A person in an oddly familiar style of armor pops into existence with a sprinkle of pink light and enough momentum to roll down a flight of crumbling stairs.

"Fuck," she says, then, more alarmedly, "Fuck!"

He stops. The ragged half-armor he's wearing starts to coalesce around one arm. 

"Well, you weren't on the agenda. And I actually read the agenda this time."

"- hello, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt your... wander through the... here," she says, sitting up. "Don't, uh, let me stop you - are you okay?"

"Oh, have you not heard the news yet."

"I'm from way too far away to be getting the bulletins. Er, hang on -" She doesn't appear to do anything except look momentarily thoughtful. "- sorry, I can check exactly how far away I'm from while you tell me whatever it is you want me to know, go ahead -"

"It, ah, won't actually matter how far away you were. Big purple fellow, goes by Thanos, has been collecting infinity stones. He's on a tear to reduce overpopulation. He, uh, got the last one. Ten minutes ago, give or take - computer - eleven minutes ago.

Then he killed half of everyone, everywhere. Now, we're not planning to let that stand or anything, but - yeah, that's how today has been going so far."

"Okay, that's - I'm from an alternate universe, and it requires several instances of alternate universe travel to get from here to where I'm from, but that is still very bad, that's - that's gonna take a while to fix." She starts rummaging around on her person. "You don't happen to have a pen, I assume."

"I do not have a pen. My computer can take notes, if we need to be writing things down. ...are you Asgardian."

"Culturally. I do need to put things to physical medium, yes, and I have paper but not a pen - can your computer take dictation from me okay?"

"Yep, it's got you. Asgard's gone. Like, not just the half-and-half thing that hit everyone, they got blown up before that. And Thanos intercepted the refugees on the way to Earth. And if there were any survivors of that I don't know if he left them out of the half-and-half thing. He did not strike me as a particularly conscientious maniac."

"...this is going to be such a horror to fix, is this how Swift feels all the time - no, I assume he feels worse - okay, dictating now. Letter to Cam code raglan cardboard marionette, I found some kind of variant Edda, half of the entire world's population has reportedly been murdered just now, no one step connections to the map, find me ASAP, love Loki."

"Is there anyone else you wanna address that to in case he was in the unlucky half."

"- sure, to be safe. Carbon copy Attn Vanda Nossëo, carbon copy Ambaróna VIP channel code spork feather, carbon copy Sibyl code bear twig jump. By 'everywhere' do you mean 'places you could theoretically get by traveling through space'."

"No idea. There was a fellow here who could probably have answered that for you, but he was in the other half. And wouldn't have mentioned it unless it changed our plans. Though he didn't mention you, and that wouldn't have taken very long - 'grab the stray Asgardian' or 'don't' -"

"I might need more context, I am I think not from here. I am pretty sure my Asgard spins on. Incidentally when I asked if you were okay I was originally intending to lead into an offer of healing magic?"

"This technically won't kill me but that sounds lovely."

She pops over rather than walk the intervening steps and gives him a noseboop.

He straightens up. "Lovely. But now you've got to testify when we get home that I did not sit out the fight. There are people who I'd hate to have think that, and some of them might even be alive.

We had the time stone, and a wizard. Wizard checked for futures where we won. He was at it a while. Looked through fourteen million where we lost, found something. Where we still lost but if everything lines up right we can undo it."

"Time stone liked the wizard?"

"You know, I'm not clear at all on how the shiny rocks work. Do they have opinions about people? If they like Thanos I question their taste."

"They're not qualified judges of character. I can't guarantee the ones here are like mine, of course."

"Well, maybe the time stone made him sit through fourteen million bad ends because if you're a space rock then that's hilarious, or maybe it was being as helpful as it could. Thanos has it now."

"It's really inconvenient that teleporting requires me to know what the place I'm going to looks like."

"We're going to Midgard! How well do you need to know it?"

"Uh, seeing a picture does the trick. Are you from Midgard?"

"Yep. We call it Earth, but, you know, everyone who called it Midgard is dead, makes me a bit more accommodating. It wouldn't surprise me if Quill kept postcards in his spaceship but I don't have pictures on me."

"...My Midgard isn't an Earth, Earths are a different thing. Also the people from my Midgard have soul animals and I don't see one on you and you haven't commented on my not having one although that might just mean you're very cosmopolitan."

"Soul animals."

"Yeah, like -" She illusions a fox into existence at her feet; it tilts its head. "This," says the fox.

"I am pretty sure we don't have soul animals. Before I heard there was a maniac running around with a soul stone I would have said we didn't have souls. He's cute, though. Do souls do anything?"

"They have various cultural features but don't confer powers." She dismisses the fox. "Anyway, I've been to Midgard, and I've been to Earth, so if this is some blend of the two maybe I can land on it some way or another - what year is it by Earth's calendar?"

"2018."

"What is up with that approximate time band - uh, anyway, I can probably land in space around it and then jump down based on the visual? I could come back and get you if you're not good to survive a moment in space?"

His armor starts flowing around his chest again, and then up his neck. "I should be fine if I'm not going to need to maneuver. 2018 a recurring theme in apocalypses?"

"Not 2018 in particular but we've never found an Earth earlier than 1812 or later than 2160. Say when."

"Assuming you can't do 'an hour ago', now's good."

"My time stone tolerates me but I don't want to try it with a strange one till I've at least verbally addressed the space stone." She takes his hand and boops them into space above Scandinavia on the second try, then down into a green patch of forest from there. "Uh, I can try for a better vantage point, I don't know how wireless you are while battle-damaged but this seems very high tech for a 2018 Earth -" She waves at his suit.

"F.R.I.D.A.Y. is Pepper alive?"

"No, sir. I'm sorry."

"Is Nick Fury alive."

"No, sir. I'm -"

"Rhodey?"

"Three hours ago he left for Wakanda with Steve Rogers, Vision, and Wanda Maximoff. I have no information on the outcome of the confrontation there beyond what can be inferred from -"

"Right. Okay. Fantastic. Send me another suit."

"If you don't have nonreductionist souls we can resurrect people. Like, your local time travel option is better for the mass casualties, we aren't that efficient at resurrecting people, but if we can't swing that we can get anybody who's a particularly important first-pass target."

