Chapter Text
Derry, Maine - 1962
Earth SK-001
Mobius tucked his tempad away and attempted to shake the cloying feeling of dread and disaster seeping into his bones.
All of the colours of the early-sixties Midgardian town were far too bright, popping out in eccentric hues like neon.
The sun was vibrant and warm against the back of his neck, feeling like a scalding touch slipping across the skin.
It was eerie and unexplainable.
“I suppose you’re feeling it too?” Loki murmured, eyeing the rustling trees of the park.
A statue was being built slowly, the jaunty whistles of workers floating on the air to them.
Mobius missed the hum of the time door, feeling an itch to bring it back, just for the sake of having the option to turn around and leave.
“Yeah,” Mobius breathed, “This place is…off?”
“Did B-15 give us any clues as to what we’re dealing with?” Loki raised a brow.
“Only what she told us both. She said that they had to pull in the techs from the Nightmare Department to study the temporal aura of this ‘variant’. She looked kind of spooked.”
“It’s not a variant though, is it?” Loki frowned.
“No,” Mobius shook his head, “The temporal aura is like nothing we’ve ever seen. It has similarities to the Phoenix Force but it's also just…nothing like it.”
“Well, that’s extremely helpful,” Loki sighed, gustily.
“Hey, I’m not the one who wrote up the report,” Mobius bickered.
Loki took a few steps forward, taking in a lungful of summer air.
“It smells weird here,” he wrinkled his nose.
“How’d you mean?” Mobius stared at him.
“Sweet,” Loki grimaced, “Like…nevermind.”
“Loki-“
“It doesn’t matter,” he shook his head, “Let’s head into the town and work out our next move from there.”
…
Mobius was curious about the statue and logged it as a detail into his analyst’s report.
Paul Bunyun.
Loki was stirring his black coffee with a small spoon, distracted. His eyes wouldn’t leave the street, focused intently on the bustle of tightly wound residents scurrying from place to place.
Looking over their shoulders.
Mobius followed the line of his gaze to a lamp post where a missing child poster was stapled to the middle of the column.
No, not one poster.
Five separate posters.
“A lot of missing kids around here,” Mobius mumbled uncomfortably.
“Yeah…” Loki’s hand stilled, the spoon dropping and clinking against the side of the mint green mug.
“You okay?” Mobius reached over between them and linked their fingers.
Loki absently squeezed his fingers with his own, eyes not tearing from the opposite side of the road.
He was now looking past the lampost, fixated on a mediocre, mundane tailors shop. A figure was peering out of the small shop front window, in a well-worn 1940s style suit that was twenty years out of fashion.
Mobius squinted as the dead expression -slack mouth and expressionless eyes- shifted on the elderly man’s face. A slow-growing and unsettlingly toothy smile hung woodenly from the man’s face.
Mobius glanced away from the odd man, clocking Loki’s thunderous expression.
“Weird right? He’s staring right at us,” Mobius whispered.
“I think we should-“ Loki began.
His gaze was torn from the window as a bill was slammed down on their table, rattling their coffees.
A portly and unfriendly faced man with a beefy neck glared at them.
“S’cuse me. We don’t tolerate your kind in our establishment," he said, spittle flying from his swollen bottom lip.
Mobius, unperturbed, gave him a sickly sweet smile. The man nodded to their linked fingers with an expectant flash of his cruel eyes.
“Loki? How about we move along?” he said.
Loki’s expression had only grown darker at the blatant hatred towards their connection from the human man. Loki stood abruptly, the chair tipping over.
He made no move to pick it up, releasing Mobius’s hand only to step into the large man’s personal bubble.
Loki was a good head taller and the Derry cafe owner visibly shrank back at the blaze of Loki’s stare.
“Come on, Loki,” Mobius slipped some money from his pocket onto the bill.
He pointedly placed a hand against Loki’s lower back as he steered the God away from the brewing altercation.
They left with a jingle of the door’s bell and the disgruntled cafe owner watched them leave, swallowing subtly.
Mobius rubbed Loki’s back soothingly, “You okay?”
