Tales Across The Cosmos

A story in which a young sorcerer is Earth bound as a lesson in innovation and his brother comes along as luggage (aka the loosest plot in the world to allow for a lot of shit to go down), featuring:

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The night was stark against the young boy's back as he scaled the rusted stairs of the fire escape to ascend to the roof. He reached it eagerly with a thud, his back heavy with a satchel of mostly books, and began to set up shop. With six candles of varying sizes and colors he set up a small ring around the rest of his belongings: a stack of texts and a two pillow set complete with a small blanket. He lounged backwards onto his wrists then, a manuscript of ancient proportions placed comfortably in his lap, and began to ponder its contents between the silver light of the moon.
[[shooting for, like, 17 or 18 year old equivalent...I think.]]

A rattling in the darkness, and not the sound of a comet shattering the sky or a shiver falling through the planet's crust. Thor was unaccustomed to these petty details taking up space in his world's periphery. But this wasn't his world, was it?

He let the waning sense of relaxation rush from his body as he rose from the chair, stretching out his stiff limbs with a small shake applied to each. His hazy movements brought him to the window sill, and he drew its frame up midway and peered out, through the screen-less orifice, into the cool night. The boy was elevated on the roof across from him once more, the silhouette of a simple frame obscured by the penetration of the moonlight, too overwhelming to give him form. Thor narrowed his eyelids to hide the gleam of unnatural blueness across the dark landscape. His brother was perceptive, and the sight of anything unexpected would awaken his senses to Thor's presence piercing the night. So he lowered them, and fumbled with large fingers for a pencil.

Reading, 2:37 am, he documented, settling in with eyes on Loki's next move.

The city was a flowing river below him teeming with the golden and pinky glow of headlights and bar signs, all of them beckoning for his attention. But he ignored it keenly from his perch. As he read on the candle flame grew. In his lap the ancient words began to give way from behind their riddles and revealed, like a lusty and rushed lover, their meaning.

His current conundrum aptly was monetary. His rent was due in two weeks and his pockets were heavy with all of twenty dollars of some Midgardian nature or another. In slow motion within the city's heart the book began to take life through pale purple and green energies, it's pages beginning to flutter about their binding. And so he read on eagerly of the words for luck, money, and prosperity. He would have to call on Figga's energies if he were to evoke their proper power. Exciting himself with the materializing spell Loki took stance to ground himself from the power and all at once the candles blew out: the book died in his arms. It was the third time this week.

Frusterated he fell to his ass and let the book collapse before him in the small cloud of smoke that surrounded him.

Thor observed Loki's defeat in the misty plume of a disparaging exhale as the scenery around him changed. He heard the book's spine snap shut as the candles that had been dancing around the younger burst mightily and then were rolled across the breeze, towards Thor's apartment. He scribbled a parting word into his own journal, gently slapped it closed, and leaned against the window frame now to personally observe his brother in his slumped position, as flimsy as some of the books which he had worn greatly, through page and ink.

Oft, Loki remained like this, in his stoic position, as if grounding himself back into a reality separated from obvious magic- Thor didn't know, but he appreciated these times, allowed to dwell in a careful space crafted naturally, in which he could yearn privately, and not reduce his feelings to a set of three or four words on a page that would instantly be transported to his father's bedroom scrolls. Thor had his own bedroom scrolls, none explicitly verbalized.

The air seemed to play with Loki's hair before it roared and lept through his window, bringing the smoke from the adjacent rooftop into the room.

Thor yelped loudly as the vapor singed his hand, burning the flesh of his right palm. He grasped his wrist as it flickered between skin and gold, hardening before him and turning rigid and cold, leaving him with a yellow tinge, a burning sensation, and fingers made entirely out of precious metal.

With the book's defeated thud Loki transitioned to where he couldn't be seen except for in illusion. Thor's apartment, form where Loki lurked in the shadows, was small compared to his stature and yet at a firm maybe of four rooms large without laundry it still put his own dwelling to shame. With his index finger he allowed the illusion he cast on the rooftop to breathe heavily as though distressed while he ran with the shadows of Thor's apartment until he was behind the cumbersome man who was struggling with his wrist.

"I should have known." Loki sneered as he stepped out of the darkness, slightly confused by the scene before him. The illusion on the opposite rooftop dropped as the glimmer of Thor's hand captured his attention and his tone changed from upset to intrigued at the sight of the solid gold hue, "What did you manage to do this time?"

His eyes were allowed to grow wide for but only a moment, as Thor was ultimately no longer penetrated by any form of surprise when it came to his brother. He noticed the sensation of his pain dull in that brief moment of anxiety, but as he turned to face the voice behind him, it spiked back up and made him double back in pain, sinking harshly against the brick walls that structured his living quarters.

