A/N Thank you xbecbebex, Donlaeta and FMA Human Starter Kit for your reviews! Sorry for the wait, everybody! I'd give an excuse if I had one, but I don't, so, y'know, here's a chapter instead. :-P

Last chapter's Easter Eggs were both Lori Tragger lines from Kyle XY. When Loki asks, "Are you shrinking me?" It's a quote from Lori asking her therapist mother the same question, and her mom replies, "shrinking… momming…" and shrugs as if to say, "whatever works." The phrase "guarding her like queen freakin' Elizabeth," was from when Lori got mugged and her brothers started following her around because they were worried about her.

Vengeance

There were very few people in the world—the cosmos, actually—that Loki would call "friend." Of this small, select list, Darcy Lewis was currently at the very top, in bold capital letters, highlighted in multiple colors and circled in red ink. She was fun, she was low-drama, she'd believed in him when no one else would, she kept the freezer full of ice cream and didn't get personally offended if his topics of conversation sometimes went over her head.

So, while she seemed to be handling her breakup fairly well—after Rowena Ahlström had eventually threatened to involve the school's administrators if Jeff didn't get off her case—he found himself unable (or perhaps unwilling) to so easily forgive the wretched, unworthy thing. It also did not escape his notice that Jeff Parsons—hereafter referred to as the Mop-Haired Maggot—had chosen to involve Loki himself, however indirectly, by blaming the demigod for his own inability to trust his now ex-girlfriend. Then there was the fact that he'd broken up with her specifically for manipulative purposes, and had then spent the next week haranguing her once he realized she wasn't going to come crawling back to him.

While Loki had no intention of winding up back in SHIELD custody over this, revenge was still very much in order.

Knowing that mortal culture was still somewhat foreign—and that he'd have to be very careful about safety, so that the Maggot wouldn't die inconveniently—he started with some research, looking up traditional revenge prank strategies. Once he realized that many of the good ones required access to the victim's home or car, he easily pick-pocketed the Maggot's keys in passing—he was asking for it! he literally went out of his way to bump into Loki; the young god didn't have to orchestrate a thing!—and then cut his afternoon class having cheap copies made at the hardware store. Then he replaced them when the Maggot left his bag unattended in the library to use the restroom, the copies in their little barcoded bags safe in his pocket.

The next order of business was to get a look inside his apartment, see which ideas were viable. Loki got off of work at 9pm that night, Jeff tended bar until 11, so including the 20 minute walk—he didn't want his car to be seen by anyone—he had about two hours until the Maggot got home. Cole, his former roommate, had moved out about a week before, and he was living alone until he could find somebody else to take the space.

Loki took a moment to walk through the set of rooms, frowning as he realized that the Maggot's desire to have Darcy move in would have been a downgrade for her; the place wasn't quite as nice as they one they currently shared. Yet another reason for a little karma delivery.

After a thorough inspection of the living space and the Maggot's possessions, Loki decided to devote his remaining hour to one particularly evil piece of work he'd read about online, and move every piece of furniture three inches to the left. He also changed the alarm clock from AM to PM, and changed the radio station it played from the local indie music station to one playing loud fire-and-brimstone religious sermons 24 hours a day. By 10:45pm, he had carefully erased all evidence of his intrusion, turned off the lights, and headed out into the night.

"Because I'm Batman," he could almost hear Darcy saying in the back of his mind.

On the way out, he noticed that there was a large, overgrown patch of landscaping on the right side of the door, which ran under the Maggot's front window—his apartment was on the ground floor. He smirked evilly.

-0-

The next night, Loki was off but Jeff—he knew from overhearing a conversation in the hallway—would be playing his guitar at an out of town venue, and from Darcy's description, it would be unusual if he got back in before dawn. That meant tonight was Loki's best bet for getting any real work done.