" - well. That'd be - that'd be good. Excellent, even. Makes me feel bad about how this next conversation is going to be really awkward - you said your name was Loki, right?"

"Yes. Is there one of me here? That would be kind of weird, instances of me usually don't match my circumstances - there's an Earth version that's common but I'm a one-off."

"There's a Loki. Or, well, fifty-fifty there's a Loki. He's a dude. He is not wildly popular on this planet because he tried to conquer it."

"I come in dude... and planetary conquest, but usually more popularly. He look like this?" She pops up an illusion of Cam, just the head, no wings. As an afterthought one of Cor. "Or this, there's ethnic variance. I don't know what the male version of Miranda or Aly's ethnic clusters would look like."

"Nah he looks more like you than either of those people do. The planetary conquest might've been popular if he'd succeeded at it, he had the mind stone and a little army of merry slaves."

"- take some more dictation please computer. Same address and CCs, that part's important. Update: Variant Edda has someone name of Loki looks like me but not Cam or Kib might or might not be an alt or just a namesake might be the Bell version of Midnight, check if he's alive, check if he's us, if both escalate more than you already escalated, I don't care what Sibyl's doing." She takes a deep breath.

Blink. "That's worse news than the omnicide?"

"We can fix omnicide, it's a staggering logistical problem and it will take a really long time but even if you do have nonreductionist souls I'm working on the generic of resurrection. If you have a me and he's evil he's gonna escape."

"Okay. It looks like my care package is still a couple of minutes out, so maybe you can explain the 'if you have a me' thing. We have a Loki. Son of Odin, except he's adopted, Thor's brother, he does the cute illusions too - what else are you having your friends check?"

"Uh, so, there are people who look like me." She illustrates with a group photo. She fills it in with the people who are her and do not look like her. "And there's people who don't look like us but are us. This one," Kib lights up, "is a reincarnation, used to look like this," ghost Aly appears beside him. "We're called Bells, it's a pun in English, are you hearing English I can't actually tell - we all have the syllable 'Bell' in our birth names - you don't happen to know your Loki's birth name do you -"

"I don't know his birth name. Thor might."

"Boy Thor, that's weirder than boy me... unless they're just different people of the same names, which, stranger things have happened. Anyway, Cam," Cam lights up in the illusion, "can conjure arbitrary material objects including in a way that means this power can act as a search function and most importantly he can do it from any number of steps away on the map of the multiverse as long as he knows about the existence of the world he's searching to quantify over it - did that make sense? -"

"I was just assuming you had a Heimdall who liked looking rather than listening but sure, okay. So he can check whether our Loki is dead -"

"Heimdall doesn't work even one step away on the map. Yes, Cam can check if he's dead and he can also check if he's a Bell because being a member of a template turns out to be a conjurable parameter. - what's your name, your software calls you 'sir' -"

"Tony Stark. I doubt you have me. You'd have heard of me."

"Well, pleased to meet you, wish it were better circumstances, who knows maybe you're five years old in a preindustrial civ somewhere, when things are settled down we can check as a courtesy if you like."

"I hope not, I have no idea what I'd do with a five-year-old. Make sure no one murdered his parents, maybe." Something on rockets comes arcing out of the sky towards them. 

"Friendly?" she asks of the rocket thing.

"Yeah, that's our care package. Should have -" its thrusters cut out abruptly, dumping a package at their feet - "nanites to patch my suit with and a big book of flashcards for you if you pinky-swear you're not gonna conquer the planet right this minute."

"Asgardians aren't the ones who swear binding oaths but I promise I do not want your planet and definitely don't want it on that schedule."

"Great! You are my favorite Loki." He picks something out of the care package and appears to just push it directly into his chest. "You'd be my favorite Loki even if you wanted to conquer the planet, I can use 'hot chick' as a tiebreaker, but you're my favorite Loki without the need to resort to any tiebreakers." He picks something else out of the care package. It's a tablet. "Next stop right outside Wakanda, I think, unless you've thought of something we should do first."

"I don't think I've heard of Wakanda, is that a city, I don't think I've read a list of all the cities -" She takes the tablet.

"Country. They might not let us in but we can stand at the border and yell and maybe someone will pass it on. F.R.I.D.A.Y., show us somewhere near the border -"

The tablet shows some empty African savanna.

"I did read a list of all the - you know I can teleport, right, do they have antimagic or is this just one of those 'knock politely' things -"

"I doubt they have anti-teleporters but I don't doubt they'd shoot at us. Besides, yeah, it's rude."

"Okay then." She touches his arm and they pop. "Illusions do audio if yelling normally doesn't work."

The border outside Wakanda is littered with dead bodies. Not human ones. Some of them are charred and some of them are smoking slightly and some of them have gaping wounds. 

" - if there's still fighting then I think I'll risk being rude, can you pop me in without going yourself -"

"No, sorry, this spell was developed under emergency conditions and it's hacky."

"How are you in a fight, from 'it's a better idea to have you there anyway' to 'I will spend all my time keeping you safe and still might fail and then your buddies will be sad' -"

She pulls Lævateinn off her belt and glaives it. "I'm good even without the magic, how much did you say you knew about Asgardians - maybe yours are different - anyway I don't have a non-reductionist soul, they can get me right back, though then you'll have to wait for us to find your world. If something gets through my being indestructible, but an infinity stone might, haven't tested that."

"If Thanos is there we should bounce straight back out. Back to Titan, maybe, to minimize collateral damage if he does follow us. If Thanos isn't there then still be careful, you're plan A for getting off this planet."

"What's he look like?"

"Big. Purple. Too much chin."

"Gotcha. Pity I leave my Tesseract home, maybe it'd work here - where to?"

He points past the bodies at some tranquil forested area totally devoid of bodies. "There."

Pop.

("Introduce yourself as, I don't know, Susan," he advises at the last minute.)

The fighting is over. There are a lot of dead bodies. There are some hovercraft from which medical people are checking which are dead bodies. There are craters in the ground. There is the distinctive scarring of a whole lot of lightning.

"Was local Thor maybe here?" she asks, not moving her lips, baffling the sound. "I'm not letting sound escape, you can answer even if you wouldn't want to be overheard."

