EVENT ★ RECOLLECTION DAY

[futurologists]

RECOLLECTION DAY On the recruits' return to Oska, they will find some dreary weather, plus the entire castle and town decorated in purple and silver. Ribbons, streamers, and lights in ALASTAIR's colors fill every populated space, and there are more people milling about than before: humanoids and others in equal measure, all of them dressed in ALASTAIR uniforms of some degree. Dagny, Uruz, Cherenkov, and Crowley can be found among the others, as can recent recruit Pomarr, the undead Dakal from the last mission. The weather seems to be due to Pomarr. It's generally overcast around Oska, but the in area nearest to their newest recruit it will always be softly raining to some degree. THE FEAST Inside the castle, one of the many studies is decorated lavishly in the same purple-and-silver scheme as the rest of Oska. Today the kitchen is porting food directly into this room, where it's set out along long tables at the edges of the room. You can find anything here, food to suit any kind of diet from any kind of planet at all. There are no promises that all food will suit all diets, though. But still, if you want to try the bubbling pot of orange with the little worms that keep trying to struggle out of it, no one's going to stop you. A well-dressed, gently green lady stands at the center of the room, nursing a wineglass full of something silvery and addressing the room at large. She seems to be going over the history of Oska, to anyone who will listen. The gist of it is that Oska was once an entire world, densely populated and well known for its music and carefully bred hunting companion animals. However, its energy was severely unbalanced, and the world was swiftly coming undone. ALASTAIR recruits of the time realized it was the very animals the natives so loved that were the focus of all of the planet's energy, but by the time they had finally figured it out and began to cull the animals, it was too late. This little scrap is all they managed to save. What locals remained eventually died out, being too few to repopulate by themselves, and ALASTAIR opted to move in and reclaim the space, so as not to let this world go entirely forgotten. With their very base of operations as a reminder of what can happen to any world at any time, ALASTAIR of today is not likely to forget the necessity of their mission any time soon. Come for the food, stay for the slightly depressing story, and leave again fuller and maybe a little more somber than you were before. THE OBSERVATORY This room is usually home to a large telescope, a ceiling that slides open, and a lot of gauzy, ethereal decoration. Today it's been cleared out for what seems to be a room-wide, three dimensional documentary, playing on repeat throughout the festival. Images of a vast star system are projected into this room from no identifiable source, floating holograms the viewer can walk between and admire from any angle. A deep, soothing, presumably male voice speaks over the moving images, describing the action as it unfolds. In the beginning, there was one universe. It was vast and eternal, and most importantly, self-sustaining. There was no reason to doubt it would go on forever. The images at this point are on a cosmic scale, an impossible number of tiny stars swirling in silent patterns. We don't know what shattered the harmony, we only know that shatter it, it did. We call this the Cataclysm. This part is clearly an artist's interpretation. Slivers of light snake across the universe like the cracks in a broken window, shaking apart the entire scene. Some of the broken sections implode onto themselves in beautiful colors; some of them spread out and consume their neighbors. It's beautiful in a way, and probably completely visually inaccurate to whatever the real event looked like. The voice continues: The Universe became the Multiverse. The harmony is broken, and the energy no longer balances out. Worlds are thrown into disarray and chaos, some burning out immediately while others struggle on as they are able. There are even dozens of iterations of the same reality existing in some places, just barely splintered from one another and overlapping in impossible ways. The shards of our formerly united reality are nearly limitless. There are flashes of worlds as the narrator's voice continues. Each one lasts no longer than five seconds, filling the room and then flashing into the next scene. These are flashes of real worlds, broadcast up from the mysterious Viewing Hall and all of its mirrors down in the dungeons. Recruits watching diligently enough may even catch sight of familiar scenes. This is ALASTAIR's duty. We travel from reality to reality, doing what we must to equalize the energy. The necessary tasks can vary wildly, as