Chapter 28: Mental strain!

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Harry pulled his wand from his left sleeve and concentrated hard, Loki's will joining him. He began to weave the illusion, imagining every angle and then forcing the light to bend into that shape.

Then the brown-suited man stood in the middle of the street, unmoving and looking slightly alien.

With a further burst of concentration, Harry made the man move forward in a robotic, repetitive movement.

'That won't convince anyone but an idiot,' Loki commented. 'I told you to do this outside so that you can observe real people and see how they act. You must learn to mimic them.'

With a nod, Harry refocused upon the task at hand. Eventually he was able to craft a figure realistic enough to fool someone distracted by being in the heat battle.

Too mentally exhausted from doing that for a while, he decided to move onto the next task.

While doing telepathic illusions on a muggle was already easy, a little practise could never hurt. It also turned out to be a test of his ability to keep a straight face as he kept on forcing illusions upon a rather rude customer within the restaurant so that they kept mistaking their lap for their mouth and pouring their drinks all over themself.

The first time she simply looked incredibly embarrassed, and the second she ran off, much to the amusement of Loki and Harry. Whilst that was fun, it was not the only purpose.

Hitting himself with a muggle-repelling charm, Harry followed the woman into the back of the restaurant, whose toilets she was probably heading for.

Putting her in emotional distress had made her mind more fragile, and now it would be easier to break in.

Coming across the woman, he murmured, "Hey," prompting her to make eye-contact before he projected himself forward.

When creating illusions, Harry simply hovered on the outside, forcing images and sensations from his own brain into theirs, but not going in himself.

This time, he would go in. With Loki to aid him and no prior experience, the best way in would most likely be brute force.

Harry smashed forward, and for a brief moment, he was rushing through the woman's mind.

Colours rushed around him, too bright and too vibrant – and then pain, too much pain. He found himself hurled backwards and out of the mind.

As Loki began to do away with the agony, he gasped for breath and collapsed to the floor. Looking up, he saw the woman had also slumped and blood was flowing from her nose.

Loki sighed. 'Well, I suppose that was to be expected.'

'What?' Harry demanded. 'Then why did you tell me to do it?!'

'Asgardian magic cannot be used to enter minds, whilst mortal magic can. I wanted to test if a combination of both could.'

'And you couldn't have warned me?!'

'You might not have done it if I did,' Loki pointed out.

Harry glanced back to the woman. 'So why did that fail?'

'Asgardians cannot do mind magic like this because we automatically perceive all of their mind at once, including the pain they feel from intrusion, resulting in being unfocused, and thus thrown out. The issue was similar with you.'

'So, is she dead?'

Loki snorted. 'Dead? Definitely not. Perhaps if one as powerful as I had been doing it she would be dead, but she is only unconscious...and maybe a bit brain-damaged….'

With a groan, Harry got to his feet, wiping away the blood from the nosebleed he had only just noticed. "I won't be trying that again," he muttered.

Suddenly someone screamed, and Harry was immediately spinning around. In his disorientated state, he hadn't heard the approaching footsteps of...a chef?

He sighed and cast a stunning spell at them before turning on his heel and apparating, ignoring Loki's orders not to do it; he couldn't be bothered to walk back to his hotel at the moment.

The world warped and twisted around him, a crushing blackness squeezing in upon him. As clarity slammed against him, he decided it had been a terrible idea - probably induced by intruding into the mind of a stupid person. He hated apparating normally, but he had done it - and whilst already confused, no less.

That was why he missed his location, finding himself appearing a few meters above the ground and promptly falling at far faster speeds than he should have been, too confused to react.

With a resounding thump he smashed against the concrete of what appeared to be an alleyway, his head rebounding of the floor.

Normally it wouldn't have been too harmful, but combined with the stress of apparation and attempted mental infiltration, he promptly found blackness closing in on him, Loki's annoyed sigh and grumble of him being a complete imbecile the only noise in his ears.

Harry awoke with a groan and immediately noticed he wasn't where he had lost consciousness. 'Where am I?'

'Believe it or not, I don't know,' Loki deadpanned. 'As powerful, handsome, charismatic, intelligent, and modest I am, I'm not exactly in a state where I can go off and take a stroll.'

Harry rolled his eyes and looked around, seeing nothing but darkness. He felt that he was laying upon a metal surface and when he reached forward it was made obvious he was in a cage.

After a moment his eyes had adjusted to the light, and after pouring a bit of magic into them, he could see the world in more detail.

Two other cages were in the room, but both were empty but for a few blood stains. At the other side of the room was a table with a pistol and a few magazines sitting on it. Harry checked his ankle and under his t-shirt.

Sure enough, he still had both daggers, but he had to have dropped his wand when he apparated.

'Just my bloody luck,' he muttered. 'I get kidnapped by some bloody amateur muggles. Why did I pick a hotel in an area with a high crime rate?!'

'Some do-gooder taking you to a hospital might have been worse. That would put your face and fingerprints in the system, and seeing as you had a wand with you, they might have handed you to a magic hospital, which is even worse than a muggle hospital. They might've taken your diguise and-'

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