Sir Saladvocate - Lokius

🥑 All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.

"You know what? I'll pick on you all I want," Mobius refutes as he scrapes some seeds away. "It's my job to oversee your behavior and I am free to make any decisions regarding it."

Confrontationally, Mobius stares him down. Not breaking eye contact, Loki looks sharply back, neither of them wanting to give up their pride. Mobius himself has become somewhat of an expert at staring contests, so it's no problem for him to look Loki over like this. They're both silent, overly resilient, a smirk resting on Mobius' expression as he stops his tomato-cutting entirely to focus on the new task at hand.

Loki suddenly glances to his lips, tenses up, and looks away. Satisfied, Mobius sits back in his seat.

The god points to the tomato peel. "If we were back home, I'd have you skinned like this, but worse," he promises, though it is empty and breakable. He couldn't skin Mobius if he tried. Plus, he's lost the staring contest.

"Is that why you're homesick, now?" Mobius assumes jokingly. "Because you'd be able to kill me?"

Loki bares his teeth. "I'm not homesick."

"Are people ever really convinced when you say things like that?"

There is a moment wherein a response to this is not found. It's easy to win in a bantering argument if you only need to one-up the other person; not if the person suggests that your comments are fabricated. Loki grips the serrated tomato knife in his fist like a spear.

"Don't test me," he decides on saying as a last resort. "I could stab you right now. One word and I will draw all your seeds and liquids out."

The man in the suit only gives him a look. "Do you have any idea what that sentence sounds like?"

This doesn't assuage Loki much. "There's context; focus on it."

Mobius doesn't. He sits back and crosses his arms instead. "Oh, loosen up. Eat some tomato peel or something. You're so irritable. God."

Loki sighs and gives up on the tomato, setting everything on the table and mirroring the stance of the man across from him. "Thank you for the knife."

Mobius, reminded, grabs it. "I'm taking it back."

"Damn it," Loki exclaims with a pound of his fist against the table. Mobius cleans off the blades he's confiscated again and grips them roughly in his hands, just in case anyone decides to try and take a grab at one. "Thank you for teaching me how to cut a tomato, then."

"My pleasure," Mobius says to him, and then to the tomato skins: "Are those actually even very good?"

Silently, Loki hands him a piece. Mobius bites off a small bit with his front teeth and curls up his nose in distaste.

"Disgusting. Tastes like tomato."

"It... tends to," Loki replies. "Do you not like tomato?"

"I prefer them in salads," Mobius says, tossing the piece away and carrying the knives to the doorway. "I'm hiding the knives again. Don't blow up the TVA while I'm gone."

Loki raises a brow. "Well, what if I want to?" he challenges. "I'll escape."

"No, you won't," Mobius calls casually back to him as he walks away, winking at him as he pushes open the door and walks out of it. Loki whips his gaze away to the tomato juice that he's unskillfully distributed onto the floor.

Agent B-15 appears through the doors like clockwork as soon as Mobius is gone, an entire woven basket of tomatoes under her arm as she rushes in. Her eyes nervously scan the room for others before she tiptoes over and sets everything on the table, a few tomatoes spilling off the top and rolling onto the darkened surface of the table. Being prepared as she always is, she takes out two knives which happen to be better than the ones Mobius himself has been hiding.

"You were rather efficient in finding out he had left," Loki remarks. B-15 dips her head as if praised by this.

"I was spying on him through the cameras," she replies. "Let's get started, then. We'll have your beau wrapped around your finger in no time."

"Beau is a generously assumptive term," Loki argues, but is dismissed.

"The best components to any salad are the following," B-15 says as she removes a bowl from beneath the other one. "One source of vegetable, one source of fruit, one source of protein, and one sauce, oil, or vinaigrette. This is my personal opinion, but that's never really wrong. Just trust me on it." Reaching into her coat, she grabs a small plastic container of what looks like a caesar dressing and a bag of pre-chopped lettuce. "Stole these from the kitchen. Didn't trust the chicken so we're leaving it out."

She hands everything to Loki and instructs him to dump it all in the bowl. Strangely enough, he does as he's told, and then they begin chopping tomatoes.

"Now, I'm guessing he's taught you pretty well, but I can teach you better," B-15 adds. "There are multiple ways to go about actually chopping a tomato. The way he prefers it, and don't let him know I told you this, is when the tomato is finely sliced into small rectangles. So once you've gutted the thing, take the knife like this and slice each section into thinner segments, going back diagonally in the opposite direction when you're done with it."

Loki begins to cut, glancing up at the agent and clearing his throat. "You lot must be awfully bored if all anyone wants to do is cut tomatoes with a variant," he says. "What is it that drives you to even be in this room at the present moment? Have you acquired nothing more important to do? And don't tell me that time is different here and that this interferes with how urgent anything happens to be. That's Mobius' excuse for everything. You'd better not begin overusing it with him."

B-15 glances up at him as she slices her own tomato, tossing the finished pieces into the bowl. "I just want to see how it turns out," she replies. "I want to see if my salad theory is correct; if it really is true that the gesture of a salad will charm him right out of his suit."

"If I wanted to charm his clothes off, I would have already done it," Loki scoffs. This does not much assist his case.

"You can't use magic here, remember?" B-15 taunts. "For all I know, you could have been trying this whole time."

"I do not speak of literal charm."

B-15 smirks. "And neither do I."