Don't own Loki and friends, not making money off this. Also, slight spoilers for the Item 47 short that's on the Avengers DVD. If you haven't seen it, you need to.
Chapter 10: Magic and Science
Once they reached the lab, Tony gestured towards a station next to an open-ended box. The walls of the box were dark gray and looked porous.
"We've been using this to analyze the weapons the Chitauri left behind," he explained.
Loki frowned. "Those weapons should be unable to work without the Tesseract powering them."
Tony grinned. "Oh, they don't. But some punk kid figured out how to hot-wire them, and decided to go out and rob a bunch of banks."
"What happened to him?" Loki looked genuinely concerned.
"SHIELD hired him," Tony offered quickly, "But why do you care?"
Loki fingered the edge of the sensor box. "I feel like... like it's my fault, you know? I brought them here, so anything they left behind, any trouble that caused..."
Tony stared at Loki for a long moment. It was pretty clear to him that she was in fact the same Loki who had tried to take over the world a couple weeks ago. But at the same time, she was very different, and not just because she was more fun to look at.
"So what should I do?" she was trying to ignore his obvious assessment.
Tony snapped out of it. "The flame thingy. Just stick your hand in the box and set it on fire again." He tapped a couple keys on the computer, waking it up and turning on the sensors.
Loki extended her hand and summoned the little green flame. She could see Tony's face through the clear display, as well as the graphs and numbers scrolling by.
"Interesting..." he enlarged one of the graphs, and tapped in a couple commands, focusing on one area. "Obviously it's plasma, but what kind?"
"Plasma?" Loki asked.
"Yeah, there are four states of matter: solid, liquid, gas and plasma. All fire is plasma, although it's usually a combination of elements from whatever it's burning. This is much simpler, and more stable."
"I can control what it burns, if that helps," she offered.
"How much control?" he asked, unsure.
She gave him a cocky smile. "Perfect control."
He narrowed his eyes at her, and grabbed a piece of scratch paper. He drew a line down the center, and slid it across the table to her. "Prove it. Burn the one side, but not the other."
She raised her eyebrows, but picked up the paper, feeding it to the small flame. Once it took, she removed her hand from beneath it and watched the green fire crawl across the page. She stared at it in deep concentration.
"Will you lose control if you don't stay focused?" Tony asked loudly, always one to pop the balloon to see who would jump.
"No," Loki answered calmly, her focus unshaken. "The fire would return, extinguishing it."
"Return?"
"From wherever it was summoned."
"So that's plasma from somewhere else in the universe? You didn't turn something into fire?"
"That is correct." The fire had made it's way to the dividing line, and continued to crawl downward, ignoring the other half as if it didn't even exist.
Tony sprang into action as an idea came to him. He swiped away the current readings on his panel, and called up another. "Cancel out the background light..." he murmured, glancing up at the ceiling. He made a few more adjustments, and suddenly the graph turned green, a name appearing above it. "That can't be right..."
"What?"
"I ran a spectrometer on it, it's what astrophysicists like Foster and Selvig use to determine the composition of a star, just by looking at the light it emits. Stars are basically big balls of plasma, so..."
"So what is the problem?" Loki watched as the last of the side of paper burned away, and set it back down on the counter, but Tony was too wrapped up in the new mystery to notice.
"This says it's made of sulfur. Sulfur isn't even conductive, and at normal atmosphere it's always almost always solid... to make plasma from it..." he glanced around the lab as if it would answer his questions, "you'd have to be in the middle of a supernova." he finished.
"What is a supernova?" Loki asked.
"When a star destabilizes... dies, really, it explodes," he said.
"Yes, I am familiar with this phenomenon, go on,"
"Well we call it a supernova," Tony finished lamely.
Loki thought about that a moment. "It's certainly possible that the fire was summoned from a dying star," she answered casually. "Mjulnir was forged in just such a place."
Tony stared at her in disbelief. "I suppose that would explain the density..." he muttered absentmindedly. "But. But! If you summoned sulfur plasma here, why didn't it cause an enormous explosion, or dissipate or coalesce into a solid?! For that matter, why hasn't your hand, much less everything in a 5-mile radius, been totally vaporized? It should be much hotter than..." he gestured wildly, "a freaking lighter."
Loki shrugged. "Magic. It's much harder to actually summon than it is to control."
