"Alright."

He relays the final roster aloud for the other Avengers.

"Do we want to leave immediately? I don't know what, uh, time zone you guys who went to Valinor are on."

"I'm not quite sure either. We spent less than a day there, but it was pretty late when we arrived."

:I would prefer to get a night's sleep first. And prepare our magical protections. Which of you were present for the battle we will be revisiting? I wish to get a better sense of what the main threats are and what protective talismans we ought to wear for it: 

"Uh, I was there, so were Cap, Thor, Bruce, and Natasha." He points out the latter two as he says their names. "As far as the threats, uh, lots of aliens in big spaceships? They're pretty squishy individually but there were a fuckton of them. I can show you some video recordings—uh, FRIDAY—

"We're planning to go in about five minutes before past me nukes their mothership anyway, that'll give us just enough time to get in position to grab the Space and Mind Stones before they get taken off where we can't get to them, without exposing ourselves to too much risk of random violent death by alien.

"So, possibly bigger danger is Loki, Thor's somewhat...wayward brother who was orchestrating the whole thing on Thanos' behalf. Thor thinks he was mind-controlled, I'm not so sure but that's not the point. He had the Mind Stone in his scepter and was using it to mind-control people, and he had the Space Stone in this blue cube thing called the Tesseract and was using it to make a portal for his army of aliens to come through. Uh, Thor and Loki are both Asgardians, they look like humans but they're super strong and have really advanced tech, a few cultures here a thousand years ago worshipped them as gods, et cetera. Even most stuff I make can't really touch them. Loki in particular can shape-shift. I don't know how the durability or the shapeshifting will hold up against your magic, but if you have to fight him I'd suggest something other than blasting.

"The third problem is that the secret agency that took the Mind Stone after the battle, and tried to take the Space Stone, was actually evil. We didn't know it at the time—we gave them the Stones not knowing they'd been infiltrated—but it will make things significantly more complicated than they otherwise would be if they manage to get away with them this time—if they'd actually ended up at SHIELD like they should've we could probably just drop in way later and ask them—"

FRIDAY plays some video clips of the Battle of New York on the conference room's main screen.

Vanyel is immediately very distracted by the concept of recordings of moving pictures! (Everyone else has seen them before and at least somewhat gotten used to it.) 

Leareth watches for a minute, until he's pretty sure he's seen everything that's useful to him. 

He turns to Thor. :Would you mind if we tested some non-destructive, easily reversible Velgarth magic on you? It seems important to check if Velgarth Mindhealing or Compulsions would work on Asgardians: 

:Pretty sure Thoughtsensing does: Vanyel volunteers. :I met Loki, in Mandos' realm. He was being kept prisoner in Sauron's place, but I could tell something was off: 

"It might not function the same when dead, though, so we'd better test it. Go ahead, I guess, just warn me of exactly what you're going to do first."

"I'm going to drop the shield I have on you to let them do the test," Strange tells Thor, and then does so.

Leareth turns to Nayoki. Nods.

:I am going to attempt a compulsion, which is mage-work, and then a Mindhealing set-command: Nayoki tells Thor. :Both will be very simple; they should prevent you from walking or moving your feet, but have no other effects. I will leave each one for ten seconds so that you can test it and attempt to break it, and then undo it - or, if you ask us to, I will undo it sooner. Ready?: 

"Yes."

She tries the compulsion, exactly as described. 

Thor is unable to move his feet for ten seconds!

"Huh. That's weird," he says.

Also, now that Nayoki is looking, she notices another small mind in what appears to be empty space near Thor. Definitely not a human, too simple even to be an animal, and oddly, artificially regular, but something with its own limited intelligence, nonetheless.

She'll ask him about it after. 

:Now I will test the Mindhealing set-command: 

This one has the same effect, but it's a lot faster, and it - feels like something, in his head, in addition to the pure physical effects. Like a wall being dropped into place, and for a fraction of a second the world is soft around the corners and then it snaps back. 

Thor looks significantly more disconcerted by this one than the last one, but it also works.

"Of course, while Loki has the Mind Stone, this magic will probably be useless on him, at least if he notices it, and he'll probably be able to lay compulsions on you that your magic can't break."

:Leareth is very good at compulsions. I expect he could manage one subtle enough that Loki would not notice: 

:And the rest of our plan should involve not being noticed. Could you give us a timeline of when he would have the Mind Stone, versus not?: 

"He shouldn't have it when we arrive, and he'll be arrested shortly after that if all goes according to plan. However, we're going to be disrupting the plan, so there's a chance he might get it back."

Nod. :Then we will plan some contingencies for that. One of our people being mind-controlled could be very, very dangerous. Assuming we manage to disrupt things before he has the Stone, though, we should be able to neutralize him with Velgarth magic. And locate him even if he is shapeshifted: 

"That sounds good. Is there anything else you need?"

:Do your people have technology-based armour, or shielding, or anything else that could supplement our magical protections?: 

"Only what I'm wearing—oh, it's cloaked, I forgot." Thor looks like he's wearing normal Earth clothes, but as soon as he says that, it changes into his armor. He also appears to pull a huge battle-axe out of thin air; it seems to be the source of the strange mind that Nayoki saw earlier. "Unfortunately Asgard was recently destroyed, so we don't exactly have spares."

:Fascinating. I may wish to study it later, but there is not time now. Nayoki?: