Not long after Tony and Steve jump out of the jet, chasing after the two Asgardians, Mazzy finds herself in a giant hovercraft in the sky. She sits beside Natasha at a large table in a shiny room full of all sorts of strong materials made for withstanding more than Mazzy can even imagine. There are workers all around, staring into screens and typing away at their keyboards. Mazzy wonders what they could all possibly be doing. Probably something boring. 

What is more interesting— in Mazzy's opinion, anyway— is the black-haired God on the screen in front of her. In her dad's defense, she does think the man, Loki, sounds quite British. But she now knows that he is actually from a completely different planet named Asgard, which is also where the blond God is from. 

Mazzy has a lot of questions to ask. First of all, where has her dad gone? She still hasn't seen him since he jumped out of the jet. She's just been sticking to Natasha's side like glue. Second of all, who are all these people? She recognizes Nick Fury, who's talking to Loki, and now she knows Steve Rogers, too. But there is also a woman dressed in all black who looks like she means business, and there is a new nervous-looking man in a purple shirt. And third, what the heck is going on?

All Mazzy can hope is that her questions will be answered by Fury as he interacts with Loki on the other side of the screen. And maybe she'll learn some things from the conversations of the adults around her. She hates being out of the loop, after all. 

Everyone seems tense and a little frightened as they watch Fury's interaction with Loki through the security camera's footage. Fury says that Loki threatened their world with war, which was alarming to Mazzy. War was never good, in her opinion. She wishes everyone could just get along, but deep inside, she knows that's impossible. No one can ever agree on anything, especially when power is at play. 

Mazzy leans forward and holds her chin in her hand, focusing in on the security camera footage. 

"You steal a force you cannot hope to control," Fury says to Loki. Mazzy assumes he's talking about the Tesseract, which she learned is the magical Rubik's cube. She still wants to know more about the cube and what type of power it contains, though. From what she can tell, it's incredibly dangerous.

"You talk about peace, and you kill because it's fun," Fury continues, standing across the glass from Loki. 

Killing. Mazzy hates killing. The idea of it makes her stomach hurt. Just the idea of taking away someone else's life makes her heart feel like it's going to break in two. She can't imagine herself killing anyone, let alone doing it for fun. She wonders if Loki really is doing it for fun, or if there is something else to it. People usually turn out to be more complex than she ever would have guessed. 

"He really grows on you, doesn't he?" the man in a purple shirt jokes, breaking Mazzy out of her thoughts. The man isn't in any of the videos Mazzy saw back at home, so who is he?

"Loki's gonna drag this out," Steve says with a sigh. He's still in his spangly outfit, as Tony calls it. Mazzy thinks the suit looks uncomfortable, but she keeps those thoughts to herself because she figures it won't be useful right now. "So, Thor, what's his play?" Steve asks, looking at the blond god.

Thor is the blond god's name, Mazzy learned. They have quite uncommon names in Asgard, apparently. But Mazzy isn't that common of a name either, she supposes. Anyway, from what Mazzy has gathered, Thor and Loki have some sort of dysfunctional relationship.

"He has an army called the Chitauri," Thor says darkly, his voice low and grumbly. He sounds like a character out of a Disney movie, Mazzy thinks. He's cool. "They're not of Asgard, nor any world known. He means to lead them against your people. They will win him the Earth." 

Mazzy's eyebrows shoot up. Loki wants the entire Earth?! Gods must be ambitious.

"In turn, I suspect, for the Tesseract," Thor continues.

"An army," Steve sighs, "from outer space."

"So, he's building another portal. That's what he needs Erik Selvig for," the man in purple suggests, fidgeting with his glasses in his hands. 

Erik Selvig? Boy, being a kid in this situation sucks. Mazzy feels stupid. She doesn't know anything. And she hates not knowing anything because she is a Stark. She is supposed to be smart. Smart like her dad. But how is she supposed to know any of this stuff if no one tells her? She isn't supposed to be here in the first place, though, so instead of telling her what's going on, they all just expect her to sit back and do nothing. Mazzy hates sitting back and doing nothing. 

Luckily, though, some of the others have missing pieces as well. "Selvig?" Thor asks, voicing Mazzy's question.

"He's an astrophysicist," the purple-shirted man says. Mazzy isn't one hundred percent sure what an astrophysicist does, but she figures it's something complicated and important. Considering the astro and physicist in the word, she guesses it has something to do with outer space and physics. 

"He's a friend," Thor says. He knows him, apparently. Interesting.

"Loki has him under some kind of spell," Natasha explains, a little solemnly. Mazzy scoots her chair closer to hers. "Along with one of ours." 

"Well, we can make him better, I bet," Mazzy says, frowning slightly. She hasn't seen Natasha seem sad before and she wants her to be happy again. Natasha forces a small, tight-lipped smile and places her hand on top of Mazzy's. 

