Even Tez’s return from the kitchen didn’t break the five minutes of awkward tedium that passed thereafter, which I ended by slamming my fist onto the table and breaking it in half.

“Listen up.” I smiled at the assembled crowd as food rained down from the heavens. “This is nice and all, but we’ve got a lot to get through and I’d like to make it out in one piece.”

The action elicited such a horrified goggle from Vince I suspected he couldn’t conceive of food being treated with such callous disrespect. Tru simply scowled at me and proceeded to shake sauce out of his outfit.

A splatter hit my wrist and I made to shift it clean, only for it to be followed immediately by another – not food, but rain. Fat droplets squelched out of the sky from clouds that had only just started to form, though few and far between.

Lucy sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Lay it on us.”

“What?” Durga asked, finally snapping to attention. She paced over from the garden, fingers twitching on all but the dead arm. “No clever plans from you this time? Or are we going to find out about them after half of us are dead or dying again?”

“I’m all out,” the devil said, unbothered. “Out of tricks, out of secrets, and almost out of time. I figure my breathing space now can be best spent whipping these demon lords into some form of rudimentary organisation.”

Three of whom weren’t even here. Between the pope under angelic guard sucking up media attention, Regina isolated inside the Singapore bubble and Gia undergoing emergency virtual dive training, it had to be said our demonic quotient for the war council could have been better.

“Great,” growled Durga, similarly unimpressed. “Our elite forces come down to a haphazard and primarily missing congregation of neophytes.”

“Well, that and an entire army,” Lucy reminded her.

“Competent neophytes,” I put in.

Vince shot me a grateful look.

“Needs work, though,” I added. A raindrop hit me in the centre of my head as if to reprimand my impertinence, and my mouth turned up at the corner.

“This army,” Durga broached. “Did they agree to be part of this? They’re children, Lucifer. Young children. They shouldn’t be fighting this war. And if we fail here, all your efforts to preserve them will have been for nothing.”

I winced at the words as Tru and Vince glanced at each other dubiously. We didn’t need this now.

“Hmm,” said Lucy. He kicked over the half of the table that was still standing and rose to his feet, stepping out from the wreckage. “Not unless something goes terribly wrong on a number of different measures, and that’s what we have Tez for. But I did promise no more secrets. That goes for everyone here.”

Vince followed suit, trailing behind the devil like a lost and strangely elderly puppy. “My lord,” he began hesitantly, “is this true? You’d send children off to battle? Are they not perhaps mighty demons taking the form of innocent babes to lure the unwary?”

I glanced at Tez, curious as to why he wasn’t stepping in to stop the train already in the middle of sailing off the cliff in front of us, and found him watching the scene with a nonchalant expression.

“No, Vince,” said Lucy, meeting his subordinate’s eyes. “Just human children abandoned by those who didn’t want them. But it may just be better if you see it for yourselves. Stand back.” Hands together, fingers pointing forwards, he paced forwards towards the edge of the cliff, then turned back to face us, head bowed.

Between us, a soft glow appeared among the grass of the garden. As Lucy’s hands parted, the light intensified, spreading in cracks until the whole thing blazed white, searing the vegetation from the earth below. Where raindrops hit the glyph, they sizzled and hissed into smoke. After a few seconds it cleared into a circle of intricate lines and symbols in jagged Aramaic, and when Lucy’s head came up, a tear of red blood trailed from each corner of his eyes.

“Step forward,” he ordered.

Tez was already moving, striding harmlessly over the lines. I followed suit after a brief hesitation, aware Mayari, Durga and Vince were doing the same, the latter tracing an inverse cross over the centre of his chest. Tru brought up the rear in what I was fairly sure was the result of peer pressure, looking deeply uncomfortable about what his life had come to.

Lucy stepped in after us, turning one palm face down at the sigils. He lifted the other to his eyes and collected some of the blood, flicking it onto the glyph. The next thing I knew, my body was ablaze with searing pain as the ground dropped out beneath me, world distorting in a tangle of senses until it spit me out on my face in yet another pocket dimension. Apparently everyone and their dog had one these days. I was starting to feel annoyingly left out.

The vortex, still stamped in glowing relief in the air behind us, had dumped us onto a dusty ridge overlooking a vast twinkling pit. Behind it not two metres away the world came to an abrupt, inelegant end, only a thin veneer of rock obscuring its cylindrical borders. The ridge itself spanned only a few metres across before it sheered away. Just looking at it spurred my feet into instinctively clawing onto the rock for purchase.

Long, prismatic structures poked inwards from the edges towards the pit’s centre, but I barely had a chance to register them. Instead, my attention was busy being taken up by the fact I’d changed shape, unintentionally, to the body of a child. “Interesting side effect,” I muttered, aging myself back up to adulthood. Well, my powers were still working.

