A/N: This...this is what happens when I read too many Avengers stories...and too many Thor stories...and too many stories, web comics, and word-of-mouth interpretations and old records of Norse mythology. I think I'm a little too biased when it comes to everyone's favorite trickster god, but I can't really help it, I like him. He's a very complex, interesting character, always a bit more layered, and I have to admit, in the films it was far easier for me to like Loki than Thor. Thor is...well, he's nice, and incredibly friendly, but he's also painfully naive, often arrogant and rude, and he's so reckless and brash that half the time he's onscreen I feel like he's going to end up getting killed, even if that's technically impossible. And don't even get me started on Odin, he's not winning any awards in the parental department from me. How, it all the nine realms and the seven mad gods that rule the sea, is it possible to be so completely biased towards your offspring? On Asgard, a place where strength, bravery, and brute power are so heavily prized in such a heavily warrior-based society, Loki...Loki, with his tricks, his magic, his way with words...he likely wouldn't have gotten an easy time of things, especially since magic seems to be considered "weak" in comparison to beating or slashing your opponent to a pulp. In comparison to his "poster child of Asgard" older brother, he'd probably be considered "inferior". In the first five minutes of the first Thor film, I already saw some massive issues going on concerning how Loki is perceived by other people: Thor calls his magic nothing more than "tricks", and then labels him completely "incapable of sincerity". When your own brother (at the time?) is willing to say that to your face, how do you think he's viewed by everyone else in Asgard?
Thor goes on a rampage and slaughters a bunch of Jotnar after being called a "princess", starting massive war between them and Asgard that's only just barely prevented by old One-Eye, Odin himself, showing up to bail his kids out for a stupid stunt...and he gets turned into a mortal and sent to Earth to be "grounded". He doesn't even stay there longer than three days, and he makes friends, eats snacks and smashes coffee mugs, and gets a girlfriend out of it! The Destroyer hits him a handful of times (given the size of that thing, and Thor being supposedly powerless and "human", he should be DEAD from blows like that, not landing on his back and then getting up with a few bruises and a black eye on his face, so I can only assume Odin made him not entirely human and left his godliness intact in case his firstborn does something monumentally idiotic while on Midgard but hasn't yet "learned his lesson" and earned the hammer back) and then Mjolnir comes flying back and he gets to magically beat the living tar out of it...after stating the most unauthentic attempt at a self-sacrificing heroic speech I've ever heard in my life. There was literally no vocal infliction at all, not one syllable of it sounded like he was invested in his apparent "apology". How, pray tell, does that equate him having learned his lesson and suddenly deciding to "embrace-the-humans-and-their-ways", when only a few days before he's perfectly fine with going to smash all Jotnar in sight and calling his father, the king at the time, an old man and a fool to his face? Three days in "divine time-out" does not equal a sudden dissipation of genocidal urges. If he had lived on Midgard as a proper human and had to learn humility and normalcy from scratch like in the comic world, I'd be much more convinced than his little film!verse "mini-vacation" with a pretty astrophysicist and a box of baked pastry goods.
Loki has a meltdown over his real parentage and Odin...Odin falls asleep. It's understandable that the Odinsleep is to recharge his immense powers and keep him going. But given that he's held it off for months, possibly years now, couldn't he have possibly staved it off for five more minutes while he explains things to Loki? He's just told his adopted, emotionally-shredded son that he was taken from a war-torn planet where he'd been abandoned just because his own people thought he was too puny to keep, and that Loki was essentially a bargaining chip to ensure the treaty. And then he goes for a convenient-seeming sleep (you couldn't have held out for a few moments more and done a little reassuring?)...while Loki is meanwhile having a massive internal breakdown from being told he's originally part of a race of beings that he's been taught his entire life are, as far as Asgardian customs go, "the monsters under the bed to scare the children", supposedly completely evil. Odin tells him that he kept his parentage secret and lied to Loki his entire life because he wanted to protect him? Loki even points out that this might have been avoided if he'd been told his heritage from the beginning! Hiding something so big for long periods of time usually ends in disaster, but he does it anyway! How would Loki be able to be seen as an example that Jotnar can be trusted if no one ever even knew about it? It's a little hard to ignore the great big gaping hole the size of the BiFrost in your logic, Odin.
