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Loki is not technically banished. This is just - giving her mother space. To think. About what to do with her wayward child. She will be called back in a few years for a more permanent decision. Midgard's nice enough, anyway, and Sigyn's coming along.
The Bifrost lights up in all its colors and -
- this might be Midgard, but it is not a part of Midgard she ever saw and not the place she was expecting to be dropped, and there is no Sigyn with her.
She holds Lævateinn ready as a glaive. Maybe her mother feared her sorcery and thought she'd best be sent somewhere deadly under the impression she was meant to survive the trip -
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purposeful_glory
"Then I think I have to fight you, if you're going to change me so I can't do my job." It stands up. Very very slowly.
purposeful_glory
"You can't do any of your job if you're dead," she points out, "either. If you're a bird you can hate Elves all day and night; just not do anything else on the list."
"If I die. Maybe I'll get away, then I can do my whole job and still be an orc."
purposeful_glory
"You're not going to get away," she says. "If it helps I can make that more obvious."
"You'd say that anyway. Like orc-chief saying no one ever lives in fight with him."
purposeful_glory
So she shrugs, and turns invisible, and swats the orc to the ground again and pins it there by a forked Lævateinn again, and turns invisible again.
It lies there, breathing hard. "Are you asking me to choose bird or die, strange one?"
purposeful_glory
"I am asking you to think. You know what I want from you and you know I'm strong enough to get it. Can you think of any way for you to get anything you want given that? For you and for any of your friends and family I can catch or get Elves to catch for me."
"I want to go home and tell everyone if we don't hurt the Elves there'll be more Elves, billions of Elves and then we won't hurt Elves and won't fight you and won't have to be birds."
purposeful_glory
"But you'll still work for Melkor; and he can force different oaths from your new little orcs; and you'll still bring him prisoners to hurt," she says.
"Yes. Bringing prisoners makes more Elves too, the prisoners' children aren't proper orcs but their children are. Should do that even if we're waiting for billions of Elves."
purposeful_glory
Loki shakes her head. "Think harder. I want so little to have to kill you."
"I can't say things that don't serve Melkor, I promised to serve Melkor. If I thought of something that would make you happy it wouldn't be something that served Melkor and I couldn't tell you, it would be wrong."
purposeful_glory
"Okay. What, to the best of your understanding, constitutes serving Melkor, what does he want?"
"He wants to rule the world and have it full of orcs who obey him and fight his enemies."
"...yes. Are there other worlds?"
"I don't think he wants to rule the other worlds. He might if someone mentioned it, but he doesn't right now, and I serve him-today, not him-if-you-asked-strange questions."
purposeful_glory
Drat. Convince the orc that the entity it has these preferences from was not in fact Melkor, or that some illusion is and has updated his desires...? Not stable even if she pulls it off and she probably can't, the orc isn't stupid. She doesn't have a "billions of Elves" style argument for why serving Melkor actually means flying around eating bugs, either, let alone how it could continue to mean that if Melkor noticed orcs were flying around eating bugs with his horrible mind reading powers. She could turn the orc into a bird and build it a cage and it would be quite unable to harm but she can't build an aviary for the lot of them, she cannot hand Melkor flying spies who travel at a hundred miles an hour and fetch back all the things they see -
"Well," she says. "There may not be a solution."
"Well," she says. "There may not be a solution."
"You could turn us into mountain goats or wild cats? It's a bit closer to being an orc so it wouldn't be as scary, we couldn't go home because the other orcs would think we were food and eat us. Or you could send us to a faraway place with no Elves where we can only serve Melkor by having more children and teaching them."
purposeful_glory
"I can't do any animals besides birds. Or get you very far away, yet." And she's not sure she approves of creating orcs because she's not sure how intrinsic the CONSTANT AGONY is to being a new-made orc she hasn't personally attended to and eventually somebody would invent a boat or something.
"How does Melkor's mind-reading work?"
"How does Melkor's mind-reading work?"
"Feels like something splitting your head open, and then he knows what you're thinking and kills you if it's bad."
purposeful_glory
Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh. "What does he know about what you're thinking?"
It shakes its head. "I don't know. I'll be a bird if you want, a bird wouldn't be too bad."