"Just relax, Loki," Loralei told him, again.
"That's difficult with you poking around in my brain looking for things to burn," Loki grumbled.
"Would it help if I told you that if and when I find something to burn, it will be much worse for you if you're this wound up, risking pulling more emotional circuits into the burn path?" Loralei asked sweetly.
"No," Loki answered with a scowl.
"Didn't think so."
"I hate you."
"Hey, the good news is we're about a third of the way done, and I haven't found anything yet."
"Wonderful. I'm sure that will be a great comfort when you render me more mentally handicapped if you do find something the court ordered you to remove."
Loralei winced suddenly and sighed. "Sorry. I shouldn't bait you while I'm rummaging around in your head. It's very rude, isn't it?" She winced again as she sensed Loki's opinion on the matter, even though he said nothing out loud. "Fine. I still want you to relax, though, so talk to me."
"About what?"
"About anything. Maybe Fandral's ceremony yesterday since I wasn't invited?"
"You heard the announcement, I'm sure."
"Yes, you forget I'm still representing the College on the council, at least until the Archsorcery vote next week. I was there when they picked 'God of Generous Spirit.' Very nice. More appropriate than 'God of Shapely Buttocks,' which I'm not sorry to say won my vote on the initial, anonymous round." Loki snickered. He had liked that one too. "Who all did garner an invitation?" Loralei continued.
"Fandral's family, my family, Lady Eir, the senior officers of the Elite, General Tyr, and several pairs of previous Life Sponsorships."
"How many of those are there?" Loralei asked curiously.
"Seven."
"Seven pairs? I never would have guessed there would be that many in the city."
"No, seven people."
Loralei peered down at him. "Seven is not divisible by two."
"It is not." He did not care to explain. The survivor of the pair in question was the life-sponsor. She had approached Loki after the ceremony and inquired into his own healing, with very serious concerns about his mental health; he gathered the person she had saved had committed suicide a few years later. He had done his best to reassure her, but it had been an awkward and unnerving encounter.
"Oh..." Loki forced himself not to roll his eyes. The subject was very personal, but he had no way to conceal his feelings from the intruder in his brain. "Sorry, again," Loralei said. "Tell me about what you've been up to on Midgard instead."
This was a much more comfortable subject, fortunately. "There have been numerous small projects so far. I spent most of the first week cleaning out one of their rivers."
"What was wrong with it?"
"A lot. Frankly, the Chitauri leviathan craft crashing into it was only a minor calamity in the grand scheme of the ecosystem. That river is a major shipping route for the humans and runs through one of their biggest cities. I was focusing on removing toxic material from the Chitauri craft, obviously, but I ended up removing rather a lot of other pollutants. Their cities are huge by the way."
"I haven't been there in centuries," Loralei said breezily. "How big can it be?"
"I'm told New York City holds about eight million. Their total population numbers in the billions."
Loralei's eyes widened. "Norns..."
Loki shared her surprise. Asgard's population was barely a hundred million. "I spent the next week at one of their military bases inspecting their hoarded Chitauri detritus and dismantling some of the weapons that posed an ongoing risk of discharging or exploding unpredictably. There will probably be more of that kind of work when I get back - they captured a fair amount of intact weaponry that they did not show yet show me, but I suspect they will soon. Hopefully, they will take my warnings seriously that some of these may be designed to decay and become more dangerous when abandoned." That was a very common practice amongst space-faring races as a method of protecting proprietary technology.
"If not, they will learn the same the hard way," Loralei concluded.
"I'd rather they did not have to. There are plenty of injured and dead already," Loki said. "I was finally invited to see some of the injured just this past week. There were several humans injured so severely they ended up in some kind of long-term healing facility to deal with the ongoing complications. I'm obviously not so fine a healer as to be able to restore them to normal health, but I was able to cure several severe infections that were limiting chances of recovery. I plan to seek some additional guidance from Lady Eir before I go back."
"What are you hoping to accomplish at this point that can't be done with the general spells?" Loralei asked. Like Loki, she had never ventured into advanced healing beyond the general curriculum, which covered acceleration of native healing mechanisms, pain mitigation, purging of infections, emergency physiomimicry for cardiopulmonary arrest, and wound-knitting. Ailments beyond these were uncommon in Asgard and tended to be severe enough an expert healer would be required no matter what.