And that's not even counting when he was about to fall off the edge into the Void, barely hanging on, and then Odin says "No, Loki." Nice choice of words for your literally-hanging-off-the-edge son who still craves your worthless, useless approval, isn't it? Thor vows (and technically tried, given that he went to Jotunheim and started smashing heads in) to kill off all the Jotnar and you only ground him for less than a week with Mjolnir a couple of miles away. Loki vows to do the same thing (even killing off his own biological father (who looked at the time to be sneaking in to do murder) to win approval and show his loyalty to the royal family and to Asgard and to keep the perceived threat from attacking those in the room, which, by extension, includes Odin and Frigga) because he thinks a preemptive strike is the only way Asgard will survive it's current unfortunate situation (we don't see any council or governing body other than the ruling family in the film, and it's in shambles here: the Allfather is in Dreamland, Thor is in godly time-out, Frigga apparently isn't allowed to rule on her own, and Loki...no one seems to consider listening to him, even when legitimately standing in as Frigga-appointed Regent) and Jotunheim VERY likely to at least CONSIDER (if not actually acting on the urge) wanting some form of retribution after Thor almost set off the intergalactic version of a World War on their world and took out a chunk of their people...and then you let him fall to his apparent death. That's a very large gap between them all concerning family priorities.
Then we get Thor 2: The Dark World...and he tells him his birthright was to die, not to mention we get the rather unpleasant fulfillment of Loki's "stolen relic, locked up, until you have use of me" comment, considering he was broken out only to help Thor sneak through the cracks between realms.
That...that's just wrong. And if even a couple of those stories in Norse mythology were true...well, it's not really a surprise that he lost it. He always seems to get the short end of the stick. There's just no pleasing the universe for him.
By the way, just so you know, I'm part of the "Chitauri-mind-control-Loki-wasn't-entirely-in-his -own-mind-or-was-tortured-into-doing-the-takeover/ conquest-of-Earth-thing" camp. Call me out on it if you want, but I like to believe that there's some hope for him yet, his eyes kept changing colours throughout the entire invasion and there was a definite Tesseract-blue tint in several scenes, which is a direct change from the sharp green we see in the first Thor. Then there's the "pep talk" he was given before he left for Earth in the first place; how would you like to have your encouragement be "If you fail, if the Tesseract is kept from us, there will be no realm, no barren moon, no crevice where we can't find you. You think you know pain? He will make you long for something sweet as pain..."? That's not a nice bit of encouragement, that's legitimate implication of severe punishment (likely torture and/or death) if he failed. The fact that he looked rather beat up and paranoid (not to mention in need of a sandwich before he falls over, and the serious raccoon-mask rings around his eyes; sleep deprivation, perhaps?) when he first stepped out of the portal further gives me the idea that he's gone through some serious hell while in the Void to further warp and twist him into what we see in The Avengers.
And even if the attempted conquest was entirely his idea and fault...I can't help it, I'd still give the guy a hug, he looks like he needs one. Or a few thousand. And possibly an army of therapists to help him with all the emotional and physiological problems that he's got.
So yes, I am a Loki fan. I felt like giving a little more humor to this fandom. In this case, giving this humor means unleashing Loki's mad legions of fans and followers (myself included) upon the potential prank-target known as Earth in my personal form of vengeance for putting Loki in that darn muzzle.
WARNINGS: crackfic!, explosions, destruction and defacing of Midgardian property (private and otherwise), destruction and defacing of Asgardian property (including the throne room), references to George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones, BBC Sherlock or Tolkein's The Hobbit/The Lord of the Rings, and a Midgardian-wide fanbase militia/"official" army comprised of armed, dangerous, overprotective, and incredibly creative and mischevious Loki-fans...which have been suitably equipped with enough pranking equipment to ensure that Zonko's and Weasley's Wizard Wheezes are sold out for a good millennium and a half.
ADDITIONAL WARNINGS: I do not own Marvel's The Avengers, or Rick Riordan's wonderful Party Ponies. I also did not come up with the ingenuity of the Rubix cube, the Toyota car, or the Nerf gun. I am NOT the genius who came up with the fantastic idea of "Loki's Army", I am merely someone who thought it might be fun to add to the archives here as a nice, cracky little oneshot. Although I am the creator of this (albeit unofficial, seeing as I made it up) "pledge of allegiance/theme song" for Loki's Army...
In retrospect, S.H.I.E.L.D. really ought to have seen this one coming. In fact, most people, civilian, alien, mutant, or otherwise, should've seen this coming.
