A Brief Visit From The Allfather

“Alright, you good?” Ray asked as they set out on foot toward the Viking camp.

“I’m pretty sure it’s a bad idea,” Leslie explained, “I need a wider hat, this is never going to work.”

“If it doesn’t work, I’ll send some lead downrange,” Ray held out their hand, “good luck, man.”

Leslie handed off the deer rifle to Ray, and they went to find a handy little sniper’s nest. Ray was not unfamiliar with the operation and use of a firearm of this nature. Before they had given themselves completely over to the shades, Ray had been raised a redneck, much like Leslie. This meant that skills like small engine repair, recombinant cooking, and marksmanship were something that was drilled into them from a very young age. Whether these skills remained applicable in adulthood was an open question, but they were kind of winging it here.

Ray went off on their stealthy way. The cold weather coverall that they wore could change color to suit different applications. Choosing not to go around in blaze orange or jet black, Ray selected a winter camouflage pattern to hide their form while they found an appropriate vantage. Leslie went and found a large walking stick.

“Coms check,” Ray said over the radio in the collar of their coverall. These coveralls that Leslie had were endlessly useful. With the miniaturization and ubiquity of technology, it was actually pretty difficult to purchase clothing without some sort of smart feature. The coveralls he had were extremely smart. This was not intentional on his part, he just needed to get some coveralls to wear every day. He had purchased them at the local hardware store. This was a place that sold wood and screws and things that were silly to print out of a nanoscale printer. Their main customers were tradespeople, and most folks in the trades lacked the financial fluidity to be able to swing a printer. So the hardware store had a few that shit out screws and pipe fittings all day. The whole arrangement was a lot like a vending machine that you could walk into.

When Leslie bought his coveralls, the model that he chose had a number of features that he found to be superfluous and honestly a little flashy for his taste. He liked the look and the utility of them, but fundamentally their styling made a lot of assumptions about his life. He wanted something rough and tumble that would be useful in the cold. This basically relegated him to a hunting coverall.
Hunting, which Leslie thought of as a solo activity, was something that was frequently carried out by groups of people as a sort of expedition. They would leave the comfort of their homes and venture out into the wilds, expecting to bring some of those comforts with them. Hence the integrated heaters, mesh radio, cuff illumination, and variable display fabric. The whole thing could connect wirelessly to a smart scope on a rifle and provide haptic feedback to make a yoga teacher into the kind of marksman that could defend Stalingrad for a month or two.

“Check,” Leslie said as he selected a walking stick with the appropriate gravitas for what he was about to undertake.

Leslie went about everyday with an eyepatch, or sometimes a bandanna over his bad eye. He wasn’t self conscious about the whole thing, but he understood that it looked kind of gross and could be very distracting in a conversation. When he was patchless, he would notice that people would make such deliberate eye contact with his good eye that they wouldn’t be able to concentrate on what he was saying. He removed his patch and crammed it into a convenient pocket on his coverall.
He had fished a wool blanket out of the back of the Delica and had it affixed around his neck so that it lay upon him like a cloak. He pulled the hood of his coverall onto his head, and that completed his disguise. His stupid, wildly risky, disguise.

“Ray,” Leslie said after a couple of minutes of walking, “set the smartscope on the rifle to the deer setting.”

“Roger,” Ray answered.

Leslie rolled his eye and continued his journey toward the camp. This plan was contingent on a few extremely tenuous assumptions in his opinion. The first of these assumptions was that he wouldn’t be immediately recognisable as himself. These Vikings were all shades addicts, so their perception of him wouldn’t necessarily line up with reality. Historically, these guys would have seen him as a peasant or an epic warrior or something. He knew that Lagertha had seen him quite differently than he appeared in reality at least. For her, the shades had noticed that he had only one eye and had seen fit to deify him. The other assumption was that the Vikings would be desperate enough to buy a truly dogshit story.

When he first sidled into the camp, nobody really noticed him. He was just another dude in a wool cape, which seemed to be the fashion in the camp. Thinking he could pull this whole thing off without a single word being spoken, he nonchalantly started to amble his way toward Lagertha.

He made it to within about ten yards of the former Yarl before he was spotted.

“Halt,” a voice boomed from his left, he recognized this voice as Magnus’ “any closer and you will join her on the pyre, stranger.”

