From The Time The Dwarves (Briefly) Served Loki

Loki, in general, prefers making mischief to making things, but when you’re being worshipped by Dwarves, one is hard to teach, and the other, easy to ask.

Here are nine things the Dwarves made for Loki:

9. The None Ring. It’s difficult to get onto your finger. It’s difficult to remove from your finger. It makes you extremely visible and highly socially awkward, and it also looks terrible.

8. The Unpredictable And Angry Sentient Sword. Sharp? Oh, it’s sharp. Enhances your own skills with the sword? Immeasurably. Talkative? …not really. It’s brusque most of the time, if it chooses to respond at all. It will speak, once in a while, though.

“I will most definitely slay the next several enemies you face, but at some point, I’m going to slice that stupid hood off your robe; I hate that thing.”

“What?”

(Ominous silence.”

7. Excalibrate. Whoseover pulleth this sword from the Stone shall be king of all England! However, there is no England in this particular magical Universe. You’ll have to recalibrate the Universe first.

6. The Cloak of Invertability was only ever worn once and, as with so many things, we not only do not speak of it, we try, and fail, to forget it.

5. String. This is a shortsword, a gift to the Elves, which glows eagerly when Orcs are near, and whenever you try to hit them with its four feet of tempered steel, the whole thing turns to string.

Did we mention that Dwarves don’t like Elves?

4. What Might Or Might Not Be The Philosopher’s Stone. No-one explained to the Dwarves that the ‘philosophy’ involved was Eternal Life. not Eternal Indeterminacy.

3. The Cwidder of Extraordinary Music. Actually, this sounds wonderful and amplifies the skills of anyone who plays it. All three of the people in the Multiverse who can actually play a cwidder, or, indeed, know what one is, would really love to get their hands on it; it’s in a warehouse somewhere and needs new strings, of course.

2. Sneezing Powder of Addictiveness. Do you know what you’d get if you combined cocaine and sneezing powder? No. No, you really don’t. Really. Truly.

1. The Staff of Argument Solving. Whenever an argument gets really, really heated, this Staff acts of its own accord to begin hitting the other person about the head and shoulders repeatedly. While this is a ‘cursed’ item, it should be noted that this is nevertheless one of the most sought-after items in history.

For no special reason, of course.

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