Idun knew she was at a severe disadvantage the moment Bragi presented the guns to her. They were deceptively simple in appearance, which meant that they were incredibly intimidating to look upon, and in all her years, Idun had never seen anything quite like them. Her husband handed her one politely, a gentleman to the end, and then they were both armed with three barrels of firepower. Three! It was wickedness to an extreme, and they had decided to fight one another with them. She knew this wasn't going to end well. Idun had very limited experience with guns, and Bragi had been able to fiddle with these prototypes for an undetermined period of time before he presented them to his wife. He could've practiced! Bragi might be an expert marksman by now! They each took their guns and, to be fair, bolted in opposite directions to spread the battlefield across their entire hall. But Bragi was an expert marksman, and he was very fast. Oh, she was definitely at a severe disadvantage.

( What Idun needed was a hostage. )

When Idun blinked, it felt like she always imagined being born felt. There had been no comprehension before this, not a single noise or image or proper thought. When she blinked, it cleared tears from her eyes and Idun realized that thinking of this as though she had just entered this world was far nicer than thinking of herself as ( frozen before this moment. )

The skald watched Bragi going over his prose. There was an eager sort of light in the skald's eyes. Bragi did not know the skald's name. He didn't know the tavern's name either. Or the town's for that matter. Bragi never asked. He hadn't asked about any of the last skalds or the last taverns either. He just sat and wrote in any spare moment. He took his meals at the same time every day. He said please and thank you when it was expected to say please and thank you. When someone spoke to him, Bragi listened all the way until they finished a sentence before he politely excused himself. When someone expected him to smile, Bragi turned the corners of his lips upwards. He went to bed as soon as possible, because that was the best time to go to bed, and woke up late, because the writing didn't require him to get up early. He didn't stay at any one place too long. Every place looked rather similar and the differences didn't really matter, but Bragi didn't stay anyway. Bragi did not keep moving because he wanted to go somewhere. He kept moving because he didn't want to be anywhere.

The pieces Bragi worked on contained some of the best prose he had ever written. And in the past three months since he had started traveling, he had written mountains of it. All jam packed with sentiment, beauty, and characters who always died at the very end, because Bragi couldn't think of anything else better to do with them. Occasionally in the evenings, he read a loud. The people who didn't know him, but who called him father when he wasn't there, clapped. They complimented. They asked for help with their own prose. Bragi didn't hear any of it, but he did help.

Together they were starting a movement. They were putting expression into their work so that it didn't have to exist in the regular world. People felt when Bragi read. They didn't have to feel anything when he didn't, because it was all in the paper. They used to play songs in the evenings too, but that had stopped. Their instruments gathered dust. They'd all lost interest in music for some reason. This was good. ( It gave them more time for other things. )

The axe sliced through the air where Bragi's head was a split second ago. Idun's brother nearly toppled from the momentum, but caught himself in the last second. He grinned, but Bragi didn't see it. Bragi wasn't looking at his face. He couldn't afford to blink or focus on any one thing for more than a fraction of a second. He saw the arms swinging the axe. Left. Go the other way. The advancing legs. Right. Go the other way. Tavern wall. His shoes. Alley. Dirt. Faces. Shoulder. Arm. Axe. Sidestep. Axe. Duck. Axe. Move. Fist. Run. Duck. Don't crash.

How many minutes Bragi could keep dodging exactly matched how many minutes he had left to live. Bragi intended to live for as long as possible. Optimistically, he had maybe five minutes left.

The axe came from the left. He didn't see it that time, but he heard it and sidestepped out of the way right on time. Almost. A searing pain shot up Bragi's arm where the axe grazed. Blood soaked into his sleeve then dripped on the ground. Bragi didn't have time to wince, or cry out. He kept moving. His arm was on fire. His muscles grew wearier. Idun's brother grew angrier.

( Maybe he'd been too optimistic. )

(OOC: While Bragi is still courting 'Jondi.')

Thanks to the latest tender, romantic ballad written for Bragi's goddess, ( Idun now knew exactly what it sounded like when the Road God declared love. )

The truth of the matter was that everyone had secrets. Even the gods, though most of their secrets tended to be public knowledge from one start of the pantheon to the other, thanks to however it was that mortals kept hearing about them and spreading the tales.( Even the Underworld wasn't safe from gossip. )

There was a good amount of pondering for a goddess to do after unexpectedly finding herself trapped in a net suspended precariously from a tree branch. This was surprising to Idun when she found herself in just such a situation. Her thoughts refused to stop at Now what? On the contrary, she had thoughts stumbling over one another in a frenzied attempt to grab her attention first. Perhaps it was because Idun had never given nets much thought, but now that she was trapped in one, she realized it would've been nice to be prepared for something like this. ( Having an 'In Case of Imprisonment in Tree Net' emergency plan probably would've made her feel better. )

As far as Idun was concerned, there was absolutely no reason to count the days since she unexpectedly ran across a relative stranger of a god on an unfamiliar road while she happened to be very lost. There was no reason to count the days, because there was no pressing need to keep tally of the time passing. Why track something that had no true relevance, no striking, groundbreaking purpose in her day-to-day life? She was existing as she always had, nothing changed, nothing altered, absolutely nothing different whatsoever. Why would anything be different, anyway? It wasn't like he'd rocked the very foundation of her existence. Bragi was just a god on a road. What did it matter if exactly fourteen days had passed by? What were fourteen days in the stretching expanse of time?

Nothing. That's what. A tingling sliver of a fraction of a sneeze blown from the nose of eternity. That's what.

Except, to some extent, in some small way, fourteen days had been excruciating. ( And it was all because of that kiss. )

It had been two weeks since Thor had discovered that his wife had been having an affair with one of his best friends. He hadn't asked for details, or the length of time it had been taking place. Simply because he couldn't bear to know specifics right then; but he had demanded to know if it was in fact, truth. (  His actions afterwards were a blur. )

OOC: This takes place before the Norse family meeting and pancakes

Bragi did not mean to be late. He arrived at the Bifrost bridge with what he hoped was time to spare. One problem was that he wasn't exactly sure the exact time Idun had said in the first place. Still, he'd arrived early enough that he was sure he would make it that time and he would have gone straight to their hall after he'd talked to Heimdall for a few minutes, but then somehow The Seven Years War came up. Bragi wasn't sure how, and he wasn't sure why, but really given the circumstances he was lucky he made it to their hall when he did. They only talked for about thirty minutes. The Seven Years War was seven years long. He could have talked about it for three years, and still come out impressively ahead. Well, if he knew more about it. ( Bragi didn't really like to talk about wars. )

Well. There really was no hiding it. Idun was lost. She was horribly, delightfully lost, and she was enjoying every moment of it. While she knew the forests, the fields and roads were a different story entirely. Her goal wasn't to learn them, either. She liked that she was lost. It brought on a rather charming sense of aimlessness. She could follow her feet in any direction and still be lost. Walk closer to the treeline and still be lost. Flop onto her back in a meadow, stare at the beautiful sky, and still be lost.

Much of her morning had been spent just like that, in a meadow, staring at the sky, lost. She had never done a bit of cloud-gazing while lost before. It added a shocking variety of options to each cloud shape, oddly enough. Idun could be as dramatic as she pleased. Oh, that one's the tree I'll never climb again, because I'm lost and Look, my brother, who I'll never see again, because I'm lost! If anybody happened to wander by, she would've left the impression of deep-seeded insanity, of course. A goddess in a flowing white dress, covered in grass stains and stray leaves, laughing alone in the middle of a meadow. She might've been lost, but she looked like the soundness of her mind was the only thing missing. But Idun was lost. ( There was nobody around to call her crazy and ruin her good time. )

OOC: Takes place when Hel, Fenrir and Jormungandr are young and still living with their father in Asgard.

Sometimes Loki felt like a shadow of himself. As if he were always bending and flowing with what was expected of him without so much as an actual thought as to what he wanted to do. He was expected to be lewd and lascivious. Which was sometimes the case, he wouldn't never argue that it wasn't, but while he was promiscuous -there was no denying that either, he did have some measure of control. He was not a man with an insatiable lust governed by what lay beneath his trousers. Most of the women that had actually shared his embrace understood that. Those who did not -whether by his choice or theirs, didn't understand and simply propagated his reputation.

It didn't matter that he treated women with respect, that he never went where he wasn't invited, or that he would never physically harm a woman no matter the level of violence she may show him -which if anyone observed his rather short marriage to Angrboda, they would know. No, what mattered to the Asgardian populace at large was that he rarely lacked a warm female body to share a bed with and that he was apparently quite skilled what he did when he got them there. ( At least he hoped the latter was being spread around too. )

Idun only needed one stroll through the marketplace to realize how very much she was going to like China. She had never explored this part of the world, but if the marketplaces were intriguing, she knew she was going to be a frequent shopper. ( And this particular marketplace was very, very intriguing. )