“I’ll never understand humans’ fascination with compartmentalising what love is acceptable to them,” Loki groused.
Mobius smiled slightly to himself, ignoring the shrewd looks from a passerby as he kept his arm wound round Loki.
They had walked only two shops down before Loki was looking back at the tailors again.
Mobius turned and the elderly man was still there in the window, frozen and staring.
The vivid, eerie smile hadn’t faltered and had only grown unnaturally wider.
…
Loki kept close to Mobius as his partner tried to get the tempad to work.
The screen was fizzing with pixels, glitching like he’d never seen it act up before.
The image of Miss Minutes danced sporadically; the error message was hard to decipher and scattered into smudges.
Mobius gave it a rough shake and lame slap, trying to get the device to restart.
“I can’t even pull up B-15’s name!” Mobius grunted with agitation.
Loki leant back against the cold wall of a boarded up theatre, eyes sliding to note the police tape flapping loosely around the sealed doors.
“It’s this town,” Loki commented, “There’s something deeply wrong.”
Mobius exhaled roughly, “I can’t access our notes either, the briefing or the readings on the temporal aura. We’re stuck here. If I can't even do that, we’ve no hope of getting a time door open.”
“We need to find the variant first-“
“Not a variant,” Mobius corrected, “A being of unknown power.”
“Yes,” Loki said, pushing off from the wall, “Most likely the very same thing that’s messing with our tech.”
“What are you trying to say?” Mobius probed.
Loki took the tempad from Mobius’s grasp and tucked it gently back into Mobius’s pocket, laying his palm calmly over Mobius’s chest. His partner’s heartbeat was strong and fervent under his palm.
“You’re worried,” Loki frowned.
“This place gives me the creeps,” Mobius shuddered, casting a look over his shoulder, “I can’t explain it but I’ve got good instincts.”
Loki smiled warmly.
“I know that, Darling,” he murmured.
Mobius returned the smile and pointed behind Loki, the expression faltering as he realised where exactly they were.
“Hold on, this building was referenced in the briefing,” he said, wetting his lips habitually in thought.
Loki pivoted and took in the theatre, glancing over the police tape again.
He did recall a snapshot of the building from the file that had been presented to them; the black and white photo had shown copious groups of police men gathered around the entrance and a mortician’s gurney being brought through the doors.
The body bag had been too small to have held an adult mortal.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood to attention.
“The Theatre massacre,” Loki murmured worriedly.
With trepidation and a rush of adrenaline surging through his veins, Loki reached out for the wall. Mobius stepped closer, brows furrowed.
“Maybe you shouldn’t-“
Loki’s palm connected with the stone and his seidr rushed to his fingertips. As it connected with the building, the theatre’s memory hit him like a train eviscerating a car at a level crossing.
A violent glare of green blinded his mind's eye and the images rushed in quick succession, snapping and popping through his head like a film reel.
There was a group of children, their anxiety and fear a palpable, overwhelming resonance that fed back to him across time.
A girl named Lily cried out to a boy cradling a warbling, concealed infant, her friend’s voices chiming in to beckon the boy ‘’Matty’ out of the screen.
The scene changed rapidly as the infant was revealed.
It burst from the screen, a twisted homunculi with bat wings and a deformed, vile baby face full of vicious dripping teeth.
One by one, it tore through the kids, leaving a single survivor drenched in crimson, a severed wrist and hand gripped in her sweating, blood-slick fingers.
A girl called Ronnie rushed to comfort her friend, begging her for context and then they both clocked the severed appendage of a six-year old still locked in Lily’s grasp.
As Lily’s blood-splattered face contorted into a grief-stricken, horrified scream, Loki pulled himself away from the theatre wall.
He stumbled back, nearly falling off of the curb as his breaths came too fast and too heavy.
“Loki!” Mobius lunged for him and pulled him out of the way of a vintage vehicle.
Loki gripped onto Mobius, shallow breathing struggling past his paling lips.
“What did you see?” Mobius demanded, softening his tone as Loki stared at him, wide-eyed.