"That sure does look like Thor. Strange didn't think he'd be among the dust bunnies, but Strange didn't see you at all so I don't have high expectations. How often can you do the healing trick -"

"Often as I want but has to be touch range."

The suit has jet thrusters, suddenly; he zips over to the nearest medical hovercraft. "Hey! This is my friend Susan, she has magic touch-range healing, can you make her useful and do you happen to know if any of the Avengers are here."

      "They were fighting over by the river. I think they may still be there. Can she do anything about the people who are -"

"Not yet but we are absolutely working on that, highly motivated, definitely have a plan. Just people who got conventionally stabbed, because it looks like there are a bunch of those."

      "We could make use of assistance."

"Great. Susan will help you out, then, and I am sorry about our being here without permission, and I am sorry about. Well. The world, and -"

The suit jet-thrusters off towards the river.

("I was gonna say Isabella," she mentions, teleporting over to the people who can find her stabbed patients.) "I can heal fast but can't identify still-alive fast -"

The doctor standing at the ship holds out her hand, palm upturned, and produces a hologram of the surrounding area with people marked for triage. "We assigned categories in the absence of magical healing but the dead are identified."

"Perfect, thanks." She memorizes it in a second's skim, then pops from person to person, starting with those in the nearest-term danger in the triage system.

There are people standing in the trees; his heat sensors, which pick them up first, can't tell him who they are, but a few seconds later they're in view and he can. 

He moves perhaps a little faster than there's any call for. "Rhodey!"

"Tony. You made it."

      "So did you. I was about to complain I was batting much worse than fifty-fifty on this dead friends thing."

"Pepper's -"

      "Pepper's dead, Dr. Strange is dead, the spiderkid is dead, a bunch of people you didn't meet - Thanos's daughter is alive and will help us out - you guys look like you did a little better -"

"We failed."

"Well, yeah, but you were screwed, right? Strange had the magic time rock, he took a look, looked through fourteen million before he found one where we win. It was hopeless, we were outgunned."

       "I nearly killed him," said Thor.

"Strange says nah you didn't."

      "I drove my axe through his body and he snapped his fingers with his dying breath - had I only -"

"You'd have thought of that sometimes, right?"

     Thor blinks wearily at him.

"If you were stabbing a dude a hundred times, you think once you'd think maybe to go for the MacGuffin?"

     "Tony," says Natasha. 

"I'm not rubbing it in I'm making a point - that wouldn't have worked either, couldn't have worked, because Strange looked and we never ever win and that means it's never really close."

"You said he envisioned one world where we won."

  "Yeah. He did. But now there's a complication - uh, I'll start with the plan and then I'll add the complication, how's that. There are some heroes we didn't know about; we go and we round them up. Successfully contacting them is going to be complicated, but technically complicated, in a way that apparently I and some Wakandan woman I've never heard of can get through if we try hard and believe in ourselves. The mold for the Infinity Gauntlet apparently still exists; while we're inventing something that can call the backup someone needs to make us an Infinity Gauntlet of our own. 

And then, twenty-six days from now, there's a nuclear war on a planet called Lemistra, because of the instability caused by all this genocide going around lately - there are gonna be a lot of those, we're waiting for Lemistra because that'll be enough time to have rounded up our new friends and not enough time for him to stop resting on his laurels and repair his gauntlet. Lemistra goes up in flames, billions of people die, they give themselves a nuclear winter and the survivors hang out slowly starving.

Nebula goes to her daddy, asks if he'll consider undoing that since, you know, it's terrible for the balance. Thanos should not know that this is happening left and right, he's gotta think it's a weird one-off in an otherwise successful campaign to bring about peace and happiness everywhere. Apparently he will show. We ambush him. One of the heroes we didn't know about, called Carol Danvers, has an affinity for the Power Stone. There's apparently a way for her to peel it off Thanos if we can overwhelm him in the fight. It's not gonna go the same as last time because we picked the location, we don't need the planet to survive the mess intact, and we have a month to assemble enough guns. 

We assemble our own gauntlet, find someone who can wield it to undo everything. This will probably be deadly, but you know, hell of a way to go."

"And the complication?"

"Where's your brother?"

"He is dead. ...I think this time he will remain so."

"Oh boy. Uh. Condolences. So on Titan I ran into this teleporting Asgardian. Teleporting girl Asgardian. With healing powers. She goes by Loki."

"That is - impossible -"

"I don't think she is your brother Mark IV - she seems - smarter? Less unhinged? But. She sure exists. She's healing Wakandans right now, I thought I'd get you all caught up so you could decide, uh, how you feel about alternate-universe sisters."

"My experience of sisters has not, so far, been encouraging."

"Yeah, about that, are you sure you're not the adopted one? Whole family of violent psychopaths with ambitions of world domination, and then you're - you know, blonde, and well-meaning -"

"My mother was blonde. And well-meaning."

       "Sorry," says Rhodey, "how is Loki's renewed status as ambiguously dead a complication in the plan you outlined?"

"Well, she's got friends who she told to come and get her, and who can resurrect people, so long as we don't have immortal souls - apparently that varies by planet, which is not how I would have expected it to vary if I'd been told it varied at all - and her friends have a lot of firepower so if they turn up then things probably go well. Or on the other hand, she's buddy-buddy with the Tesseract from her Asgard and thinks she could maybe get Thanos's space rock to defect, if we do the plan as stated but with her instead of Danvers.

Or we can ignore her and stick to the plan, Strange thought it'd work. Though he wasn't super confident in that. Actually he sounded downright pessimistic though I'm not sure that had anything to do with our actual odds."

"Who exactly is Dr. Strange," says Steve, "and how did he know all this?"

"Yeah, I thought that was pretty bullshit too. So apparently there are guardians of the mystic arts hanging out in sanctums, one of which was in New York. I don't know if they all have sentient cloaks or if that was just Strange. Never said hello because - well, he hasn't got a good excuse for not making me aware that there was another target for alien attacks in New York, but I guess he does have a good excuse for not telling you, since you were a fugitive. Really looking the part, by the way."

"I'm told I pull off the beard. Go on."

"He had the time stone. Wore it on a necklace. When we got to Titan he sat down and looked through millions and millions of futures, and then he gave Thanos the time stone and said that this was the only winning move he saw."

