So sorry for failing to update on Monday! Those of you who follow me on tumblr (skiesovergideon there, too) know that I was relatively incapacitated with a migraine. Thanks for sticking around, and here are the next two chapters!

"So you found a sprout." Mike looked like he didn't believe her.

"Yes!" Anna was exasperated.

"And when you touched it?" Pensive, Loki took a sip of his tea.

She made a frustrated gesture, clenching her hands into fists. "I told you. Nothing happened."

"Except that, later, you saw Ben's true form and the swirl of magic throughout the school." Loki touched the tips of fingers together around the body of his mug. "Which suggests something did, indeed, happen."

She scowled. "Yeah, but nothing I remember."

"Wait, wasn't there something on the news?" Mike, lounging on the couch and tossing a baseball back and forth between his hands, looked a bit hopeful. "Something about a huge power surge and none of the TVs working downtown?"

Anna rolled her eyes. "Because stuff happening downtown has anything to do with stuff happening here."

"Uh, duh," Mike returned, tossing the baseball at her head. She caught it and threw it back. "Monsters here, monsters there. Asgardian god here, Asgardian god there. So maybe it does matter."

Pulling a face, Anna leaned against the arm of the couch and dropped her legs on Loki's lap. Loki straightened and looked at her as though she had lost her mind. She returned his stare with an even one of her own, and he saw her mother in her face. He hoped she never reproduced. If she did, her children would have his unmitigated pity.

"Is that all you know about what happened downtown?" Loki asked Mike.

Mike nodded. "I YouTubed some stuff earlier, because it looked weird, and, you know, research, right?"

Anna rolled her eyes.

"But, yeah, there wasn't much. Just people posting vlogs all like—" He made one of the most ridiculous faces Loki had ever seen, and he had seen quite a few. Thor had cornered the market on idiotic expressions. "—'oh, no, the sky is falling, what are we going to do, there was no power.' And then there were people who were all 'at least the Avengers are here to fix things like this, the hell with New York.'" He shrugged. "That's about it."

Loki considered this, turning the words over in his mind. "When was that?"

Mike shook his head. "Dunno, sometime this morning."

"Anna, when did you find the sapling?"

She shrugged. "Maybe around ten thirty?"

Loki leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and trapping Anna's legs across his lap. "I find it remarkable," he said, directing his words toward Anna, "that the issue with the city's electronics occurred this morning, likely around the time you touched the plant." He tilted his head to the side, eyes sliding along the edges of a wooden bookshelf. "I find it especially remarkable that nothing in the immediate area was disturbed. And I wonder why."

With a laugh, Mike said, "Maybe it's because we're boring." His tone was dismissive, and it was that nonchalance that caught Loki's attention.

The look of sharp interest on his face made Mike jump. "You're what?"

"Boring?" Now it was a question, offered hesitantly instead of with a studious lack of care.

"No. Not, it's not that." Loki frowned, touching his lips to the edge of the mug of tea and inhaling the scent of bergamot. His eyes closed, and he let the smell take him back to his workshop in Asgard, to the familiar space filled with books and magic. The weight of Anna's legs on his lap became the weight of a grimoire, and in his imaginings, he paged through it.

Magic, the grimoire explained, was a strange thing. In sufficient amounts, it could become almost sentient, but not quite. It was like a Venus flytrap, having no brain but the ability to respond to stimuli when given a specific set of circumstances. The magic that suffused the school wasn't a tiny droplet of ephemeral power. It was potent enough to attract the attention of creatures from across the Nine Realms. That suggested there was more than enough of it to react.

So it protected itself.

"It's not that you're boring," Loki said slowly, opening his eyes as a chilly smile spread across his face. "It's that you're not a threat."

Loki's enemies ran from the smile he wore; they turned tail and, screaming, fled from battle. It was the only warning they received before he attacked. Mike and Anna were, apparently, immune. Her toes curled around the fabric of his pants, and she shifted, digging her heels into his thighs. "What are you talking about?" she asked.

The smile melted into a long-suffering look of martyrdom. "What is in Chicago that isn't here?" he asked. Her face remained blank. "An organization, Anna, that would have a vested interest in magic and strange things."

Mike's eyes grew wide. "Oh. Shit."