The first order of business involved convincing the sweet, elderly landlady that he worked for her block's landscaping company. Although he used an American accent and altered the illusion of his face slightly so as not to leave an impression, he was still able to charm her into not finding anything amiss when he spent an hour rooting around in the landscaping. He made sure to pull the weeds and prune some of the flowers before laying his trap, so it wouldn't seem like an obvious prank.

Then he carefully dotted the area with the contents of an entire flat of catnip plants, purchased cheaply from the local nursery's clearance rack. The Mop-Haired Maggot had a strong cat allergy, but since he had managed to kill even a cactus (according to a brief viewing of his Facebook wall) he would almost certainly not be able to recognize the catnip for what it was.

Then Loki headed home to wash up, change clothes and wait for the sun to set so he'd be obscured. The drain from changing his face hit him like a shift in gravity had somehow made him weigh ten times what he usually did, but he'd been expecting that, and laid down on the sofa for a power-nap, setting his phone to wake him after 20 minutes. He also took a look at his list and supplies, and crossed a few things off—there was no reason to harm the sweet landlady's lawn, or to damage any appliances that she'd be on the hook to replace. No matter—there was still plenty for him to do.

At dusk, he returned, dressed in dark, nondescript clothing, his face hidden beneath an unmarked baseball cap that Darcy had promised he would eventually want for 3am trips to the convenience store for emergency Vodka and other errands he'd rather perform faceless. Perhaps she expected him to be doing things like this, perhaps she did not, but either way, she was correct in her assertion that he'd want the thing.

The next stage began with a few things to take care of in the bathroom. Jeff styled his hair with copious amounts of thick, sticky purple hair paste, with a consistency similar to the bargain off-brand Nair copycat paste that Loki had picked up from Walgreens. He knew that the stuff didn't work very well, and many users had complained that it only took the hair off in patches, but he wasn't looking to give him a smooth, intentional-looking cue ball. He mixed the two pastes together thoroughly and then replaced about the same amount in the container. It looked and felt the same, but over time, it would begin to loosen the emo flop of hair that the Maggot seemed so proud of.

Next, he opened up the back of the toilet and dumped in half a bottle of clear, unscented dishwashing liquid. Then he unhooked the chain to the flusher handle. The Mop-Haired Maggot had often told Darcy in a loud voice that she needed a real manly-man around to fix things—a not-so-subtle jibe at Loki's somewhat refined English gentleman demeanor. He would think himself so clever to have "fixed" the problem, until he started flushing and the bowl filled with unexplained suds.

Next came the cologne that the Maggot used so liberally. Since the bottle was opaque and glass, it wasn't immediately evident how much liquid was in it—and it was almost impossible to tell once Loki had added a few tablespoons of dried, powdered catnip to the mix. He wasn't sure how diluted it would get or if the cologne would cover the scent, but he was willing to take a shot at it.

Finally, there was glitter.

Darcy had told him a while ago about a website where one could mail one's enemies glitter, and Loki had no trouble at all with taking tips from other evil geniuses. He'd purchased a large package of craft glitter, and now applied a thick helping to the insides of the bedsheets—as well as the clean sheets in the box under the bed. He sprinkled it evenly in every pair of underwear he could find, and in the toes of all the shoes. He used his height advantage and a small screwdriver to remove the cover from the bathroom fan and carefully added little piles to the top of the blades so that it would fluff out in a cloud of what Darcy called "craft-herpes" while Jeff was taking a shower.

More glitter adorned the top of the gasket on the refrigerator door, so that it would all fall inside as soon as the door was opened—after Loki unsealed ever soda and bottle of beer he could find, so that they'd all be flat by morning. The brushes of the vacuum cleaner received a generous coating, and he subtly turned the heat up, then glittered the top of the living room ceiling fan. For the magnum opus, he poked a hole in a laundry detergent pouch, drained its contents, filled it with more glitter, and stuck it right below the spigot where the washer filled up with water. The water would dissolve the pouch, showering all of the laundry in glorious, glorious glitter, but the tiny contraption wasn't visible unless one knew what to look for.

