It's a strategy game for ridiculously convoluted political intrigue. That sounds like the sort of outcome it would produce. The Valar frowned on it because it occasionally ended in fistfights.

Sounds like a fun game. Her strategy did lack the important component of 'remotely adequate parenting', let alone 'remotely adequate parenting for the prospective queen of the frost giants'.

You strike me as a perfectly good prospective frost giant queen.

Don't give her any credit for it. If I'd turned out like she wanted I'd have desired their extinction and likely contemplated suicide on discovering I was one.

...you okay?

I'm fine. Took some adjustment, but I'm fine. Also I may or may not have cool ice powers. I didn't think I could get any more contemptuous of Odin but clearly my imagination didn't suffice.

And disinclined to drive any planetsful of people extinct?

I am as ever inclined against.

Good, he thinks, since you just fought a Balrog and the King keeps pushing 'weapons that would give us a chance against Loki' farther down the priority queue and Huan can't fly.

He has 'weapons that would give us a chance against Loki' in the priority queue? I don't know whether I'm insulted or flattered. I may be both. ...This is the second time you have opined that your dog could take me and this time you're saying it the same day I killed a Balrog, please explain.

Well, sure, but 'figure out how to defeat the friendly alien' seems like a strictly lesser priority than 'figure out how to defeat the evil Vala who is the primary means via which the friendly alien might be suborned', so I hope the plan wasn't to develop anything specialized versus me as opposed to 'sufficient to give us a chance against Loki' being a benchmark for general efficacy?

Yeah, of course.

Okay, then I can just be flattered.

They're approaching camp. You should probably fly as an invisible bird more, that being the very very obvious way to take you down and Elves having so much better vision than you that we could be within archery range when you're not even in eyesight range.

Yeah, good plan. Do you want to be invisible?

These mountains have now been very thoroughly checked for trouble. We're safe here. I was thinking more generally.

The only trouble with being invisible is that I can't turn my illusions invisible - that being sort of a contradiction with their continued existence - so I have to either hide them behind something and rely on my ability to color-match the sky, which I'm sure is inadequate, or have them follow me from underground, which makes me worry about accidentally losing them and not being able to find them again.

You could illusion yourself as a different kind of bird, now that it's widely known you can only be one kind of bird? Or you can try color-matching the sky and I can tell you whether I'd make that shot.

So Loki makes an illusion of the outside of her illusion notebook and then encircles it in sky blue.

I'm also a bird right now, I'm not going to be able to tell. At worst you could have twenty little circles like that in the air around you when you fly, so anyone inclined to attempt it has bad odds and it'll be obvious if they tried.

That works; thanks. She dismisses it. You can't tell while you're a bird if you could make a shot? I thought you kept your vision.

For almost every relevant purpose, but for archery the distance between your eyes matters a lot, and swift eyes are not positioned for depth vision.

Oh, I see, I should've thought of that.

Most people don't look out at the world and think about what they could hit with an eight-foot-tall longbow.