wildly as the realities themselves do. In some worlds we find great success, snatching them from the brink of destruction and allowing them to continue on, rebalanced. Some worlds cannot be saved. The images shift, this time replaying old, completed missions. The variety is huge here, too. One team of blue humanoids dressed in ALASTAIR purple struggles to pull a mammoth out of a tar pit. Two small, doglike recruits dash through a dark alleyway, dodging laser fire. A team of something human-shaped but bundled up in spacesuits climb carefully through the weightlessness of space along the outside edge of an enormous spaceship. The narrator has just one more line to add: Ours is no easy task, but if not us. . . who? The informational recording fades out, and five minutes later, plays again from the beginning. THE COURTYARD Down in the courtyard, the festivities continue, this time led by Dagny and Uruz. They have a great number of temporary pens set up in the middle of the area, each one holding a strange, fantastical animal, which doesn't seem at all happy to be there. These are new mounts, Uruz will explain. Each one of them was personally rescued from a dying world by Dagny and herself. They're not quite tame yet, though, and so they've made a competition of it: anyone who can convince a creature to let them sit astride its back and then guide it into a pen in the stables proper will win a prize. Dagny would like to request that you be really careful, please! Those tusks and spikes can get really sharp. The prize given to any winning recruit will be a small, silvery musicbox. Opening it plays a soothing tune that will calm anything within the area for about 30 minutes. It can only be used once. Feel free to make up what kind of creature your character runs into. The stables of ALASTAIR are well known for their variety! LOST ORBS Have you ever wondered how Oska is powered? Well, obviously it's plasma orbs, how else? Oska's resident cats have been hard at work creating more of these, to the point that those not yet in use need somewhere to be contained. The problem is, these things are mobile. They'll float anywhere they please with some kind of debatable mind of their own, and lately it's not been uncommon to see two or three of them floating idly down the hallway together. Crowley and Cherenkov have requested recruit assistance in corralling these things and bringing them to a room set up to keep them in on the third floor. They're a bit like slowly deflating helium balloons, and can be guided with gentle taps to get them floating along in the right direction. Touching one of them is a strange experience that tends to leave hair standing on end. Touching more than one of them at the same time, however, is not recommended. Simultaneous contact with two or more plasma orbs has been known to have strange effects on people, including but not limited to developing the power to fly, sudden weightlessness, animal shapeshifting, ice breath, teleportation, and creating a protective and impenetrable bubble around oneself. None of these effects lasts longer than two minutes, and in each case, the following magitek hangover will make any orb-toucher feel awful for at least half an hour. HOTSPRINGS There's a new addition to Oska, down by the lake. It seems another team recently extracted an enormous, very hot core from a sentient and murderous AI. The core's power source isn't expected to run out for at least another thousand years, and unsure what else to do with it, the team dug it a pit not far from the lake. They failed to realize that this would accidentally have a very, very pleasant outcome. There are now hotsprings by the lake, nestled into the small grove of trees that grow around it. The water bubbles softly up from the ground in a new (technically man-made) pool, and some enterprising recruits have built wooden decks and stairs around and through the whole affair. It's a little bit of a hike to get there from the castle, but anyone who has visited can agree: it's worth it. OOC INFO Welcome to the festival! This will ICly last for 3 days (and OOCly for 2 weeks), at the end of which the other teams visiting the party will ship out to other missions and leave the PC team to unwind with Oska all to themselves. Through the duration of the festival, recruits will find themselves asked one question repeatedly: do you new guys have a team name yet? It seems everyone else has a team name! Really, it's just sort of sad that a team this big doesn't have a name, isn't it? We'll be including a section for characters to ICly suggest team names, and later on will be hosting an IC vote to pick a team name. Characters who signed up to remain in Nalawi for three months will arrive late to the party, but how late is up to players.