       "He gave Thanos the -"

"Yeah." He feels uncomfortable disclosing that there was bargaining for his life involved. He should - he should maybe get over that. "Asked him to spare me, gave him the rock. I thought maybe one of the hits he took had knocked him off his rocker but apparently you need me. So now you have me. Hi."

Rhodey hugs him. They can't actually feel each other through the armor, but it's still nice.

"Are we that confident in how these stones even work, or is this obviated by... extra Loki?" says Steve. "You're sure she's just healing Wakandans? They let you guys in so she could do that?"

"We teleported in. We thought there might still be fighting going on. I know she hasn't run off to engage in ritual combat for the throne, I'm tracking her tablet, but I haven't got details."

"Perhaps I should go meet my new sister."

"Just, you know, don't die. You're a plan element."

"Loki was never my equal in combat. - Hela, on the other hand, made mashed potatoes of the both of us."

"That's super reassuring. Go make friends, I apparently need a Wakandan for this plan and so I want to avoid grievously offending them all."

Thor takes off flying.

" - since when can he do that? And why'd he trade the hammer out for -"

      People shrug, tiredly.

Thor seeks out Loki.

Bopping around bopping people, Lævateinn back on her belt harmlessly.

He lands. "Hello."

"Oh! You're probably boy Thor! How do you... fly without a... maybe Asgardians here are different."

"The circumstances required me to forge a better weapon, and to channel my powers more effectively even without it. Also my last sister broke my hammer."

"You have a sister? Oh, uh, it's not conventional to borrow alts' siblings quite like that, some of my alts have twins and I don't consider them extra sisters." She pops to two more people to heal them and that's the last of it besides walking wounded. "I'm not even sure your Loki is a me and not just some strange thing, my boyfriend'll look into it but might take a while to get here."

"Stark explained. How did you get here?"

"So, my time's very valuable for all kindsa reasons - spell development and handling the Tesseract and stuff - but I've done a lot of literally minimal break time spell development in the last recently, had to save a planet from an evil god, it was a thing, it sucked, and now I cordon off a fair amount of not-doing-high-stakes-things time. I go to chocolate tastings, or I spar with my sister, or I read books, or I hang out with my friends who sing a lot without simultaneously doing politics and worldsaving and listen to them sing... or I go to a planet somebody's turned up with a really awesome field of giant mushrooms, and my precog's either falling down on the job or thought this was worth it and couldn't have me arrive better-informed, because apparently some of the mushrooms if you brush up against them fling you a few hops away on the map of worlds-you-can-get-to-from-other-worlds."

"The bifrost has been destroyed but I can travel as though by Bifrost with my new weapon."

"Snazzy! Yeah, what, uh, happened, to your Asgard?"

"A great many things went terribly wrong at once. The first was that, long ago, my father Odin had another child, his daughter Hela; she terrorized the realms with him. When he came to regret this approach to galactic diplomacy, she didn't. He, unable to destroy her, sealed her away for as long as he would live. The second was that Loki impersonated my father, erased his memories, and left him in a nursing home on Earth. The third was that this occurred just as it had come to my attention that the Infinity Stones were, improbably, turning up across the Nine Realms in event after event, after ages during which they lay dormant. I went out seeking them. Loki ruled Asgard in my father's stead. And when I returned and discovered the impersonation, my father was on the brink of death, and we had no opportunity to prepare for my sister's attack.

She drew her power from Asgard itself and was indestructible for as long as it endured. And so in the end it was necessary to destroy Asgard to destroy her. The refugees fled towards Earth. Thanos met us on the way."

"...okay, I think that is all just different in my Asgard, Frigg's certainly had chances to tell me if - or is this a half-sister, my lines of communication with Odin are not good, she could totally be hiding a half... sibling... from me and my Thor."

"I do not know who Hela's mother was."

"Okay, might have one, I'll check, thanks for the tipoff. This seems like a variant in a lot of ways, though, my Midgard's not an Earth and most Earths aren't Midgards, the genderswapped family's a thing we've seen before but might or might not be affecting stuff, my opposite number here sounds like an evil nutcase, etcetera."

"My Loki had many shortcomings, but he also fell into Thanos's hands for quite some time and I think he might have avoided the worst of his errors if not for that. I can't guess at the rest. You wield your Tesseract?"

"Yes. I poked it when I was little, it taught me a sorcerous alphabet, I worked on magic myself from there without further access to it, it later decided I was boring and kicked me into a neighboring universe, I invented the teleport spell I use now to get out of that universe and grab it to save the planet I'd been on from an evil god, it lets me use it all the time now. It's grouchy because we've discovered universes it can't reach; it only works within one hop."

"Do we know if the reach of Thanos's stones is similarly limited?"

"No idea, haven't met this set. It's likeliest, lots of things can't operate outside their neighborhoods, but it's not guaranteed, there are also portable things or things that stretch from wherever they happen to be. In point of fact the knowledge that there exist other universes in this sense should definitely not make it to Thanos in case that matters; there's precedent."

"Understood. Can you tell me anything about your Thor that you would expect to be persistent across worlds, and not public knowledge -"

"Uh, most of what I know about her isn't exactly intimate secrets and alts vary in what things are consistent between them. I can tell you about her but I don't have a password like that, sorry."

He nods. "We have a great deal of planning to do. I would like to trust you. At least as far as I would trust a total stranger. Anything you can think of would be helpful."

"That's fair. She looks like this," illusion, complete with Mjolnir. "I was clumsy as a child and she used to make fun of me while trying all kinds of things to make me less so; I pretended it was the dance lessons when I solved it with magic. She's the best fighter on the planet barring Odin using her various cheats. Her best friends are Fandral, Hogun, and Volstagg. - I don't actually consider us particularly distant sisters but she's not really verbally intimate, I wish I had more concrete facts to list, hm - she picked up Mjolnir on an impulse to take it to fight a giant bear - maybe this will work better in video, how about that -" She plays an illusion of Thor sparring with the Three all in a laughing pile of limbs and weapons.

He watches. He looks a little sad. 

"Did the Man of Iron tell you his plan?"

"The one from the Time Stone fellow? No."

"I think you should join us and we can figure out any adjustments your abilities enable."

