Mind my wicked words.

[selfimage]

WHO: Loki & people who are brave enough to associate with him
WHERE: Various; he goes where he wants.
WHEN: Middle to end of August, possibly beginning of September.
WHAT: Getting into trouble over the next month or two.
NOTES OR WARNINGS: Possibly, Loki is himself. This'll be updated if necessary.


Overview

[ in defiance of normal people everywhere, Loki's schedule is never consistent. he's in and out of his own apartment frequently, adhering only (and painfully) to his own work schedule. the thought of having to crawl up the corporate ladder coupled with the horrifying idea of doing actual work put a damper on just about everything. the daily monotony is enough to drive him to absolute and utter boredom, making him antsy during the day to get out at night. whatever mood decides to eclipse him, he has plenty to do.

(a) lunches from his job are uneventful and boring. there's gossip, coworkers, and talks around the water cooler, but he's more of a number than an employee. for now, the anonymity does him good. when things get particularly mundane, he heads off campus to scrounge New Amsterdam's midnight street food market. spoilers: every coffee alternative sucks.

(b) in passing he can be found at his apartment, either during the peak of day or in the heat of the afternoon. those who drop by unannounced have a fifty-fifty chance of catching him.

(c) there's a system of caves beneath the city that have piqued his interest. as not to be suspicious, he breaks apart his snooping by surveying separate parts of the system and where they may lead from different angles, never retracing his steps back. it takes him through a few manmade structures, into a few seedier parts of the city, as well as passing other parts that have yet to be explored. if he's looking for something, it's hard to tell what, exactly. he hums Les Mis under his breath at intravenous moments, testing the echo and anyone's patience that he may come across.

(d) switching around his hours to accompany the new schedule has been interesting for his side hustle at the fighting pits. it's becoming an early morning excursion rather than a midnight one, with frames of the fighters lunching at each other during the break of dawn. there's still credits to be made to bridge the gap in finances between him and Thor, and he needs to stimulate his brain with the trickery and gambling. he could be deceiving a poor sap out of their money, or taking some time to himself to speculate on the next fight—mood depending. ]

[ Notes: feel free to pick a prompt or just yell if something doesn't work & I'll write a closed prompt! you can hit me up on plurk, hadal, or send over a PM on this journal. feel free to grab his inbox for anything else xoxo ]

Comments

[deicider]

"You advertised it," Sniper mock-admonishes. They deal in secrets more than lies. Misdirection was easier to pull off, and information was as precious as blood.

So, misdirection.

"It is. Well, that's the best way I can describe it. Back home I was a doll; fun, harmless, familiar. It's the same thing—produces the same effect."

Absolutely no context for the doll thing.

[selfimage]

Secrets are definitely still lies, that's omission. Misdirection is rhetoric and exaggeration, depending on the circumstances. While Loki never outright lied, she most certainly used several other techniques in her ability to mislead. It may as well been close to the same.

"How passive."

No context, but she swings the hammer.

[deicider]

It's a miss, and Sniper lets her know with a sideways look and an arched brow. Being a doll had been a hobby, one they had highly enjoyed and even strove to perfect.

But it was always secondary to their real work.

"I loved it." Their tone is warm, wistful. Their gaze sharpens, pointedly flicking over Loki's new form. "Everyone can use a little pretend sometimes."

[selfimage]

For Loki, it hits something. Thor makes it an art to swing a hammer, and while sometimes it matters where it lands, other times it stirs other things around it. She's shed the honed manipulations of her predecessors and turned to something more of improvisation. Perhaps it's defiance. Mephisto had called it sloppy, and she finds it more interesting. More chaotic, and far more challenging.

She ignores the implications like she hadn't heard them at all.

"Everyone has a thing." And she's not here to judge for it. "I suppose you can't be something in the middle, can you? Just an extreme on either end."

[deicider]

"No."

It's a placeholder while they ponder over how to elaborate. Once the assassination conspiracy had gotten blown wide open, there had been plenty who cried brainwashing, accusing the adults of the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash' of molding their children like set-sets to perform their task without question. That they had crippled their children from participating in and interfacing naturally and productively with human society and the world at large.

Those were people who had never had to make a hard choice. They didn't understand belief and conviction or the ferocious, worthy effort it took to make will into reality.

They tip their head up at Loki, questioning. "You know what your life is capable of. Could you really choose less without going crazy?"

[selfimage]

It was a very human thing to dance between extremities, or even believe them to be more than ideas formed by words. Yet, they were still powerful, they were always powerful in their weight.

