Actually, not drinking was frequently embarrassing; I learned to tolerate it in modest quantities and spill things and pretend to be drunker than I was.

There's definitely a song for making oneself sober.

The part of my healing magic that does poison clears it right up, but that would have been terrible to be caught doing at home.

Are you going to go back? If we win this war and seem capable of getting along afterwards?

I want to find out what happened to Sigyn. And find out if my sister will hate me. And if my father knew. I suppose I don't really see myself living on Asgard again.

....no one's likely to claim the Helcaraxe, if you want a frost giant kingdom here.

Ha. Cozy. I don't know enough about frost giants to predict if I'll be able to finagle that fraction of Odin's plan, though, let alone to figure out whether they'd find the environment just like home. Jötunheim is, I think, farther from its sun, and has life on it besides them.

You seem sufficiently unlike the Eldar that I don't think the kind of civilization we intend to build once we win would suit your temperament. Nonethless, I'm sure we'd be happy to aid you in any way we can.

Well, I'm not sure I'm like anybody. I may not know much about frost giants, so I can't be sure, but I don't think they're a whole society of Lokis. It would... look very different.

They would rule the galaxy. Benevolently.

Yes, exactly. And frost giants do not do that. They're less of a galactic force than Asgard is, and less by aesthetic self-handicap. I have no idea what their deal is. But I plan to find out.

So will you still be working full-time on teleportation, even though it's no longer the fastest avenue to a victory here?

I still have to teleport if I want to get anywhere else. I suppose I could be enticed into doing something else first but I'm not planning to stay on one planet for however improbably few centuries it takes your father to invent the spaceship, discover the falsity of the stars, get around that, and go visit Eru's other pet projects.

Without time pressure I think even he would take a few millennia to get around to that. Ruling this world is actually going to present all sorts of challenges, and then there's breaking everyone out of the Halls of Mandos...

And all sorts of local goals are much simplified if I can just stroll into some galactic commerce hub with shiny magical trade goods and come home with whatever is convenient to speed that up.

Yes, I suppose they are.

And hire people! I could hire people with galactic-standard equipment to do things! It'd be easier to build cities that way, for sure.

I expect that Dwarves are very good at building cities and that I can hire a lot of them. This is probably much worse than galactic-standard equipment but it'll be very beautiful and built to endure for the lifetime of Arda, I can do that.

Fair enough.

I'd like to hear more about the frost giant thing, if it's not a painful topic.

What about it?

Why are Asgard and Jotunheim in a perpetual state of war? How would Asgard's ruler have had the opportunity to pull something like this off? How much planning would it have required, and who would she have delegated it to?

We've been in a perpetual state of war for an exceedingly long time and I'm not sure anyone remembers how it started; everything's about more recent grievances acquired over the course of the perpetual state of war. I assume she invaded Jötunheim and managed to get into the palace - if I'm a princess or possibly prince-refitted-to-her-cultural-needs - or somebody's house, if I'm not. I don't know how her not-technically-sorcery magic works so she may have patched arbitrary flaws in her plan with it; she normally uses it seldom but I'm not sure if that's because she knows 'oh, it's not sorcery' is an extremely flimsy excuse or because there's a genuine usage limitation or if it takes more of the mysterious sacrifices she had to offer up to get it every time. I'm assuming it's her magic I'm under to make me usually not blue, age correctly, possibly not manifest frost powers, etcetera; my own spells are approached differently from conventional sorcery but the underlying mechanics are the same and something would have gone wrong with the first one I cast - which was on myself - if it had been sorcery and I'd been operating on the wrong understanding of my body plan. I think. She might have had no accomplices at all depending on how sure she was she'd be able to bring home a suitable baby, or could have told Frigg, or could have put me with some random person for the duration of a pretend Asgardian pregnancy in order to fool him. She may or may not have planned far enough in advance to collect intelligence on Jötunheim's neonatal population and its kidnappability; it's just within the realm of possibility that she was storming a palace and spotted me and had a flash of something I hesitate to call brilliance.

How many palaces has Jotunheim? How many princes or princesses, do they know you were stolen or would they consider it plausible that Odin killed a child?

Don't know, I've never been there except for when I was too young to remember a thing. I don't even know if they actually have a monarchy. I could be the President's kid or a random orphan or the supposed reincarnation of a prophet or something. We're just supposed to know how to kill them. It'd be completely plausible that she'd kill a child, though, that's only against the honor code for non-frost giants, like so many other things.