Rei seemed to come back to herself, and shook her head from side to side, as if negating everything around her. She gave Micah a small smile, as if to reassure him, then quickly moved out from between him and Smith. Micah looked askance at his other version, but Smith's expression gave nothing away as he shrugged. Smith seemed as baffled by Rei's actions as Micah was.

Rei went over to Mia, and the two exchanged a few words. Most of Mia's attention was clearly still on her translation work, and Micah noted that she was still looking at the ideographs around the arena structure. He wondered if the icons told a story, or if they were simply a list of monsters the allosaurs had fought at various times in their arena. Maybe the name of their greatest champion was spelled out in some alien tongue, surrounded by the many kills he had made. He noticed some odd symbols next to some of the depictions; perhaps that was how many their champion had slain within the arena.

Micah felt a bit like a third wheel, and Rei confirmed that feeling when she walked back over to him. "Master, it's going to be several hours before we start the landing approach, and the Overminds have asked all non-essential personnel to exit the simulation. I'll be recording any observations of interest; perhaps by the time we land, we'll have a working translation of the more ambiguous hieroglyphs."

"Yeah, I was getting kinda bored anyway," Micah replied, though in truth he had no desire whatsoever to leave the Sephirot. This was one of the most momentous occasions in mankind's history, their first landing upon an alien exoplanet, and he was being shuffled off to clear RAM space. He walked over to Mia, and the two briefly said their goodbyes to each other, their lips touching in a virtual kiss.

"Alright, I guess I'll head back to Valhalla, then," Micah said to Rei, still feeling a bit awkward around Smith and his expressionless face. "If the assault on Asgard was any indication, we won't be able to rely upon our free upgrades. Get ahold of Tony and Gunnar, see if they'd like to join in. Maybe we can run one of their new elite dungeons, pick up some new gear."

"Have fun, Master," Rei replied with a smile, giving her head a sharp nod. As her chin dipped towards her breasts and then back up, the Sephirot faded around him, and with a rainbow-tinted flash of light, he was standing upon a snowy hill covered in icy permafrost.

He grunted with the sudden chill, but Thorin was made of sterner stuff. He faced into the biting northern wind, breathing deep of the cold, clear air, and smiled. He was up in the mountains, where nights could sometimes last for months during the dead of winter, and above him was the spectacular light show of the Aurora Borealis. Looking up at the shifting curtains of green light had a calming effect on him, helping distract him from worrying over what was going on with Rei.

She had been acting a bit oddly lately, ever since he'd run her off on Valentine's Day. He'd asked her about it afterwards, and she had just smiled mysteriously and said she'd been doing some independent study on the mythology behind Mars' Olympus Mons. But as near as he could tell, it was just some Martian holy site, like Tibet had been before the 20th century, and it was constantly obscured by chaotic electromagnetic storms. There seemed little point to it, but Rei never slept, so he supposed she needed a hobby to keep herself occupied.

There was a crash of thunder as a bolt of lightning shot down next to him, and in the blink of an eye, his fellow warriors had joined him. Gosta and Lilith were there, as were Tyrion and Tempest. To his surprise, Hiro and Kitara were with them as well, the Chinese-Japanese hybrid hiding his expression beneath the shadows cast by his kabuto. He nodded to Thorin silently, then turned his own face into the polar wind, breathing deeply.

"Astronauts needed the RAM space, huh?" Tyrion said with a smirk, giving his shoulder a firm punch. "Don't fret about it too much, you're still gonna be getting closer to that planet than any of the rest of us are. We'll be lucky to get the guided tour once Ragnarok's passed through the other side of the System."

"Assuming the initial projections of it being on a collision course with Earth weren't correct," Tempest cut in. "If that's the case, we'll be seeing it very up close indeed. Even if it's the last thing we ever see."

"Don't be so optimistic; if that planet wanted to blow us up, it'd have much more efficient ways of doing so than ramming all 18 sextillion tons of rock into us," Hiro replied. "Don't forget about those cloaked meteors the Outer Planets had to shoot down. If it can hide a couple billion tons of space debris, I'm willing to bet it can hit Earth with enough energy to disintegrate it, and us on the Moon along with it."

