Thor heads to a steel plant to reforge his damaged Uru hammer; before he leaves he takes the time to pay tribute to the Pittsburgh steel industry. Flying off, he stops in a remote area (later revealed to be in Southeast Asia), to check on the Norn Stones; bad move, since he loses one of them (this will come back to bite him in the behind later). Thor then returns to Asgard to present the Stones to Odin as proof that Loki cheated in the Trial of the Gods (issue #116); the noble Thunder God then intercedes for Loki that he can’t help being evil and Odin abandons all plans for further punishment.
Meanwhile, Loki, still not helping being evil, imprisons Ularic the warlock and helps himself to all the cool new toys with which to plot further mischief. Thor, hanging around Asgard for (apparently) months, requests of Odin that he may return to Earth to see his beloved Jane Foster. Arriving at Don Blake’s office, he finds the place shut up, the patients gone, and the rent overdue; Jane has not been seen for months. On the edge of panic he heads to Avengers Mansion to enlist the help of his old comrades in searching for her but he receives a shock: the place is occupied by heroes he has never seen before—Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver, who were recruited in AVENGERS #16 while Thor was undergoing the Trial of the Gods. Unwilling to trust a team of strangers, he goes off on his own and broods. Meanwhile, we see Jane a virtual prisoner in a dark room, told by a mystery man to forget Thor….
In Asgard, Loki, wielding the arcane devices of the Royal Warlock, has located a drifting cloud of helium in space—a cloud which was once a man! As Thor conceives a plan to contact Jane by television, he is distracted by a spheroid descending from the sky. It breaks open on the surface to reveal—the Absorbing Man! The villain turns himself into brick, ready for a rematch against the Thunder God!