The answer was more or less what she'd expected: of the four, Sif, being a deity, could change her attire, while the three friends of Thor's could not.
The whole lot of them clamored to go and find Thor.
Strength was the foundation of any conversation. The Asgardian warriors ran through introductions for Daisy first, so that everyone was at least formally acquainted now.
The hulking one with the axe was Volstagg. The swordsman with the trim golden mustache was Fandral. The rank-and-file fighter swinging a chained flail was Hogun. As for Sif, she'd given her name earlier.
Fandral spoke up first. "If I may—where is this New York?"
Daisy looked them over. They had the air of men ready to swim from Antarctica to New York if that was what it took.
To spare them being chased down by sharks somewhere in the open ocean, Daisy figured she'd better just bring them along.
Hauling four at once was no small task. Sif's strength was only middling and the three warriors were frankly dead weight, but their weapons and armor were forged of Asgardian metal, brutally heavy to move—and add Thor's hammer on top of that and teleporting the whole load became a real strain.
So she simply called in a Quinjet to carry the group and the hammer back to S.H.I.E.L.D.
Watching her grip Mjolnir with open distaste written all over her face, Sif finally couldn't hold it in.
"Why is it you can lift Mjolnir? I can't make sense of it..."
Daisy mimicked Thor from the movies, swinging the hammer in a couple of lazy circles, fooling around while she tossed off a quick word or two about magnetism and gravity.
For all the good it did. The Asgardians had starships and laser-spitting spears and even laser cannons, sure—but this particular bunch clearly didn't grasp the first thing about science. Textbook Asgardians: brilliant with hammers and axes, hopeless past that. In the end Sif still couldn't work out how Daisy was holding Mjolnir, though she had at least sorted out the one thing that mattered—the hammer hadn't acknowledged this woman at all.
The pilot who came to collect them in the Quinjet was an old familiar face: high-ranking, yet coasting along on autopilot day in and day out—Black Widow. Nick Fury had posted her to keep watch on the Hulk, lately reinvented as a devoted dog person, which had put her down in South America. Word that Daisy's situation up here was urgent, urgent enough to threaten the safety of the entire world, had sent Baldy scrambling to reassign her.
Daisy boarded the plane with the group, the hammer in one hand and the corpse dragged along in the other.
Black Widow caught sight of the Nazi armband on the body, and that unmistakable skull-like face, and her expression flickered.
"Who's this...?"
"Tied to Red Skull, that much is certain. The rest will have to wait until we can examine her back at base."
Daisy kept her answer deliberately vague. Anything that touched Red Skull was serious business, so Black Widow set aside her surveillance of the dog-lover for the moment and flew the group back toward Washington.
Mjolnir didn't acknowledge her, true, but it hadn't dug its heels in about staying in Antarctica either. Perhaps it too had sensed the situation turning dire; it followed Daisy onto the plane and got tossed into the cabin by a certain someone.
The hammer was a thoroughly temperamental thing. When it felt like moving, it weighed barely ten kilograms (22 lbs)—set it on any table or chair you liked. When it didn't, it sank into the floor as though it had grown roots, and you could pry up the whole deck and still not budge it. In short, it was the sort of thing where Asgard reserved the final say on how it worked.
In the air, Daisy turned over the matter of Thor. This was the real world, not a film; it wasn't going to hand Thor a heroic power surge or a tidy flashback to find himself. For all she knew, while they were still in flight, some street brawl in New York would get Thor himself killed.
To the Asgardians, to Loki, Thor was one of a kind. To Daisy, Thor might be one of a kind—but the God of Thunder was not.
There was no shortage of people who could lift Mjolnir. The Black Widow up in the cockpit could manage it right now, for one. Beyond the well-known names—Captain America, Black Widow—plenty of others could do it too: Rogue, who could siphon off Thor's divine power; Storm, who commanded the weather and called down lightning; even the boundlessly loving Jane Foster. Every one of them could raise the hammer.
Who said women were the weaker sex? Most of the people who'd ever lifted that hammer were women.
Privately, Daisy filed Mjolnir under "pervert."
The rest of the flight passed without a word. The plane set down on a concealed pad at S.H.I.E.L.D.'s New York headquarters.
If Asgard wanted any chance of tracking Thor down, they'd have to lean on S.H.I.E.L.D.; in a city of millions, this handful could search themselves to death and never find him.
The hatch opened. Under the twitching eyes of the Asgardians, Daisy stretched out a hand, and the hammer flew to her palm—half on its own, half under protest—after which she used gravity to drag the woman's corpse out of the cabin behind her.
"This way, if you please." Coulson, who'd been waiting a good while, met the four Asgardians with a face full of smiles. It had all been arranged back on the plane: the eternally good-natured Coulson would lead them in the search, and Daisy was lending a few of her own Intelligence Department people to help comb the city.
Unlike that little New Mexico town from the original timeline, running down a single person in a metropolis of millions was punishing work even with the full weight of officialdom behind it.
First they'd screen the official identity and registration records here at headquarters; if that came up empty, all that remained was a dragnet search on foot.
Leaving the headache to Coulson, Daisy carried the hammer and dragged the corpse off to see Baldy. Catching Black Widow making to leave from the corner of her eye, she quickly called out.
"Natasha, hold on—we may still need you later."
Black Widow didn't mind. She'd always been the take-it-or-leave-it type—able to stand beside Stark in support of the Registration Act, and equally able to let Captain America slip away at the decisive moment. If anyone embodied wanting nothing and minding nothing, it was her.
Daisy set the hammer down on Nick Fury's desk and gestured at it. "This is the hammer you sent me to look at. I brought it back."
Nick Fury could only stare at her, lost for words. She'd stumbled her way into yet another world-shaking mess, and now even gods out of myth and legend were showing up on Earth. He honestly couldn't decide whether Daisy's luck ran impossibly good or impossibly bad.
"Ow!" Baldy found the hammer cluttering up his desk an eyesore and reached over to shift it aside—only to nearly throw his old back out. His foot had already taken half a step forward when the hammer's flat refusal to cooperate dragged him bodily back.
Neither Black Widow nor Daisy could keep a straight face at that. Black Widow's laugh was discreet, gentle with a thread of allure; Daisy, with the Phoenix's influence currently leashed, laughed rather more carelessly.
"That's not on me—I was towing it with my powers," she explained at once.
Baldy glanced back. The hammer hadn't crushed the desk, so the thing itself wasn't heavy? He gave it a couple more surreptitious tugs anyway. It didn't shift a hair.
"What's the mechanism behind this?" King of agents that he was, Nick Fury possessed strength comfortably above the human average, and he simply couldn't reason it out. He could lift the desk—so why not the hammer?
"It's probably that the hammer has certain requirements about who's allowed to use it. Same as the Hammer of Skadi we tested together back then—these Norse relics all seem to share the trait." Daisy explained.
Nick Fury leaned in along the side of the hammer and spotted two lines of runes etched there. Semi-illiterate as he was, he naturally couldn't read a word of them, so Daisy ran through it for him.