Thor, on his nightly patrol, comes across a band of muggers
robbing a woman; he offers them the choice of giving the lady’s purse back or
continuing in their life of crime and suffering the consequences. Then a police
chase zooms past and the baddies lose control and Thor knocks their car into
the air to avoid hitting some children. Thor’s lecture, now with a concrete
example of crime not paying, leads the mugger leader to grudgingly return the
lady’s purse….
Down in Hades, Mephisto pitches a fit because Thor is
interfering with evil by giving humans a divine example of goodness and messing
up the balance of good and evil. So Meph goes to the surface world and
invisibly tempts people to acts of sin and evil—theft, arson, violence—until the
city is aflame. Thor races back to find the gang of muggers looting a store,
the leader defying Thor. Then Mephisto causes the ground to erupt and open into
a chasm with the wrongdoers falling into Hades. Thor leaps after them and
confronts his Satanic foe. Meph orders his demons to attack Thor but the
outnumbered hero merely shakes them all off so Meph realizes he must whup Thor on
his own. Meph causes the stone floor to sprout tentacles to enwrap Thor but he
smashes them. Meph creates multiple illusions of himself but Mjolnir can find
the right one. Meph grows into a giant and Thor still knocks him flat. So
Mephisto tries a different tack: he threatens to destroy the souls of those he
had kidnapped from the street and who are now melted into a stone pillar. Thor
hurls Mjolnir but the trapped souls seize it and hold it until Thor transforms
back into Donald Blake whom Mephisto can easily destroy. Don offers himself in
place of the kidnapped souls and this offer so moves the mugger leader that he fights
the others and throws Don back his stick, allowing him to become Thor again.
The Thunder God offers Mephisto the choice: release the souls he has taken to
return to the world, or he and Thor can fight it out forever. (He also points
out that Meph’s complaining about Thor’s interference in humans’ moral lives
while constantly interfering himself makes him a hypocrite, like that’s the worst
of his sins.) Meph reluctantly releases the souls and they go back to their
previous lives with no memory of what had happened that night.