"Heh-heh, he said sex," Tyrion said in a nasal, choked-sounding voice, and Hiro snorted a bit.

"You'd think that our culture would have evolved past Beavis and Butt-head references," Tempest said sadly, drawing her knives and tossing one experimentally, using its arc to gauge the wind speed.

"Humanity's like war ... and war never changes," Thorin replied, and with a blink of his eyes, he switched the visual feed with a top-down map. "Speaking of, looks like Lusarth is up. The Champion of the White just spawned; if we hurry, we should be able to get there in time to hit Phase 2."

"Phat loot, ahoy!" Tyrion said cheerfully, summoning his gigantic two-handed axe and letting the blade slice into the arctic wind. "Last one to hit the Ice Dragon pays for the drinks."

In a series of flashes, the Aesir disappeared from the hill, as far off in the distance, a sound like a dragon's roar echoed across the wind-swept mountains.

* * *

A few hours later, the party of adventurers sat down to a bowl of warm stew around a crackling fire, and compared their loot. Tempest had pulled a spectacular bow from the giant chest that Lusarth had left behind, and Thorin was still trying out different paint jobs for his new helmet, studded with dragon's fangs, like the savage crown of a barbarian king. After the Ice Dragon, they'd ran Elite drops for awhile, before rounding things out with a dungeon. Gosta had only needed a few more dungeon tokens to finish his Sea King's armor, so they had rounded out the evening with a series of delves into Aegir's Grotto.

"Did you see how I cracked that giant crab boss' shell wide open with this thing?" Tyrion was saying, spinning his new two-handed axe by the shaft. The wide axe blades crackled with red lightning, especially the vicious-looking black runes that were only half visible beneath a patina of dried blood. "Axe of the Bloodlord, it's called. Designed to split even the largest foes, and weighted for extra force." He then started listing a series of numbers, most of them bonuses to his attack, damage, and speed.

While Tyrion was still boasting about his new axe, Gosta finished ladling out his bowl of stew and sat down next to Thorin with a nod. "Sweet pull you picked up there, my friend," Gosta said, propping his war-staff against one shoulder while he ate. The food was flavorful but, by itself, not terribly filling, being merely a simulation. On the upside, it meant they could all eat a lot of it, and Hiro had taken enough ranks in Hunter and Chef to cook and prepare food that provided in-game bonuses in addition to a subtle and powerful umami.

"Thanks," Thorin said, setting aside his own empty wooden trencher and slipping it on over his long, golden beard. The crown of bones felt a bit unwieldy, but a quick glance at his stats showed that it was definitely an upgrade from the winged helmet he'd been wearing up till this point. "How does it look?"

"I like it, the dark blue contrasts nicely with the platinum highlights and the dragonbone ivory," Lilith put in, sliding seductively into Gosta's lap and waving off his offer of stew. "All I ended up getting was this little icon." She held up a palm-sized cat sculpture, delicately carved out of a solid chunk of jet. "There's a command word scribed on the underside, and the Valhalla wiki page is telling me that it's a Stone of the Black Huntress. Some sort of summoning item, brings out a giant war-cat or some such thing." She waved a hand at it, and it disappeared back into her inventory.

"Should come in handy the next time we go up against Teen Wolf's posse," Thorin said, looking up at the brightening sky and the stars that glittered within it. "Speaking of, when do we want to take a run at the Yggdrasil? I'm getting pretty close to the new level cap already, and we're all pretty decked out with top-rank gear. We're about as ready as we're going to get, if you ask me."

There was a boom of thunder, as overhead a bolt of lightning appeared in defiance of the clear, cloudless sky, jumping across the horizon before flashing down right next to Thorin. When everyone had finished blinking the afterimage out of their eyes, Avril had joined them, arriving at his right hand side. She smiled a little tensely at everyone, then gave Thorin a look that neither he nor Micah could interpret.

"Forgive me for interrupting, Master, but I agree. It's time we took the fight to Ragnarok, and it looks like everyone's loaded up with new expansion gear." She seemed to study Tyrion's new axe, and the curved compound bow that Tempest was calmly using to shoot some nearly-invisible water bugs in half. "And as it happens, I've been studying the way there. I think I know how to make it all the way to the poison at the heart of Yggdrasil."