The last few pieces of mischief were electronic. Since Jeff's tablet was in "home mode," it didn't require a password as long as the GPS listed it as within his apartment. That was the trouble with convenience, Loki thought to himself with a smirk as he opened up Craigslist, which of course had saved the Maggot's username and password. Jeff had listed the spare room in his apartment, along with some pictures of the place, and Loki deftly altered the ad to advertise for casual hookups, saying that the word "roommate" was a "secret code-word," and swapping out the apartment pictures for images of a leather-clad "naughty agent" that he'd gotten from an online porn advert.

After erasing all traces of himself from the apartment, Loki slipped out the back door, locking it securely behind him.

Then he returned to his own apartment, and spent the hour until Darcy got off of work calling every local advertising religious organization, pretending to be Jeff, and crying about how he needed a higher power, and would somebody be willing to drop by in the next couple of days, just to sit with him, and tell him about angels? Some representatives from the "Mormons" and the "Jehovah's Witnesses" and a few others happily made appointments with him.

The best thing was, of course, that Darcy was at her very public workplace, where she was pretty hard to miss, in case Jeff accused her of doing any of it. Nobody would suspect Loki, of course—because everyone knew that Luke Randle was entirely too nice to do something like that to someone. That and the fact that many of his pranks occurred in stages, so he wouldn't notice some of them for days, and they could continue to plague him with no maintenance from Loki himself.

-0-

"Jeff looks like he walked through a glitter tornado," Ted commented with a snort as he stood chatting with Darcy and Loki before they had to split up to go to their respective classes. Darcy turned to glance in her ex's direction and did a double-take. His hair and clothes were, in fact covered with vibrant, multicolored glitter, and he looked murderously angry. He was also walking with a slight limp. Had he run into a piece of shifted furniture once hard, or repeatedly until damage occurred, Loki wondered idly, keeping his face neutral.

"What happened?" Darcy called as he passed her. "Did a unicorn fart on you?" Loki inhaled subtly as he passed. Heavy cologne, heavy hair product, no smell of shower gel… he'd woken up late due to the reset alarm, so he hadn't taken a shower yet. Oh, how perfect.

"Someone broke into my house and filled my damn bed and dresser with it," Jeff snapped, halting abruptly. "Where were you last night, huh?"

"At work," Darcy replied with a snort. "I wish it was me—I'd have put Nair in your shampoo." Jeff glared daggers at her, then stormed off to make it to class in time. Loki wondered in delight if he would be paranoid about his shampoo and just keep re-applying Nair-laced hair paste, speeding up the balding process. Oh, these layers were wonderful. He hadn't had this much fun since the time he'd replaced Thor's coming-of-age speech with a treatise on the history of the toilet.

Ted guffawed and then headed off to class, pulling out his phone to snap a picture. Knowing the guy, it would find its way to every social media known to man, with the hashtag #unicornfarts or something similar.

Darcy glanced up at him with narrowed eyes, quirking an eyebrow at such a steep angle that he thought perhaps he could stab someone with it.

"Where were you last night?" she asked pointedly.

"Why, Miss Lewis, are you accusing me of conducting mischief?" he asked innocently. Her eyes widened. "I seem to recall," he pressed, as he also headed for his classroom, "someone told me to go ahead and be an asshole once in a while… wise words, I must say."

A/N: I researched pranking ideas, as well as liberally borrowing from some coworkers of mine who are engaged in an ongoing prank war with one another, so I can't take credit for everything Loki does in this chapter.

Please Review! This is my favorite chapter so far to write!

Chapter 12: TITLE

September 23rd, Loki officially got transferred out of the café, and onto the sales floor. His pay was raised by $1.50 per hour, and after the initial excitement, he spent a few hours feeling thoroughly sick to his stomach at the thought that this was his life now—that something like that could make him so happy. He was a god and a prince—and now he was rejoicing over $1.50 more per hour and the prospect of spending his time in the same building on the other side of the café counter.