think Dee does too, really, but that's neither here nor there.
We hang out around the front for a while, getting our photos taken and whatnot before wafting into the main hall. Sig and the girls quickly vanish into the maze of booths and tables, while I wander meaninglessly around for a while.
"N-nice costume."
I look down, and then down some more, to where a kid in a winged plastic Thor helmet is looking up at me nervously. A red sheet and cardboard outfit, he nevertheless has a rather convincing replica of Mjolnir clutched nervously to his thin chest. He reeks of Ásatrú; he's an honest-to-gods Thorsman, and not even I have the heart to tell him his god is long dead.
Instead, I just grin. "You too," and he almost blushes. "The hammer especially, can I see it?"
"Sure, here."
It doesn't look like Mjollnir, of course, but it sure as hell looks a lot like what humans think Mjollnir looks like. It's a little bit longer than a forearm, the haft is wrapped in deerskin, and the head is inscribed with intricate patterns and meaningless protective runes. And it feels old, like, really old. It's not Mjollnir -- I know where Mjollnir is, and it's not here -- but by pathos alone it could easily fool someone who didn't know exactly what they were looking for.
"It's cool, isn't it!" the kid enthuses, apparently encouraged by my interest. "I bought it off eBay."
"That wacky eBay..." I'm not really listening to myself.
"Some dude in, like, Iceland or something. Supposedly found it cleaning out his attic. I tell you it was expensive, too; the guy reckoned it was cursed; he had this whole big write-up about all the weird things that'd happened to him after he found it."
"Weird things?"
(hotiron blood on snow and the ravens circle overhead, he knows it won't be much longer now but oh gods it hurts and all he can smell is the blood the blood and the shit even though he'd fasted for a week beforehand, just like)
"Yeah, you know. This one time, we were like playing DnD and I had it out on the table and, like, left it there overnight after everyone had gone home. Next morning I came down and it was like there'd been an earthquake; broken china all over the floor, pictures fallen off the walls, none of the lights working. I got in so much shit from mum; but it wasn't us I swear. When Greg and Steve left the room was totally normal."
It's like being smacked in the face by foreshadowing. "How much do you want for it?" I ask suddenly, without even really thinking.
"Huh?"
One way or another, this kid is not going home with this thing. "I want to buy it. How much?"
"... why?"
I blink, and finally look at the kid. I grin my best Lokean grin. "A cursed Mjolnir? Why wouldn't I want it! C'mon, how much?"
He seems to think for a moment. "Five thousand," he eventually blurts.
"Alex, at that price I'd but two." I think the poor kid almost dies from sock. Fortunately, it keeps him from remembering that he never told me his name. And then it occurs to me I'm wearing a skin-tight lycra leotard and that Sigmund has my wallet. Being honest is such a pain in the ass. "Come with me," I say. "Gotta find the guy who has my money."
"W-- really? You're serious, aren't you?"
"Deadly," I say, scanning the hall for a glimpse of gold and red. An extremely ominous feeling starts to seep into the pit of my stomach; I can't find Sigmund. It's not that I can't see him in the crowd; I shouldn't need to. I should be able to smell him, to feel him... and I can't. The girls are gone too.
"H-hey, where are you going? My hammer, wait!"
I barely register the kid shouting after me as I start tearing madly around the hall. People jump out of my way as I pass -- there's something about finding yourself in the path of an angry god dressed as a supervillain that really gets a human's legs moving -- but no matter where I go, who I crash into, I can't find them.
And that really, really pisses me off. It's either that or terrifies the crap out of me, and I select the former.
I'm fuming down next to the elevated stage at one end of the hall by the time Alex catches up with me. I can vaguely smell burning leather, and realise that smoke has started to seep between my fingers where they're clutching the fake Mjolnir. I relax my grip, make a conscious effort to calm down -- too many people, don't freak out, too many people -- and tell myself there's a perfectly logical reason why I can't feel Sigmund's presence in the city anymore.
Despite what they try and tell you, I really am a pretty bad liar.
"Hey, hey man wh--"
Alex is cut off abruptly when he suddenly find his feet are no longer on the floor and his eyes are absolutely level with mine. "Where are they?"
And that's just the thing, you know; suddenly a part of the kid's brain just shuts itself off. He looks into my burning, inhuman eyes and -- with complete and total composure -- says, "It's the hammer."
It wasn't at all the answer I was expecting. Or, for that matter, even the general reaction. I blink slowly, open my mouth, close it, then very gently put Alex down. He adjusts himself with as much dignity as someone wearing a sheet tied around their neck can manage. "What?" I say finally.
He eyes me up, I can feel the back of his mind carefully sliding itself into something he's only before ever read about, but nevertheless secretly prepared for. "Who's missing?" he asks in return.
"Some people that are... that I know," I say finally. "A boy and two girls."
"Harry Potter and the Endless," he guesses and I nod. "I saw you walk in." He sighs. "Sorry, this is all my fault. I mean, it is the hammer, isn't it? Ever since I bought it, I had this silly, uh, fantasy I guess. That, like, you know, it was the real Mjolnir. That, like, it'd gone missing from Ásgard or something and one day someone was going to come looking for it... and then the weird things started happening..." He trails off, acutely embarrassed. He reminds me of Sigmund, I think. I abhor the idea that I need someone to do that. Someone that's not Sigmund.
I'm about to reply, when someone beats me to it. "And now they have come looking, haven't they?"
I'm suddenly hit with the realisation that someone is going to die. And soon. And it's not going to be me...
"Modi." Flatly, I turn; standing not ten feet away is the current object of all my soon to be very raging rage. Modi isn't tall or particularly thick set, not like his brother, but there's still something inherently powerful about him. Even standing in the middle of a comic convention looking incredibly out of place in out-of-fashion denim jeans and a blazer.
"Hand over the hammer, Lie-Smith."
"That's what I always liked about you, Modi," I say. "No bullshit except, oh wait, you think I'm going to just do what you say, just because you say."
"I'm not here to play silly word games," he says, inhumanly cool and calm. "I'm here to reclaim my father's hammer. In fact, I'm going to trade for it; the hammer for your humans."
Anger abruptly finds itself pushed aside by amusement, then concern, before making a showing again.
"Modi, you're fucking on crack," I say, somewhat concisely. "What makes you think this is Mjolnir?"
He just sighs. "I said no games." Two things occur to me in that moment. The first is that he's deadly serious, and the second is that he's not a guy who seems like he's interested in the exposition. I very briefly go over what I know, which turns out to be something like this:
Once upon a time there was a twit with a magic hammer who died in a big fight. After the fight, his clever uncle (that's me, incidentally) who had managed to not die found his sorry corpse before anyone else and had taken the magic hammer and hidden it somewhere no-one would ever find it because, when you came right down to it, history had taught the clever uncle that magic hammers were almost always more bloody trouble than they were worth. The end.
It'd never really occurred to me, but I suppose that all that anyone else knew about this story was that Mjolnir had gone missing after Ragnarökk. Lots of things did, after all; it was a chaotic time in Midgard as well, and for a while there the lines between worlds were blurry as hell. Of course Magni would be after his father's hammer; I try scouring Baldr's memories but come up mostly blank. The guy was far too obsessed with finding me to bother much with the other gods, though there is something vague there; some kind of half-forgotten tacit approval to visit Midgard to try and reclaim anything that'd been lost with the coming of the Twilight. It makes sense, I guess; stalking around after likely-looking human artefacts. Modi was just a kid back in the day, and it occurs to me he probably has no idea what he's looking for, really. Gods have notoriously bad memories.
So Modi thinks I'm currently holding Mjolnir, which means he also probably thinks I'm looking for it for some reason or other, which in turn means he doesn't know I don't need to look for Mjolnir because I was the one who hid it in the first place.
Ah. A problem. I'm not going to give up that fucking hammer to Thor's nitwit, bloodthirsty sons. Neither am I going to let anything happen to Sigmund.
"Your father's hammer is a curse, Modi," I say eventually.
"Yes, I'd expect you to think as much." He grins just a little. I want to smack him. "I gather you are not going to give it up willingly?"
"You always were the clever one."
It occurs to me, right after I say this, that despite what people might try and tell you, I really am not. The clever one. This occurs to me about the same time I notice Modi sigh, and raise a hand -- palm forward -- towards me, before flicking it just-so, and before I know it I'm flying halfway across the hall. Luckily, my fall is broken by a table of Magic: the Gathering players, who shout in alarm as cards go flying in every direction. When I pick myself up, I notice I'm no longer holding Alex's hammer.
"Fucknuts!" I catch sight of it glinting underneath a table not ten feet away, and somehow manage to launch myself on all-fours and grab a hold of the hilt just as it shoots up into the air, controlled by the same sorcery Modi used to throw me into the card players. Hanging from a floating hammer ten feet above the ground dressed in a supervillain outfit is a pretty good way of getting a lot of attention, pretty fast, and all over the hall people have stopped to point and stare. Most of them are still convinced that this is some kind of elaborate stage show, which is fine by me.
Now, Modi might have picked up a bit of sorcery but my people practically invented the stuff, and the runes he's using are easy enough to unpick. My boots hit the ground with a resounding thwack, and now I'm watching for them I easily deflect Modi's next attacks.
"Using magic against a jötun?" I scoff. "You don't want Mjolnir, kid. What good will it do you?"
"It is one of our finest treasures; our enemies circle us even now, and we must have the means to defend ourselves if you will not do it for us."
I roll my eyes. "Defend? Against who, Modi? The elves? Dwarves? Those filthy little cave maggots."
"Every day the thurs and the trolls creep closer to Ásgard's walls; you have left us defenceless!"
"Against a few gibbering trolls?" I ask, eyebrow cocked. "Surely the Æsir are not still such children that they are frightened of bogeymen?"
Surprisingly, he looks a little embarrassed. "We must defend ourselves! Ásgard cannot be seen as a weak target or we risk invasion from the j--" He cuts himself off, looks away angrily.
"From the jötun? From my people?"
