10533/Where Stars Shine Brightest

Where Stars Shine Brightest
Date of Scene:	21 March 2022
Location:	Hayden Planetarium
Synopsis:	Jane gets a visitor.
Cast of Characters:	Jane Foster, Loki

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Jane Foster has posed:
The equinox tiptoes up to catch New York in its embrace, and at various places around the world, certain ancient monuments and cutting edge observatories catch the moment when shadow and light balance one another. Creeping day extends further in the northern hemisphere, while the south begins the slow decline to a time of ice and cold, storm and wind. Unless, of course, you're Rio and the party keeps going.

Jane sits cross-legged in her chair at a desk, a pair of heavy Bluetooth headphones on as she faces a mic assembly. Screens feeding oodles of data might as well be grimoires for the modern age, since the knowledge contained there about dimensions and folded space-time probably exceeds what the lay person would understand. Of course, explaining the significance of a black hole, cool as it may be, is a lot less interesting than yapping about the elongation of Venus' orbit and some exciting radio signals emanating from what might be an aggressive black hole. The night's menu for a live podcast that winds down in its topics, headed straight for the Q&A section.

"Cara and Javier, what have we got for listener mail on this glorious first day of spring?" Sundays are /fun days/!"

The Hayden Planetarium is mostly after hours, with a late show in the actual planetarium over and the guests wandering around the exhibits courtesy of a couple of Jane's underlings. That's what you get for being part of a delegation from the ESA come to admire the handiwork, and some multinational conglomerate building reusable rockets with eyes on a Freedom grant from this Richards person. She sits back in her chair, watching the screens, but glad for the mute on her microphone and eyeing up the 'camera off' button... Tempting.

Loki has posed:
Loki is a man that feels the shifting of the seasons, the celebrations of the Equinox deeply. Across the world, there are those that attempt to keep the traditions alive, even if they have no idea, no concept truly of what their ancestors felt, did, or dreamed of. It is the 'holiday' for the ladies in his life, or rather, in his own mind, one, and having returned from Asgard for that 'Mother's Day' celebration, the younger Prince intermingling in the exhibits. He's dressed neatly in suit and tie, dark with touches of gold and green. His hair is combed back and off his face, and with each step, he gains //looks// before they look away.

He looks familiar, somehow, but not.

How quickly some forget.

Voices speak of the stars, some of the heavens and the importance given them by earlier tribes, and others hearkening back to the star patterns shown in the late show- the skies of a thousand years ago, two thousand..

Jane Foster has posed:
The seasons balance on a spindle, same growing light and diminishing shadow or the inverse as has happened for four and a half billion years. Spheres twisting around stars know these shifts, where planets at least tilt, though the season might last a day or centuries like poor overturned Uranus. The strange beauty and countless variations on a theme no doubt respond to something deeper in creation than simply marking a calendar. What makes sentient creatures themselves if not an awareness for the passage of time? Even near-immortal beings mark the coming and going of the centuries, the seasons measured perhaps in their way.

The brunette rubs the spot on her wrist below the golden bangle. The desk left a mark there, but not much of one, punching a thin line against overly pale skin. She watches the blue lines under the skin for a moment, then shakes her head.

Cara and Javier cheerfully take up their part of the conversation, giving her time to lift an empty tea cup automatically and take a sip of the lukewarm contents within. She sighs, a look rendered in longing depths as much as the tones of her voice. No help to be had, after all, her electric kettle and abundant tea selection too far to be reached before the broadcast resumes.

With a quick check around, she unfolds herself out of the chair and darts out of her office, checking if the interns or someone on staff better suited to doing work at a desk has left hot water anywhere. Coffee's popular but not as much as that. Her shadow resolves to the exact same, rather blithe woman she always is, hair pulled back in a French braid. Clothes differ. But the ageless state of affairs is no different.

Neither is the ferocious artifact clamped to her wrist as an unassuming little bangle bracelet, totally unimportant, dully gold. Nope, not the Mother of Storms /at all/. For which the murmurs and cadences of conversation below attract her notice, a smile ever present for those caught in the sundown glow of the last hour of liquid light before the Big Apple becomes the City that Never Sleeps. A pause. A lingering. Silhouettes pull in a certain way.

Or the bracelet itches. Either way.

Loki has posed:
Magic.

The younger son, the adopted son of the much beloved Frigg feels magic in ways that cannot be truly explained or comprehended. It simply is. It is a trick of birth and of training that others simply lack that has him feel the wash of familiar yet not so of the Storm-tossed bangle. There, in the middle of a group, Loki stops, his head turning around slowly and deliberately, green eyes searching. It's not an idle search, not one born of curiosity and done only for the sake of knowledge, no.

As soon as Jane darts from her office and into something a little more of a public venue, but not much, green eyes are locked. See how the shadows and form conflict yet conform.. and a brief frown crosses the man's face. He can almost feel the fires of Hel upon his face.

He had hoped if he ignored it, there would be peace.

No. Such. Luck.

Once finding she for whom he'd searched, Loki begins his path towards her, his voice calling out, though not loudly, but enough to cut through the murmurs and softly respectful conversations at the displays.

"Jane." A single word spoken, a quiet, cultured English accented voice.

Jane Foster has posed:
Magic soars in motes. Everyone has a little in their heart, maybe some more than others. The huge auras of the Greenwich Village sorcerers tend to drown out the noise elsewhere, too, but so many people together leave auras layered, colliding, and awhirl in joyous colours. The festivals that thrive on the return of the light are, in their way, full of promise and joy.

Jane slides along the hallway, still visible up there beyond the walk that folds and wraps past the theatre and the planetarium displays. It's not like the staff need to /hide/.

Not like a woman in her particular state could, not from Loki, when he is a thing of mischief and she's evidence of the broken boundaries, the loopholes in the law, a vexing refusal to behave according to already pulverized ways things should be. But more importantly, she's the story without the counterpoint, the melody bereft of a harmony. In some ways, the messy kludge of humanity all around is just that: a messy old kludge. They're clay and earth, fire and noise. The signal from her is awfully damn pure in its way, magically.

No such luck hiding.

She has a moment of double-taking him down there. Yes, he's put together and precise in ways that cut hard. Too smooth, someone who knows the value of looks, deeds, and a uniform as power. Of course, the prince who cares for things such as that also reflects the mother who probably corrected his rune casting and smoothed a lock from his brow in other times. The idea springs to mind, for no reason at all.

The gig is up if she speaks. But she does, though the pronunciation is a bit off, maybe fluid and melodic enough to confound. Maybe; possibly not. "Loki" spoken in Aesir is a bit different from Old Norse and it's not just "Low-key", you know?

Loki has posed:
To Loki, the magic that comes from the streets, the bold and beautiful symphony to one is uncontrolled. Lazy. Sloppy. Not even his chaos is that bold, that loud.. it as he seeks to be. Quiet and understated. That other //stuff// is cacophonous, not to be trusted or respected. A planet of hedge-mages, as it were.

It's the woman in her state, however, that he searches for and discovers in the corridor.

And the sound of her voice, the way in which his name is spoken? It hearkens to home, not the bastardization that some give it here. It hadn't always been such, but now, there is change, and the young prince and sorcerer can feel it.

It also gives him pause; the breath of Asgard fleeting across his face, there and gone before the mask that he wears for all save one is settled once again. One hand seeks a pocket to rest while the other gestures lightly, encompassing everything- the building, the general idea of the museum.

"So this is where you are. Amongst the stars, as you believe you should be." He nods at the bangle that looks like any other but doesn't. It's made its mark, and it's acknowledged. "Does it do anything to fulfill that desire?"

Jane Foster has posed:
Sloppy music that lingers in cities still harbours the rhythms of life itself, disordered and vibrant, spawning hopeful eddies spun among a wider kaleidoscope that's everchanging. Some people might be more suited to changing the shades or snapping them clear and true. No one's going to deny that Captain America brings a laser focus to purpose in the same way Christmas often delivers a softening, welcome shade that suffuses the darkened world in a different kind of light.

Here, things may seem more ordered due to the nature of a museum and the contemplative aspects of studying things that dwarf any human, any civilisation. True, some types of empire span galaxies, but galaxies are a speck in a filament far more vast than even most beings can fathom.

"Yes, that's my name on the door," she quips. Jane gestures back the way she came when Loki rouses his questions, such as they are. "I believe they have me in the phone book. Online, anyway. If print ones exist, they must be rare."

Just goes to show even technology evolves at a lightning clip, for a young race and a young people. Her smile doesn't falter, head tilted to the sun glowing in all its resplendence. "You tell me. Learning and pushing the knowledge of what we collectively know, does that satisfy some part within?"

Loki has posed:
The references to 'phone book' are lost on the Prince as 'pop culture'. Something he's not familiar with, nor concerned with. Brows crease in that brief, visual acknowledgment of ignorance, and he moves on. Quickly and easily. There is a great deal to learn, and in his short time 'back', there are some things that still surprise him.

"I was asking you. If suddenly you have become a collective, that would be a surprising turn of events." A soft laugh exits the God of Chaos before he simply shrugs his shoulders. "Staring at the stars and recounting stories." He shakes his head soon after and makes a light gesture offering a walk, perhaps.

"As for the masses, why should you care? They are better left in ignorance. Such is their lot."

Jane Foster has posed:
You never know what a man as unusual as Loki Odinson picks up in his many travels. He might recall when phone books were cutting edge and full of nonsensical information like anniversary presents, tsunami instructions, and ads for local pizza places complete with their unchanging menus.

Jane breaks into a soft, easy laugh. "A collective? I prefer not to be legion, thank you. One of me is probably enough for the world." She leans against the rail, forsaking the mild peep of the phone in her back pocket. The podcast will just have to go on without her as she gazes on the god of stories and mischief in all his vaunted lines, an assessment rendered in wide cinnamon-brown eyes framed by curious graces instead of the harder disdain or distrust that could just as easily be considered a common feature. Loki is Loki, after all. The stories so often lean in his favour until they don't.

"The stories of the stars will never cease to fascinate me, but then that's because their stories are those of life itself. Even subterranean cultures must have something to say about them, don't you think?" Not quite flippant, but it's doubtful she asks idly or from a place of complete uncertainty on that. Fact matters too much for the brunette in her arts and scientific pursuits, where facts bleed into hypotheses all built on their own celestial narrative. Imagination, that's what gives the quantum physicists their real punch.

He won't have long for her to descend the ramp, switchbacking past a diorama of the moons of Saturn, passing a speckled projection of starfields captured by the James Webb. Far better than seeing archangels leading a massacre, anyway.

"There are minds opened by questions, enlivened by wonder, braving the unknown. If they can be reached, who am I to deprive them of what I know? Knowledge isn't meant to molder on a shelf," she says when she draws closer to the Asgardian prince. "It is meant to be savoured, experienced, shared. In those ways will it grow and expand beyond itself, as space itself does, if you want the unnecessary metaphor."

Loki has posed:
Loki would be the first to say, and rightly so, that the stories of his deeds done upon Midgard were told by drunken feast-goers fresh off the battlefields. They pick one, two.. and because the man has always been slighter, more lithe of frame than his more famous brother, he'd been cast in a less than favorable light. With each tale, it begins rightly enough; aid is asked of him, and his solutions were.. a product of thinking outside the box.

Hands fall into his pants pockets in a slightly casual frame, and a shrug gives his shoulders rise. "There are those deserving of the knowledge, and the masses?" He shakes his head and *tsks* softly, skirting the word 'worthy'. "It would only frustrate them, not understanding their place under the stars." His head shakes again, and he gestures with a nod of his head towards the bracelet. "Just like that. Confuses and confounds, the unknown that remains there. The 'why' of it all only serves to cause unrest and unease."

