[center][img]http://31.media.tumblr.com/ad076eb026510152890a28a0786775c7/tumblr_mf8o1nDGiU1qi5lu7o1_500.gif[/img] [img]http://txt-dynamic.static.1001fonts.net/txt/b3RmLjcyLmU0ZjhmYy5UY09oYm1rLC4w/norse.regular.png[/img] [i]"That's not something you just skirt over."[/i] [b][u]Interactions:[/u] With his computers[/b] [b][u]Location:[/u] Observatory, Phoenix, Arizona; 8:08 p.m.[/b][/center] [hr][hr] Moonlight settled the range of sepia rock and barely there shrubbery in a light haze, far above the smog of Phoenix's city life. Beyond the mountain and the pollution of lights smearing the sky in a viscous black ink, the only lights catching the horizon for miles came from the beat up Honda Civic rumbling down a dirt path and into a tiny parking garage. Honestly, the garage itself looked more like a shack than something paid for by a well-off university. Dwarfing the garage, the Observatory stood atop a hillside, pointing its panels and revealed telescope toward Orion's bow in the winter sky. Attached to the observatory lay a small building where various, powerful machines were housed for research. And off west and to the side, sat a numerous amount of far too large to be ordinary antennae settled on one vocal point in the northern sky. The observatory itself remained separate from the house of machines, computers, and hard drives, which ran for the satellite project dubbed Haus. The entirety of the observatory's astronomers took part in Haus' research, meaning the University itself helped fund it. The research aimed to look into space at a higher definition and much, much farther than Hubble's could ever quite reach. The Haus telescope could render an image in real time for that section in space, meaning light wouldn't have to travel millions of miles. The project seemed far advanced for its time, which could be acquitted to the man who made the telescope from scratch: Valentine Haus, or as Emmanuel grew to know him, Vulcan. A disheveled man, looking to be on Australian time rather than his own, bumbled out of the Civic with his suit coat wrinkled over his shoulders and a case in a barely there grip in his hands. Emmanuel Welch found his vacation to have ended abruptly, though the look on his face looked conflicted with the return of monitoring the night sky coupled with actually working. It found a nice in between scowl whilst Emmanuel jogged up the steps to one of the numerous entrances in order to slide his key fob in and tumble inside himself. "A little late there, bucko," a quiet voice owned by a [url=https://media.giphy.com/media/85qoHGkUbgEKc/giphy.gif]petite blonde[/url] rounded the corner the moment Emmanuel did. Snark held tight to the blonde's features, keeping an almost there scowl twisting her lips and cheeks. Caustic words seemed her go to, reaching an irritating balance between nasally and sarcastic. With a taught frown, he sat what possessions he brought across from her small frame within the tiny space they acquired. "Anything big from Haus, Danielle?" Emmanuel moved past her toward their cramped space of coffee pots, mugs, and a half-eaten dish of cheesecake. "You realize everything we find with that thing is considered groundbreaking, right?" Danielle replied with a steel glare. Emmanuel deflected both the question and her scrutiny with a well placed cup of coffee. "But, I think I did find something. You might wanna head down to the computer house to check the recent images Haus acquired," Danielle, after a lengthy pause, began, setting whatever she'd been working on down to look more closely at Emmanuel, "Steve thinks it's a glitch, that something's blocking the telescope's view, but I dunno." "Well, fuck Steve, then. Tell me what you think," Emmanuel said, turning toward her with a mug of sugar in his hands—he liked his coffee heavy on the sweet side. He watched Danny squirm in her seat as her eyes moved toward the papers in her hands. She shuffled them with her brow pinched, before pursing her lips and stacking them neatly within her grasp. A sigh left her lips before she set the papers down again and turned fully toward Emmanuel, eyeing his hazmat mug with caution. "I think you need to take a look at it yourself." [hr][hr] [center][img]http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcosk5cYkn1rxwyfuo2_500.gif[/img] [img]http://txt-dynamic.static.1001fonts.net/txt/dHRmLjcyLjM0Njc3Zi5UMlJwYmcsLC4w/odins-spear.ragged-hollow.png[/img] [i]Alias: Odyn Redheart[/i] [b][u]Interactions:[/u] Nobody in Particular[/b] [b][u]Location:[/u] High rise, Sydney, Australia; 2:08 p.m.