"What have I done?" The snap was reflexive; involuntary, almost, assuming Loki was universally and timelessly at fault for some destructively playful or intentionally cruel act. He motioned his hand towards Loki, fearing to release it only to find his other palm would be trapped in a circle around his wrist, also turned to gold. "What were you trying to conjure up there? Or should I say, why was it this?" His accusations came from between teeth. "Whatever you failed to produce in front of you has uselessly and painfully presented itself a building away, Loki."

Momentarily, from somewhere within the bridge of his nose, Loki let loose a wicked smile at the sight of his brother's unique situation. Like a cat he circled around it in study: was it real? Was it actually precious? It was the first attempt that had actually succeeded, in a roundabout sort of way, and he felt his chest surge with pride.

"If you've been watching for at least two nights, then why on this one has this taken hold?" He asked, almost purred, rhetorically.

Without a second thought he grabbed at Thor's wrist, shooing the other's hand away, to look at the structure closer. Indeed it was cool and dead and heavy, possibly growing heavier. He'd only been fiddling with an ancient, benign text on luck, or so he'd thought, though with a mutter forming between his lips Loki supposed that on occasion spells didn't only fail but backfired. This, however, was hardly a failure in his eyes. Tentatively he tested the intermediate space between the metal and Thor's flesh with his thumb, trying to determine a point of transition.

"Does it hurt? Is it solid? Can you feel through it?" The questions came rapid fire from his tongue, matched with a bright excitement in his eyes as he looked up finally from the new golden state of Thor's flesh to the depths of his stormy eyes. He calmed there. "Rather...can you move it?"

Cautiously, Thor gave a nearly imperceptible twist, flicking his wrist slightly. With courage built, he slowly allowed his hand to rotate around in place, curiously looking at the way his veins were now smoothed over with a cobbled effect, a bright jaundice that ended obviously right at the indent of his wrist bone, the golden stones irregularly layered. He gave way to enchantment for such a long moment he'd almost forgotten his anger.

"Of course it hurts, you've bound my neurons to rock," he confronted loudly, snatching his limb back. Tension crippled the air between.

"Ah." He quieted, holding the stone-like appendage in his still-fleshy hand and observing it with touch and sight. "It did hurt," he amended in a grumble, "When it was hit, it was as though somebody had poured hot oil into my blood and then solidified it. It is like..." He was very aware of Loki's eyes on him as he shuffled his gaze from the floor and to his hand. "More or less, an arm or leg that has fallen asleep. No sensation, but the disturbing reminder that there used to be." He let some sense of vulnerability cross his expression, even if only expressed by the motion of looking at Loki directly. "Can you... fix this?"

"Fix it?" Loki tried his best not to sing as he crossed the room with the slightest of hops in his step. "I'm not sure. What's in it for me?"

And in all honesty, he wasn't. If Thor wanted a surefire remedy he'd need to retreat back to their mother's chambers a realm away, but Loki's smile suggested otherwise. After all, in a position of opportunity like this he wasn't going to throw away his new guinea pig. Instead he drew back his books from the opposite rooftop and allowed them to thump upon the nearest table. He crossed to them, bringing up the lights, to contemplate their titles and indexes.

"I'm sure that I can. The same remedies for paralyzation should do: wiggle your fingers." He threw the words over his shoulder from where he stood half bent over on his elbows.

Holding his hand afront him, Thor tried to find tenderness stir in his heavy block of a limb. "I can't," he growled lowly, directing his anger at his fingers and verging on smashing them against the wall. Loki had his tricks; what could be called care-taking became a staple when it came to his lessons and applying them. But Loki's patterns and the word mishap did not ring true to Thor.

"You've grown destitute," he asked before he could phrase it into a question, letting his focus wane. He did not notice his golden fingers coming less curled despite their hardened structure. Father had asked Thor to mark Loki's adaptation to Midgard, and somehow in the midst of his recording, Thor had forgotten to actually think about what he was viewing. "You make mistakes only in desperation, and I would say poverty is cause for rashness." He cocked his head slightly, looking at Loki's appearance. "Have you a place to live, still? Do illusions mask rags?"

Most of the books that he had lugged up with him were small in their stature, comprised of a few hand-written pages bound together with some sort of primitive glue, but three were, comparatively, humongous. Their size accounted for all of the weight he had gathered for the evening and their indexes laden with adept descriptions of everything from elixirs to luck. Loki settled on the second of these, Fróðleikr Kunnusta, and began to search for a remedy between it's pages with Thor's voice but a dull murmur behind him.

He searched fervently through the section on curse breaking in hopes of finding something that would be able to twist in his favor, only to find himself at the tail end of the segment as Thor finally started the usual tradition of battering the younger with questions involving health and morality. Underneath his skin Loki bristled sharp like a crystalline feature chandelier and for a split second his temper surged into the icy cool heat of the most offended angers. He stiffened his shoulders, then hung his head.

