Loki’s Origin Story
In heaven, souls are assigned to cat bodies with great care and celestial precision.
Usually.
On one otherwise ordinary day in the Department of Feline Deployment, an angel is preparing to place a fresh little cat soul into a kitten body.
Everything is going according to protocol until something shiny, holy, or mildly dramatic happens nearby.
A trumpet blast.
A glowing wing malfunction.
A cherub crashes into a harp.
Whatever it is, several of the angel’s eyes get distracted for one flawed second.
The kitty soul is dropped.
It bounces.
Souls, it turns out, are rather like the things you get from gumball machines. Very elastic.
The higher the bounce, the closer to God.
The panicked angel scrambles, scoops up the bouncing soul, pops it into the serene little kitten body, and sends the kitten on her way.
Unfortunately, the angel fails to calibrate the soul to the body.
Failure should, of course, be impossible for an angel. Particularly a multi-eyed celestial being who exists as an extension of God’s will and consciousness.
But failure happens nonetheless.
This is, incidentally, what causes problems for many souls and bodies.
Even God can have a bad day.
And angels can have celestial accidents.
Thankfully, this was only a cat.
Not a human soul.
Certainly not a soul destined to become the leader of a world power.
Headaches or no headaches, God made sure those souls were properly calibrated.
Always.
Except on Tuesdays.
Tuesday was golf day.
On Tuesdays, God handed supervision over to the Angel Gabriel.
Gabriel was also flawless in all executions.
Except on this particular Tuesday, when he caught one of his wings on what could best be described as the celestial equivalent of a cactus.
What followed was a distraction of truly universal proportions.
It was loud.
It was spectacular.
It was glorious.
It caused a black hole and the accidental creation of a new star.
Hence our angel’s distraction.
And the dropped cat soul.
Not a failure.
Not even really a mistake.
Just normal universal chaos.
Universal chaos, incidentally, keeps an entire department of prayer receivers very busy.
But that is another shortie.
ANYWAY.
At first, everything seems normal enough.
She is soft.
Tiny.
Sweet.
Perfectly kitten-shaped.
She is called Lilly, and no one suspects a thing.
Bottle-fed.
Sleepy.
Curious.
Normal.
But after a few months, it becomes increasingly clear that Lilly is not, in fact, Lilly.
She growls at her own hindquarters as though they are an enemy cat.
She wrestles tunnels like they insulted her bloodline.
She pauses mid-entanglement to eat and drink without ever freeing herself.
She climbs stairs sideways.
And backwards.
She identifies the dog as her large brother and all actual cats as rival kingdoms.
Wet food is treated as a crime scene.
And then the truth emerges.
Lilly was never Lilly.
She is LOKI.
Not merely a cat, but a misfiled celestial being.
Chaos Goblin Majesty.
Patron saint of sideways stair climbing, tunnel warfare, suspicious buttocks, and purring baked-potato states.
Somewhere in heaven, an angel quietly avoids eye contact with management.