"Sounds good. Bear in mind that my organization may find this world at any time and pop in to help, but we should probably operate conservatively on the assumption that they won't do that within the span of time this operation takes."

"I think we would be delighted to be so interrupted."

"Of course. Where am I joining you to?"

Thor lifts his axe and Bifrosts them on over. 

His companions are, apparently, two more men in metal exoskeletons like Stark's and a man and a woman in only light armor. And a raccoon. The raccoon would fit as someone's spirit animal except for how these Midgardians don't have those.

" - don't know where to start on finding Danvers," he's saying, "but maybe Fury took notes. And wasn't responsible enough about security."

The raccoon is also wearing clothes and carrying guns. "Hello, introduce me and catch me up please?"

"Hi, slightly-more-vetted Loki! This is my buddy Rhodey, we met at M.I.T., he was Stark Industries' liaison to the military until I guess yesterday when he got some really stupid orders. This is Cap - do you not go by Cap anymore -"

"Cap is fine," says Cap.

"This is Cap! Captain America, symbol of justice, freedom, and the American way, wanted for terrorism and massive property damage and so on. That's Bruce Banner, he spends most of his time getting PhDs and some of it turning into an enormous green rage monster, that's Natasha, I have no idea what her job description is at the moment. I never met the raccoon in my life."

"Rocket," says the raccoon. "Charmed, I'm not at all sure."

"It's nice to meet you all," says Loki. "Your opsec is terrible, you didn't check if I'd passed my vetting by kidnapping your Thor and replacing him with an illusion at all."

Cap startles. Black Widow kicks Thor in the shin.

"Your illusions don't do heat signatures."

"Oh, interesting - you're right, they don't, they do affect people with infrared vision these days but yeah, I retract my complaint."

"So the plan we were going with before you dropped into our lives was to find some hidden heroes, make a gauntlet of our own, set up an ambush for Thanos on one of the planets he doomed and try to lure the Power Stone out of its bearing. An advantage of this plan is that Strange foresaw it working; anything else we go with doesn't have that going for it. Disadvantage is that it takes a month, Strange wasn't all that sure of it, and it involves the gauntlet ending up with a random stranger whose only qualification is that her name is Carol. So probably she won't conquer the universe with it or anything, I can't really imagine a galactic empress Carol."

"It'd sound imposing after a while if she did it anyway."

"Would Strange not have warned you if -"

"Not if he thought I wouldn't do it, or would have trouble getting all of you to do it, if I was scared of our future space empress."

"Anyway, does this plan have enough juke tolerance that I could try approaching the space stone before the point at which Carol is introduced? In theory it shouldn't care where I am and I can and should try monologuing at it a bit now, in practice it probably won't take notice unless I seem to be within its current bearer's scope of interest or liable to pick it up imminently."

"Hmm. If Thanos captures you and finds out about other universes he might snap them up too. If something weird happens then maybe he's not trusting enough to go do famine relief on Lemistra. The plan is not super juke-tolerant, it was fourteen million to one, though I don't know how much of that was picking out Lemistra in particular, me in particular - all these particulars - what do you get if you go near the stone?"

"When I talked to mine it jumped into my hand of its own accord. But it knew me and had interfered with me twice before; this is its alt and maybe not a very good facsimile considering my own, and isn't familiar with me, except perhaps through my... not very good facsimile."

"First time I met our Loki he threw me out my kitchen window. I fell sixty stories. Luckily it's a seventieth-story kitchen. Okay, so we're not likely to get 'jumping into your hand', but - signs of friendliness? Things that might help you conclude you can peel it off him in a fight?"

"So the thing with the stones, or at least the Edda stones, is that while they are people, they prefer to pretend very aggressively in almost all situations to be inanimate objects. I don't expect it to glitter encouragingly at me. If you pick up a stone and it wanted its personal space, you and possibly the planet you're standing on are in trouble. If you pick up a stone and it approximately tolerates you, you can use it a little, maybe it hurts like crazy to hold onto while you're doing that. If it loves you, it's like my Tesseract and me. I think that the stones can't reasonably universally love Thanos - they have different enough tastes, not good taste but varied, and he doesn't seem to have had quite that insane level of fine control based on my limited evidence... Anyway, if you don't pick up a stone, you probably don't find out how much it likes you. My case was extremely anomalous and I don't know if this Space Stone will appreciate me the same way, let alone on short acquaintance. But it's not out of the question that it might if I tried; the question is, what does it cost to try."

"We probably only get one shot at the ambush. The other pieces of the plan look a little less fragile - though it wouldn't surprise me if there's only enough metal to attempt to reforge the gauntlet once, or something like that -"

Loki nods. "Anyone who, uh, decides they believe my frankly incredible story about belonging to an interdimensional organization that can do nearly anything except get here promptly, and I wouldn't blame anyone for not being such a someone, can relax a little. The wizard doesn't seem to have had advance knowledge of me and mine, incidentally supporting the hypothesis that these stones are also adjacency-limited, so the fault tolerance of this plan isn't predicated on something like you all having souls and being unresurrectable, or something annoying like that. With enough coordination, even if confronting Thanos is impossible, we can move all of the relevant planets far enough away that Thanos can't find them, put them somewhere nice, and get started on the logistics and vetting processes for magic powers that bring everybody back, and the only lasting inconvenience is that people have to adjust to different local laws of faster than light travel and stuff like that."

"It's good to have a backup plan better than 'attend a lot of funerals, try to prevent the collapse of civilization.'"

"I think we can do better than 'move a lot of planets' but it's a reasonable floor and we've had to do it once, a few stars were rigged to be eaten by spiders, long story."

"I don't even know how many people there are in the universe.  - Earth doesn't have FTL. Possibly I should've been working on that. Coulda made some friends, run into those Guardians in peacetime or something."

"I don't know how much of the universe matches but more people looking to get infinity stones before Thanos did would have been good."

He was even forewarned. He was forewarned and he nearly destroyed the Earth for Thanos and then alienated half the people who could fight him and successfully recruited exactly one ally. Who was a sophomore in high school. 

"Okay, let's try to read Nick Fury's diary and then go from there."

"Who's Nick Fury?"

"He ran S.H.I.E.L.D., back when that was a thing. He worked with us on saving the world, which has come up surprisingly often this decade. Strange says Fury knows how to reach the people we need. But, regrettably, Fury's a dustbunny, so hopefully he wrote it down."

