![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
norseloki.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
lt_safe_house2009-10-16 12:39 pm
Another Loki arrives
Date: April 1, 2003, early evening
Status: Public
Setting: Just outside Tadfield Manor
Summary: Loki (II) arrives (complete)
The world had changed while he had been out of the game. The time he had spent in chains had felt like an eternity to Loki, and when he re-emerged into the world, he was no longer sure if that was really just his perception of it.
Asgard seemed a bad place for him to turn up right then, alone and without anyone to go to battle with him. He considered different options and finally settled on Midgard. That was the place where he would start to gather both intelligence and support. To renew old acquaintances and to make new ones. To take revenge on the ones that had wronged him and his children…
A bitter taste rose to his mouth when he thought of it. Midgard it would be, and then on, on to gather an army that would outdo prophecy. As far as he was concerned, prophecy could hardly be written in stone. If he went about it smartly, maybe he could turn the tide in his favour. Maybe Ragnarök wouldn't even mean his death them. He had deserved some good luck after these last decades or millennia or whatever it had been. He had not counted, and no one had ever been very specific about dates where the doom of the gods was concerned.
So Midgard it would be for the beginning, a place with inhabitants that were easily influenced and convinced of a cause…
For a little while, he seriously wondered whether someone had gone ahead and started Ragnarök without him. Nothing was as he remembered it. The last time he had visited Midgard before his imprisonment, people had ridden horses, brandished swords and warhammers and yelled "Thor" and "Odin" when they rode into battle. Warriors had been revered, not locked away apart from the others. He could not help but grin at the thought of how it must gall both Thor and his sons to see that.
Thinking of them, where were they anyway? Travelling the world, he realized that there was certainly no shortage of priests and prophets, but most of them were affiliated with some deity or other that he had never even heard about. It probably didn't matter – it just put him before a completely different problem. People were always better supporters when they believed in the cause they supported. These people seemed to have forgotten that there was such a thing as Ragnarök, let alone that it might happen within their lifetime.
Then, after some weeks of aimless wandering, in the middle of one of those incredibly big towns his path crossed that of something – or someone – he had no longer expected to find: A warrior in full battle-gear was walking down the street, ambling towards some goal without any obvious haste. No one seemed to take special notice of him, either. Intrigued, Loki followed the stranger. Where there was one, there might be more. Not wanting to draw too much attention, he took the first opportune moment to change into a shape that was less easily visible.
When he found the clothes of the warrior to be clean and utterly free of any mortal fleas, suspicion started to dawn on him. He stayed with his warrior until they entered some place where he could see larger numbers of people in proper cloths instead of the silly things he had seen almost exclusively during his recent travels. Then he left the man and found a quiet corner to change.
An hour later, he had relieved some unsuspecting person of her money-purse, acquired a mead-horn someplace and savoured the first mead since he had regained his freedom. Mead, at least, had not changed as much as people had. His suspicion was quickly confirmed. While these people made him feel a little more at home, they were only pretending. Any remaining plans of going ahead quickly with ending the world evaporated. He needed to find his place in this changed world first, it seemed, and establish himself again as a power.
He went back to letting himself drift, going wherever chance brought him, learning what he could, never staying in one place for long.
Right now, his path hat brought him to what they now called England, and, more precisely, to a small town that looked to him as if it could have been just about anywhere in this world. He was feeling more "right" today than he had for a long time, and he was not quite sure whether it was the time or the place that caused it. Since it was getting late, he contemplated his options. He could find a place to spend the night or move on to the next town, which would be nothing different from this one, and then the next... Nights outside were still pretty cool at this time of the year, and he had had some rather unpleasant experiences while wearing different shapes these last few weeks. Well, if this town had a hotel or hostel or something, maybe he could spend not only the night but even a few days like any other person, listening, talking and maybe finding a kindred spirit. He almost laughed at the thought, but decided to act on it anyway.
The hotel, as he found out, was somewhat over-sized for the town. Good for him. If they had that many visitors, there would be lots of people with nothing better to do than to talk and be talked to. He stood at the gates for a minute or two, watching the building and the grounds silently. Then he shouldered the holdall that kept whatever all that he had considered worth keeping with him instead of acquiring anew each time he needed it, quickly checked how much the wallet held that he was currently carrying, opened the gates and walked towards the entrance of the building.
Page 6 of 7