"It's a bit different for me." In many, many ways. She was Asgardian, even posing as a mortal in a new city she was different than those that had been brought there. A perspective had been taken from her, re-arranged and left her disconnected to both the World Tree and her own nature. "I don't know if I'd be the best at an opinion in pushing the limits of mortal capabilities."

She means that in earnesty, to some extent.

[deicider]

"No," This time they're simply agreeing. Something always sparks for them, when Loki goes on about the lofty ways of gods. A lot of times it's irritation. Other times it's...

Like laying eyes on Jehovah for the first time and knowing, sensing the difference that laid there, wanting to feel it and know everything about it. It hooks something deep in them and pulls. They've seen the thirst for the divine in others enough to know that it's not that, but they don't have a name for the restless ache in their limbs when they contemplate their divine adversary's strangeness.

Jehovah, too, had been unmoored from his divine nature, much like Loki. He'd made it work for himself, however.

"But it's something to think about. Since you're not adhering to your broad nature as a god anymore."

[selfimage]

While Loki can certainly use that divinity as a prop, it's used to illustrate the gap between what she is and what everyone else is. Even if her shape may be human, her experiences and perceptions of reality are far, far different. Her own fragments of memory are different, and the way she interacts with it.

"I'm not saying I don't understand, just that boundaries and limitations are ... well, they get bigger, so to say."

Like blowing up an angelic army, for example.

"Even like this."

[deicider]

And the pendulum swings back to irritation. Sniper maintains an air of friendly amusement. "Limitations don't mean anything if you sit back and do nothing." Like by hanging out and letting the world end multiple times, Loki. "Which seems to be what most gods are about, when they're not destroying the world or trying to take it over."

It wasn't an entirely fair accusation, in general and to Loki in particular. Humans on the whole could be accused of the same laziness, falling to the status quo of violence again and again.

But if gods were supposed to be so much mightier, there was little evidence of it across the whole of human history.

[selfimage]

"I know you're not that myopic, Ojiro." She tilts her head at them with a lift of a dark eyebrow. "Nor so over-simplistic. Humanity has the same tendency, but sometimes they do it in the names of gods of their own making. Then, other times, it ends up like this."

Loki makes a gesture to the—well—all around them, really. New Amsterdam is the pinnacle of human achievement in some ways, but certainly not in others. "Those of this world certainly didn't have qualms committing genocide on the spark of life that they, themselves, created for their own selfish purposes. Though I'm hardly forgiving of the fault of the gods, depending on the who, my father included.

"He had a head for divine purpose so far as he overlooked better solutions."

[deicider]

Sniper meets her gaze, more somber. "Humans are humans." With all the violence and shortsightedness that implied. Sniper knew better than most how helpless humans were when it came down to leaving their vices aside. But they also knew the heights of human accomplishment, the continuous striving to overcome themselves. Many thought they could achieve that through religion. Sniper had never believed in that, not even after their encounter with omnibenevolent Jehovah, but they could still recognize it as a worthy effort.

"They worship gods because they're supposed to be better."

[selfimage]

There is a lot going on there, but there is something that makes Loki pause.

"Do you think the gods are meant for you?"

Like parents teaching a child—like adults that should be better. Humanity were not children just as the gods were not adults. The difference was less simple: they were different beings living in the same reality, interacting with it differently. She had been trying to reconstruct expectations around herself, around the reputation of Loki, and this seemed counter-intuitive.

[deicider]

"I hope not. That really would be a cruel joke." There's a fierceness to their tone, offended on behalf of those humans who believed exactly that, who wanted there to be a better existence and were willing to strive for it. Who was Loki to look down on them?

"Personally, I just think we're stuck with each other, and the only difference is gods can screw us over and we can't screw them back."

[selfimage]

"There is no top nor bottom of the spectrum of existence—if it's as you've said, that we're just different, then that's all it is. Perhaps I would've told you something else in a past life, but I've never been the biggest fan of the gods. The cycle of Ragnarok under my instigation came as an end for them, but it was fate that they couldn't avoid. That Loki just used that, instead."

There's a little shrug. "Limitations this and limitations that, but you don't challenge the limits on your perspective, when you clearly have the mind and capability to tear it down."

She means it, especially during conversations like this. It feels like there's something just out of her reach, a kind of box that Sniper has put around themselves to move within.

"It could be bigger than mortals and immortals."