"Mkay. Say, anyone have a pen -"

"A pen?" says Cap.

"My boyfriend can conjure arbitrary material objects including letters I write here, but I have to do it in physical medium, if I write in illusion it's not a material object."

"I've got a pen," says the raccoon, digging around in his pockets. "No, that's somebody's thumb. Thought I had a pen."

"I can keep dictating to Tony's computer, that's fine, I want to send a longer letter earliest convenience though."

"I expect that Wakanda would be happy to provide you with your own transcription-capable computer."

"That would be great. I really have no excuse for leaving my computer behind while tromping through the apparently dimensional teleportation capable mushrooms but I have learned my lesson."

"Are we welcome in Wakanda, we kind of just dropped in -"

      "I don't know who's in charge," says Natasha, "but it'd surprise me if evicting us was their top priority."

"T'Challa's dead?"

      "Yep."

"Any guesses on the engineer I am supposed to meet."

      "I suspect you want Princess Shuri."

"Then let's head in, get Loki her computer, meet the princess, figure out where we're looking for Fury's stuff."

Loki follows along with the people who know what direction they're going.

Wakanda is in something of a state of chaos, sirens blaring; there are people leaning against buildings and sobbing. Empty levitating trains zip by. 

She doesn't have anything for these people on hand. Hurry up, peal.

They speak to some people. They get into an elevator. It elevators them through an elaborate underground complex at least two hundred times the size of the aboveground city. 

"Princess Shuri is occupied," someone tells them when they get out of the elevator. "You will have to wait."

"Yeah, we figured. When she's got a moment let her know there's a way to undo it, we're working on it, we need her."

        "I will convey that."

And someone gets Loki a room and her own computer. Or a pen, if she'd prefer that.

Computer's better. Allspeak works on typing. She writes up the long version.

And at some point the busy Princess can be apprised of the plan. 

         "What do we know about this Danvers woman?"

"Nothing. I don't love it but we're running with what we've got. If we get a sign that the stones are on our side even without her then we can move faster, but without something really convincing in that direction I think we've got no choice but to stick to the plan."

        "What do we know about the engineering problem?"

"Also nothing. I was expecting that part to make more sense once we've grabbed Fury's stuff and looked into it a little. Natasha's trying to figure out where to look right now. ....I saw the dampeners on the train. What's the top speed vibranium can handle?"

      "Is this related to -"

"This is not related to the engineering problem I needed to be alive for, but since there's going to be a Thanos fight take two I'm thinking how to make it go better than take one."

When she has finished her letter Loki attempts long distance monologuing at the local space stone, introducing herself, describing her history with its alts and the concept of alts, apologizing for the existence of space it cannot reach, demonstrating the teleport, asking if it would like to defect.

She is not surprised that it doesn't appear in her hand.

She is surprised that, with the tiniest crackle suggesting that in some fraction of possible ways it is here while in all others it is not, it addresses her, in the same not a voice as her own:

Do something interesting.

She amends her letter and departs her room to look for someone to report to on this.

Engineers are huddled over a holographic projection arguing excitedly.

"I don't even know what they're working on," says Natasha, "we haven't got Fury's hardware yet. You need anything?"

"I need to be heavily involved on - stylistic approach, and probably more than that," she says. "I didn't get the rock by talking to it from where I was standing, but it did talk to me, which I wasn't expecting, and it wants me to do something interesting. The bad news is the last time a space stone wanted me to do something interesting I spent the next several subjective decades managing a war with an evil god, the good news is it bothered acknowledging me at all."

" - okay. So its sensibilities for interestingness are -"

"...not as bad as they could be? I have seen worse aesthetics. Running entire universes. The first thing I should actually try is see if there are any Ardas adjacent to here, I checked for worlds I've visited before in case the map loops around somewhere I've been to here, and I can't check for alts-wherever-they-may-be with my version of teleportation, but I didn't check for a new Arda and I can because they have lots of the same locations, and the multiverse is infested with them. An Arda's usefulness and potential immediate-term interestingness depend a whole lot on when it is, we find them all over the timeline, they're on rails till someone visits, but I might be able to harvest help of some caliber or other."

 "Yes, that sounds useful. We're in the rounding-up-allies stage, the more allies the better."

"Mmhm -" She checks for Tol Eressëas, space and flat versions. Safely Technically Not Valinor so she won't bother the Valar in her landing (she's not Elspeth and can't just assume she'll be forgiven for showing up on Taniquetil), safely Technically Not Endorë so she won't find that it's been geographically fucked by a war with an evil god and too different to teleport to.

Space Tol Eressëa goes. 

She pops back. "Good news, you have an Arda neighbor! They're a Space Arda, too, they'll have spaceships. Now I have to figure out what year it is and whether anyone I know is alive."

Natasha looks like this happens every day, or at least enough days she's stopped having any expectations about whether it will. "Do you need anything to accomplish that?"

"I do not, but it might take me a while to find out - I should make sure now if it's, uh, cinematically poised to have any main events I could avert happen, but if it's in between things it can wait a few days if that would be more convenient for any reason."

"Thor's helping them teleport around picking up hardware, so I don't think we urgently need you here for anything."

"Okay, cool. I will go try to get you some help." She scoops up her computer, notes that the place has an Arda neighbor but obviously that's not going to help them find her since they've already tried finding Ardas from everywhere they've mapped, and goes back to the Tol Eressëa and turns into a bird and looks for an Elf to ask what year it is.

There are some Elves at the shore of a big, lazy river. They're naked (they are of course not Elf-naked) and eating flower petals.

They'll probably think she's a Maia and even if they don't they're Elves what are they gonna do, stab her? She lands on a treetrunk nearby and says by illusion, "Excuse me, what year is it?"

The Elves look at each other uncertainly, then at her. “1530,” one of them offers after a moment, as if they don’t think about this very often and expect Valar to even less often.”

"Thank you." She flies away a bit and starts trying candidate places on Endorë. It'll be different from the other Space Arda, this is much later - she's not sure how a lot of it would play out in space, but some of the landscape may still be there. She doesn't manage and winds up aiming for well above an Endorë ocean so she can aim visually for land. She does this invisibly; no point alarming Melkor.

