[Spoken word: LYFRASSIR]
And the Ratatosk Express launches. Speed readings peak at 250 miles an hour as the the tracks engage, and then the odometer starts to go a little bit weird. Can’t quite figure out how fast it's traveling, or if it’s standing still. External cameras are only black and white, but still manage to give a sense of the shifting, undulating hues inside the Bifrost. The train’s underway, and it should be out the other side in just under 72 hours. That's how long the journey was supposed to take, though no one left living knows why.
There’s a lot of corruption in the recording, and picking out clear words and images is difficult at best, but I scan the first day intently, looking for signs of anyone or anything that might have led to the train’s destruction. For a while I come up empty - plenty of folks seem unhappy to be making the journey, regardless of the luxury. Even Odin seems to be less than fully comfortable, spending every spare second staring out the glass wall of her personal observation deck. But there’s nothing I can put my finger on as too out of place.
Then I spot Loki lurking in one of the private suites, and everything starts to make sense. Not much sense, because Loki was supposed to be dead already, but before that she spent 30 years working with a Midgardian terrorist cell, so if anyone is behind the Bifrost Incident, it would be her.
On the video feed, she doesn’t look well. Drawn, haggard, hidden away in that suite, she just clutches her head for hours and hours. Not the behavior of a ruthless saboteur. Police files from before the incident are patchy, but I can still get the details of Loki’s arrest and sentencing. Execution, apparently carried out as ordered, but there’s something else there. Loki used to work on the Bifrost, right at its inception, decades before the incident. Maybe Odin couldn’t afford to lose her knowledge, and secretly swapped out execution for something that kept her expertise intact. But even through the grainy playback of the video feed, it’s clear that whatever Odin did instead messed her head up something awful.