But they didn't, and right now, Director Nick Fury was damning everything within sight to the deepest depths of hell because of it.
Pinching the bridge of his nose to stave off the impending headache, he took a deep breath, a long-suffering sigh issuing forth as he stared angrily at the screen in front of him. It wasn't really a surprise why.
Clearing his throat, he tried, for a moment unsuccessfully, to accurately state the absolute chaos on the screen. In the end, he settled for a single, horrified word.
"Dammit."
There was, honestly, no other way to explain it.
The Natural History Museum had reports streaming live of exhibits coming to life in a burst of green sparks, the taxidermy animals and the bleached bones of dinosaurs being ridden as impromptu mounts for crazed teenagers and screaming children as parents frantically dialed 911 to shout into the operators' ears that their families were being held hostage by museum exhibits. Japan had somehow become a nationwide cosplay convention (and subsequently did very well in several of its later international fashion shows), and both Tokyo and Osaka seemed to be locked in a giant mecha-robot wrestling match, with the gargantuan automatons being controlled by local high school robotics teams. India had become engulfed in dancing fever, and now city-wide conga lines and dance numbers burst into action every time someone so much as mentioned "Bollywood". Russia had discovered only that afternoon that the biting cold lands of Siberia had somehow found all the snow changed to Neapolitan ice cream, and Italy had found itself trapped with a rainstorm of Spanish swimsuit models for the past several hours (although according to reports, no one actually seemed to be complaining about that last one). No one in S.H.I.E.L.D. even wanted to hint at Broadway's wardrobe dilemma (although it seemed that the noodle incident in Thailand involving the cursed shrimp and assassination-prone chopsticks had something to do with it).
The Eiffel Tower had been swathed in a gauzy layer of sparkling champagne-gold silk, which fluttered and made the most inappropriate fit of magically-magnified giggling whenever tourists happened to walk underneath. Mount Rushmore was reciting dirty limericks every time the elderly passed, Spain's shores (despite not having any nests the night before) were covered with a mysterious arrival of thousands of tiny, newly hatched baby sea turtles (thankfully, the locals took it upon themselves to rescue the little creatures and help them back to the water), and the country of Canada was missing its entire maple syrup supply, which had turned up roughly an hour ago by way of flooding Stark Tower from top to bottom...in the middle of one of Pepper's visits. Tony was still trying to figure out how much he owed her and their newest client in dry-cleaning coverage.
Croatia's newest medieval-style television hit had come to life in the middle of shooting an episode, leaving newcomers both elated and terrified as they were chased from the beautiful filming sets by a series of equally beautiful and frighteningly live (though, luckily for the human populace, much smaller than televised) dragons, and the locals had to placate the magnificent creatures with offerings of all the chicken, fish, beef, and various sea cucumbers from the local markets to distract them from eating the newly-arrived tourists, who meanwhile switched between snapping photos, screaming in terror and running like rabbits, or frantically calling the nearest newspaper.
There was a giant chicken wandering around the state of Montana, pecking crop circles into corn fields and dropping eggs the size of Toyotas in the streets. Florida's lifeguards, backed by the National Guard and what seemingly the entire Tampa fishing industry, were still trying to fight off a sudden wave of invading deep-sea squid that had decided to terrorize the coastal beaches, and Texas had suddenly found its state borders rearranged into the shape of a giant boot, complete with a cowboy spur. Las Vegas, Nevada had all of its neon signs changed to bright pink, and all the casinos had mysteriously turned into meetings for a sudden "Earth child" convention, with liberal amounts of tye-dye shirts, "hippie" jewelry, exotic glass-blown pipes of "herbal soothers", and brightly-coloured neckties being passed around. Part of Idaho's potato crop had turned neon orange, grown rather handsome sets of feathery golden-brown wings, and migrated across the state alongside a flock of geese, and Maine's streets had mysteriously flooded with hundreds of thousands of brightly coloured balloons, which, according to reports, frightened the tourists half to death and left locals wandering around with earplugs in to keep out to sound of the balloons' popping by mischievous children to scare people.
