The Other watched Midgard through the eyes of his Puppet. He did not have to lift a finger for the Puppet to rapidly dispatch the handful of humans who attacked it, but he did reign it in slightly to keep it from getting carried away. They needed at least one prisoner, afterall. The Puppet stopped fighting and started speaking to the remaining terrified mortals. "Freedom... Freedom is life's great lie. Once you accept that, in your heart... You will know peace." Then the Puppet, clever thing, used the Mind Stone to replicate his own spell, though elegantly adapted to meld with the perfectly conscious humans. The Other was a little jealous of how easily the Puppet could modify its human charges, actually. It was not fair, compared to the laborious process he had taken to create the Puppet. But then, the human minds were intact, just redirected.

This would be fun, it occurred to the Other. He smiled.

Things went smoothly for the most part. He only rarely and gently nudged the spell to keep the Puppet in line as it gathered intelligence from its own human slaves before disbursing them to various tasks and itself heading out to create a distraction. The Puppet's plan was almost too daring in the Other's opinion. It was also, dare he say it, mischievous, but it would probably work. That was enough.

It was certainly entertaining. The Puppet shouted commands and taunts into a crowd of cowering mortals, deliberately terrorizing and mocking them while waiting for the baited trap to lure in its game - the self-styled Avengers, a motley band of trained soldiers and superhuman fighters anticipated to be the most difficult opponent in their task, at least according to the intelligence the Puppet had gathered when it first arrived. "Is not this simpler?" the Puppet crowed. "Is this not your natural state? It is the unspoken truth of humanity, that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life's joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel."

An old human climbed to his feet and retorted in a gravelly voice, "Not to men like you."

"There are no men like me." The Other smiled along with his Puppet, waiting for it to disintegrate the human. That is what he would do as well. Disappointingly, their true prey arrived on time. The man survived.

...

"What's the matter, scared of a little lightning?" That was Captain America, according to their informant.

"I'm not overly fond of what follows..." And there was a thump and clash of thunder. The memory and emotional circuits of the spell blazed in his mind's eye, totally unbalancing the spell and threatening collapse. The feedback hit the Other with a shock of fear, anger and humiliation that were not his own. He could no longer see what was going on on the ground and did not know what was causing it. The feedback intensified with a feeling of... disgust? Memories, again not his, surged into his mind, a confusing montage of remembered pain and laughter, and the face of a young man wreathed in a nimbus of yellow hair. The cascade of negative emotions shifted to something remarkably like affection, or even hope.

Now, that was not within the parameters of the spell he had designed with the Mind Stone. He had deliberately limited the program to curtail spontaneous mental activity outside of the primary goal-directed program, and thereby maximize his own control. The Puppet, unbelievably, was veering alarmingly towards true consciousness, independent of the Other's thought. Or else it was short-circuiting. Either way, it was not something the Other particularly wanted to happen away from the lab where he would not be in complete control of the process, whether through the Stone or the more traditional methods he used on the Children of Thanos. The Other cursed as he briefly shut down the emotional circuits entirely and quickly worked to reorient the Puppet. They had clearly not field-tested the Puppet sufficiently.

He had it half-corrected pretty rapidly but found he had twisted the visual circuits somehow so that everything was tilted and red-tinged. The Puppet almost stumbled off the cliff before he forced it to sit in the powdery snow. He slackened the spell again and was able to rework it just in time for them to be recaptured. When he was able to fully attend to their surroundings in Terra again, he finally realized with a shudder of uncertainty that there was another Asgardian there now. That was what the memories had been about. Neither he nor the Puppet had planned for that.

...

"Barton told me everything. Your ledger is dripping, it's gushing red, and you think saving a man no more virtuous than yourself will change anything? This is the basest sentimentality. This is a child at prayer... pathetic! You lie and kill in the service of liars and killers. You pretend to be separate, to have your own code. Something that makes up for the horrors. But they are a part of you, and they will never go away!... I won't touch Barton. Not until I make him kill you!" The Other grinned as the spy's eyes started to bulge with fear. He liked it when the Puppet took its cues from its master. "Slowly," it continued, "intimately, in every way he knows you fear! And then he'll wake just long enough to see his good work, and when he screams, I'll split his skull! This is my bargain, you mewling quim!"

"You're a monster!" She fairly whimpered, causing the Other to chuckle.

"Oh no, you brought the monster." You brought the Hulk. The spy, unfortunately, understood exactly what the Puppet meant by that comment. The Other cursed to himself and bent over the spell again. He could not have the Puppet telling its plan to all and sundry just for laughs.