Comments

[expatriates]

You've heard this before?

[ Natasha stood off to the side of the green woman with rapt attention, but cut it away to glance at Loki as he passed, an inexplicable sense of familiarity in his countenance that she couldn't place driving her towards him. The universe did that sometimes. She liked to listen. ]

Lucky the natives aren't around to take offense. [ Not one to offer any undue reverence to the natural rise and fall of civilizations, evidenced in her willingness to call it lucky at all, Natasha all the same had a keen eye for the way others could—and therefore, an eye for the irreverence that Loki afforded it. ]

[selfimage]

You could call it general experience.

[ oh, but he knows her on sight. she's different, certainly, but there are some things about people—some signatures—that make them unmistakable. he should have expected that someone would show up, either from his world or his other brother's (coined currently as "other brother" to keep from the inevitable mix-up), though he found that he was disquieted when it happened.

it was, however, an opportunity. ]

You're new. [ it was less of a question, and more of a statement. ] Be glad that they decided against the simulated apocalyptic disaster world and exchanged it for something everyone would like.

[ he realizes the horns probably give him away, and it hardly seems like he cares. ]

[expatriates]

Simulated apocalypse disaster world.

[ A muddied sort of impressed skepticism colored the flat repetition; her eyebrows arched slightly as she folded her arms beneath her chest, body turning to make more apparent her interest in what he had to say. ]

I guess I missed out. You'll have to paint me a picture.

[selfimage]

[ Natasha looks at him, and Loki decides it's a perfect them to re-examine the dessert table behind him. ]

You want specifics? [ oh, look, tiramisu! ] Hmm—well, it had the whole fire and burning thing going for it. Earthquakes, suspicious lack of provisions, everyone gone and disappeared ... ah, no zombies, though.

[ digging a thoughtful spoon into the dessert, he mulls those last words over. ] Apocalypses are always better with zombies.

[expatriates]

[ While he spoke, she took a dessert cup, but didn't eat from it. ]

We're ranking them now?

[ She couldn't decide whether to consider that an estimation of how effective ALASTAIR was at dispatching them, or the same kind of uneasy flagrance that one would hear around nurses and doctors and soldiers who had grown too used to death. Ultimately she settled on the acknowledgment that it did not matter which it was because they were complementary, necessary to one another on some level. ]

You must have seen a lot. All of them with ALASTAIR?

[ The question needled rhetorically, not exactly asserting an expectation that she believed he would affirm, but rather targeting a gap that she felt spoke of some greater negative space that she couldn't gauge. The way he spoke told of more than a product of these circumstances. ]

[selfimage]

[ the spoon is used like a second hand, and he gestures openly with it, twisting it between dark nailed fingers and motioning off into the distance dismissively. it's easy to be casual about this sort of thing, not only had he seen stranger, but ALASTAIR's presence was entirely unsurprising (but none less disturbing). ]

"Seen a lot" is fairly subjective when it comes to the inter-dimensional. Possibly comparable, depending on who comes from where and has done what. But ALASTAIR sure has collected a rather eclectic bunch of anomalies, haven't they ... [ and as if he's just noticed, his green eyes dart across the room before he returns to the tiramisu.

ALASTAIR wasn't the Aesir, and Oska wasn't Asgardia—that's all it needed to be some place better. Loki had pegged it as an opportunity, a way to find a crack in the veneer of the timestream to make certain that he reclaimed a future free of the evil and predictable. ]

[expatriates]

A natural consequence of their mission, I gather.

[ While Loki turned to cast his gaze outward, Natasha kept hers fixed on him. It was a graceful deflection, but a deflection nonetheless, one that afforded him the luxury of not having to divulge any meaningful, personal information. She had to wonder if it was conscious or not. ]

That's the story of the animals outside, at least. Refugees. I imagine many of Oska's new population have the same story.

[selfimage]

[ if he notices he's under scrutiny, it doesn't seem to affect him. there's a casual glance here and there, watching someone pass or getting distracted with the next table. the sort of look that she's giving him is something he's used to, but usually contains more glare. ]

Oh, us too, of course. Worlds lost—poof!—just like that. Some sort of excuse about energy and justifying all means by the same end.

That's what they used when the program claimed we needed to kill the goddesses on our last mission, anyway.

[ that's still an awkward sore point. while Loki remained teetering on the blade between accepting divinity as-is and wanting it in ruin, the idea that someone else was making that decision for him bristled him like a cat.

despite that, there doesn't seem to be a notable change in his demeanor, only a frown as he tries to scrape up the last bit of that tiramisu. ]

[expatriates]

[ Worlds lost, energy, that much was easy to ascribe information to in relation to what she had heard from the observatory, and she put details to his hurried survey without much effort or second thought. Unimportant, Natasha had decided quickly—those were givens, and everything operated within that system of fixed variables.

Kill the goddesses violated those knowns enough to elicit a genuinely jarred widening of Natasha's eyes that she made no move to disguise. Were he comfortable with it, Loki would not have mentioned it, and her visceral reaction to such extreme measures might then earn her points.