"I wanna know why Loki let us take him," Steve speaks up. "He's not leading an army here."

"I don't think we should be focusing on Loki," the purple shirt guy says. Mazzy likes him. He's smart, it seems like. And awkward people are funny, usually. Also, she likes purple. "That guy's brain is a bag full of cats. You could smell the crazy on him."

Mazzy giggles at that. She turns to Natasha. "I like the purple shirt guy," she says to her quietly. Not quietly enough, apparently, because Thor looks her way, unamused.

"Have care how you speak," Thor says. Why is he talking like Yoda? It seems like everything is backward. "Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard. And he is my brother."

Brothers. That makes more sense to Mazzy. Brothers don't always get along. Like in the movie Brother Bear.

"He killed 80 people in two days," Natasha says, a blank look on her face.

Mazzy frowns again. She wants her dad. Where the heck is he?

Thor presses his lips together and raises his eyebrows. "He's adopted," he clarifies. 

"But you were still raised by the same parents," Mazzy points out somewhat nervously. She isn't sure whether or not she is supposed to be talking in this situation, but her dad isn't there to tell her not to, so she figures she'll just have to cross that bridge when she gets to it. 

"I'm sorry, who is this little girl?" Thor asks, gesturing to the girl. Mazzy furrows her eyebrows at him.

"I'm not little," Mazzy tells him. She sits up taller in her chair and crosses her arms. Of course, she knows she is technically little, but she's smart enough not to be dismissed as just some little girl. 

"She's Stark's kid," Natasha answers.

"I'm seven, for your information," Mazzy clarifies. Natasha only rolls her eyes. "I'm just short. But I'll be taller than you someday if I eat my vegetables," Mazzy goes on, raising her eyebrows at Thor.

"No, you won't," Thor tells her.

"Thor-" Natasha begins to reprimand but is quickly interrupted. 

"I think it's about the mechanics," the purple shirt guy speaks up, switching the subject back to what's important, which is Loki and what he's planning to do. "Iridium... What do they need the iridium for?"

"It's a stabilizing agent," Tony says, announcing his presence in the room. Mazzy spins around in her chair to look at him. He looks down at her. "There you are. I thought the space magician made you disappear or something." Everyone looks up at him with questioning looks. "It means the portal won't collapse in on itself, like it did at SHIELD," he explains.

Tony walks deeper into the room, messing up Mazzy's hair as he passes by her chair. She furrows her eyebrows at him and smacks his hand away. Tony passes by Thor next. "No hard feelings, Point Break. You've got a mean swing," he says, tapping the God on the arm. "Also, it means the portal can open as wide and stay open as long, as Loki wants." 

Tony walks up to where Fury would usually stand and utters some jumbled-up words, making everyone look at him confusedly. 

Then, he points off to a random man at a computer. "That man is playing Galaga. He thought we wouldn't notice, but we did." 

Mazzy looks over at the man's screen and, nevertheless, he is playing Galaga. Eyes burning at the back of his head, the man scrambles to shut off the game and clicks to a different tab. 

Tony raises a hand up to his left eye and looks around at the screens around him. "How does Fury even see these?"

"He turns," the woman in black answers. She looks cool. Mazzy wants to know her name.

"Sounds exhausting," Dad said. Mazzy rolls her eyes, slouching down in her chair. She's getting bored of this. Bored and tired. She had her sugar in that ice cream and now she's about to crash. 

She watches as her dad messes around with Fury's technology and continues to explain what Loki needs to execute his plan, which is to get the Tesseract and make his big portal that will bring his space army. Everyone else seems so focused on what he's saying and how he's messing with the computers that they don't notice when he plants a small listening device underneath the desk. But Mazzy notices. She makes a mental note to ask him about it later. 

"When did you become an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics?" the cool-looking agent in all black asks.

"Last night," Tony answers in a snarky voice with a tilt of his head. "The packet, Selvig's notes, the extraction theory papers," he lists. Those must be what he was reading after he sent Mazzy to bed. "Am I the only one who did the reading?"

"Does Loki need any particular kind of power source?" Steve buds in.

"He'd have to heat the cube to 120 million Kelvin just to break through the Coulomb barrier," the purple shirt guy says. 

Tony holds his hands out to his sides. "Unless Selvig has figured out how to stabilize the quantum tunneling effect."

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

"Finally, someone who speaks English!" Tony says enthusiastically, gesturing to the purple shirt man.

"Is that what just happened?" Steve asks rhetorically.

