And the Ratatosk Express launches
Speed readings peak at 250 miles an hour as 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