in which loki is bored and decides to give out magical rorschach tests

[newtruths]

"Gah!"

Loki sat up just in time for a small black key to bounce of his head and fall in his lap. He looked at it in bewilderment for a moment before it turned into a ring that coiled like a snake around his finger. When he stood he was rather on the short side, and thin as a rail. Really aside from overly large eyes he was rather unassuming. If you ignored the fact that he looked as if he'd walked off the set of The Lord of the Rings. And the fact that his garb seemed to constantly shift in cut and color.

Though as he took a little bit of a walk around and read a brochure someone handed my he slowly took on a more modern look that ended with a pair of ripped up and battered skinny jeans, the holes and tears in which seemed to be slowly wandering and meandering around his legs, and a faded old graphic t-shirt, the print of which apparently shifted every time one stopped paying attention to it. And no shoes! Because sometimes you just really don't feel like wearing them.

"I guess I didn't fall apart quite as badly as I thought I would," he laughed as he pocketed the brochure and fiddled with the ring that was a key minutes before. It shifted again as he walked. Now it was a small rubix cube, black on all side that he twisted and turned without really looking at it. And then it was a key again, which he flipped into the air and caught.

An idle Loki with nothing to do, no plots winding down, and no one to pester was never a particularly good thing.

He turned on his heel just in time to stop someone passing by. He holds the key out already turning into a puddle of liquid onyx in his hand and forming into something new. Something unknown.

"Tell me stranger, what do you see here?"

A simple enough magic was working here. A magical Rorschach test you could call it. Whatever the new target of his boredom thought they saw in the amorphous twisting liquid key would be plucked from their imagination and made solid. Sometimes they saw something they desired, money, their lost love. Sometimes they saw fears.  Sometimes it was something from their past.  Other times it was completely random; a bird, a shoe, a rock.  Yes one highly uncreative individual once imagined a rock in the depths of a reality altering wrong magic spell.  Whatever they thought they saw in this three dimensional Rorschach, would be plucked from their imagination and made solid in the palm of his hand.

Comments

[u_can_have_it_4_a_song]

The man who passes, nattily attired and walking with a silver-headed cane, pauses as the little object catches his eye, intrigued. "It looks..." he allows, after a moment's consideration, "like a promise. Where ever did you come by it, sir?"

[newtruths]

Oh. Now there's a surprising answer. A promise! He did love the unexpected and it was so hard to find it these days.

"Where I find most of my own promises I imagine," he nods firmly, "I made it."

[u_can_have_it_4_a_song]

"It's one you've not yet given, then?" the thin man asks, studying the little object, "or is it to yourself?"

[newtruths]

"Made, given, fulfilled, and returned. Surprisingly unbroken," he turns it over in his hand and hold the key up for closer inspection, "It was a long time in the works, I might be keeping it to myself for a bit now."

A promise, a game, a lie many long centuries in the making.

[u_can_have_it_4_a_song]

"A promise with a story, then," he observes. Removing his hat, he adds, "may I congratulate your craftsmanship, sir."

[newtruths]

"Thank you but I can't claim all the credit," he offers the stranger a wry grin, "It was crafted over a thousand years as it passed through the hands of hundreds."

[u_can_have_it_4_a_song]

"The best stories are," he replies, lips tugging upward in a wry hint of a smile in answer.