Marvel: Emotion Farming System

Only four normal Chapters this week cause my boss slammed additional work on my table today.

The bonus Chapters are still fair game.

Next one at 5k.

Get cracking.

...

Far away from Earth, a plane floated in the Nine Realms, the Home of the Asgardians and Thor, Asgard.

Loki had just returned to the Royal Palace of Valaskjalf from Earth after a very fruitless endeavour. But he hadn’t left his room since then. He couldn’t eat or sleep; all he did was stare at the book he had brought back with him from Midgard.

Even after all his attempts, he could find no trace of the pompous human who wrote this book.

On the day he had visited Midgard, with the intent to trick Thor, Heimdal seemed a bit distracted. He had paid little attention to Loki’s movements for some reason.

Grasping the opportunity, Loki slipped into Midgard using the secret path he knew of. From there, he only observed Thor from a distance. At least that was what he had planned.

As he was planning to follow Thor to Mjolnir’s landing site, he found an old man crying while walking on the roadside. It was a lanky old man with a brimmed hat over his white hair and folded sunglasses in his shirt’s pocket.

His eyes turned blurry as he held onto the book for some reason.

"This poor thing..." He looked devastated. So much so that he didn’t see where he was going and stumbled into Loki.

Loki caught the book as the old man regained his balance on his own. But as he was planning to hand the book back, his eyes happened to catch the words on the page.

It was a conversation between an old man and another man with a weird mask.

"You’re just a glorified Weapon! You’ll never learn to play the piano! That piano’s not designed to be touched by a weapon of mass destruction! You belong out on the battlefield!"

Why was a weapon of mass destruction trying to learn how to play a Piano? And why was this old man so adamantly denying him that?

Loki couldn’t understand why those words caught his attention. He really couldn’t tell why he did it, but in that moment, he used magic to camouflage himself and walked away with the book in his hand.

"Oh dear, sorry, I wasn’t looking." Leaving the old man behind, utterly confused and horrified at the loss of his book. "Huh? Didn’t I bump into someone? Wait! The book!"

Loki entered a simple café since there wasn’t a park or benches in this small desert town. The cold air from the AC was a nice change from the heat outside. Heat didn’t really bother him much, but if anyone saw the clothes he wore in this heat, they would surely think he had lost his mind.

"Get me your best drink." Thankfully, he had magic to steer clear of such futilities.

After taking a seat in the far corner, Loki finally looked at the paper book in his hand that had this newly printed smell to it. It was well made by human standards, and seemed to be around 200 pages.

His eyes pored over the sharp gaze of the man on the front cover. Pluto. That was the title. He wondered what type of story it was to be talking about topics like that.

’I really ought to be going after Thor, but...’ He couldn’t help but open the book; it was compelling him to.

For a moment he wondered if it had a suggestion spell on it or was enchanted in any other way. But after studying it in detail, that didn’t seem like the case. His mind was still on that masked man. A machine made for war that wanted to learn music.

What could make it want that?

"I suppose I shall find out." Glancing at the black water that arrived in a light blue cup, Loki opened the first page with a scrutinising gaze.

He went past what was the title page and looked at the coloured drawings on the smooth paper. There were some Midgardian books in Asgard, but this one was meant to be read the opposite way.

’A story told entirely through hand-drawn pictures... seems quite the chore to pull off.’ He took a sip of the drink called an Americano and turned the page.

The first four pages depicted a raging fire and an old man rushing into said fire, looking for someone named Mont Blanc. Which was also the title of the first Chapter.

But from the next page, things shifted. It was a trail of blood and a man waking up abruptly in his bed. It was the man from the cover.

Seemed like an overworked man with a worrying, loving wife. The only thing of importance in those 3-4 pages was that Mont Blanc wasn’t a human; it was a thing humans called a robot.

A lifeform created through metal and given intelligence by human hands. It seemed this man was following the murder of Mont Blanc, which was a loved robot around the world.

’Loved? Can they truly love someone that is fundamentally a different life form?’ Loki frowned as the man, now called Gesicht, entered another crime scene.

Seemed like he was a big shot in some organization called Europol. But Loki was impatiently reading through the scene where the victim’s body was placed with a lamp and an iron pipe to make horns.

’When will we get to that masked man?’

It was like someone had watched a cool fight scene on YouTube and decided to watch said anime, and now they couldn’t wait for the scene to come back. Holding their breath with each passing episode.

The only reason Loki didn’t skip to the supposed scene was that it wouldn’t help. A story was written in a specific order for a reason. Jumping at any point in the middle without the knowledge of prior content could leave one looking like a fool.

That’s why he tolerated the pages where Gesicht rushed to catch the one that had broken through a checkpoint and destroyed another robot. Seemed like a solid lead until he found the man in question, who turned out to be a normal junkie.

’So, he is also a robot?’ A small smile tugged at Loki’s lips. He felt something was off about this guy from the start, but now it seemed clear.

"And it can’t kill humans, but humans can kill robots?" And these humans wanted to act like they loved a robot?

His mocking chuckle came to a halt as Gesicht brought the patrol bot’s, Robby, remains to his wife. It wasn’t the fact that the robot had a wife, even Gesicht had one, but it was this wife’s reaction that made him pause.

A robot, a piece of metal given form by human hands. It couldn’t cry, and it didn’t try to shout. But it asked her fellow robot to come drink tea.

"By living like humans, they say we can... refine our behaviour and become more human-like. I guess that is true."

Loki could understand that line of thought to an extent. People were formed by those around them, but how much of that was true? When they left that circle of influence, wouldn’t they revert to what they truly were?

’How do you understand that? What gives it away?’

Right now, this robot thought she understood the feeling of loss that a human boy, a kid of the family she worked for, had felt after losing a dog he had.

And even if Gesicht offered to erase her memory of Robby, she chose to keep them.

But more than that, Loki’s eyes were on Gesicht, who made that proposal. He wasn’t a human, but he surprisingly felt like one. A deeply compassionate human.

The mystery surrounding the murders deepened. The horns, the one from Lanke’s murder, were also found marking Mont Blanc’s head.

Gesicht had settled on the fact that it didn’t matter if the murderer was a human or a robot; he would catch it.

Chapter 2 started with the preparations for Mont Blanc’s Memorial service. And it seemed that the robot was indeed loved; the people loved him just as much as he had loved them.

The old man from the first pages returned; he thought of Mont Blanc as his son. And it seemed he wanted revenge. Still, the next line he said to Gesicht made Loki shake his head.

"But perhaps I’m wasting my breath; you’re a robot yourself. How could you understand?"

’He calls one robot his son and treats the other so coldly.’ Loki couldn’t help the small scoff bursting out of his lips.

Maybe he really should’ve skipped ahead, but it was too late. His mouth had already turned bitter, and it definitely wasn’t the drink.

What followed was a long conversation between Gesicht and another doctor who was checking up on him. This one was tricky. It felt like he treated Gesicht as a human, but also as a robot when it suited him.

In the end, it felt like he was more interested in the supposed dreams Gesicht, a robot, had.

Still, Gesicht kept showing a more humane side. He took the thing called a memory chip, belonging to Robby, and brought it to the robot’s wife.

And in typical good begets good fashion, he was rewarded with a big clue regarding his case.

The one who murdered Lanke and Mont Blanc was a human.

"Of course it is a human." Loki brought the cup to his mouth but found it empty. He looked at the middle-aged man behind the counter and raised the cup. "Another."

Good thing he remembered that Midgardians didn’t smash the cup at the last moment and placed it on the table awkwardly.

...

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Change the @ to ’a’ first, though.