"I knew the purple shirt guy seemed smart," Mazzy says with a proud smile. She scoots her chair closer to the table again and rests her head in her arms. Her eyes feel heavy and her voice starts to feel difficult to use. Usually, she would be able to understand at least some of what they're talking about because Tony Stark is her father and all, but today, she doesn't know what they're talking about in the slightest. Half their words aren't even registering in her brain. "I knew he was smart 'cause of how he was standing, Dad," Mazzy says. 

"Good job?" Tony murmurs, pinching his eyebrows together. 

"Um, my name's Bruce, by the way," the purple shirt man says.

Tony walks up to him and shakes his hand. "It's good to meet you, Dr. Banner," he says. 

"Yeah. It's good to meet you, Dr. Banner," Mazzy echoes. 

"Your work on antielectron collisions is unparalleled. And I'm a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous, green rage monster," Tony goes on. 

Dr. Banner looks away for a moment before muttering, "Thanks."

Mazzy's eyes widen and she sits up in her seat, suddenly full of energy all over again. "You're the green guy?!" she asks. She stands in the chair on her knees, leaning over the table. 

"Yeah," Bruce murmurs somewhat uncomfortably.

"Did you get attacked by a leprechaun? I heard they turn things green at school on Saint Patrick's Day, but I don't know for sure because I've never been to school before," she says in a quick, mildly jumbled rant. 

Bruce seems a bit less uncomfortable answering that question. He lets out a quiet laugh. "No, not a leprechaun. It was something called gamma radiation. Have you done any chemistry stuff before?"

"Not yet. I'm doing biology stuff right now, but I'm doing chemistry stuff next," Mazzy explains, tapping her hands on the table excitedly.

"Well, gamma rays are something you'll learn about when doing chemistry. It's a penetrating form of electromagnetic radiation-"

"We don't need to hear about it now," Natasha interrupts before Bruce can go on and start rambling about science jargon that only he and Tony would be able to understand. 

Mazzy didn't know that the green man would just be a normal human, let alone the awkward genius who she has been sitting in a room with. 

"Dr. Banner is only here to track the cube," Nick Fury says as he marches into the room. He looks at Tony, raising his eyebrows. "I was hoping you might join him."

"I'd start with that stick of his. It may be magical, but it works an awful lot like a Hydra weapon," Steve says. Mazzy isn't sure what Hydra is, but it sounds familiar to her. Maybe she'll ask her dad about it later. 

"I don't know about that, but it is powered by the cube. And I'd like to know how Loki used it to turn two of the sharpest men I know into his personal flying monkeys," Fury tells them all. 

"Monkeys?" Thor murmurs, furrowing his eyebrows with confusion. "I do not understand." 

Suddenly, Steve shoots his hand out to Fury and says, "I do!" There is an awkward silence as everyone stares at him. "I understood that reference..." he says sheepishly.

"It's from The Wizard of Oz," Mazzy clarifies for Thor.

Tony ignores them both and turns to Dr. Banner. "Shall we play, Doctor?"

"This way, sir," Dr. Banner says, gesturing towards the door.

Tony leans over the top of Mazzy's chair. "Let's go, Sleeping Beauty," he says. 

"I'm not sleepy," Mazzy lies as she stands up and follows after the two geniuses. She leans into her dad's side tiredly, despite her claims of not being tired, and Tony keeps an arm around her shoulders as they follow Dr. Banner through the halls of the hovercraft.

Dr. Banner leads them into a room with a bunch of windows. The magical stick that Steve was talking about is on a table, precariously placed above some pieces of technology that Mazzy has never seen before. Mazzy finds a spot on one of the desk chairs in the room and curls up in a ball on top of it. 

Dr. Banner begins talking some more about gamma radiation as he hovers some weird device over the staff.

"If we bypass their mainframe and direct route to the Homer cluster we can clock this at around 600 teraflops," Tony says as he messes with a computer. Mazzy giggles at the word teraflops.

Bruce chuckles. "All I packed was a toothbrush," he says.

"All I packed was nothing 'cause my dad picked me up and made me fly against my will," Mazzy mutters, making Tony roll his eyes and Bruce laugh. "Guess I should've packed a sleeping bag, apparently, 'cause no one sleeps around here."

"I sleep," Dr. Banner says, slightly raising a hand. "Just not when a God is threatening our planet with world domination, apparently." 

"You know, you should come by Stark Tower sometime. Top ten floors, all R&D. You'd love it. It's Candy Land," Tony tells him. Mazzy figures he's excited to have someone around who is actually as smart as him. Unfortunately, however, not being the only genius in the room doesn't humble him.

"Thanks, but the last time I was in New York, I kind of broke Harlem," Bruce says, sounding a little ashamed.

"Well, I promise a stress-free environment," Tony says.

"He's lying," Mazzy interjects.

"Not lying," Tony says as he walks up next to Bruce. "No tension. No surprises." He sticks a metal object into Dr. Banner's side, making him jump.