Cold, perhaps, to look at it that way, but pragmatic. ]

They told you that the only way to save a world was to kill its deities? How does that add up? Were they some kind of false gods? [ She doubted it, with the use of the word 'claimed,' but she offers the option to give ALASTAIR the impression of the benefit of the doubt at least. ]

[selfimage]

[ there was a face that he remembered, but he wasn't so reckless to believe that every Natasha reacted in the same manner. now that would be both presumptuous and hypocritical of him. ]

No, but here's the thing: they were "using up too much energy" and needed to be exterminated. False divinity would have been easier to find a suitable solution that ended in candy bars and daisies. Apparently protecting the integrity of the multiverse is about forced sacrifice—what a novel concept.

[ okay, well, now the bitterness comes out. plus, he's out of tiramisu. he plays with the edge of the cup between his dark nailed fingers, frowning at the loss. ]

So ... [ green eyes turn to her again. ] I'm Loki. Since we'll be working together, should we exchange pleasantries?

1/2

[expatriates]

[ BSOD, hold on ]

[expatriates]

[ Genuine unease, bordering on terror, rippled through Natasha's expression, and at least a moment of it was not because she allowed it. By Thor's report, his brother was dead—a fact which he'd grieved, not for the first time, but which had been a comfort to the likes of Clint and Tony. Natasha, too, found that the news put her at greater ease. There was no celebration, not when his brother mourned him, but they all implicitly understood that they would sleep easier knowing that he was not merely confined in Asgard until he could escape, but gone for good.

Or so they'd believed.

The subject of goddesses and energy fell to the wayside, saved for another time, another conversation with another person—if it was indeed the last mission, it was information she would be able to siphon out of anyone who was on it. Perhaps not with such a similar bias—suddenly, his distaste for dethroning deities made sense.

She suppressed the honesty of her reaction after allowing it to go on a moment too long to ensure that he read it, lest her dread elicited in him some arrogance that could be maneuvered. A stony look of apathy replaced it. ]

I thought I left more of an impression than that. [ It would have sounded playful, challenging, if even a ghost of a smirk touched her lips, but it didn't. ] Not much point in changing your face if you keep the name.

[selfimage]

[ it would have dropped sooner or later, and it's better for him to have a decent idea of what path a Loki in another universe had taken. if there was a Loki, and from the reaction, this was most certainly the case. there were questions that he had (did all Avengers have a Loki? was he demanded as a villain just as he was in Asgard?), claims he meant to make (I'm not the same as him), but all in due time.

another Loki on the pathway to evil; there wouldn't be much in the way of multiversal resonance if they hadn't been in the majority. ]

I'm more of a runner than a hider, really. [ he's taken trying to scoop up the last bit of tiramisu with his finger from the bottom of the cup. ] Unfortunately there's not many places to run to when you're tucked away in the pocket dimension with ALASTAIR officials rattling how they can't get you back.

So, here I am! [ he swings that finger in the air. ] And Loki it is—I can't get around it, and if we're being honest, I'd rather not. I like being me, as surprising as that may sound.

[ Loki takes the look with a casual grace that says that he's all too used to being glared at, snapped and the center of harsh japes.

during all his time here, the only semblance of anyone close to his version of home he had come into contact with had been Thor. it's for the better; when Loki did new starts, he didn't want the shadow of an old life on his heels. what was before him was something different: the preconceived notion of another self, someone else who hurt people. ]

The last time we—well, me and another you, or so I'm guessing—met, I was stealing a very important artifact from a SHIELD helicarrier. In a stunning display of my own spywork, I broke into Avenger's Tower. Other you caught me, blamed me, and was very firm with me.

You don't seem the same, so I thought I'd give the whole introductions thing a go. It only seemed polite.

[expatriates]

[ Now that she had the context for who he is, the wheels of her mind began to spin, racing to make sense of information that had meant something very different to her only moments before. His mannerisms, speech patterns, in addition to his physical appearance, are all different, but she cannot claim that she would know if that were something Loki had such great control over that he might have faked, or might be faking now—but why would he? He claimed not to want to hide, but for him to be alive now, he must have hidden something from his brother, and he had certainly attempted to hide and deceive them thoroughly enough aboard the helicarrier.

The same helicarrier that he now attributed their most recent interactions to, but the more he spoke, the more at odds it was with what she remembered. There was no tower—Stark Tower, but she would never have called it Avengers Tower. That wasn't where she'd caught him, either, and he didn't steal anything from the helicarrier itself, but from a SHIELD base, and—

It didn't add up.