[/b][/center] [hr][hr] Crimson red coated the walls of this Sydney penthouse, with gold trimming that demanded attention. A chandelier hung in the middle of a semi-circular living room, above a yew coffee table in a dipped annex between the kitchen and a large panoramic view of the sandy beach and endless ocean. An empty wine glass sat stained red beside a vase of yellow and orange anemones, the owner having left for a quick shower before his meeting—an unfortunate severance deal for the splitting of two companies who didn't see eye to eye in the first place. It required a touch of alcohol. In the far corner of room itself writhed a curtain of steam from the bedroom door. From it a silhouette emerged, bracketed by the open door frame with a towel tight around its waist and a phone to its ear. "Apologies, my shower faucet has been acting up," the gruff figure of Odyn rumbled into the speaker as he walked through his penthouse with no regard for his lack of clothing, "it gets locked up and wastes all of my hot water. I have steam wafting into my bedroom and rolling out into the main chamber. "Anyway, I'll be there in about," Odyn took the moment to glance up at the stationed clock by his fridge. It staid stock still at 2:08 p.m. with a sharp crack unusually straight down the middle. His brow furrowed, but he made no effort to truly care; he didn't have time to ponder over faulty machinery. "I'll get there in an hour, expect me by, let's say three." Upon turning, Odyn's brows furrowed at the shadow cast at his feet that grew with a rapid intensity. His eyes caught a figure outside, and he tilted his head with a scrunched expression. Chalking it up to nothing, Odyn moved back toward his bedroom only to be stopped mid stride by grasping blackness. A scream caught his throat, the phone clattering as the blackness edged over him and promptly disappeared, leaving the former god a mere husk—a stain on his marble floors. [hr][hr] [center][img]http://33.media.tumblr.com/2398cd519df18040cbfa2dda6904945a/tumblr_inline_mnqrlnH0gz1qz4rgp.gif[/img] [img]http://txt-dynamic.static.1001fonts.net/txt/b3RmLjcyLmU0ZjhmYy5UY09oYm1rLC4w/norse.regular.png[/img] [i]"A glitch my [b]fucking[/b] ass."[/i] [b][u]Interactions:[/u] [url=https://media.giphy.com/media/85qoHGkUbgEKc/giphy.gif]Danielle[/url], Computers[/b] [b][u]Location:[/u] Observatory, Phoenix, Arizona; 8:11 p.m.[/b][/center] [hr][hr] How could anyone possibly think this [i]thing[/i] resembled a technical error? Much less something blocking the telescope. No, too obvious to be anything but the space Haus showed. Emmanuel, forehead creased and dented at the top of his bridge, looked back and forth between two HD copies of different parts of the sky. He turned to Danielle, who had proceeded to bite her lip and glanced up at him from the rim of her glasses. "Steve thinks this is a glitch?" he asked and she nodded quickly, "Where'd he get his degree?" "DePaul, why?" "Well, DePaul can suck my fucking cock," Emmanuel nearly shouted, slapping the pictures onto the table in front of him. "When were these taken?" He began a brisk walk through the warm environment, disappearing behind a large stack of state of the art computer hard drives. Danielle followed as quick as she could, cursing her high heels and awful coordination. "Just a little over a month ago. I was going to run a few tests again this morning, but Steve insisted I don't," Danielle huffed, stopping right behind the hunched body of Emmanuel, "I can't believe they hired such a blatant, sexist asshole. Are we allowed to get him fired for this?" "I would like to, yes, but I'm not," Emmanuel said, hands typing code quickly through the keyboard before finally, on the projector to his side, an image popped up. It laid black as night, but eerie in quality, as if he were staring into an abyss that dared to stare back. Danielle frowned at his side, her eyes never leaving the displayed image while Emmanuel continued fiddling with the code. "Here's another," he said the moment the second picture lit up the screen, displaying a partial galaxy. "Wait, that's... that's the Andromeda galaxy," Danielle stated and Emmanuel nodded, before typing another set of codes in. The image widened to reveal more of the galaxy. "What the [i]fuck[/i]? That's not natural—not for this galaxy." "Millions of light years of space, just gone." [hr][hr] [center][img]http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e219/sfallon20/jkomg.gif[/img] [img]http://txt-dynamic.static.1001fonts.net/txt/dHRmLjcyLjIzOWE5OS5TbUZ1ZFhNLC4w/grecian-formula.regular.png[/img] [i]"I wonder if he's still alive in ther—nope, that's pretty dead."[/i] [b][u]Interactions:[/u] Odin's Dead Body[/b] [b][u]Location:[/u] High rise, Sydney, Australia; 3:11 p.m.[/b][/center] [hr][hr] [i]Moments later...[/i] "Mr. Redheart?" a crisp Australian accent rang through the hallway leading to the personal elevator, stopping short of the foyer. Nothing seemed unusual, aside from an astray picture on the wall that needed correcting. The man, decked in a service uniform, left his cart of cleaning supplies at the entrance to the living room and proceeded to examine what needed cleaning. His eyes stopped roaming the moment they landed on the rooted and charred figure of Odyn Redheart in the midst of his foyer, his garish, orange colored cellphone cracked on the marble beneath him. "Jesus Christ," he ran toward the figure before gingerly picking up the phone and, swiping for emergency contact and entering the triple zero. He ranted off what he could and made his way back to the foyer to await—and partially because the statue that used to be Mr. Redheart still had its eyes intact. Once the man left, voice barred by the door between him and the living room, the clack of footsteps echoed through the spacious living area. The feet belonged to rather long, brown slacks, and a white buttoned up torso. And the face, with it's pursed lips and inquisitive eyes, belonged to a very disconcerted deity. James made a circle around the supposed evidence the Oracle of Delphi had directed him towards. Her words rang stark in his ears. [i]... body like molten ash, hollowed out with eyes frantically looking on as the stars collapsed and the skies fell. He smells of sulphur and cyanide; he wreaks of radiation. It feels like a star died within him.