Did America have country folk? It did — plenty of them.
In a land so vast and thinly populated, many people were born in small towns and ran their own farms; apart from going away to college, they spent their whole lives right where they were and never went anywhere. Outsiders didn't come in, and the locals didn't go out.
The way the plumber carried himself proved he'd seen more of the world than most Americans. At the very least, on meeting someone like Iron Man — a super-billionaire and superhero rolled into one — he showed little sign of awe, treating him as casually and evenly as he would any ordinary person.
The middle-aged man's words were startling enough to stun the assembled heroes. Aliens were going to invade Earth? And this time it seemed to be not one, but a whole horde?
"How many of the enemy are there?" the veteran Captain America asked, deeply worried.
Even after years working for the Nova Corps, the plumber still recognized Captain America — the man was a symbol of the American spirit, after all. A little nervously, he answered, "Many. More than you can imagine. They're a race that finds planets and sells them off."
The middle-aged man took a glossy black helmet from his backpack, stroking it the way one might caress a lover. His rough fingers tapped it lightly, and a screen of light flared to life; countless pale-blue grids formed in an instant, and within two seconds they rendered a reasonably clear image.
An enormous celestial body filled two-thirds of the picture, and thanks to the man's earlier description, everyone recognized the planet as Jupiter.
The normally quiet, serene Jupiter had a great many uninvited guests today.
The man pointed at the image. "The Chitauri can survive in space. Their internal circulation is nothing like ours; they don't need oxygen to live. These creatures riding the craft, the ones that look like they've been coated in a layer of rust — those are the Chitauri."
The others still harbored doubts to varying degrees, but Daisy already believed it completely.
Stuck in her old way of thinking, she'd assumed that stopping the Tesseract meant everything would be fine, never expecting that this time there'd be no portal at all — the Chitauri were flying in on their own. Which was the greater strain, an army massing at the border or a portal tearing open over New York, was honestly hard to say.
In the movies it was only a few hundred, maybe a thousand enemies, all wiped out by a single nuclear missile.
This was a whole different story. From the image, the Chitauri at Jupiter were an entire race, their numbers blotting out the sky beyond any count. The Chitauri Leviathans alone — those half-biological, half-mechanical warships shaped like giant arowana — numbered in the hundreds.
The Chitauri riding their personal Chariots were like sand in a river, impossible to count at all.
The heroes still had their doubts, but the worldly, well-traveled Nick Fury believed it entirely, and he asked the plumber urgently, "How long until they reach Earth?"
"Hard to say. I fought them years ago. From the look of it, they aren't advancing at full speed — maybe there's some dispute among them, maybe they're waiting on orders. At their current pace, I'd estimate three or four hours."
With that, the plumber bowed deeply to them. "Please forgive my cowardice, but for Sam's sake, I can't take part in the fight — it would draw the Nova Corps' attention. Earth is in your hands now."
The plumber had made his terms clear with Daisy beforehand: he'd come to tip off S.H.I.E.L.D. purely out of a sense of duty, but he himself wouldn't join the battle. With tens of thousands of Chitauri swarming in, one lone Nova soldier really wouldn't make much difference. Director Daisy kept her word and simply opened the hatch to let him go.
A wordless silence settled over the aircraft; everyone was at a loss. What was there to say now? Aliens were coming, and hardly the peace-seeking kind — they were hideous to look at and marching in with an army at their back.
Daisy fell silent too. She'd long had her eye on the spaceship in Nick Fury's possession, but in the current situation, even having one would be useless. Play the lone hero like in the movies and pilot a ship out for a showdown with the aliens? Don't make me laugh — she'd be blasted to ash before she ever got close.
As for tracking down the enemy's leader for a decapitation strike, that was nonsense too. Who was going to tell Daisy where the enemy leader even was?
She had no way to survive in outer space right now; go gallivanting out there and she might never make it back. Director Daisy was not about to do anything that stupid.
The only option was to fight on Earth. It would do the planet a certain amount of damage, but for an Earth with no space-combat capability, it was the only option there was.
A phone call broke into her thoughts. Daisy answered, exchanged a few brief words, and hung up. "That was Reed. He's spotted the aliens too. We don't have much time left."
Daisy and Nick Fury exchanged a glance and quickly divided up the work. The better-looking one would go brief that crowd of government and military types; the less good-looking one would organize the heroes and set up a defensive line.
…
"Really? You're not joking?" President Obama, just one month into the job, wore a look of pure disbelief. It struck him as absurd. Aliens — tens of thousands of them, maybe a hundred thousand — were about to appear before the public, right in front of the whole world's eyes?
"There's no doubt about it, Mr. President. NORAD has picked up the enemy's trail as well. The aliens seem to want to pile on the pressure — they've slowed to half their speed." Daisy had rushed to the White House, dragged the dozing President Obama up out of his chair, and delivered him this horrifying news.
President Obama checked twice that no one was pulling his leg, then quickly summoned Secretary of State Ross and got the Pentagon on the line.
"Commander Johnson, where will the enemy make landfall?" Ignoring the generals' astonishment, the Secretary of Defense was the first to fire off the crucial question.
It was an important matter — there was a difference between fighting a war in your own home and fighting one in someone else's.
"I'm sorry to say, Mr. Secretary, that S.H.I.E.L.D.'s analysis points to humanity's research into the Tesseract as what drew their attention. Their target is the Tesseract, which means New York. The odds of us fighting on home soil run as high as ninety percent."
On the comms channel, several generals fell instantly silent. They were in New York themselves — would it look bad to log off and run at this exact moment? Their faces went ashen. The time had come to choose between their political lives and their actual lives, and they were utterly at a loss, gaping and speechless, with no idea what to say.
"If we just hand that Tesseract thing over to them, will they pull their army back?" a general in charge of logistics asked, voicing the question on many people's minds.
Daisy didn't dignify such a naive question with an answer. Ross gave a cold snort and stayed silent too. Under the scorn of his colleagues, the man realized he'd been so frightened out of his wits that he was talking nonsense.
The group lapsed into silence. A mass evacuation of New York's citizens, followed by troops moving into the city to fight the aliens street by street — in peacetime, with no warning at all, that was, frankly, a very hard order to hand down.
The only one who could give such an order now was the President — and of course, if anything went wrong, he'd be the one left holding the bag. That was what the job demanded; otherwise Daisy would simply have gone straight to the Secretary of Defense and been done with it, rather than making the trip all the way to the White House.
For a moment, everyone waited for President Obama to exercise the power of his office.