Synopsis / Summary / Plot
All-New All-Different Avengers #15 Synopsis by
Rob Johnson
The female Thor calls on Heimdall to grant her passage to the Rainbow Bridge. He greets her on Bifrost. She tells him that Avengers are fighting each other on Earth over the idea of condemning people for crimes the precog Inhuman Ulysses says they will commit, but of course he already knows. She is unsure what side to take and wants his advice because he too can see through time. Instead he tells her a story of when the male Thor came to him with a similar request.
It was in the days of the original team of Avengers, after they had revived Captain America. Iron Man has information about a large new weapon of war created by Dr Doom. They can't arrest him because he's the ruler of Latveria. But he's using it to attack neighbouring Rotruvia to get control of their deposits of valuable molynite. Cap says Rotruvia's government has refused American aid, but Rick Jones has detected pleas for help from the population. Giant-Man says he and Wasp are worried about causing an international incident if they interfere. (Wasp is just miffed he 'spoke for her' without consulting her.) (The male) Thor is tired of all this discussion and suggests they go ask Heimdall's advice.
Thor wants to know if their intervention will have a good outcome. Heimdall doesn't want to look at the future because experience tells him that whenever he does so he turns the future he sees from a probability into a certainty, and he doesn't want that responsibility. But Thor nags him into it, and Heimdall predicts that the Avengers will win the battle but they won't defeat Doom. Thor's pride makes him declare that they will find a way stop the villain.
Heimdall transports them to the battlefield where the war has already begun and the Latverians are overrunning the Rotruvians. The team throw themselves into the fray.
It turns out Wasp knows Hungarian which is close enough to Rotruvian for her to translate comments on the situation. Even the locals' molynite-powered weapons can't get them past the Doombots to Doom and his superweapon. So Cap leads the Avengers in that direction. But they are unaware of the smile that blooms behind Doom's mask.
Cap engages Doom in hand-to-hand combat until the armoured foe wrests his shield from his grasp. But this has been distraction/setup as Wasp flying overhead drops an even tinier Ant-Man who grows into an extra-large Giant-Man as he falls. 1 giant foot lands on Doom, the other on the weapon. As Doom holds up 'his' foot with Cap's shield a combination of repulsor rays and Mjolnir sends him careening into the weapon which is smashed to pieces.
But Dr Doom doesn't seem beaten. The weapon fragments glow with energy, and the Rotruvians molynite weapons dissolve. Doom gloats that he had rigged the weapon to do this if destroyed. It has emitted an alchemical radiation which has destroyed all the molynite in the country. Iron Man realises that the Rotruvian economy is now shattered, and he predicts that the government will have to ask Doom to take over their country to save them. Thor is angry but Doom has teleported to safety.
It all transpires as Shellhead predicted and there's nothing the Avengers can do about it. Heimdall's prediction too was correct, they won the battle but lost the war. They can only console themselves that their action saved the lives of many Rotruvian soldiers. Thor realises he should have listened to Heimdall's advice.
In the present Jane-Thor comments that Heimdall's lesson in humility was more effective than Odin's turning Thor into Don Blake. Heimdall offers her a smaller vision of the future. He knows that as Jane Foster she is dying of cancer, and offers to tell her how long she has left to live. She declines because she doesn't want his looking to fix that date. She'd rather believe she can still do things to delay it.
So he sends her on her way with a final bit of advice, to trust her conscience.