In Scotland, the infamous Loch Ness monster had surfaced from the deep and had taken to giving the tourists rides on her back across the lake, provided she was given a barrel of quality ginger beer as payment (the locals, of course, got to ride free). Australia and New Zealand's sheep and koala populations got swapped round at noon, and the animal activists were going mad trying to ensure that nothing got eaten. In the process, it took a while (and the help of a rather befuddled tourist) to discover that the film set of a relatively recent and successful film series had somehow become real for several hours, complete with beautiful under-the-hill homes with little round doors, fields of lovely flowers surrounding a huge tree just made for parties, and every tourist lucky enough to stumble across it mysteriously becoming at least a foot shorter in height, and a good two or three sizes bigger in the vicinity of their feet. Upon leaving, the travelers to the pretty area found that they had the oddest craving for mushrooms...
The famous London Eye had actually become an eye, which had then proceeded to have a staring contest with everyone (birds, stray animals, and airplanes included) within a hundred miles. China became engrossed in a nationwide dance number to the soundtrack of Bye Bye Birdy, while Vietnam became the hub center of half a million or so computer hacks that gave emails of adorable kitten videos. Several cruise ships heading to the Caribbean found their ballrooms and decks coated in silly string, and the U.S.-Mexico border became neon pink, as if a giant had gone over it in neon highlighter. Hawaii, as of 6 o'clock this morning, appeared to have decided that there were not enough hula dancing contests for the tourists, so a 24-hour state-wide dance contest had broken out, and now all the U.N.'s visiting dignitaries on holiday in Maui were left to wriggle and twist as well as they could in swim trunks, unfortunate sunburns, and brightly coloured floral necklaces as the locals shouted amused encouragement.
Ireland's streets had turned to gold overnight and now the international gold market was going haywire trying to balance prices, and somehow, in all this mess, it took several minutes and a sheepish pointing out from one of the new interns to get anyone to notice that the entire continent of Africa had become painted fluorescent rainbow...with the continental borders outlined with polka dots made up of giant green glow-sticks and gold-filled lava lamps.
By mid-afternoon, all the 1950s-themed diners in the United States of America had gotten their food swapped with that of England's pubs, France's topless beaches had become nunneries, San Francisco's entire Comic-Con population had been mysteriously transported all the way across the country to Disneyworld, and Finland and Sweden had ended up playing host to what appeared to be a very, very confused band of tourists dressed in elf costumes, all of whom were insisting that they were North Pole immigrants who'd come to make a life in the shoe business after fleeing the melting ice caps.
It didn't help matters that Egypt's famous Pyramids of Giza had somehow changed into enormous stone Rubix cubes, Mt. Fuji had become Mt. Fuji Apple, or that New York's very own beloved Statue of Liberty had been taken over by a group of madmen armed with bats, Nerf guns, bows and arrows, and paintball equipment who insisted that the Agents sent to clear them out of the national symbol stay for partying and a refreshing round of frothy, ice cold root beer.
In all cases, S.H.I.E.L.D. found only one thing linking all the strange phenomenon together: at each scene, a single symbol was present, either spray-painted, chiseled, etched, carved, burned, soaked, glued, or even duct-taped on. Fury's one visible eye bulged with rage as he took in the familiar sweeping horns, the golden metal, and, in place of the head, the words Loki's Army crudely sprayed in trickster green, the sharp, neon look reminiscent of the I Believe in Sherlock Holmes graffiti movement.
By midnight, the entire globe was as high-strung as ten thousand violins, and Fury's eye twitch was so bad that he'd been offered eye drops and a suggestion for a "more breathable" eye patch no less than a half dozen times. That little bastard, Thor's got a lot of nerve letting his brother run amok like this after all the stunts he's pulled.
Patching a call through to Asgard with help from Jane Foster, however, led to a dead end. According the testimony of the guards, the royal family, and everyone else he managed to question, Loki was still in Asgard, magic, at least at the moment, silenced and bound so much he'd be unable to charm so much as a teabag, not this level of insanity. Only intergalactic political protocols kept Fury from living up to his name and doing something drastic to try and get answers...although Thor's famous hammer was not the lesser for helping in persuasion. By the time discussions had ended, Fury's headache had worsened and Thor had been hurriedly summoned back to the throne room (despite the fact that the man in question was in a prison cell several stories underground in "lockdown", apparently the Royal Court was completely convinced that Loki was in fact responsible for the sudden flooding of the throne room with treacle, the escape of Sleipnir with the help of several previously unknown unicorns to the woods of Álfheim, and all of Odin's spare eyepatches being victims of spontaneous combustion).