I hadn’t been the only one affected. The goddesses and Tez hadn’t changed, but Tru and Vince had all reverted to pre-pubescent boys in tinier versions of their earlier outfits. Vince seemed delighted at the transition, examining his arms with mouth wide in an astonished ‘O’, while Tru wore a look of absolute horror and was busy patting his face with his hands.

Next to him, Mayari tilted her head as she picked herself up and dusted red dirt from her palms. “I can see,” she muttered, poking at the skin around her eye. Sure enough, it registered smooth and symmetrical. Both eyes flashed gold instead of their usual silver. Even her hair had changed tone, becoming a pale white-blonde. “And the world’s not burning. How is this possible?” She glanced among the group then back over at Lucy, the only one who’d managed to avoid an undignified landing. “You’ve de-aged us. And I know I’m on a different dimension right now, or I’d have just caused an Armageddon event. The planet had better still be there when we go back.”

“It will,” said Tez, walking over. “You’ll revert to normal on the return visit. Better enjoy it while it lasts.” He stuck out a hand and caught Vince as the occultist let out a whoop and nearly cartwheeled off the side of the ridge.

De-aging and whatever was going on with Mayari weren’t the only new changes, however. Both demons had popped out of my awareness the moment we’d crossed into Lucy’s insane childverse, the runes vanishing from the back of my head completely. When I tried to locate them, instead all that happened was that they appeared on my own palms – fehu on the left and hagalaz on the right – scintillating prettily in appearance only. I sent them away again.

Whatever was being done to us was affecting our powers, too.

A sudden burst of heat at my side brought my attention back to Mayari, who was staring at what appeared to be a miniature sun threatening to plunge the group of us into an early cremation service. “Holy crap,” she exclaimed, sounding dazed. “It’s been forever since I’ve been able to do this.”

In response I felt myself change again, this time into a vaguely human-shaped pillar of fire. “Thor’s magnets,” I snapped, once I’d put it out. Every time I even remotely thought about transforming, it would happen. And not in a ‘convenient place of power’ way, but an ‘uncontrollable, going through puberty’ sort of way I hadn’t experienced since I was a child.

Which I was, I realised belatedly. That initial reversion hadn’t just been cosmetic. I hadn’t managed to magic myself out of it like I’d first assumed. It seemed I was currently old enough to control the nature of my transformations, but young enough that they still manifested all over the place at the slightest provocation.

Which meant I was not the safest person to be around at the moment.

It fit. Mayari and Durga had come into the world ready-made adults, as had Lucy. Tru and Vince had had the standard mortal experience, and Tez, who had nowhere to de-age to, was all of three days old.

And then there was me. I tried very hard not to think about all the things I didn’t want to transform into, and my arms promptly dissolved into slush. “Ugh.”

A hand fell on the shoulder I reconstituted, and I recognised the feel of Lucy’s magic. “There,” he said, dusting his hands. “That should help. I didn’t realise you’d be affected like this, or I’d have done it sooner.”

“Thanks,” I said, trying to shift and watching my nails lengthen in slow motion. “That would have gotten embarrassing if it had lasted much longer. I’ve told you about jötnar childhoods.”

“You did. Admittedly I wasn’t sure how much was exaggeration.”

If anything, I’d downplayed it. Accidents had been common. I’d personally had a cousin who’d spent two years as a rock. By all accounts their early education had been a challenge. And it could get much worse; you didn’t grow up on Jötunheim without hearing all kinds of cautionary tales. Parenting was something you took seriously or not at all – though of course, in a world of shapeshifters, it wasn’t something you could fall into by accident.

I gave my co-worker the eye. “Since when have you been able to swat my powers down like that?”

“Since forever.”

“Not according to the geas I put on you.”

“That’s because I helped you with it. Binding promises and all that. How do you think I wrangled my way out of the company power suppression?”

“I had a theory,” I mentioned, sending him the image of my tug-of-war theory by way of little stick figures; a tiny angry stick Yahweh in halo and beard tied by a rope to an equally tiny and angry stick Lucifer with devil horns. It lasted all of three seconds before a giant stick fish hook descended from the heavens and pulled the rope up with it, leaving the stick family dangling below flailing ineffectually at each other as they rotated at the ends of the setup.

Lucy snorted. “You’re not far off,” he revealed. “There’s a bit of that. But I also inherited some of Dad’s override power. Not all of it, and it doesn’t work against him. However,” he added, holding up a finger, “he has one critical weakness. Youth.”

Even as he said it, I felt myself start to change back into a physically younger body again. I definitely hadn’t missed this. Tru, who had sat down as far from the chasm as possible, was also looking rather green. His head turned away from us and his lips moved silently.

“How does that work?” Durga was asking, homing in on the conversation the moment weaknesses were mentioned.

“Well, look at Loki.”

“Thanks,” I drawled, shaking half-formed feathers out of my hair onto a ring on the ground. My body felt odd as it continued pushing changes through at a snail’s pace. “Now everybody gets to watch me hit second adolescence.”