Tony ran a hand through his hair. "Ok, let me pull everything up." He started tapping on commands on his panel until it was filled with little windows. He pulled over a second panel so he could open even more.
"Summon the fire, start the paper burning, and then make it go away," he ordered.
Loki picked up the paper, a little unsure what she had gotten herself into, and did as she was told. Once she had done it, he immediately started analyzing the raw data.
He tapped a window, and after a moment Dr. Banner's face appeared in it. "Yeah?" he asked.
"Bruce, you gotta come up here. This is some really whack data." he didn't even turn to face the video call as he spoke. Bruce spied Loki in the background, and offered her a sympathetic look.
"Ok, but it will take me a while to get over there."
"Whatever," Tony ended the call. He worked in silence for a few moments longer.
"Errrr... If Dr. Banner is coming, may I leave?" she asked uncomfortably.
"What?" Tony had forgotten she was there. "Oh, sure." He tapped the com window again, and this time the face of a man she didn't know came up. "Agent Sitwell, I'm officially designating you babysitter. Take her wherever."
"Yessir. I will meet you at the front, Miss Loki," he said politely, and ended the call.
"Off you go then," Tony said absently. "I've got work to do."
Loki felt a little hurt at his dismissal, and the feeling only intensified as she endured the unnerving ride down the elevator. It must have shown on her face, because when she met agent Sitwell at the front doors, he patted her consolingly on the arm.
"Hey, don't feel bad, he does that when he's on to something. I've even seen him pull that on Miss Potts," he offered.
"Really?" she asked, surprised he could be that much of a jerk.
Sitwell shrugged. "Believe me, she's used to it. She worked for him for three years before they started dating."
They exchanged a look that clearly questioned Pepper's sanity.
"So, where to?" Sitwell asked. "I can't really take you just anywhere, but..."
Loki shook her head. "I'd just like to go back to my rooms, please. I'm tired."
Sitwell smiled sympathetically. "Sure thing." He opened the doors and gestured her towards one of the black company cars parked on the street. After opening her door, he jogged around and got in to the back seat on the other side. "SHIELD housing unit 9," he told the driver, who nodded and pulled out into traffic.
Loki stared out the window as they drove, trying not to be overwhelmed by the destruction she saw around her. How was she going to fix all of this? Her reverie was broken by the nagging feeling of being watched. She turned suddenly to catch Sitwell staring at her.
"I'm sorry!" he smiled sheepishly at having been caught. "It's just... Before, it was my job to run the facial recognition search that eventually located you in Stuttgart. It's fascinating, even though you've changed genders, and therefore all of your features are softer, they're all still in the exact same locations. I'd wager the program would still work."
Loki blinked at him. She felt like some kind of insect to be examined, and she didn't like it. Instead of making a response, she merely turned to face out the window again. Sitwell seemed suitably discomforted.
Once they reached the apartment, Sitwell let her in. "I'll be right outside if you need anything." He sounded a little apologetic for his earlier behavior. She nodded and closed the door, hearing him lock it on the other side. So this was to be a prison, too.
She sighed heavily and made straight for her room, falling face-first onto the bed. She vanished her fancy clothes, replacing them with the leather pants and tunic she was more familiar with. When she excavated her head from the pillow, she noticed someone had placed the laptop and magazines from Pepper and Natasha on the desk. The book from Dr. Bryardie was next to them. She got up and went over to the desk, flipping through a couple magazines before tossing them back down frustrated. She glared at the book-she did not want to tackle that right now.
Instead she picked up the laptop, walking back to her bed and curling up with it open on her lap. It booted up automatically, and she stared at the desktop for a long time. She had a general idea as to how computers were run, but the specifics...
"Would you like some assistance?" the voice of Jarvis piped up from the laptop's speakers.
Loki had jumped at the unexpected voice, but then sighed appreciatively. "Yes, please."
"What would you like to do?" he asked pleasantly.
She ran her hands over her face. "I don't know... I want... I need to feel human, Jarvis." She couldn't help smirking at the irony of her request to the AI.
"Might I suggest a guided tour of the history of art and music? Most humans cite their creative abilities as the defining difference between them and lesser life forms, although the distinction is somewhat incorrect."
Loki shrugged. "Sure, seems as good a place to start as any."
Jarvis opened a browser, and took her to a page showing highly stylized animals drawn on a rough rock wall. "Some of the earliest known works of art are found on cave walls near Lascaux, France..."