"Well, a shocking number of the city's inhabitants seem to have suffered lung injuries related to inhalation of smoke, dust, and other poisonous fumes. All that damage is chronic now, and beyond their mortal bodies' capacity to fully heal in the first place. I saw some very severe cases in the facility I mentioned where the patients are actually still relying on machines to help them breathe. If I can learn how to fix that, I can actually give some of these people their lives back in a meaningful way." He shook his head sadly. "I'm told a number of the advanced cases were already at-risk due to a different disaster that hit the city over ten of their years ago."
"What would that have been? I never heard of an attack on Midgard at that time."
"No, this was a human affair, apparently, but it brought down two enormous buildings made of steel, concrete, and synthetics, so the smoke and ash was very dangerous to everyone in the vicinity. The buildings were occupied at the time, and over two thousand died. There were even more casualties in the battles that followed of course."
"Norns. They're worse than you."
Loki winced at her flippant comment. "I added to their trauma."
"And now you're making amends," Loralei said firmly. "I bet once you figure out how to fix human lungs, you're not going to bother screening people to make sure they were actually hurt in the Chitauri invasion, are you? You're just going to accept all-comers, aren't you?"
Loki shrugged. "Who am I to say where the poisons in their bodies came from?"
The conversation lulled for a time as Loralei continued to work. It was an odd sensation for Loki, random wisps of thoughts drifting through before being abruptly exchanged for others. He was sure Loralei was following some kind of methodical search, but whatever it was, it was alien to the patterns of his own mind.
"I heard you met with Skadi too yesterday," Loralei said abruptly.
"I did. It was our first official mentoring session since the trial."
"How did that go?"
"It was...interesting," he said after a moment.
"You mean embarrassing," Loralei observed.
"A little, but only at first. I think it was more embarrassing for her than for me, actually." Loki had come to Skadi very eager to learn, and much more willing to converse directly with her than he had been at his trial, considering he had just spent a month practicing how to coexist and work with his human victims. Skadi had been unprepared for him, in several ways.
"Why would she be embarrassed?"
"Because she asked me to drop the Aes illusion, and apparently without it, I literally look like a corpse when I'm not wearing long sleeves. She and her attendants were not very good at covering their surprise."
"You look like a corpse," Loralei repeated skeptically. "Are you a skeleton under there, oh God of Lies? Never figured even Fandral would go for that."
Loki snorted. "Hardly. No, it's because the scarring is so confluent. Only my face appears a normal, healthy Jotun blue color. Almost everything else they could see is pale gray-white, which is the color of death on Jotunheim, with only sparse speckles of blue. Thus, I look like a walking corpse. This was naturally far more shocking and disturbing to them than it was to me." Both colors appeared equally abnormal to him, after all.
"Interesting. That would not have occurred to me either, no."
"The meeting went rather well once they got over their initial surprise though, I thought. We spent most of the time just talking about the questions I had coming in about Jotunheim, Laufey, and the Jotnar in general. Then we talked a little about the status of their rebuilding efforts and what projects I might be requisitioned for in the future. And she gave me some books to read."
"What about?"
"Cultural histories mostly. Also a few textbooks on their geology and engineering sciences in case I am eventually asked to contribute to the rebuilding substantially. And a book of poetry which I gather is a favorite of hers." Loralei made a noise of distaste. "You dislike poetry, my lady?" Loki inquired.
"It's fine in the right context, I suppose. I don't seek it out. I avoid Bragi like the plague."
Loki smiled at that comment, but he had to disagree with her. He rather liked poetry. He glanced up at her and softly recited,
"See the sunshine on the glacier glimmer,
A hundred ice-faces throw back a thousand shimmers.
Feel the frost fly in the blinding blizzard,
A soft raiment falling hard to blunt the land's shear scissors.
Hear the wind howl over frozen water;
The strident sound is muted by the very drifts it brought hear.
Sing the soul-song in the depths of winter's handgrip:
Cold quencheth not the fires of love, nor cools the warmth of friendship.
Nay! Cold means closeness, means contentment, means comfort, means community.
Heat and summer nourish the body.
Cold and winter nourish the soul."
Loralei grinned. "Alright, I admit that one's cute. It'll take some convincing to get me to like winter, though."
Loki grinned back. "That's what Fandral said, too. How much time to we have left? I can regale you with all the poems I can remember and all the random facts I've learned about Jotunheim so far."
"Another hour at least. Go for it."
Author's note: 'Tis the winding down phase. Amusingly, since they don't actually anticipate anything "burnable" during the neural evisceration session, it's turning into more of a respite day for both Loki and Loralei. Who knows, maybe they'll even get to be real friends in Loki 2.0's future...