"My Lord, please stop this charade! They are not your people, they are the people of--"
"Enough, Modi." I say, voice a low growl. He looks away again, ashamed and angry and impotent all at once, and I have to admit I feel sorry for the guy. Feel sorry for him and the massive, fur-lined boots he has to fill.
"I don't want to fight you, my Lord," he says. "But I will. I... I am Modi Thorsson; protector of Ásgard, and I cannot let your madness stand in the way of the safety of our people." I can almost hear the tendons in his knuckles creak as his hands form into tightly-wound fists.
I manage to get out, "Modi, seriously kid th--" before I'm cut off as he comes flying right at me, poleaxing me in the chest and sending us both skidding across the floor in between an aisle of tables. I'm quick but this time Modi is quicker, and before I can get to my feet he's on his. The next thing I feel is a loafer to the face, and the force of it snaps my neck back in an arc, driving my skull neatly into the floor with a sickening crack and a large smear of green-black blood that starts to hiss and bubble against the lacquered timber. Before I can think of a witty retort, the boot comes down again; this time on my hand and reflexively I release my grip on the hammer's handle. Modi snatches it before I know what's going on, and the laugh he gives off it not entirely sane.
"Finally," he says, "it's mine..."
While he's gloating I peel myself off the floor, rolling backwards into a crouch, dead green eyes watching.
When Modi next looks at me, I see the same madness in him that I sometimes saw in his father. "You fear me now," he says. "Your kind thinks yourselves immortal, but my father's hammer crushes you like chalk."
With a roar and the sharp small of ozone, Modi throws the hammer. It may not actually be Mjolnir, but a hell of a lot of people in the room are starting to think that it is, and that's giving me a problem. My problem has currently manifested itself as a white-hot arc of electricity that's about to hit me in the face. I decide it's time for some good ol' fashioned chicanery, and catch the lightning. Literally.
Modi looks shocked, and so does the audience; I can hear the oooh! as I snatch the hammer out of the air. It has momentum, and I can feel the pull on the handle -- wanting to return to the hand of its owner -- but I control its swing and manage to hold onto it.
"How--"
"Please, kid, give me some credit," I scoff. "Remember who got this damn thing made. You think I would really have had something made if it could be used in anger against my own people?"
Modi looks like a goldfish.
I continue. "Your father felled thus and trolls by the hundreds with Mjolnir, but never any of my own people. You've never even seen another jötun, kid, and the same goes true for every other person still living in Ásgard."
He joins some dots. "Ragnarökk... You... you set him up. My father, you set him up to die. With a weapon that would be useless..."
I shake my head. "The Serpent was no jötun. The hammer worked well enough when it had to."
Modi still looks like he doesn't quite believe me. On a whim, I take a long step forward, crossing the distance between us, and hold out the hammer -- handle first -- to Modi. "Take it, kid, if it means that much to you. But it's a curse, you know it as well as I do."
He looks between me and the hammer warily. "What do you mean?" he finally asks.
"All great treasures are curses," I explain. "There are so many who covet power, and when that power is manifest in an object then they covet that, too. And treasures get lost, or stolen, or bartered far too easily."
He frowns, still not taking the handle. "Is that why you were looking for it? To hide it?" After a moment he adds, "Or destroy it?"
I nod slowly, not quite lying. "Odin lusted after power and treasure and in the end it was his downfall. I will not make his mistakes again, Modi."
For a moment, it looks like he is about to argue. Finally, however, he simply hangs his head. "I... understand, my Lord. Please, forgive me for--"
I wave my free hand in the air, irritably. "Cut the 'my Lord' fealty crap. Just tell me what you've done with my wife."
"Um, hello. Over here."
Ah, right. I look at Modi, who actually blushes a little, and now that I know what I'm looking for, I can find the spell that cut me off from Sigmund.
He is standing not a hundred feet away, Alex on one side and the girls on the other, and I can barely describe the relief that floods through me at his presence. Sigmund walks over quickly, picking his way around shocked bystanders and scattered cards. "Um, sorry," he says. "Someone totally had a Burning Crusade alpha key set up out the back and we got distracted until this guy came in and told us you were tearing up the hall.... Um, were you looking for us?"
I open my mouth, close it, and finally say, "No, it's okay." I shoot Modi a glare which lets him know he's both extremely lucky and not as dumb as he looks, before noticing Alex hovering uncertainly behind Wayne. "Hey, kid!" He looks up, and I toss him the hammer. It's heavy and unwieldy, and by all accounts he should drop it. He doesn't, and I grin. "Keep it secret," I say. "Keep it safe."
Smiling uncertainly, he nods, then looks nervously at Modi, who does a little half-bow, his eyes never leaving the hammer. Good, that's settled then.
I look around the hall; at the upturned tables and dumbstruck con-goers. I look at Sigmund, slightly ruffled in his silly Harry Potter school robe, and Wayne and Dee, looking not much different from their normal selves. I look at Modi, who seems to be waiting to be dismissed, and Alex, who is totally thinking about how no-one on the internet is going to believe this when he blogs about it. Finally, I think of myself, standing here in green and gold spandex and a gold helmet adorned by two-foot horns.
Eventually, I say, "I gotta get changed. I look fucking ridiculous."
The crowd bursts into applause.