Jane Foster has posed:
What deeds can be reaped from the lips of men, wet with ale and conceit? The stories woven of the younger prince of Asgard, if not the youngest, must take on a wholly different character. Jane looks askance at Loki, surveying him rather easily, though with none of the simpering or the calculated malice that surely travels wherever his reputation slinks ahead or his tattered notoriety leaks in thereafter. Hers is an entirely different quality altogether of assessment, though the thin value of home-turf advantage might be responsible for being more at ease than highly guarded.

"You know the story of Odysseus of Ithaka?" she asks. A casual question as he tempers a shrug and she glances out over the floor again, taking in the whole details. "A man quite unlike any other for his time or place, wasn't he? Valued without a doubt, though his tale differs so entirely from Achilles, Herakles, Agamemnon. All those 'proper' heroes endowed with a strength of arms and certain nobility. Aeneas follows that tradition some, though not quite the same. So you ask me the value of knowledge and then set before us that knowledge might frustrate, yet it's the feats of Odysseus and not so much Achilles that people remember. They know /him/ for the tendon, but they know the Trojan horse best of all. Curious then, does that signal an appreciation for the unknown, a desire for the answer to the riddle? That we are always striving, asking relentlessly why, must signal something."

An endearment that might naturally come to the tongue gets bitten off. "The why may cause confusion. The why defines who we are, what and where in a frame of time."

Loki has posed:
Loki breaks into something of a smile, a soft laugh exits his throat as he shrugs yet again. He'll not agree, regardless of argument. (He can almost see his mother smile as only a mother can when looking at her immovable son.) "We come from different worlds," he reminds. "Yours, a realm so unused to structure. A misguided belief so tenderly held that curiosity and knowledge can elevate even the least." And his, well.. he was raised so very differently. A prince in a warrior's court, in a realm ruled so firmly that very few rose above their lot in life.

He is very much the product of Asgard.

It hasn't escaped his note, certainly, that there is neither the air of malice, nor fear, nor anything that he has met since his brief return to this realm. Instead, there is the soft breath of understanding, a hint of something that has elevated the once and still shadow of the woman. At first, his offer of aid was in response to an undoubtedly ill-chosen idea to gain his brother's favor, but now?

She intrigues the younger prince.

Jane Foster has posed:
Frigga's devotion to her children is matched only by her wits to spar with Odin. The real threat in Asgard may reside in the Odinforce, but the mother of the gods holds no insignificant power of her own. Nor does Jane lack affection for the woman who extended her arm to the first mortal in the Golden Realm for ages upon ages, despite having little reason to know or trust humanity in the modern age. "Unused to structure when we've built societies and civilisations on those very principles? When we prize order out of chaos, though perhaps sometimes cherish our individual freedoms a touch too much to fall into line. Our nature could be argued as striving to build structure at every turn. Throw ten of us into any wilderness and you'll see it emerge within a week or two."

He was raised so very differently, and therein lies the rub. A man whose position was ordained by birth, flawed or faulted, choosing a different path as did Sif by taking up the blade. What of Jane, upstart mortal doomed to die -- already dead -- who watches said defiance from the sidelines, that of Thor Odinson and Amora the Enchantress, Loki and Sif, so many of a generation that refuses utterly to behave as their peers and elder generations would have? Is that not the /tale/ of youth?

Is that not the tale of the god of stories? To outline the parameters and step outside them, stay within them.

"Knowledge breaks the barriers and it overcomes other weaknesses. We solve for sickness and scarcity. To hold it all to your chest means the knowledge is an inert tool, or a dead seed, its potential wasted," she points out softly. "You build further horizons when you dare. Surely you know what it means to fearlessly approach the edge of the unknown, laughing where others hold back or walk into that darkness awaiting what's on the other side. We have abundance of caution, but we have a high taste for risk. That matters."

Loki has posed:
Loki has tried to be the dutiful son, servant of Asgard, prince of his people, and at each turn, at each attempt to show his value, his worth, there was something in the way. A wrong path chosen, a showing-up by the golden-haired son, so beloved of the All Father. Rebuffed at every juncture, finding a name and a path for himself was the next best thing so he could present his victories and thus be welcomed. To be loved.