"Exactly what do you want to banter about?" Loki sighed as he eyed up a potential solution, a healing spell of flesh wounds-- perhaps it was but the muscle of Thor's that had grown precious, "Your situation or mine?"

Thor gave his hand over, the gesture done with pure hedonistic need coupled with surrender to Loki's verbal and implied exasperation, which Thor could not help but try to gauge how feigned (or merely reflexive) it was. Perhaps this was the way it had always been- a final moment of vulnerability because even though Thor would have gladly forced his molecules back into blood cell and tissue if he could, Loki was the only one capable of cleaning up Loki's mess.

An audible sigh resulted from the end of Thor holding in his words and breath alike. "For somebody who broods about social neglect and parental mistreatment, Loki, you are just as spoiled as I." He smiled gently, tone level and careful to avoid insult. "We are God sons, food promised to be pure, playthings and textbooks abundant, beds and ceilings ascertained from the start. You may reject your lineage on the grounds of your blood, but you have not shed your childhood experiences that linger in the halls of the Aesir, treating you as one."

His hand faltered, the heaviness pulled against the gravity of this realm's atmosphere, but he fought to keep it proffered to his brother. "Even isolated to this Earth where you've moved, you have not been alone and unsafe. I have always been watching. From your first descent."

"Really, you don't say." Loki deadpanned as he snatched Thor's hand into his own pair.

The weight was heavy in his grasp, cool to the touch, as he tried to stop fluttering his eyes to make out the winding text that sat on the table-- truth be told, Thor's words flustered him. The nights he'd spent in the Aesir palace halls as equal were what may as well have been eons behind him and yet they still managed to haunt him a little more than frequently. Someone was always eager to shove it into his face.

"If I'm so spoiled," He continued as a steady seidr began to grow around their clasped hands, "Then why haven't you swept me away from this city already?"

With a slow burn the energy died between his hands, fizzling out with the smell of burnt hair, and he cursed his luck: it wasn't merely muscle that had been turned. Disgruntled he turned away to examine the other books he'd already accumulated, hoping he didn't have to conjure the whole damn library into Thor's apartment.

Disappointed without surprise, Thor heavily exhaled and let his hand return to him, falling into his other grasp. It didn't have to do with Loki's talent, but the entire establishment of the magic system failed him mentally. His rough palms and calloused war-driven spirit were how he got things done, none of this plucking strings out of the air, assembled into miracle cures or a desire actualized. He switched topics. "Is your skill not lucrative here?" he wondered, knowing that there were no Earthly trainers that would bank their work on a magician, something not presumed to exist. Even if Loki could conjure money, Thor suspected that the world would not bend to such unequivocal behavior and would soon seek to compensate.

As the rustling of pages filled the space, Thor found it easier to speak his words into the ambiance of a buffer. "Did you suspect that the one who took you in would so easily shove you out without concern for your well being?"

Interiorly Loki froze at the words that mingled in the petrichor air with the crinkle of turning manuscripts. Every single quip out of Thor had been critical of their situation, trying to lecture his little brother on life lessons of friendliness and living condition. He kept his tongue to himself though in favour of clenching his jaw taught: for once, the high road seemed preferable.

He could feel it building up in his chest though as the texts gave way to nothing new. Instead he dog earred a few pages, one on paralyzation and another that claimed to regrow limbs. Were his skills lucrative he growled at the phrase. Of course they were. They'd always been. But the infernal crust of the planet grounded his magik in a way that only served to piss him off. Everything about the planet, possibly the realm, ruined his spell casting. Humans, he decided in a mental note, only ruined the atmospheres in which they existed. Surly, it was their fault.

"Do you want me to fix this or drop to my knees and beg for your charity?" The words slipped from Loki's tongue before he realized they were even being said with sadist undertones becoming as much a part of him as his eyes; he almost did drop and ask for help after he spoke as Thor's presence started to obstruct of his own, personal, illusions.

"I can go, Loki."

Thor pinched each of his unresponsive fingers, running the tip of his index along the jagged border between flesh and metal. "Not like this; yes I need you to help if you can, but I can go home afterwards." He pulled a chair from beneath his desk and sank into it, allowing the hand to drop atop his leg. "I don't much like it here. The people look down when they walk, scurrying along in large quantities with no individual traits to often define them. I suppose this is the exposure of the elite, but are we poisoned or enlightened?" He looked at Loki and smiled down at himself. "I suppose I fear you becoming one of them, though it's a petty concern. There is not likely to be one irksome enough to rival your impetuous stubbornness in all the realms, my brother.

I will leave you if you want, or I will rip up the documents I send to father, or I will forge tragedy to explain why I have lost your location. But I will not lose you to the masses of those who are your rightful inferiors."