“Stranger?” Leslie pulled back his hood, “that is one of the names you should know me by.”

There might as well have been a jukebox scratching its way to an uncomfortable silence, because the Viking camp became off puttingly quiet as every Norseman within earshot stopped what they were doing and gave Leslie their undivided attention.

Every ganglia in Leslie’s sympathetic nervous system was telling him to run. What he observed was abject danger, in a pure and unadulterated form. What the Vikings saw were some very telltale signs that he was in fact Odin, the big papa bear of the Norse Pantheon.

Since each one of these people had put on the shades and chosen to be Vikings, they had been steeping themselves in Viking lore. Everyday they woke up and saw real factual evidence that gods like Loki and Thor were real live people. They rode the Bifrost bridge everyday to the top of the mountain. They rode around in a longship and went on daily raids in the local village. This life had stopped roughly five hours ago, and hopefully they would still be reeling enough to buy a big fat load of bullshit.

Technically, these Vikings worshipped Ullr. The god of skiing and archery, among other things. In the family tree of the Aesir, Ullr came in as Odin’s step grandson on Thor’s side. So the god that they worshipped would have grown up at Odin’s knee in Asgard while he doled out Worther’s Originals and screwed anything that moved. For Odin to drop by for a face to face, was kind of a big deal.

Magnus narrowed his eyes as he made a bit of a mental calculation. Magnus was not stupid. Deluded, yes, fantastically violent and unpredictable, clearly, but stupid? Unfortunately not. The antler crown that he wore was a pretty new phenomenon, and his fresh mantle of power could be removed if things went sideways with his followers. A number of his followers were in fact stupid and would buy this bullshit story hook line and sinker, so Leslie had put him in a bit of a pickle from a leadership standpoint.

Magnus had to choose between stable power and the narrative that they had been living, or an existential crisis caused by gutting the chief deity of their pantheon where he stood.

“Oh,” Magnus said facetiously, “the Allfather has graced us with his presence. To what do we owe the honor?”

“Sacrifice, Magnus.” Leslie stood his ground and continued to spout bullshit, “Lagertha carries the blood of Odin. My progeny. While I can choose to sacrifice myself, you do not have that right.”

Magnus darted his eyes around the crowd and tried to get a read on what was going on. The consensus seemed to be that Odin had stopped in for a visit and roughly sixty percent of the Vikings were in awe. Politically speaking, this was a super majority. Magnus walked towards Leslie for a bit of a private chat.

“Want me to take the shot?” Ray asked from his right ear, “Shake your head yes or no.”
Leslie shook his head no, not seeing immediate violence in Magnus’ eyes, but certainly a simmering rage.

“Oh this is fucking cute Leslie,” Magnus whispered when he came up on him, “that’s who you are right?”

Because of how the shades had previously altered his perception, Magnus couldn’t really tell if this was Leslie or not. He had never actually seen him without the shades as an intermediary. He was able to intuit who Leslie was because of context clues, namely the one eye thing.

“No, it’s me the fucking Allfather,” Leslie looked him square in the eyes and tried not to pay any attention to the crowbar that he was carrying in his right hand.

“I have to give you some credit,” Magnus continued, “this is pretty clever, but I’m going to fucking get you. You won’t even see it coming.”

“What the fuck did I do?” Leslie pointed out, “You’re the one about to burn a fucking pregnant woman, who, by the way, might be carrying your child you fucking psychopath.”

Magnus just stared at him with narrowed eyes, simmering with rage.

“The Allfather has spoken.” Magnus announced in a voice that could be heard clear across the valley, “He will take the traitorous slut Lagertha, and in trade he blesses me as Yarl. Isn’t that right allfather?”

“That is the truth of it,” Leslie played along, “Magnus shall lead you well.”

Magnus pulled a knife from his belt, and for a second, Leslie thought he was going to open his belly. Instead he trotted over to Lagertha and cut her bonds. For his trouble, Lagertha went to kick him in the balls, but he saw that one coming a mile away and all she caught was a bit of thigh. He laughed at this and shoved her toward Leslie.

“There you are, Allfather,” Magnus bowed sarcastically, “your blushing bride, still full of piss.”

Leslie took her by the hand and got the fuck out of there. He didn’t run, for that would have been the last thing he did, but he was in quite a hurry on his way out.