[deicider]

The simple answer is that it was all irrelevant to Sniper, of academic interest only. Six months ago, that would have been reason enough to have them greedily committing every detail they could in order to bring back home. Now, the people they would have shared the information with—visions of warm afternoons sprawled across Mycroft's scarred body, an alternate life where they met Jehovah as a friend and not a threat—were bound to kill them on sight, and they would, unless Sniper killed them first. Which they would. Sniper would be dead within a year of returning regardless of who did the deed. The only thing that mattered in the time they had left was winning the war for human freedom. Their duty. Always their duty.

The only thing they needed to know about divinity was that it could be killed.

They could tell Loki all of this, in this world where none of their secrets mattered, to Loki who already knew too much. But habit kept them back, the knowledge that Loki was clever enough to turn facts into weapons if he wanted to. In retrospect, swapping out the ominous surname of Sniper for Juniper had been more than an abstract precaution.

For now, Sniper flits away from Loki's too-keen observation, tone flip. "O great Loki, we mortals are but mayflies. If there's a bigger picture, that sounds like a problem for the immortal gods, not me."

[selfimage]

"So much for pushing limitations, I suppose."

Gods or humans, it didn't matter—destiny was a threat to freedom, to both of them. It seemed too simple to call gods the enemies of mortals and mortals the enemies of gods, it was the same cycle that fueled the Ten Realms into war time and time again. That isn't to say that there weren't gods or mortals that perpetuated the problem.

For as much as Sniper talked of freedom and limitations, they certainly found ways to divert them in places that made them uncomfortable. (Not that Loki could talk.) Not all weapons needed to be secrets divulged, and Loki knew well enough that the untold was always as important as what was offered.

[deicider]

Sniper has to hand it to Loki. She's talented at baiting them; Sniper has scarcely ever been irritated so easily by anyone but Cato, and that was expected out of a sibling. Their response is nonchalant.

"You can postmark some metaphysical crap to ponder over a thousand years from now. I already know what I'm fighting for." However much destiny had a stranglehold over human kind, it was possible to shake it off. Four hundred years of peace had proved that humans weren't helpless victims of providence. The war Sniper would return to was a perfect map of positions: human versus god, the self-destructive dangers of freedom versus the safety and stagnation of tyranny.

[selfimage]

"And you're not going to challenge that? Mental or physical—chains are still chains."

Those are dangerous words: I already know what I'm fighting for. They bear the mark of inflexibility, especially when that that fighting for becomes ingrained in someone's identity. It's where the us vs. them mentality came from.

A pause, then curiously:

"Do you think I tell you these things for shits and giggles?"

[deicider]

Sniper turns to regard her, now openly frowning. "It's what I chose to do. Even as the god of chaos, isn't there something you'd do anything for?"

Sniper thinks Loki tells them these things because she likes the sound of her own voice. Which they don't say. "Why do you tell me these things?" Considering Sniper had tried to murder Loki over her godhood, she had every reason not to.

[selfimage]

Not completely wrong, but Loki would've found something on to bather on about. Divinity is oddly personal in a way that Sniper has scratched the surface of, damning Loki as much as it was part of her identity. She purses her lips for a moment thoughtfully, then:

"Since we've been here we've been stripped of autonomy and, I don't doubt, used as we speak. There's very little in terms of stretching our legs, of finding small freedoms. Chaos means change—but things must be allowed to change.

"Whether or not you decide to move against different faucets of divinity, you have what you need to make that choice—including what I can offer. We get so little of it, and well, I thought you could use it."

[deicider]

"You didn't answer my question." Sniper says mildly, instead of responding to any of that. They don't believe Loki is just looking out for their future, but they don't have a better theory as to what her angle is. After what they've talking about, the emphasis on choice and change rubs raw; more divine arrogance. They don't need to change, and they made their choice. Maybe Loki's divine attention span prevented her from understanding duty and dedication.

[selfimage]

"I did—if you wanted to listen or not."

Perhaps not personally looking out for Sniper's future—they aren't close enough for that. Sniper is, however, interesting. There's potential there, no matter how they may board themselves up.

"We all need some level of freedom after what's been done to us. Telling half-truths is still lying, it's still disallowing some level of freedom. Of choice. Whether or not you take it is up to you, but you have it.

"Weren't you just complaining that the gods stripped you of just that?"

Not that she was meaning to be different than any of the gods, but she had been confined and tortured by them as well. Honestly, she had reason to bring about Ragnarok, and it always boiled down to either destiny, or rage against those who had wronged her.