welcome everywhere, by subterfuge

[purposeful_glory]

Loki is working on illusions.

With the healing spells all done to her satisfaction she spent a good deal of time trying to figure out what the best unison of simplicity (in spell construction), subtlety (in varying likely degrees of company) and versatility (in use) might be. Turning into a bird would be great fun, but useful only in a handful of situations; she thinks it might take as long as a millennium to work out how to teleport with all the safeties she'd like; and either one would be worthless unless she could cover her escape or saved it only for unlikely last resorts -

But illusions? If she can get general-purpose illusions working, in at least vision and sound if not touch or smell, she will be able to do anything else she likes and cover it up in front of anyone who looks. Either the doing or that it's her - she could look like a boy if she liked, go out among strangers, use her healing spells. (There are other healing spells but she thinks that building her own from the very tiniest building blocks all the way up must get better results; she is not comparatively impressed with the results of the others.) It will be useful against any wild monster she fights (without witnesses) that tracks by sight or hearing; she will be able to render herself invisible by the same principles, make it look like she's elsewhere while she nimbly relocates.

It will be disastrously complicated, if not as bad as teleporting, but - unlike things like the grace spell, which had to be cast exactly once and entire, or the healing spells, which she completed without ever needing them badly enough to take the risk, the illusions could be useful even in their most basic components. She can use pieces she invented for the healing spells to build in a concept of what living things are like and how they move for the illusion spell and she won't have to animate illusory doubles or decoys walking and turning their heads correctly on the fly in her head. (Although she will have to work out how to incorporate clothes before that will be suitable for use among people.) Invisibility should be fairly straightforward, too. And once she has all that she'll fill in the gaps until she can make anything look like anything from thin air to a scale model of the entire World Tree.

She plots out the course of her work and starts.

It's not long before she can change her face enough that - given that she's still a slip of a girl with no telltale development, anyway - she will be mistaken for an unremarkable (and, on a whim, redheaded) boy, not a princess, if she goes out.

She is then distracted for several months while she sneaks into every single lecture in a particular series about magic theory. It's interesting, or she'd stop going, but she tears herself away from excursions to the school when the series is over rather than picking up another one. She has been nearly missed at home once or twice and cannot explain. The way everyone who was not educated in ecstatic atomized summary by the Tesseract performs magic is not enough like her own methods for her to take their concepts wholesale.

(But by this time she's very keen on how it feels to go out and be seen as a boy. She doesn't so much want to be called "you there, young man" as she wants the legitimization of a hidden fraction of herself that comes with it. She'd certainly be tired of "you there, young man" if that were all she ever heard - but centuries of what is and is not womanly being made crushingly relevant to her make it a welcome distraction. So she still changes herself and she still disappears into the city around the palace, just when she wants to go for walks.

She turns outright invisible, once she can, when she wants to go into a hospital and repair the sick and hurt.)

She gets better at the illusions. She can do clothes, although the design will tend to be plain unless she has planning time or is copying something she's seen. Once she can do clothes she can cloak herself in the illusion of someone who is not only maler than herself but also taller. (Being "excuse me, sir" is a new thrill on a pattern that's become old and comfortable.) Later she can do free-formed pictures, in three dimensions as long as she's paying attention. There is still work to be done (she could decrease pinpoint size for better image resolution, she would like more of the object permanence to handle itself once she's set up an illusion of a solid, invisibility should automatically extend if she picks something up instead of her having to think about it every time) but the basics are handled.

She locks herself in her bathroom and fills the air with swimming penguins and laughs, because -

Heimdall - never - says - a - word.

She must know. There is no way she doesn't, now; the other spells could have been missed, written off in the vast confusion of the cosmos. This is unmissable, it's been going on for so long, Heimdall has to have seen. Loki has no way to tell without asking if it's tacit approval, or if everyone has culturally taboo habits in private and Heimdall operates under a general policy of quiet, or if she's getting special treatment because she is a princess which somehow doesn't extend to Odin having privileged access to the information, or what. Whatever it is? Heimdall never tells. Heimdall sees and she is silent.

---

She's gotten a bit older.

She hasn't been neglecting her practice too much, despite intensive research on the illusion spell.

She's at a good stopping place; she can stand to put it down for a while.

It's probably about time she went and killed something menacing to enter adult society, isn't it.

Comments

[purposeful_glory]

Bells, bells, bells.

Eventually, when she's been making the noise that so attracts the creature for a few minutes, it appears as a spot on the sky. Loki doesn't let up until it's tried to poison the end of her weapon - which naturally doesn't yield to the treatment, although a small length of bell-fabric does get snipped off by the sharp tail end. She torques the blade around and scores a nick on the tail, not enough to cut the barb off entirely but enough to make it painful.