"Ow!"

"Hey!" Steve yells as he walks in on the scene.

"Nothing?" Tony asks disappointedly. 

"Are you nuts?" Steve asks, clearly irritated by Tony. 

"Jury's out," Tony jokes. "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 asks, looking annoyed. He seems to look annoyed whenever Tony is present.

"Funny things are," Tony says, pointing the metal object at Steve.

"Threatening the safety of everyone on this ship isn't funny," Steve says. 

Mazzy frowns. Do they really have no faith in Dr. Banner? Do they think he's gonna hurt them all just because Tony gave him a little shock? Are they really that scared of him? She just feels so bad for him. He seems nice. He probably doesn't like being the way he is, based on how he was acting about it earlier.

"You're being rude to Bruce, Captain America," Mazzy says, holding her hands on her hips. 

Steve sighs, turning to Bruce. "No offense, Doc," he says quietly.

"It's all right," Bruce says. Mazzy is glad that he doesn't take offense to any of it, but she still feels bad for him. Even if he doesn't take offense, that doesn't give them the right to talk about him like he's a monster. Maybe the green man is a monster, but Bruce doesn't seem to be one. "I wouldn't have come aboard if I couldn't handle pointy things," Bruce says. 

"You're tip-toeing, big man. You need to strut," Tony tells him as he makes his way back to stand next to Mazzy. 

"And you need to focus on the problem, Mr. Stark," Steve says.

"Do you think I'm not focused on the problem?" Tony asks argumentatively. "Why did Fury call us in? Why now? Why not before? What isn't he telling us? I can't do the equation unless I have all the variables."

Steve looks at him seriously. "You think Fury's hiding something?" he asks. 

"He's a spy. Captain, he's the spy. His secrets have secrets," Tony insists, popping some blueberries into his mouth. "It's bugging him, too. Isn't it?" He gestures to Dr. Banner, who is still focused on whatever work he is doing.

"Uh..." Bruce seems very unsure of how to go about this without getting involved in an argument. "I just want to finish my work here and..."

"Doctor?" Steve interrupts.

Dr. Banner sighs and takes off his glasses. "'A warm light for all mankind'. Loki's jab at Fury about the cube."

"I heard it," Steve says.

"Well," Bruce says, "I think that was meant for," he points at Tony, "you." Tony doesn't say anything and offers him a blueberry, which he accepts before continuing. "Even if Barton didn't tell Loki about the tower, it was still all over the news."

"Do Gods watch the news?" Mazzy asks, raising her eyebrows.

"When they're trying to take over the world, maybe," Bruce says. 

"You're talking about Stark Tower?" Steve asks. "That big, ugly-" he pauses as Tony turns and Mazzy sits up to glare at him, "...building in New York?"

"Meanie," Mazzy mutters.

"It's powered by an arc reactor, a self-sustaining energy source. That building will run itself for, what, a year?" Bruce asks Tony.

"It's just a prototype," Tony answers. "I'm kind of the only name in clean energy right now. That's what he's getting at," Tony explains to Steve, who seemed confused before. Steve does not have a scientific brain, Mazzy decides.

"So, why didn't SHIELD bring him in on the Tesseract project?" Bruce asks.

"Because Natasha told them that he's a narcissist," Mazzy answers.

"But what are they doing in the energy business in the first place?"

"I should probably look into that, once my decryption program finishes breaking into all of SHIELD's secure files," Tony says, walking back over to the computer that's next to Mazzy.

"I'm sorry, did you say-" Steve tries to interject. 

"Jarvis has been running it since I hit the bridge. In a few hours, I'll know every dirty secret Shield has ever tried to hide. Blueberry?"

Steve ignores his offer, standing stiffly in front of him. "Yet you're confused about why they didn't want you around."

"No, they said it's because he's narcissistic," Mazzy says once again.

"Is it, though?" Tony asks her, pressing his lips together. "Or is SHIELD an intelligence organization that fears intelligence? Which is, historically, not awesome." They don't want smart people around because they're scared that they will uncover their secrets, which is exactly what's happening.

"I think Loki's trying to wind us up," Steve suggests. "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 says. 

Steve tilts his chin up at him. "And you're all about style, aren't you?"

"Of the people in the room, which one is, A, wearing a spangly outfit, and, B, not of use?" Tony asks, his eyebrows raised.

Mazzy begins typing on a keyboard in front of her, although the screen isn't even on. "Captain America," she answers.

"Rhetorical question," Tony tells her. 

"Steve, tell me none of this smells a little funky to you?" Bruce asks.

"Just find the cube," Steve says before quickly walking out of the room.

Mazzy waits until he's out of the room to say, "Jeez. He's a party-pooper."