Loki doesn't tell anyone what she's doing. They'd be disappointed; she'd get in trouble. And it's not hard to keep it secret; this is hardly a new habit for her, writing incessantly in incomprehensible ciphers. She still diaries, still processes, still makes her decisions - and now she also spell-weaves.

It is a long, hard, painstaking process. She has to come at it from both ends - peer at possible combinations of her symbols to see what makes sense, and come up with a visualization of her desired end result so she knows what parts she needs to build. She's never done this before, and keeps having to go back and edit things. One of the fourth-tier parts has so many third-tier parts in it that she takes weeks of trying just to hold them all in her mind at the same time and make them snap together into a single object she can keep memorized in its entirety. She spends a stack of notebooks as high as her waist working out another fourth-tier part, only to discover that she's got a key "word" wrong and has to start completely over because it affects everything else.

When she starts, she resigns herself to the possibility that her spell will take an entire year.

This estimate is soon revised.

It takes half a century of stolen time and backtracking and double-checking.

But it will be worth it, she thinks, if her mother will love her unreservedly, if she can keep up with Thor, if she can put her scepter - now a bit short for use as a cane, for a child her size - aside and run and dance. (If she can do magic.)

And once she casts it, it will stay forever.

She has just about built herself from atoms; there are separate bits of this spell for each muscle in her body in its current shape and accounting for its future growth (she's been reading anatomy) and connecting them all to her mind, directly, commanding their obedience.

She assembles the ninth-tier pieces into a single, unified whole, and it shines bright in her mind, and she knows exactly what to do with it, from cube-inspired knowledge stamped as bright in her thoughts as though she'd touched it yesterday.

It's all together now.

She wills it.

She knows the difference at once though there's no visible effect - even in how she holds up her head, how the last page of her notebook feels under her fingers.

She wants to get up, twirl, leap, pick up her scepter and brandish it like a sword, run down the halls whooping and show Thor.

But she doesn't. It wouldn't do to be conspicuous. (Heimdall is watching; she can't read the cipher but she can see the results.)

Loki is going to have to pretend to have outgrown her clumsiness, spend the next ten or fifteen years still tripping occasionally but less and less. Maybe she should get new shoes; maybe she should ask about learning to dance. Some outward excuse. Something less sudden.

She sketches a plan in her non-magical cipher, and sets about enacting it.

(Meanwhile, she contemplates what spell she should build next.)