So very simple, yet so very convoluted. Nothing is easy for the Trickster.

"Throw ten of you into any wilderness and there will be a single leader showing the way out," Loki reminds. "One must needs have a ruler, one that all will answer to, take direction from. Each must understand their role in order to survive, and it is in that single purpose that success is gained."

The prince looks down and away, hands still comfortably within his pants pockets. He's looking for something, perhaps, or someone before he returns his attention to Jane, the smile still present, though it shifts slightly. "Perhaps one day, we can continue this, perhaps at the Embassy? There is still some unresolved business between you, that.." and a nod is given in gesture to the storm-tossed bangle, "and myself." And Hel..

Jane Foster has posed:
"There will be some method of structure and organization that remains malleable. You can have an excellent leader, which does hardly any good when he or she cannot tell you where clean water is," Jane points out through a grin. The swatch of her braid carelessly snaps between her shoulder blades, a clean mahogany arc swaying gracefully when she tips her chin. "All contribute their value, but there have been plenty of examples of councils or, frankly, elevations based on a specific skill set. Or a popularity contest. I won't lie, that factor shows up in academic settings more than I might like." She shakes her head again.

His question draws her gaze down to her wrist and back again up to Loki, charged impression that he cuts against the backdrop of stars and planets, nebulae and places that no human camera has ever been. Yet there's a compelling, highly accurate visual image all the same. (Factually correct, no less.) Holding his gaze for some time might be uncannily direct or downright challenging, but she braves it all the same.

A chuckle briefly lingers. "I have a friend who is long overdue at the embassy, and reminds me often to check on the quality of the mead there. Rather agreeable reason with an invitation now more suited to my whims than my erudite, jazz-loving roommate's." Which clearly erases Thor as the source of that statement. "I'll warn you that trying to pry it off my arm doesn't end well." A rueful note hides in plain sight.

In case he had any ideas of hauling off a treasure and running away cackling. He might!

Loki has posed:
"Skill set. You speak of worth based upon ability. One that knows how to find water has no need to know how to shear a sheep or how to butcher an elk." As far as Loki is concerned, it speaks to his point all the same. "Rulers understand how to use their people to the best of ability. Generals, how to use their forces. There's no need to speak of stars and 'why'. To each man, their duty is to their duty, which in turn, raises the whole."

Still, as far as the young prince is concerned, his visit here is complete. A pleasant conversation, a brief skirmish of wit where both have come to a semblance of agreement, even if there appears to be none.

"Oh, I know," and his attention returns to the bangle. "I shan't attempt to separate your arm for it. It //would// be a shame." He's joking, right? "No, there are other shadows at work," Loki exhales in a soft sigh. He knows the danger, and it's only going to get harder. "There is mead, yes. Make sure you send a guard to find me upon your arrival?"

With that, then, Loki does remove his hands from his pockets and offers a gesture, a simple nod, "Until then, Lady." With that, the younger Prince finds his way to the exit and beyond.

Jane Foster has posed:
"I speak of different talents or qualities. I don't believe that every system leads to a single person atop it, though that's a perspective invariably influenced by the lattice of the universe's beginning to its possible end several billion trillion years from now." Jane gestures at the rose-gold flame of the setting sun carving up the city's skyline into long canyons and the swathe of pavement enfolding the American Natural History Museum. "Not everyone cares what the general or the president has to say or ask, and they want to follow their own inclinations. Though how we leapt from rulership to the individuality of Americans..."

Her laugh is almost silent, a clash of tongue and teeth instead of steel and spell. Not that she can wield either of the latter with any remote proficiency to worry the Trickster.

"So quick to flee? Ah, the enticement of another more grand than the current establishment and company," she muses, almost to herself, and dips her head as he chooses then to depart. Loki's pull is not as obvious as the greater suns, but then anyone in astronomy knows that it isn't stars that tug inexorably on the fabric of space time.

It's always the ones you can barely see at all, but know their presence nonetheless.