Natasha opened her mouth, thought better of the question that was ready to come out of it, and narrowed her gaze into something more scrutinizing, weighing what he said. ]

You're not just talking about pocket dimensions. You're talking about parallel universes. [ That much, she could gather, and of all the people that would know about such a thing, Loki was unfortunately probably an expert. She hated to admit as much. Still, if it was a lie he was selling, he'd sealed the seams tightly—it all fit, neatly packaged but not too neatly. ] You were captured and brought aboard the helicarrier, where I interrogated you on your intentions to sabotage us by releasing the Hulk. [ Flatly, as if it were a common occurrence and not an accusation, ] Then you rained armageddon down on New York with your alien army.

It left an impression.

[selfimage]

[ you

there's a moment when Loki winces. he knows that's not him, and it will never be him. the prospect that he resonated that closely with something like that on a cosmic level was grating. a Loki with a damned path; a story that was repeated again and again.

the alien army was no surprise, Thor had mentioned it. the Chitauri is what he had called them. while Loki's familiarity with the outer reaches of the universe were fairly vast, he can't say that it rang any bells. he'd suspect Skrulls or the Kree, but Chitauri? ]

His alien army, thank you very much. [ Loki corrects with a mock frown. there were enough sins in a past life to reconcile, he didn't need those of another universe. ] No one's holding you accountable for other Black Widow, are they?

[ while the introduction wasn't necessary, formalities had their place. he's almost disappointed he didn't get to play that little part. he cants his head with a sigh, brows drawn together as if he's in a silent debate with himself. ]

Are there Avengers where you come from? Did you stop other me from that whole nasty no-good down-right dirty New York scheme? [ then, more to himself: ] It sounds sloppy, if you ask me. New York has a lively theater district and a dashing variety of mortal cuisine—what was he thinking?

[expatriates]

[ It seemed too convenient, to a degree that she couldn't shake. Although she didn't budge, the look in Natasha's eyes seemed to regard him as one might regard prey they're circling, assessing it for the likelihood that it would fight back. Loki wasn't exactly the kind of threat they could afford to mishandle. Especially not with ALASTAIR tech in the equation. The mere thought of what Loki—the one from her universe, if this was indeed a different one—could do with something like that was. Well. Horrifying. ]

Your brother saw to it that you were in a cell in Asgard, the kind you throw away the key on. [ It occurred to her then that she was still doing it. Every cagey phrase came spring-loaded with an implicit accusation. You. She couldn't decide if she believed him or not, if it would be appropriate to drop it. Playing dumb was too easy, too obvious. Would Loki bother with something so contrived? ]

Seemed to me like it wasn't the first time that other you had made problems for him, and when a god asks for extradition … [ She tilted her head to the side, eyebrows arching. You ship the prisoner out, first class express. ] The Avengers formed as a result of the incident in New York.

As for you ... Stealing artifacts off a SHIELD helicarrier doesn't incline me to believe that any differences between you and the Loki from my world are significant enough to warrant distinction.

[selfimage]

[ her instincts were right, this Loki was most likely far more dangerous than he one that she knew.

in essence, they were the same: Loki was the person who found the cracks in the foundation of society, exploited it and watched it crumble, all with a smirk like a fresh gash across his face. he wasn't ashamed of what he was, even though he wouldn't admit that it did scare him sometimes. it had been a road of thorns to find where his identity crossed with his past, leaving a trail of his own blood behind him.

The Avengers formed as a result of the incident in New York.

a far off memory, an ink stain on the former tale of Loki. in his desperation, he had tried to undo what he had made countless time, but it had grown like a cancer. now there were countless Avengers, and in another universe, the process had repeated. Loki, scheme, Avengers. no, that Loki isn't finished. keys, even discarded, were a poor way to handle him. ]

Oh, yes—I steal, I scheme and I lie. You knew that, it's sort of what I do. I already told you, I'm never going to stop being Loki. [ a fair amount of honesty in that. ] It was mine, anyway ... but that's hardly the point. No one died, no one exploded, I didn't bring an alien army and Phil was unscathed, if not a little tied up, where I left him. The point is this: there are too many Evil Lokis in the multiverse—why should I oblige it and be another one of those?

It seems like a way to get no where fast, and I'm a god of chaos. What kind of god of chaos is only one thing? It really must be killing him.