“The kids. I saw the…”
Loki’s gaze darted past Mobius to capture a figure standing stock still down the street. Mobius turned with him and Loki dug his fingers into Mobius’s upper arm as the tall, skeletal elderly man raised a hand and waved slowly.
“Let’s go,” Mobius murmured to him, “Now. We’ll find a hostel and work it all out from there. Loki, come on.”
Loki let himself be dragged away, far from the theatre and the odd man waving to them.
…
Time Variance Authority - Mission Briefing and Statement - Primary Document
Branch: SK-001
Planet: Earth
Dominant species: Homosapian - Humans
Established time of interest: 1962, Earthen Calendar - Gregorian
Location: Derry, Maine, United States of America
Location note: Derry, Maine is not present on other multiversal branches of Earth. Tagged as ‘Anomaly’.
Signing Judge: B-15 (Variant VW-1305: Verity Willis), in agreement with Judge Gamble.
Mission agents: Agent Loki Laufeyson (Variant L-1130) and Agent Mobius M. Mobius (Variant M-FF535)
Mission briefing: Identification and analysis of source of power. Tag as original variation or Primary Variant - Nexus Being.
Multiversal concern: Unspecified Cosmic power - readings indicate the presence of an unprecedented level of power that the Time Variance Authority has not catalogued.
Attached Minute-Men team: Squad Alpha 531, forty individuals assigned.
Statement from the Nightmare Department
Signing associate: Nightmare Agent Costello N. (Variant N-3310)
Statement begins:
Under the authorisation of Judge B-15, I am writing to deliver the briefing for the attention of Agents Laufeyson and Mobius.
This mission is to be conducted by the code of the reformed Time Variance Authority, post the creation of L. Laufeyson’s multiversal tree of life. Laufeyson retains authority to consult on the fate of the branch with the aforementioned Judges.
Mobius M. Mobius is dictated as senior analyst, in accordance with his place on the War Council.
Preliminary findings indicate that the source of cosmic power is of organic and cosmic origin. The source is shifting and unstable and proves a difficulty to track.
No similarities to nexus beings already logged on the system have been found and initial conclusions on its similarity to the Phoenix Force are under investigation before official confirmation, or denial.
Upon reflection, there are no similar Earthen branches that contain the same energy signature.
This energy source presents a multiversal threat due to its inability to be monitored directly from the Time Variance Authority and its spontaneous appearance amongst the branches.
This is an isolated phenomenon and is being treated by the Nightmare Department as a New Case.
We were consulted on the Branch name SK-001 to detail this as the first branch of its kind.
Recommendations and Risk Assessment:
Agents to proceed with extreme caution and be accompanied by a trained Alpha Squad of Minute men. To avoid timeline disturbance and disruption to civilian lives, Agents are encouraged to blend in and spend a few days on the timeline gathering intel.
Alpha Squad should enter the timeline around two Earthen hours after the analysts if there is no communication from field agents before then.
As per protocol, the TVA must remain classified information and any witnesses interviewed should be approached with this in mind.
In the event of an emergency, abort mission and report directly to Nightmare Office 5, my assigned desk.
For all time, always.
Associate Costello N. - The Nightmare Department
…
To: Mobius M. Mobius
From: B-15
For the attention of Mobius and Loki,
From the information I’ve been able to gather, Derry, Maine doesn’t exist on what was the Sacred Timeline. There’s really limited information here at the TVA describing it and from what the Nightmare Department has shared, you’ll essentially be going in blind.
What we can see, at least from the Monitoring logs, is that the town has a history of tragedy. It’s a one of a kind branch and I’d consider it to be significantly dangerous.
At the time you’re stepping into, there’s been a recent tragedy concerning the deaths of several kids. I’ve attached a picture of the report that O.B was able to pull from the time-stream.
That’s why I’ve selected you two to lead the investigation. We need our senior analyst and the guardian of the Multiverse on this case so we can assess how this branch spontaneously appeared and whether it is a multiversal threat.
As you can see, it’s been flagged because of this ‘cosmic force’, so please keep your heads straight and exercise caution.
I don’t have a great feeling about this so please abort the mission and get back here with the Squad if you encounter an emergency.
For all time, always,
B-15 x