"You're gonna lose." Agent Coulson's voice broke through his concentration after a few minutes. The Other stilled, listening.

"Am I?"

"It's in your nature."

"Your heroes are scattered, your floating fortress falls from the sky... where is my disadvantage?"

"You lack conviction." The Other glowered. He could fix that, if it was indeed the case.

...

"The Chitauri are coming. Nothing will change that. What have I to fear?" In the middle of the invasion, the Puppet was just talking to Stark rather than killing him, and, horribly, the Other could not figure out how to adjust the spell correctly to change that. It had been finicky, brittle even, ever since Thor's arrival. He lived in fear of another emotional spike.

"The Avengers. That's what we call ourselves; we're sort of like a team. 'Earth's Mightiest Heroes' type thing," Stark gibbered on.

"Yes, I've met them," the Puppet answered pleasantly. The last time the Other had tried to change anything, when the Puppet was alone and things were quieter, he had first accidentally gotten the eyes stuck looking to the left, then sent it staggering into a wall as it apparently forgot how to walk correctly when he tried to fix it again, then caused it to bleed incandescent green magic into the air all around it, transforming the floor and walls into a substance resembling volcanic glass and just as prone to shattering. He hardly dared touch the spell once he got it back to semi-normal functioning again.

"Yeah, takes us a while to get any traction, I'll give you that one. But let's do a head count here: your brother the demigod; a super soldier, a living legend who kind of lives up to the legend; a man with breathtaking anger management issues; a couple of master assassins... and you, big fella, you've managed to piss off every single one of them."

"That was the plan."

"Not a great plan. When they come, and they will, they'll come for you."

"I have an army."

"We have a Hulk."

"I thought the beast had wandered off..." Still, this continuing, cloying conversation was becoming ridiculous. The portal for the Tesseract was about to open, and the Chitauri army was poised and awaiting orders. He had to do something to redirect the Puppet, as it was showing no sign at all of fighting the Iron Man and instead seemed perfectly content to chat indefinitely. He started tinkering, as gently as he could. He had a bad feeling, though, it was going to go haywire again when they inevitably reencountered and fought with Thor during the invasion.

...

"Look at this! Look around you! You think this madness will end with your rule?" That was Thor, and the Puppet's, Loki's, mind was instantly responsive to the plea in the Asgardian's voice. Of course.

"It's too late. It's too late to stop it." The Other sighed as he started siphoning power out of the overactive emotional circuits again. He hated to be proved right.

"No. We can, together." Fortunately, his new, more delicate approach to spellcraft paid off, and the Puppet took the quiet, brotherly moment as an opportunity to stab the Thunder God.

"Sentiment."

He had even managed not to deprive the Puppet of the ability to speak. The Other congratulated himself. It seemed he was getting better at these quick adjustments, even under pressure. They would win. Thanos would be pleased.

...

"Enough! You are, all of you are beneath me! I am a god, you dull creature, and I will not be bullied by..." The Hulk interrupted the tirade by lifting the Puppet off its feet and slamming it into the floor. Repeatedly.

"Puny god."

The Other screeched in outrage as his spell shattered. Then his screech turned to a whimper. He had probably just lost two Infinity Stones, and the Puppet. Thanos would not be pleased. No doubt, the "Imp" would be meeting Lady Death soon.

Author's note: well, that was fun. Mostly a plot chapter, but also playing around with brain connections. Loki is not fully conscious and aware, although it looks like he is from the outside. All the usual internal drives are originating with the spell, not organically. But, the Other still can't amp up one part of the brain in service to his spell without causing unintended effects elsewhere. When Thor gets there, that's a huge stimulus for Loki personally but completely unrelated to the Tesseract, thus the "unbalancing" of the spell. The Other tries to pull back on the memories in reaction to Thor and ends up pulling power from nearby visual processing pathways as well (both overlap towards the back of the brain). He tries changing specific behaviors but also ends up with movement problems (walking and gaze deviation, plus magic because where else can I have thal localize?) because those are also in the frontal lobes...

It occurred to me while I was writing this that this could also work as an illustration for how Tony's experimentation could have gone wrong, and then right, in the Age of Ultron. After all, it's hard to make a working mind from scratch, even if you have the "hardware" for it, which is how I'm interpreting the brain in this context.

By the way, a "man of straw" is basically a weak-willed person easily swayed or changed by others. Someone who doesn't really have strong beliefs of their own.

Enjoy, and leave a review!