Placing his fingertips together, Lucy flashed the group a roguish smile. “Don’t repeat this to anyone. Just knowing it will get you demoted if he finds out. Dad loves to tell people he was the first creator, but he wasn’t. And he did grow up from a baby. Reverted back to childhood, he has no active powers at all. Before I entered the picture, something happened to make him the way he is today.”

Mayari dropped the sun she’d been holding, where it fizzled out of existence. “So you’re saying we need to bring him here,” she remarked, gesturing down at the pit.

“I’d like to say yes, but it’s a tough sell. He knows this place exists; the youth field is the best security I have against him. His reality slice means he’ll sense it before we can trick him inside, so he’ll never go in. And the override makes him immune to obfuscation. We can’t repeat what we did with Odin.”

“There’s a reason he’s the boss,” Durga muttered.

“Can we bring it to him instead?” Mayari asked. “He’s my target, and it works out better for me if I don’t have to lurk in a hidden vault.”

“I don’t see how,” said Lucy. “I actually just brought you here to show you my army, not invert a pocket dimension. Besides, you just said it would make you destroy the world.”

“Along with half the solar system.” She sighed. “I’d only need a moment to get it under control, but a moment is all it takes for the sun to fry us all. If I knew it was coming, though… it seems a shame to let all this extra power go to waste. Although I never did have as much control over it at full strength, so perhaps it’s for the best.”

“What if we repurposed an edict?” I suggested as a half-formed plan surfaced to mind and joined forces with the one that had already been waiting there.

Lucy frowned. “The one on the moon? Risky. It’s true it would draw executive attention. But perhaps too much.”

“All of it,” Tez confirmed. “We want to split them up, not have them descend on us as a team. Not only that, but having an entire company of gods spontaneously regaining their powers is not something I’d recommend in any iteration of this insane endeavour. I am not equipped to handle that. Fortunately, that’s not what Loki’s suggesting.” He nodded at me to continue.

I found several sets of eyes back on me, and straightened up for my grand delivery. My time had finally come. Bounding up to the crest of the ridge, I cleared my throat and made a show of holding up one of my fingers. “Behold but one-fifth of Loki’s master plan,” I proclaimed. Sparks flickered and died on my fingertip, wafting eerily towards the abyss before their short lives were snuffed out. “Janus the Fourth continues to reap dividends beyond his avatar extraction services. While not an ally per se, he’s planning a prison break on a very particular edict. Not the one on the moon. And I don’t imagine he’s going to be happy with Providence once he’s out. So not only does management have a rogue threat running around with a chip on his shoulder, this is also our opportunity to use the edict to apply a similar youth field out on Earth.”

“On Earth?” Durga asked. “You mean, on everyone?”

Tru made a strained noise from over by the wall.

I shrugged. “Could be a few metres, could be the whole world. As the ones doing the repurposing, I’m assuming we get to choose, because we need the demons at functioning capacity.”

“Don’t mind me,” Vince interrupted in a boy’s high-pitched tones, hopping from toe to toe dangerously close to the edge of the pit. “To think, a chance to relive my misspent youth! Oh, the mulberries I’d steal off the trees. All those strays purring around my ankles for a bite of fresh fish. The first Bible I ever desecrated with my mother’s most fervent acolytes. That time I jumped off the roof and broke my leg.”

“You don’t need to be young to do any of those things,” Durga said, wearing an expression of bafflement.

“That is where you are mistaken, O’ diabolic vixen,” Vince argued. “Can’t get up onto the roof after you’ve had my number of knee surgeries.”

"So your goal is to have more?"

“Either way,” I continued, after Vince's newly child-sized brain caught up with the words coming out of his mouth, “an indeterminate number of old people with debilitating diseases are going to be happy, and – more importantly – we stick a nasty debuff on Yahweh.”

“And it boosts me up to full strength while active. With advance warning, I can be ready and hold myself back from destroying everything else in the process.” Mayari gave a slow nod. “With the spear, this is it. This is how we take down Yahweh.” Both her eyes flashed gold as her head turned towards the abyss. I was suddenly reminded it was somewhere in this place the deadly lance rested.

“Actually, no,” I interjected, putting a dampener on her ideas of victory. “This is how we take down Enki.”

Her head snapped back. “But –”

I gestured at Tez to elaborate.

“It’ll draw out Enki,” the god of night confirmed. “It’s his edict, and he’s the one who can fix it. But not alone. Not by himself.”

“Good thing there’s more,” I said, buoyed up by the attention. It registered as a physical change, with more sparks joining the first batch on their way to the glimmering lights below us. “This comes after Mayari and Gia disable the Helpdesk task manager.”

The glow faded from Mayari’s eyes. “Wait, what?” Her fingers spasmed as if fumbling for an invisible spear which had dropped from them and rolled away into the massive nearby hole. “And who’s Gia?”

“Welcome to the second fifth of Loki’s master plan,” I said with a grin.