"No, don't. Dont..." Loki snapped in a reflex that made his gut twist with the sound of desperation in his voice. He wasn't sure to which cause he meant to direct his words towards: the silly fear of losing him to Midgard or the hollow feeling that came with the thought of Thor leaving. "...don't leave me."

Truth be told, he'd known all along that Thor had been following him around: the Thunderer was many things but a shadow that hid well among the horizon he was not. No, Loki corrected himself, there was a mere feeling that clung to his elder and radiated off of his body with every minute movement he made. It was not often sound or sight that gave Thor away to him rather it was a heavy thudding, a drop in pressure, that he felt ripple through his chest. As much as he hated it it was a feeling of belonging.

Presently he felt his ears blush over a bright red at his silliness and he sank to his elbows to hide in the text, full well knowing that Thor must be beaming. His shoulders slumped in a mild show of defeat as he looked for a pen to begin the workings of his own magik, hoping subconsciously that his abilities would be adept enough to bring forth a healing energy despite his shaken state.

Stifling a motion at the corner of his lips, and not moving his eyes from Loki's face for a mere moment, Thor raised his good hand and called Mjolnir to him. There was no indication of her presence at first, but he had grown accustomed to this unsteady silence and learned that doubt was not to inserted here. Within a moment, the brick walls were splintering apart, ripped molecule by molecule, spraying plumes of plaster-dust into the air and dropping chunks of cement all over his floor. The hammer entered his hand with certainty.

He placed his golden hand down on the table's surface and then brought Mjolnir smashing down. The most coveted metal on Earth did not hold up to the hammer's surface any more than glass could. He winced, though he could not feel, as the weapon's edge disassembled his hand into a million pebbles of solid gold, some parts crushed into yellow smoke, some in large compounds on the floor. He dropped Mjolnir and kicked the fallen gold Loki's way.

Pieces of the upper part of his hand and fingers fell away as he stepped forward. "Now you can fund your supper. And now I cannot go until you have me fixed. And," he listened to the brewing commotion, "We must go, away from this place."

Loki'd dropped to his knees as the wall gave in to the grace of Mjolnir's force, hiding under the table that held his books in hopes of avoiding injury. The crashing left a dull ringing sound in his ears as he recovered from the shock-wave that the crushing of Thor's hand had given way to. When he finally stood again, desperately trying to make out Thor's words through his new found deafness, he was covered in a thin layer of grey dust that only served to make him look further gaunt than his monetary situation had left him: majik could only cease the pain that came with an empty stomach, it served no help in reversing the side effects.

"Are you daft?" Loki shouted just a bit louder than he'd needed to, his hearing just finally starting to even out once more. "Do you have any idea the intricacy it takes to regenerate a body part? How much time that will take?"

He as livid, a veil to hide the panic that struck him square in the chest, at the sight of a handless Thor. Truth be told it would have been easier to reverse the spell's wrongdoing: instead he would have to synthesize five different biomechanic systems, each needing the other as a base. The process could take weeks. Weeks of staying up late, weeks of building up energy only to drain himself of it, weeks of trying to convince Thor to stay fucking still. His eyes raged green.

The alternative was to take Thor to a Midgard...what was that word here?...hospital to have him fitted with a prosthetic that in turn the younger would be able to give true life. Neither option sounded particularly titillating as he crossed the room to smack the back of the Thunderer's head and look out the window. The sounds of a gathering crowd began to form outside of the door and down below, he was afraid to look down. Thor'd made quite the spectacle.

"Well now what?" Loki muttered this time, defeated and broken at the prospect of having to give Thor a new hand. "You daft oaf...What exactly is your plan for this?"

Thor grabbed Loki around the shoulders and put him into a head-lock, reaching out his wrist and grasping a returning Mjolnir inside of the still-functional hand. "I suppose now you have to feel things out for me, brother, seeing as how I have lost my function in this world." He flipped his hammer and then clutched it roughly. "Would you cloak us?"

He did not wait to see if Loki was doing so before he called upon the winds of this Earth to sweep them through the caved apartment wall and into the night, shimmering with coats of rain on everything from man-made 90 degree angles to the obscurity of nature's randomness in designing its hanging sky and whispering foliage. All objects were uniform in the rain, even he and his brother.

-

The inside of the cave was loud with the echo of rain falling heavily into the first inch of its opening, droplets coming in at an angle and pounding on the ground, the clamor bouncing from one slab of rock wall to the next. Thor thoughtfully directed the precipitation this way. Loki would have easily picked up on the steady murmur of vibrating magic below the dirt floor. Where had Loki gone off to- further into the cave, asleep or wandering?

Thor glanced behind to make sure he was alone before he took the piece of enchanted parchment from the inside pocket of his tunic and wrote with his finger.

His first test initiated, he wrote to his father, Will continue to inform you of all proceedings.