From here she can see that Endorë's continents are not green and its water is not blue and there are giant, low-hanging clouds of ash. That's probably why the teleport failed.

Yikes.

She pops around and around, assessing, looking for signs of civilization.

There are fortresses. There are some airfields. 

Any of the fortresses helpfully eight-pointed?

These fortresses make even fewer concessions to Elven sensibilities than the one of Maitimo's she looked at. But some of the airfields do have a familiar eight-pointed star.

Close enough. She looks for Elves to ask directions of there.

There are Elves staffing their airfield.

An illusion walks up to one of them. "Excuse me."

The Elf has a gun. Their hand goes to their gun. "This is a secure area. Please step back."

The illusion takes a step back. "This is really important, can you just escalate me as high as you're authorized to escalate me to or do you have to try shooting me first?"

"I am sure they're observing. More steps, please."

"I'm not actually here." It goes see-through. "Short version I'm a visitor from another world, I can teleport, I'd like to know where to find one of your people who's in osanwë distance of Curufin, so I can speak weird languages with him eavesdropping, till I can talk to someone important."

She looks torn, briefly. Then - "if you teleport with me three miles from here you'll be out of a secure area and we will remain in range for any communications that should reach our leadership to do so."

"Sure, is any direction equally good?"

"Any direction removes us from the secure area."

"If this lands you in a pond, that's your own fault," she says, and she teleports them both three miles north.

It doesn't land them in a pond, just some bombed-out ground. The Elf holsters her gun and crosses her arms.

"I speak Quenya but never learned Thindarin and will be turning my translator off for the language demo, if you need to talk to me and Quenya's too illegal wave your arm or something," Loki says, and she starts declaiming Asgardian poetry, then switches to Jotuntongue, which she has been learning the long way.

The Elf watches her for a while. Eventually waves her arm.

"Yes?" says Loki, switching back to Allspeak.

"What do you want exactly?"

"In the short term a galaxy a ways away needs some help, in the medium term I can solve all your problems but depending on some stuff I might do it faster if the thing with the other galaxy shakes out well."

"Can you expand on that."

"The details are sensitive intel and you are a rando I am talking to because I found you near an eight pointed star."

"I could get you a Dwarf phone. And then you can talk to Lord Curufin if you want him particularly."

"Maedhros would be fine too although come to think of it I don't know how available he is here and now, Curufin's just the one who can do the language thing."

"I am sure Lord Maedhros would be delighted to speak with you," she says. "Our people are looking for a Dwarf phone for you now."

"I have not used a Dwarf phone before. What's up with them?"

"They can be used by people who do not have the communications system common to Elves."

"Makes sense."

"All right, they purchased one. Someone will fly it out to us."

"Mkay." She has her computer handy; she updates the letter to Cam.

Eventually a little drone flies them a funny little headset thing. The Elf retrieves it and hands it to Loki.

"Thank you." She pops it on and sound-baffles herself so Rando Elf doesn't hear.

Rando Elf is heading back in. 

"Hello," says another Elf on the Dwarf phone. "Who's speaking, please?"

"Larya, is that you? Hi! My name is Loki."

" - hello. I don't think I know a Loki."

"Oh, you and I have never met. Where do you want me to start?"

"What do you want, how can you help us, you do realize how much you're unnerving people, don't you -"

"Yeah, I'd be doing this differently if I had all my resources at the moment but I don't and can't finely predict when I'll get them. So. One of the resources I currently don't have is a magic rock from another universe - be very careful with the 'other universe' fact, if Melkor finds out about it he can probably learn to dimension hop and Sauron might be able to do it on his own too. Universes can be next to each other or not next to each other. Most ways of getting from one universe to another only work between universes that are adjacent. I had an accident which flung me at least two steps away from where I was, which means it will take a while for my people to find me but they could at any time. Follow me so far?"

" - yes."

"So, I was flung into one of this universe's neighbors. They are currently having a problem with a maniac who acquired a full set of six magic rocks and used them to murder half of the population of the universe, some trillions of people. A precognitively vetted plan to make that not have happened with timefuckery probably is in progress and might want reinforcements, so I decided to see if a world I had previous experience with and knew how to find friendlies in might be adjacent. There's lots of Ardas. Does that put some of my behavior into better context -"

"I think I'm following. Does our universe have trillions of people?"

"No. Well, uh, it has however many people are on servers at the moment, I guess that could be trillions, and Ardas vary, but we have never encountered an Arda that came with aliens running around that you wouldn't know about at this point in time."

"That's good, at least. What affects the wait time until you can help us?"

"We're waiting on two things, whichever comes first will let me kill Melkor. One of them is one of the set of rocks the maniac has. My universe has a similar set of magic rocks - sometimes things are similar world to world on a smaller scale than 'the entire place is an Arda' - and I can use my instance of one of them to kill Melkors within one step of my home world, no problem. Ability to use infinity stones, that being this kind of magic rock, depends on the rocks liking you - an infinity stone is an inanimate object in sort of the same way Huan is a dog, if that makes sense - and this one doesn't know me yet but I convinced it to talk to me and it told me to do something interesting. If it decides I'm interesting enough, and I'm hoping 'go to an Arda' is interesting because the first time I went to an Arda it was because mine sent me there, I should be able to use it like the one at home and I currently expect it to have a similar scope of power.

"Second thing is my various alternate universe versions and various Ardasfull of Elves and so on, who collectively form a multiversal organization. I have an alt who can portably destroy Melkors; he'll have to come here, so it waits till they've found a path from the known map to this world, but after that he can bang it out in a few hours."

"All right. Can we assist with either of those?"

"Second thing not at all unless something more time sensitive than I expect is in progress here right now and I should tell them they need to throw more resources at finding me ASAP. First thing potentially, I can put you into contact with my native guides in the universe with the maniac and you can talk sending some help. A regular Elf isn't much versus the heavy-hitters in play there but Huan could be if he's handy, I don't actually know how good their FTL is and a lightleaper might beat it - uh, if you, still have any, I don't actually... know... maybe you don't... anyway, that kind of thing."

"It would not surprise me if Huan was interested in fighting some other evil being. ...there is one lightleaper. We were relying on it for evacuating some survivors if that became necessary, but if you can teleport other people then perhaps we'd no longer be so reliant on it."