[ since he's already convinced himself that Loki's alive. ]

[expatriates]

[ Phil.

A light went on in Natasha's eyes, widening slightly as she searched him for some kind of answers, clarification, hope. It made perfect sense, logically, that in this other universe, Coulson might still be alive, but hope was a cruel thing to give someone, used often purely for the sting of its loss. Her throat tightened and closed around the words, an instinctual refusal schooled into her by the red room that refused to allow her to give him that much. Her interest was concern-based, and that made it an exploitable weakness.

More to the point, if she dissociated from her emotional response for a minute, she found that it gave her something new to know about Loki: he selected the name with purpose. He knew to expect her to know Coulson, and not just that, but Phil was unscathed. That was a reassurance that had to know what he was reassuring against.

He knew something. She could use that. ]

Actually, as I understand it, it was dark elves that killed him. But if you know it killed Coulson, you probably already knew that too.

[ She canted her head slightly to the side, inviting him to expand on that without giving him any inclination as to whether she bought into this notion that he could be the good Loki, as if such a thing were possible. As if somewhere in some other version of Earth, she might actually be a ballerina with the Bolshoi. She had made her choices. Someone else's didn't really matter, yet she still resisted entertaining them. ]

[selfimage]

[ good Loki was a littler farfetched, better Loki might be closer to the target. ]

Dark elves? You mean Malekith? [ hm, curious. ] We have one of those. He always did have it in for the Aesir. Have you met him? I do hope you haven't. Not very good company, that one. Entertaining, perhaps, but there's a bloodlust that runs deep that's best left hidden.

[ Thor had told him about the demise of his other self, though he wouldn't have been surprised ,even if he hadn't known. there was always a method to Loki, and there were times in a former life where he had been met with his own death, unable to escape. there was always a reason for it, and he a nagging place in his mind reminds him that if Loki died, Loki had to die, he wanted to die.

but for what? ]

Though I wouldn't have guessed the thing with Phil. So—no, I didn't know. A shame.

[expatriates]

[ At the name, Natasha nodded. The details were partially unclear, but what she knew came from a mixture of Thor's recollection and the SHIELD reports of the aftermath, and the name was certainly familiar. Somehow, every time Asgard was involved, catastrophic destruction followed; she did not doubt that the same would be true of whatever ALASTAIR was doing with Loki here. Another, more absent, even distracted nod followed his sympathies for Phil Coulson.

She didn't have a baseline for him. Or rather, she was applying one that was no longer consistent with the person that he was. This Loki was not proud in the same way, not bursting at the seams to elicit some awe or fear over his power and through it validate himself. Did that make him more or less dangerous? ]

I never met Malekith personally. [ Loki —the other one, she realized she was automatically filling it in now— hadn't exactly left her with a desire to see more of Asgard either. Weird. ] But I'm curious. You want to change it up, stir some chaos, do the unexpected. I get that. [ No. She didn't. ] Why so eager to disavow the reputation?

[ Because it came back to that—not wanting to be associated with what Natasha considered his namesake. ] Like you said. You'll always be Loki.

[selfimage]

[ it was true that Asgard managed to bring the worst to Earth, and in the end it was why they had left, much to Thor's disappointment. their presence had brought down Loki's wrath through tools such as HAMMER and Norman Osborn, Cul Borson, who had named himself the Serpent, and Dario Agger, the self-made mortal billionaire and destructive CEO of Roxxon. they had rained their wrath upon Asgard, taking the mortals in the city below as casualty to the cause. Freyja had taken the leave while there was still something of the Oklahoma desert left.

Asgard had always been a home to turbulence, that was undeniable. ]

No one wants to live their life as the villain, as much as the world wants to make you into one. For gods, that's a very long time to burn in bitterness and hatred. It ends up hurting people, nothing really changes.

[ it was an anathema for him. he wasn't one that was meant to be forced into the box of prediction. a god of evil was easy to anticipate, as despite the means that the route was chosen, the route itself would always be the same. chaos was a driving factor, and brought something far less simple. ]

In fact, between you and me ... [ he moves a dark nailed finger between them. ] This Loki of yours? I doubt that he's actually dead. Call it a hunch. [ and as if adding to that, he shrugs his shoulders back. ]

[expatriates]

[ Surprisingly enough, Natasha found that his words struck a cord with her, and the natural result came in the softening of her expression. On the list of people she never expected to (or wanted to) empathize with, Loki hovered somewhere near the top. Many people would consider what Natasha had done for most of her life villainous on some level, but given the chance, she'd walked away from it. She couldn't imagine trying to unstick programming like that after millennia.