Upon returning to base, there was a message for the main screen, delivered by a rather nervous-looking man who held the deceptively fragile-seeming disk in his hands as if it was a live grenade. The recording rolled onscreen within seconds. A black screen became the backdrop for what sounded like a narration...if the narrator was swearing in recruits to what sounded to be the loudest fraternity in history.
Midgard's become a bit of a bore,
So upon the green light, we'll make it less so,
With tricks, and talks, and to settle a score,
We'll give 'em all hell, make wish that we'd go.
On knife, on scepter, on our trickster on high,
We'll run Midgard a gambit they can't hope to deny,
So up in arms, lads and ladies green,
Take your tricks and treats with you,
The game is on, step out of the unseen,
We'll kneel to him, so little ants, shoo!
The "poem", if it could be called that, was an explosive cacophony of noise in itself, a roaring tumult of sound that shook the screen as an enormous mass of figures become visible, all of different shapes and sizes, but all were clad in an emerald-green cloak, tied with a golden clasp done in the shape of Loki's infamous "reindeer" helm. From the viewpoint available from the recording, the weapons of choice were enough pranking supplies to cover the entire nation for April Fool's Day, along with a handful of what appeared, rather alarmingly, to be duplicates of Loki's throwing knives and the "glowstick of destiny", as well as numerous pieces of medieval clothing and weaponry ranging from arm guards to bows and arrows to shoulder armor to chest plates to kneegaurds to replicas of Loki's helm, all engraved in some manner. It was as if a Lord of the Ring's convention become star-crossed lovers with Weasley's Wizard Wheezes and eloped with enough supplies to last until the Zombie Apocalypse.
Fury stared, unable to tear his gaze away from the chanting, the stomping of feet, the excited chatter, the waving of silly-string cans and fake scepters and daggers, the roar of Loki! Loki! Loki! that made his head pound with agony as a headache stampeded through his skull like a squatter's team of musicians from the Sydney Opera House. Though he managed to maintain his composure, every instinct he had was on red alert.
Loki had an army. An army of Midgard, of Earth. He had a force here made up of Earth's people. And judging by the zoomed-in shots at the eyes, these people were not under the influence of the aptly nicknamed "glow stick of destiny", either.
"What..what is this? Some kind of sick joke? What kind of messed up organization are they?"
The words were practically spat out, full of venomous anger and frustration, but the answer came not from the recording, but the intern sitting at a computer nearby, who shivered slightly, pointing to the screen with a muffled gasp of "Fans...".
Fury stood before the screen for a long, long moment, taking a long drink of coffee. His headache was acting up, his patience was thin enough that breathing would tear it, and today's coffee tasted as crummy as if it had been brewed three days ago. As he placed a assembling order for the Avengers, a live video feed popped up onscreen of yet another pranking fest. This time, it seemed, all the artwork in the Louvre had come alive and the various naked statues from ancient Greece and the Roman Empire were busy streaking their way through the various twisting streets of Paris, the paintings engaging in dirty joke contests and arguments over which age of art was best. A dozen spray-painted copies of Loki's Army insignia plastered the sides of the glass pyramid entryway inside.
The intern by the computer giggled. Fury turned to glare at her, silently demanding to know just what was so funny. Stifling her laughter behind a manicured hand, the intern pointed to a corner of the screen, where a gaggle of marble sculptures are gesturing at each other, the leader, it seemed, being the statue of a curly-haired cherub who had decided to "moon" a scandalized-looking French statue interpretation of the Greek wine god Dionysus, who promptly called in backup from the loincloth-clad figure of a bearded old man statue with wrinkles like a crab apple and a wickedly-sharp trident. When the Ancient Egyptian section was drawn in, the hall burst into a flurry of movement, and high up above the general din, the sprinkler system went off as a satyr statue crashed into the fire alarm pulley.
The intern laughed again, leaning in to get a closer look as she pointed to the cherub, who had meanwhile found some of the Louvre's more expensive Roman antiquities and had taken to dropping them into the crowd below. "So far, it seems that the Italians are winning, Sir."
As he watched the moshpit of movement onscreen, Fury wondered what he'd done to deserve this. But as he stared at the screen longer, the tiny white imprint of the date shining into the corner caught his eye, and he swore.
April 1st. April Fool's Day.
Oh no.
April First. Dammit, I'm going to need more coffee.