When it looks like the wyvern might give up, upon receiving this wound, and it beats its wings down hard to gain altitude, she spins, polearm held high, hiding no part of the grace she spelled into her bones centuries ago, and makes a great slash in the membrane of a wing. The beast gets some air regardless, but soon loses it, unable to work hard enough to carry its bulk on a wing that can't catch air over a third of its surface. It glide-falls to the ground yards away from Loki.

She chases it. It turns to meet her. She gets the other wing, ducks a bite, takes a scratch from a hindfoot in the process of slicing the rest of the way through its tail, and then rolls away and kips up to circle it, waiting to see what other weapons it will try to deploy when it's cornered.

It goes for a bite.

She meets its attack with her glaive up through the bottom of its jaw and into its brain, and slams its head down onto the ground with enough force that its body slumps in the corresponding direction as it dies.

[einridi]

Thor and her friends burst from their hiding places to cheer.

[purposeful_glory]

Loki beams and wrestles her weapon out of the wyvern's head. She inspects the cut on her arm, finds it superficial, it can be disinfected and wrapped up later, now it is time to run over and hug her sister.

[einridi]

It is that time! That time is exactly now. Thor gives Loki a hug so exuberant it lifts her right off the ground.

[purposeful_glory]

Whee!

Loki is laughing too hard to say anything.

[einridi]

That is entirely understandable!

Eventually Thor does put her down, so that they can all return to where they left the horses. The village is certain to lay them a small feast, and Odin's hall is certain to lay them a much bigger one.

[purposeful_glory]

Loki approves of feasts entirely! Although she does insist on visiting the village's medic, first, for first aid on the scratch, after that she will enjoy the hospitality and celebrations as intended.

[einridi]

That is also entirely understandable.

If Loki wishes to recount her own tale of the battle, she will have to be quick about it, because Thor is excited enough to tell it all herself.

[purposeful_glory]

Loki will let Thor help, but she does want to do some of it herself.

[einridi]

Well, then, Thor will try to let her.

[purposeful_glory]

That is very kind of Thor. Loki describes how her previous exposure to information on wyverns and the coincidence of the attacks' timing gave her the idea, and from there segues into more conventional descriptions of the battle.

[einridi]

(Thor is occasionally unable to restrain herself from interjecting excited commentary during a lull.)

[purposeful_glory]

(That is okay. Loki will allow it.)

[einridi]

She may also surrender to the temptation to recount the story to their companions several times on the way back to the palace, despite the fact that all of them were there.

[purposeful_glory]

That is quite allowable. Loki will not even interrupt her, if that's what she wants to do. Whether her friends will become tired of it is Thor's problem.

[einridi]

Her friends do not, by and large, become tired of it! Thor is good at telling these kinds of stories, and she has ways of making the details seem fresh and exciting again, when she asks them if they remember when Loki did thus-and-such and describes it so vividly.

[purposeful_glory]

Thor has chosen her friends wisely.

Loki will be glad to have witnesses when it's time to tell her mother what's happened. She is not entirely sure Odin would believe her if she were without corroborating help.

[einridi]

No one else needs to corroborate, because Thor tells Odin the whole thing as soon as they arrive, with earnest pride and excitement. Odin actually smiles at Loki - a rare event, to be sure. And then, predictably, calls a feast.

[purposeful_glory]

Loki feels... odd, about the smile.

She'll deal with that later, she supposes. In the meantime, feasting. Loki would like to sit next to her father.

[pythbox]

Loki is welcome to sit next to her father! He bestows on her many proud smiles, and also a hug.

[purposeful_glory]

Loki's feelings about her father's approval are less mixed (though complicated in their own way). "You have probably already heard the whole story from Thor," she says, while being hugged.

[pythbox]

"I have, yes. But I will hear it from you, too, if you wish to tell it."

[purposeful_glory]

"She tells it better than I. Perhaps she should dabble in barding. But I heard that the wyvern began to attack when the Festival of the Bells started and remembered that their best sense is hearing, and thought it might be because of the bells. So I belled my glaive, and got the creature to attack it, instead of me, with its tail, and then I got its wing -" She outlines the rest of the fight, and concludes with, "The medic doesn't think the scratch will scar."

[pythbox]

"Some would think that a pity," her father remarks. "Not you, I think."

[purposeful_glory]

"I would as soon not wear the evidence of my fights in a way I cannot take off. I did keep the wyvern's tail barb for a trophy when urged to have something from it, though. I might have it made into something. It is about the right size to be a dagger's blade."