Who: Loki, with a guest appearance by sleeping Jane What: Kidnapping. Where: Jane's home in New Mexico. When: Recently. Warnings/Rating: Technically drugs, I guess, and, kidnapping. Fun!
It was a simple thing, Loki's plan. He had given Thor an opportunity to avoid the hard road, and Thor had refused to take it. If he was forced to get nasty now, then it was Thor's own fault, and he took no small measure of pleasure in knowing he'd be able to get up close in personal with Thor's favorite pet human.
Finding her was breathtakingly easy, magic or no. He knew the town in which she lived - he had sent the Destroyer to hunt Thor there, after all. It was easy to step through the door and will it to open on New Mexico.
There was, of course, the possibility that she might be elsewhere. He had seen that memory of hers, her small triumph with the Tesseract, a power she could never possibly understand the potential of. It stung him to even think that she had seen it, touched it, worked with it before he had. He would rectify that soon enough.
Not without his power, though, and no power without the girl.
He stayed close to the outskirts of town. Miss Jane Foster would be unlikely to recognize him, but he was a wanted man, and not exactly inconspicuous with the blasted manacles hanging from his wrists and clanking with his every move. There wasn't much to the town, so he found her almost immediately, walking into her glass-walled home. He watched her all through the afternoon, in the shadow of a building, feigning that he was reading a book, neatly disguising the chain that hung in his lap. He marked her routines, and he waited.
It was late into the night before she emerged on the roof of the structure, settled down out of sight, and did not get up again. Sleeping under the stars, no doubt. How romantic, for a planet-bound mortal.
He came into the building through the back entrance. A scavenged rag muffled the sound of breaking glass. Not much fear of thieves, it seemed, since the security was somewhat lax.
The machine on the first floor caught his attention, briefly, and he stepped around it, examining it, fingers slipping over its metal sides. Cords and connections and clunky moving parts. So messy. He recognized it was far ahead of the curve for this particular realm, but still woefully slow by Asgardian standards. What was it, though? The curve of the metal inside was almost disturbingly familiar...
The Bifrost. That was what it brought to mind. Its graceful, spinning design, poised at the end of the bridge. So the girl was building an easy way to get to and fro from Asgard to Midgard, a replacement Bifrost. How very good to know. He would have to steal it, once he had the resources.
He took the stairs to the second floor, and then the ladder to the roof. He wore gloves and leather shoes to soften his footfalls and quiet his approach, and cloth tied through the metal chain that would otherwise have given his approach away. Stealth had always been one of his skills. When one couldn't face the enemy head on in a fight, other tactics needed to be developed.
He pushed himself up onto the roof. Not ten feet away lay Jane, slumbering peacefully.
His feet landed on the cement was a quiet skritch. He was only a shadow in the darkness of the rooftop, just a tall, slender silhouette. He had already considered knocking her out with a blunt object, but there was too much room for error, there. A little research in a library in New York had produced a simpler option, and a break-in at the laboratory of a nearby university had produced the means to enact it. There hadn't been much else to do in his exile except plan, and devour as much information as he could find on basic Midgardian institutions. As usual, his long hours of reading had come in useful, in the end. It wasn't as direct as a hammer to the temple, but chloroform was much better suited to his own style of problem-solving. He held the same chemical-soaked rag he'd used to break open the door up to the girl's face. She struggled a little, but that ended quickly enough.
Loki pocketed the rag, picked her up, and slung her over his shoulder. "You ought to thank me that I did not kill her outright," he said, to the brother who was not there, and to his teammates. If there were cameras in this building, as there likely were, they'd all get to hear it later anyway. There was more than one purpose to all this, after all. If Thor chose to act as Loki knew he almost certainly would, those 'friends' he boasted would never trust him again. They might even hunt him, for letting Loki go. What a treat it would be to see him become the outsider, the outlaw, the despised.
Then it was down the hatch, through the closest door, and into the night.