[/i] And now that James thought of it, having an Odin Statue leaking radiation everywhere seemed very detrimental to the various human lives in the vicinity. But he couldn't help but stare because James felt it, like a chain snapped around him. As if someone dialed up on the frequency of the universe and let him hear a few more buzzes, a few more words, a few more mumbles from distant planets. The moment it happened, James felt a cold chill run down his spine and in that instant terror sank in his stomach. It felt real, now, thinking about it and perhaps that was because it was real; the terror sank back in, eating up his insides with a hunger. Or maybe that was the gamma radiation. Regardless, James wrapped his arms around Odin's deceased form and pried him from the scene of the crime to take him back through the doorway he'd come from. Upon arriving, he was greeted with the face of Tyr and Athena behind him, both looking grimly at the body chugged over his shoulder. "Looks like we'll need a meetin'," Tyr rumbled, the corners of his mouth pulling further down, "I'll task you with that. Open the doors, Janus." "Aye, aye," James replied, looking toward [url=http://38.media.tumblr.com/a555d3e86e14bc5700b7005de08e7925/tumblr_inline_ndd604lEiW1rpufxq.gif]Athena[/url] now who motioned him toward the hallway that lead to the analytical quarters of the newly fashioned 'Asgard'—a building in midday New York, shielded by what magic the remaining gods had left and only accessible through discreet permission from the gods themselves. [hr][hr] [center][img]https://24.media.tumblr.com/8926bd7bdc1b77746a67427a2d4d30ca/tumblr_myhdu2K5Dh1tneaeao1_500.gif[/img] [img]http://txt-dynamic.static.1001fonts.net/txt/b3RmLjcyLjE0NWMxYi5WSGx5LjA,/sovereign.regular.png[/img] [i]Alias: Tyler Ericson[/i] [b][u]Interactions:[/u] The Summit Hall[/b] [b][u]Location:[/u] Asgard[/b][/center] [hr][hr] The great hall of Asgard held many archways and many halls with many doors and now, in this time of desperation, they all flung open. And through each one poured a deity, confused and bewildered as the last they were summoned here, they'd lost their powers. Now, they were finding them returning and each more grew in puzzlement, with questions they asked their fellow beings as they filtered into the great hall's granite splash of grey, blue, and gold floors, it's large, assuming pillars supporting the dome of constellations that hung over their heads. Grand archways lead into a series of seats fashioned in a circle around a large pavilion, staggered like a lecture hall, where a number of Gods of Wisdom and Law kept seated, Janus among them with his eyes wandering the various faces he thought he'd soon forget. Tyr stood in the front, waiting as each god took their seat and once they had he boomed, loud and clear in the echo of Asgard's mighty walls, his only hand (rather than the nub) gesturing to a clothed figure beside him. "It is with great misfortune that I say these words," Tyr stated, thick rolling, Irish hillsides laden in his voice, his head swiveling to pan across the congregation of deities, eyes falling on empty spots of deceased gods and goddesses of the war long passed, "but we've lost a great friend and former leader. Odin, King of Asgard and all the Norse, has befallen a terrible fate." He leaned toward Janus who caught his eye, "If you would, my friend?" A shout and a few collective gasps (and a laugh, which had James snorting) rang amidst the crowd as James unveiled the stone body of Odin. "After a great many years of peace, I am shocked to be saying this," Tyr hung his head low as he spoke, "But we here suspect a fellow deity has done this. As you know, we bound our powers within a seal of our own beings. It was bound to our lifetimes, infinite as it were, but unfortunately is not," he gestured to the deceased Odin, "and with his life, the seals have begun breaking and losing one chain has rattled the others. You witnessed it, we witnessed it, unfortunately we have no evidence other than suspicion as to who could have accomplished such a feat. However, we will not be announcing any names. I bring you here to notify you of our impending investigation and to mourn our loss." Athena stepped up to offer her statement, once Tyr's pause grew lengthy enough, "We ask that you all remain here for the time being whilst the summit delivers its few statements. I assume, as gods, none of you have anywhere else to be? "Good."