I'm reading up on Luthor, trying to find out if he's a supervillain yet or not, dig up the dirt. Not finding any. Stroke of midnight, and there's a knock on my door.
"Ike, that better not be you again. You've never once caught me with contraband in my room."
The door opens and it's Coulson. He gives me a disbelieving look, "What are you doing here?"
I give one right back, "Curfew, remember? Can't be out past midnight without authorization."
He shakes his head, "We can't keep you locked up today. It's Independence Day! Come on! You've got visitors."
He leaves, and leaves the door open.
Huh.
I walk out, and Mike and Ike are still there, but they don't have guns on their belts. I make my way to the foot entrance, and the security guy waves me through without even asking any questions. Okay... I walk past him and wind my way toward the exit.
Oh.
Oh! Jane and Selvig? I walk faster and Selvig swallows me in a big hug. I'm not really a hugging person, but I don't break away because that would be rude, and I want them to know that I'm okay. I smile at Jane over Erik's shoulder.
She smiles back, a little apprehensively, "Hey. Are you okay?"
I nod, "Yeah, I'm fine. SHIELD has been taking care of me. I've been helping them with cases, and I guess this is my reward."
Erik pulls away and holds my shoulders firmly, examining my eyes as if I have a concussion, "They abducted you. I thought we'd never see you again."
"Well I am kind of a walking security breach." They don't even know about the movie thing, do they? I never got the chance to tell them.
It's kind of touching how worried they are. Jane takes a turn looking me over for injuries, "When they told us we could come see you we didn't know what to believe, but we agreed. They've been trying to get me to sign up as some kind of consultant ever since you vanished. They wanted me to try and reopen the wormhole that brought you here. I thought they might have just been tricking me into coming in to one of their labs."
"They've been asking you to sign up because I recommended you. You're the best person to continue your work. I've been working for them, working for my freedom. I guess I've gotten some of it."
The two of them look behind me. What are they looking at? Oh. Right. Mike and Ike are still there.
I roll my eyes, "I said some of it."
We walk through the final door into the open air. I see a SHIELD standard transport van nearby, and follow Jane as she walks towards it. I guess they're gonna do the obligatory "driving in circles" thing, even though we can totally see the top of the Metropolis skyline from here.
Once we all pile in, I ask, "So where's the intern?"
Jane laughs, "Darcy thought it was a trap."
"Of course she did." I don't really have anything else to say, strangely enough. So we drive in silence for a minute.
Jane says, "We tried to get you out."
I raise an eyebrow at that, "How'd you even know where to find me? You tried to break into a top secret government base?"
She sheepishly avoids eye contact, "Not exactly. The rift you first appeared from left traces, scars in spacetime. I... may have picked at the scab a little."
"You opened a wormhole to Asgard to try and break me out of a top secret government base."
"Actually we were trying to open a wormhole into the base itself and just pull you out directly. But we obviously couldn't get the coordinates quite right. We didn't get anything at all the first few attempts."
"You mean you actually managed to pull something through a wormhole into the New Mexico desert?"
She smiles, "Yeah, it was pretty cool. Of course, it was supposed to be you, so not as cool as I would've liked. But at least it came out perfectly fine! Just a minor sunburn… and blindness."
I'm more than a little shocked, "You pulled a living thing through a wormhole? And it survived?"
She nods, "A beagle. It's collar says its name is Marchioly, but we couldn't find any missing animal reports in the area. There's no phone number and the text is doubled in some kind of Arabic so we're guessing the other end was somewhere in the Middle East or North Africa."
I take a moment to close my jaw, which seems to have forgotten its job briefly, "You pulled a living thing from one place on earth to another through the leftover fragment of an alien wormhole. That's total bullshit." She doesn't seem to know what to think of that. "And by that I mean it's amazing. That's seriously one of the most impressive things anyone I've ever met has done. And I've met some impressive people since I got to this earth."
Her flattered expression once again turns to confusion, "This... earth?"
Shit. That's right. "Yeah. I never got a good opportunity to tell you. Turns out I'm from an alternate universe. This one's a lot more interesting, though, that's for sure."
She looks at me like I just grew a second head and started making out with it, "The many worlds hypothesis is true?"
I shrug, "Probably. Or maybe there are only 52 of them. Who the fuck knows, I've only been to two of them, and I didn't come here by choice. Everything I told you was true. I don't know any more now than before about how I got here."
I can tell she's already running through possible tests and new hypotheses in her head. "Is there any way I could get you away from these... nice Agents long enough to do a deep molecular tissue scan?" Yup. There it is. "If there were a way to tell people from different worlds apart, we might be able to set up an alert network for if anyone new comes through."
There's a thought. I never considered anyone else might come through from Earth Prime. "Check vibrational frequency first. I have a hunch universes might be closer than you think." That was the bullshit the Flash show used, wasn't it? It seems like they were inconsistent. Is reality inconsistent, then? It certainly doesn't make any conventional kind of sense anymore.
The car pulls over.
Selvig hops up, "We're here."
