Asgard, the home of the Norse gods. The throne room of Odin.
ODIN, KING OF THE GODS: Some people say before the Congress, there was nothing. They are wrong. There were Tea Baggers. And they have survived.
THOR, GOD OF THUNDER: Who be these Tea Baggers? I will smite them with my mystic uru hammer, Mjolnir, and send them to Hel.
LOKI, GOD OF MISCHIEF: Have a care, dear brother. These Tea Baggers be more resilient then thou thinkest.
THOR: Loki! I should guessed! I have not forgotten how thou betrayed me and my fellow Avengers in the Midgard city of New York. What dost thou know of these Tea Baggers? Answer me, before I do rip thy lying tongue from thy lying throat!
ODIN: Chill, Thor. It is I who hath summoned Loki. We be in need of his dark counsel this dark day.
LOKI (smirking): Thank you, "father." How desperate thou must be to come to me for aid. Very well, I will tell you what I know. These Tea Baggers be like the berserkers of yore. They reason not, but live only for political conflict. They are impervious to logic, and can be felled only by the polling booth. They serve Malecruz the Accursed.
THOR: I have heard this foul name whispered by the Norns, but was not sure he truly existeth. Even the President of the United States dare not speak his name.
LOKI: Oh, he existeth all right. He be king of Texasheim, one of the Nine Worlds, and ruler of the Dark Republicans. Tis a backwards world where white is black, the Civil War was fought over states rights, and their god Jehovah created the heavens and the Earth in six days. Their state motto is "Texasheim is all messed up."
ODIN: What utter rot! The universe was formed from the body of Ymir, the first and mightiest of the frost giants. I should know--I slew Ymir myself.
THOR: Very well, we must away to Texasheim. But if you betray me, I will kill you!
LOKI: I can live with that.
Texasheim, a dark, benighted world (except for Austin). THOR and LOKI confront MALECRUZ. One side of MALECRUZ'S face his horribly disfigured, causing him to speak out of both sides of his mouth.
MALECRUZ (reading from a book of spells): "I do not like green eggs and ham, I do not like them, Sam-I-Am..."
THOR: Necromancer, lay down thy evil grimoire and face my righteous wrath!
MALECRUZ: Thor! You may have stopped me from filibustering Obamacare, but I am not defeated yet! Do you recognize this arcane artifact?
MALECRUZ holds aloft what appears to be a dusty Comodore 64 console.
LOKI: It's the Cask of Ancient Computer Glitches! If you open that, then HealthCare.Gov is doomed! Tis said not even Surtur's firewall can block it!
THOR: This be worse than Internet trolls! But why would thou deny healthcare to millions of uninsured mortals? Their lives are brief compared to ours, and easily broken.
MALECRUZ (bitterly): I was born in the frozen wasteland of the north, where they have universal healthcare. But I was exiled to this infernal realm of Texasheim, where they let the uninsured die in the streets like mangy curs. If I can't have universal healthcare, nobody can have universal healthcare! Bwah-ha-ha-ha!
THOR and LOKI look at each other.
LOKI: By Odin's optometrist, I thought I was megalomaniacal.
MALECRUZ opens the Cask of Ancient Computer Glitches. HealthCare.Gov goes down.
THOR: Loki, thou art clever albeit deceitful. Can thou debug yon troubled web site?
LOKI: Sorry, dear brother, I must check to see if my policy has been cancelled. Toodeloo!
LOKI vanishes in a puff of smoke, leaving THOR alone to face MALECRUZ.
THOR: No, come back! Thou knowest thy character be more popular than mine! Maidens love bad godlings! I cannot carry this movie on my own!
MALECRUZ: Hah, thou art defeated, thunder god! Thy hammer may be good for smiting things, but it's useless as a debugging tool.
THOR: No! Obamacare is doomed! Unless..unless...to Midgard, my enchanted hammer! There is one special mortal who may yet turn the tide...
Midgard. Avengers Tower. The computer lab of billionaire playboy Tony Stark, AKA the invincible IRON MAN!
THOR: To arms, Iron Man! There is foul sorcery afoot!
IRON MAN: Already working on it. The President called me as soon as the site went down. Nothing a technological genius like me can't handle, though. I should have it up and running again in no time.
THOR: That is good to know, friend Tony. For a moment, I thought Obamacare was doomed.
IRON MAN: You want a drink? I'll have a drink. Jarvis, fetch our Asgardian friend some meade. Then maybe you and I can go out and pick up a couple of strippers.
THOR: As long as Jane Foster doth not find out. I'm having a hard enough time keeping her and Lady Sif apart.
IRON MAN: There's just this one little AI I've got to straighten out. It calls itself Ultron and keeps trying to launch the death panels application. But I'm sure it's no big thing...
Can Iron Man fix HealthCare.Com in time? Will Loki be able to keep his old policy? Is being megalomaniacal a preexisting condition? And just what is that annoying AI? Find out the startling answers to these and other rhetorical questions in....
AVENGERS 2: THE AGE OF OBAMACARE