That didn't necessarily mean she believed him, for it was too easy to imagine the Loki of her world twisting just such a notion to breach her defenses. Luckily, he provided something else for consideration. A Loki who'd survived the dark elves, one who was biding his time somewhere out of Thor's awareness. It wasn't impossible. But it wasn't appealing, either. ]

For Thor's sake, I hope you're wrong. [ And for her own. But she won't argue it too hard—she's seen enough faked deaths now to know that it's a perfectly legitimate possibility, but she also knows that it would be better for Thor to mourn his brother than to see New York repeat itself. ] You said ALASTAIR ordered you to kill the gods for using up too much energy. "Energy" is the same argument they use to justify keeping us here. Any merit to it?

[ She didn't expect a straight answer or even a reliable one, but if she got one, then an Asgardian opinion on the subject was worth more than any other she could find. She wasn't in the business of turning away good information just because it came from an unreliable source. ]

[selfimage]

[ no, for Thor's sake, I hope I'm right.

not for the sake of the Avengers, not for the sake of Asgard, but for the sake of a brother from another universe. there wasn't much Thor without Loki, even though Thor may readily sacrifice certain parts of him for the better of Midgard. after death his brother had called him back, desperate for company. he wondered if it would end the same, or worse, and Thor would be left to the throne of Asgard to turn into Odin. a terrible thought.

this was Thor who was warm and inviting, who had taken to him so readily, and who was noble in every universe that had him. it brings an ache in chest, leaving only the hollow place that echoes the memory of Thor's haunted look when he spoke of other Loki. it's not easy to ignore, but if he doesn't want it enough it tends to go away.

soon it's replaced with a sour taste in his mouth. ALASTAIR brought him Avengers, and left Thor behind. luckily the subject has already changed, and as much as he'd like to dig into it, he lets it go without complaint. ]

They're about as much in the dark as we are. Ask any of them and they've been working more toward goals rather than toward the merit of reaching them.

[ but the issue was always complicated for him. survival was only as good as you could throw it, and scraping by for something seemed counter-intuitive at times. he would much rather live for himself as a short while than start down the path of limitation. ]

It seems to justify their sacrifices. [ there's an ironic sort of snort. ]

[expatriates]

[ So merit enough to Alastair, in that they were true believers. Natasha felt surprisingly little distaste for the fact that she shared in a skeptical look that answered Loki's snort in equal part. They were in agreement, which was and wasn't comforting. She wasn't looking for comfort, though; just answers. That, she hoped, made it a non-issue. ]

At least their goals include throwing a good party. [ Her tone was too wry to find genuine ease in the statement, lifting her dessert as if it tokenized the whole experience. She allowed herself to look away from him then, in favor of scanning the crowd. ] If your world has a Tony Stark, then I should warn you that mine showed up when I did. [ Her head canted to the side in consideration of why it elicited a warning. ] He didn't much care for your doppelgänger either.

[ Thinking of Tony, of the world, under any kind of possessive umbrella of hers was an odd thing, but she didn't linger too long on it before looking back at Loki. The forewarning was peace-making, an act of gratitude in exchange for the information he'd given her. ]

Enjoy the party.

[ For Natasha's part, she needed time to think—about whether or not she believed him, about the points he'd brought up, about a lot of things—and that meant disengaging the confusing mess while she still couldn't decide what to make of it. She nodded to him before moving past to disappear into the crowd. ]

[selfimage]

[ wow, was that something nice? maybe he should be more suspicious. the pang he felt after Thor had left vibrates and deepens, and he thinks that this is a good thing. he doesn't need Thor. with other Avengers arriving, he could use the opportunity to head off another him, blocking an Evil Loki from burning across the cosmic stage. ]

Oh, isn't that lucky for me? I'm rather used to it. [ a tad self-depreciating and borderline petulant, but not untrue. Loki could count those he considered his friends on one hand.

and one of those friends was tiramisu.

so, there goes Natasha, and he leans over to grab another, left to review his prospects. ]