At least Mike was thinking. The mixture of uneasy fear on his face made it clear he knew exactly which organization Loki meant.

"Wait, wait." Anna pushed her toe into Loki's side. "You mean S.H.I.E.L.D.?" At Loki's nod, she swore too, her head dropping back against the arm of the couch. "Great. So dad's probably mixed up in this, too."

"Likely in only the most cursory of ways." Loki's attention shifted from Anna to Mike. "Could you convince your father to take you into his office for a day? Perhaps learn something that could help us?"

Mike hesitated before shaking his head. "I don't know. Security at places like that is probably super tight." At Loki's look of irritation, he held up both hands in a placating gesture. "Dude, I'll check, man, I'll check. The worst he can do is say no, and that doesn't put us back at all."

Loki's gaze swung back to Anna, and a muscle in his neck protested with a sharp twinge. "And it would be beneficial if I could see this plant for myself."

She rolled her eyes. "Yeah, but how are you going to get into the building? This problem hasn't gone away," she reminded him.

"Ah, no." He smiled and waited, enjoying the play of expressions across Anna's face.

"…wait. Wait, what did you figure out?" she asked. She had settled on a petulant look, annoyed he hadn't shared something with them.

"S.H.I.E.L.D. is a danger to whatever is here," he said, speaking slowly and clearly. As he spoke, he felt his magic twist inside him, shifting like a dog lifting its head upon hearing its master's voice. "There has been a northward trend to the attacks by the creatures from the Nine Realms. S.H.I.E.L.D. has surely noticed. Combined with today's events, I am certain this place is now one of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s points of interest."

Electric power thrummed in his veins, almost, but not quite, within his reach.

"My magic responds when I need to protect you. We've established that, yes?" The children nodded. "You attend a school where this power, whatever it is—" He had a sneaking suspicion he knew exactly what it was, and he hoped, with all his being, he was wrong. "—is centralized. By protecting you, I protect that power."

And, oh, there was the familiar, rushing burn of his own magic.

Anna jumped away from him, her eyes wide. She let out a small, strangled sound of terror. Mike, too, had jerked back. Mortals, stupid as they were, still had a strong sense of danger, Loki had to give them that. They knew something had changed, they could probably see it in his face, and they were smart enough to be afraid.

"Stop that, both of you," Loki snapped, less hurt than he was annoyed. "If I considered, even for a moment, hurting you, the power that was just returned to me would be taken away."

Mike gave him a suspicious glare. "The school's whatever power can do that?"

"It is stronger than my own, so yes. It can." Loki set his mug on the leather ottoman before him and sat straight, smoothing his hands over his abdomen. His clothes melted into an outfit he preferred from Asgard, a simple tunic with a leather belt and fitted, black trousers. He didn't bother creating the boots, and so the argyle socks he wore looked ludicrous compared to the rest of his clothing.

It felt good to have that power at his command once again, and already he had thought of one thousand things he needed to do with it. Starting with a protective spell around the whole house, and then another around the school.

He realized, then, that both children were staring at him, slack jawed.

"Magic is semi-sentient when it is present in a certain density," he explained. "The power here, unsure whether or not I was a threat to you, suppressed my innate abilities. Now that it believes I'm not, I have full command of my power."

"Unless you threaten us," Anna said.

Loki pressed his lips into a thin line. "We have established that."

The look of consideration on her face didn't bode well for anyone. He imagined she was thinking of ways to annoy him into using his power against her just to see what might happen. So he redirected her. "I can use my magic to hide myself from curious eyes and get into your school now."

Her face lit up. "Does this mean you can sit next to me in class and help me with my math tests?"

"No."

Her face dropped. "Damn."

"I can, however, see this plant. Do you take issue with me accompanying you to see it tomorrow?"

Anna shook her head. "Nope. I'll probably be able to get another pass to the library, so we're good."

Mike sighed. "And I'll work Dad over." He didn't sound too thrilled and, in retrospect, when Loki penned the events of his day in his journal, he couldn't blame Mike for his lack of excitement. Bob had reacted poorly to the question, dodging it with a fretting nervousness that Loki hadn't before seen in him.

That only made Loki certain they needed to know what S.H.I.E.L.D. was doing. But how to get at S.H.I.E.L.D.'s knowledge. That was their central problem. It was the school that provided the solution two days later.