[open]

[deicider]

WHO: Ojiro + anyone
WHERE: Safehouse, New Amsterdam's artificial river.
WHEN: Beginning-Mid July
WHAT: open log
NOTES OR WARNINGS: None really.

Morning Run
Sniper rolls out of bed every morning at 4:30 on the dot to go running, sometimes for an hour, sometimes for three. Still nursing a broken wrist, it's the one exercise they can still go all-out on, and if striving against the weakened state of their body didn't fix this whole stupid situation, it at least felt like getting something done.

They've managed to get extracting themself quietly down to an art, sleeping in their work out clothes (stolen during recent chaos, thanks kaiju) so their fumbling in the dark doesn't wake up any of the others still bunking in the safe house.

They're not opposed to company, if someone else picks up the habit. For anyone they catch awake at this hour, they give a teasing smile in the dark, whispering. "If you want to come, you have to keep up."


Sport Commentary
Sniper's inserted themself into the cooking rotation—it seemed only fair, given the amount of calories they burned through in a day—and has mastered making most of the cheap nutritious staples one-handed. Gone most of the day scouting New Amsterdam and lining up job prospects, they're always back in time to help make dinner.

Once the initial frustration of being here had faded enough to allow for idle curiosity about this version of Earth, Sniper had been drawn to investigate the cultural cornerstone they knew best: sports. The results had been disappointing. Nothing very innovative. The Olympics were still going at least, but digging further, professional sports in general seemed open only to the already-rich. There had been plenty of accusations that Sniper had used money to compensate their own small size with expert training for the pentathlon (true on paper though not in spirit), but back home it wasn't weird to see the non-wealthy go professional.

They've been steadily watching their way through the past Olympiads: opening ceremony, the pentathlons, record-breaking achievements. They use the implant with the ease of long familiarity; it was pretty similar to what they had back home (back home it didn't require brain surgery) so chopping things for dinner at the same time was easy. Judging my their scoffing, they're not that impressed. "That's the record?"


Free Lunch!
Afternoon generally finds Sniper by New Amsterdam's artificial river to find lunch. The river is a sad sight for someone who grew up seeing the ocean—this whole world was a sad sight compared to their own flourishing world—but it was lively and less claustrophobic than the rest of the city. And the food wasn't bad.

They're buying some dumplings when they spot a fellow safehouse occupant. Even if there hasn't been a formal introduction, the face is familiar, and they wave over, gesturing to the cartoon of dumplings in their hand with a smile.

"Want some? My treat."

When's the last time you had something that wasn't bug casserole?


Cast-off

Around mid-july the cast on their wrist finally comes off! You can find them celebrating doing one-armed pushups in the safe house.

Comments

[deicider]

Head cocked, expression neutral, interested to hear what Loki has to say. And how he says it. Obviously it's a heavy topic, for Loki. Sniper can understand that, even though they can't sympathize.

They say, frankly: "Do you really think humans aren't like that?"

[selfimage]

"Remember a few dozen incarnations that have happened over the millennia? Distinguish their own childhood from myth? I didn't think so."

There were several tales of his upbringing, and occasionally they cross in ways that he can't pinpoint. His origin is mashed up in an expression of oral tradition, not in the patchwork fashion of mortal memory.

[deicider]

It was almost chilling to hear that the first difference that came to Loki's mind was that mythic memory. It was the very line between story and reality that was being challenged in their own world; to Sniper, it wasn't a clear division at all. They shake their head, not conceding the point but not having the patience for a metaphysical argument. This was already turning out to be pretty informative.

"Keep going."

[selfimage]

"The universe has certain expectations for the divine—ah, it likes patterns, it likes repetition, and thus resonance."

It's never a clear division, and even less so now that he can't perceive the nuances. That doesn't mean that a futuristic evil self isn't still bent at destroying him.

To make him an evil him.

"So—gods generally have natures—or, a role, so to speak ... a designation of some natural phenomena that they dictate."

[deicider]

Again, not unlike how it was for some humans, if Mycroft's ranting about Providence was to be believed. Whether it was or wasn't hadn't ever mattered to Sniper. They had chosen their duty and its consequences, and they had never regretted it.

'Resonance' is a new phrase, one Sniper can sort of intuit the meaning of through context, but they make a note to ask more about it later. It sounds like a more interesting theory than providence.

"Right. And yours is chaos. Doesn't that go directly against repetition?"

[selfimage]

There was a lot he did to loosen himself from the grip of the universe, to pull himself from beneath its fingers and emerge as something else, something new. He burned a lot of people, he sacrificed an incarnation, and now here he was, sitting on a mountain of his own crimes, in debt for his existence.

"Stagnation does, but repetition can turn to stagnation." And has. "Gods are tied closely to that universal expectation, either in a linear fashion, or a cyclical one. The expectation the universe had for me was to begin the chain of events that would signal the end of Asgard, and the end to all the gods. Stories have beginnings, middles and endings—the gods took it as destiny, their end always looming in the horizon.

"But it didn't just happen once. That history repeated—over, and over, and over again. Rebirth, rebuild, destroy and die."

[deicider]

Sniper's drink is mostly neglected; Loki has their full attention, head cocked, dark eyes intent. Instinct tells them Jehovah and Bridger aren't 'these' kinds of gods. So the cycle stuff is interesting, but what really has their attention is what Loki's dancing around. How do you stop destiny?

Mycroft believed in providence. Achilles believed in fate. Sniper believed in choices and consequences, but they believed in covering all the bases, too. Loki made it apparent that such things could exist and curtail the freedom of both gods and humans—because it wasn't just the gods that died, right? It was disturbing to think, but—

"But you don't do that any more. So what, you made it—"A vague hand gesture. "Stop? End for good?"

Broke it, in other words.

[selfimage]

It turned out stopping destiny was the easy part, the part that could be paid for in blood and sweat, while the remnants of it were far more hard lived, and were acts of will. Or, in Loki's case, spite.

"That's a very large question." In the true extent of the term. Loki's lip twists up at one corner. "Thor was the one who stopped Ragnarok, but ... for us, as creatures of story and magic, the physical expresses in metaphor. In this case, it was a loom. He cut the binds that wove all our fates, and allowed us to die on our own terms, along with the option of not coming back. For a while, we didn't."

But there's a lot more. There was the Loki made of spite and malice, the sacrifice of another incarnation, and a deal with the goddess of the dead that no longer bound him to the underworld. He had carefully balanced his scales.