"Yeah, I can teleport people. Unfortunately I don't already know a good habitable planet to expect to exist nearby, so I can't just pick up all your civilians and drop them somewhere, although if you've got one scouted and can show me a picture..."

"We're not ready to tell you where all the civilians are but we'll keep in mind that that's an option."

"Sure thing."

"You can take a copy of Lord Maedhros to your allies in the next dimension over, if you care to, and we'll discuss the situation and get a sense of how it makes sense to involve Huan."

"Copy of - uh-huh. That makes sense."

" - I am somewhat confused about what you're familiar with about our world and what you aren't."

"Uh, most Ardas take place on low tech flat planets with more powerful, worse-at-science Valar, Valinor being one continent and Endorë being some other continents across an ocean, the equivalent of lightleapers being literal boats, music being magic, and Elves having immaterial souls instead of chips. We have seen a Space Arda before but only one and it was encountered and derailed from the normal timeline shortly post-Alqualondë, so I know roughly how your story goes and I know what substrate it goes on but not exactly how the last few hundred years' of events translated onto that substrate."

"Huh. ...how does Angband work in the magical setting, does Melkor just, um, stab people?"

"Not hardly. Your Angband is worse because of the copying and because copies can be run faster than Flat Arda Melkor can fuck with actual literal time, but he can still do hallucinations and prevent suicide and so on, he just has to do it one thread at a time while the body's alive."

"Huh. All right. Do the locals of this neighboring civilization have computers with approximately the capabilities of ours, so they can run him -"

"They have some fancy stuff but I didn't investigate deeply and don't know his system requirements. I brought a computer along and don't mind if you look at it but it's just a random computer someone gave me to write letters on because I need to commit information to physical substrate to transmit it back home, it might not be state of the art."

"Lord Maedhros says you can try it and if it doesn't work come back for one of ours."

"Mm-hm. Uh, Maedhroses are always on the more functional end of the Angband escapee bellcurve, but that's in magic Ardas where the bellcurve exists instead of consisting entirely of 'we rolled them all back, they're not salvageable' - how do you, uh -"

"Ah, I wasn't there but they just went in and edited all the numbers that were very very far outside normal tolerances and deleted a lot of things. It took a few tries. He's all right."

"Okay."

"I think we got very lucky." The drone that delivered her her Dwarf phone comes zipping back with a computer storage device of some kind.

"How is he installed, is that simple enough that I should memorize it, or should I hand him to techies from the next universe over and see what they make of it because it's dependent on the hardware?"

"That's all configured to do the work for you, it just needs more computing power than fits on a little drone."

"Okay, I'm sure someone can... whip up an appropriate cable or something. Thank you. Anything else before I bring it home?"

"Let me send you coordinates for where to land when you come back. We want to minimize the chances of attracting enemy attention."

"Very sensible. I need an image, I can't target my spell by coordinates, I apologize, it's hacked together under emergency conditions and fixing it isn't high priority for lots of reasons."

"All right. I will send you another drone with a picture."

"Thanks."

That one follows a few minutes after the first.

Loki looks at the picture. "Wonderful. Thank you, Larya, I'm sorry for scaring everyone."

"Kill Melkor, I'm sure they'll get over it."

"That's what I figured. See you around."

She pops back to Wakanda with Maedhros tucked under her arm.

Tony is sitting with Natasha this time, sorting through a big pile of hardware. "Loki! Found your friends?"

"Yes. This one is an upload. He needs more processor than was portable, can you hook him up to something? He's supposedly able to figure it out from there."

"Thought your friends were Elves."

"This is the cyborg variety of Elf."

"If it doesn't bring presents from Santa I don't think it really counts as an Elf. Last time I ran a baby computer program hoping it'd be a good guy it wasn't. Shuri, do you know -"

"I can set up hardware that's isolated but if we're accumulating allies we're likely to at some point give it more resources, we shouldn't do that at all if we think it's dangerous."

"I am reasonably sure this isn't the evil kind, and if he was the evil kind it wouldn't be in an existential threat way. He's not actually here to help directly, though, you don't really have to network him, he's here because he knows all his people and can tell you about what reinforcements they can offer."

"They don't have anyone who comes with a robot body?"

"I'm assuming he's been solely software for a few hundred years now."

"Okay. We can set up the Elf. I hear you're trying to convince the space rock that you're awesome?"

"Yes."

"What kinda stuff does the space rock think is awesome?"

"Well, last time it sent me to an Elf world and I was stuck there having a war with their evil god till I invented a teleportation spell but that took a really long time and I'm hoping that having already invented the spell gets me some points and I can just be myself for a few weeks for the rest of it."

"Still don't feel like I know what thing might happen that has the stone over here going 'that was awesome'."

"I'm not going to do anything reckless or stupid; if this stone likes those things this isn't gonna work out anyway. But I don't know exactly what about my previous adventures interested my Tesseract so I can't tell you precisely how I mean to woo it, I'm just going to be myself slightly more emphatically than I might if my stylistic tells weren't likely to help in and of themselves."

"All right, works for me. So Fury's stuff is all encrypted, but encryption works on some assumptions about how fast computers can cross their zeros and dot their ones, and it turns out Earth is in the galactic boondocks doing all our computing on a Windows box from the nineties. If we borrow some fancy stuff from our spacefaring neighbors then Fury's stuff will soon be unencrypted. That does not take a genius, let alone two geniuses, so the mystery engineering problem that is the reason I'm alive is still a mystery, but it seems to be step one."

"Okay, you want to ask locals or see if Elves can do it?"

"I guess the Elves have the advantage that they're not all having a Very Bad Day today."

"They've been having a very bad day for three hundred years, this one's still mid-war-with-evil-god, but they'll require slightly less explanation to run errands now that I've already introduced the situation. If you can wake up Maedhros he'll be able to tell me who to go to."

"Working on it. How does he want to interface with us, does he want a screen -"

"I don't know, a screen's a reasonable bet."

She hums to herself and alters things on her holographic viewscreens.

Loki updates her letter again.

And eventually Shuri says, "all right, one Elf, no internet access -"

"He gonna speak English?"

"No, but Elves are really really good at languages, especially his family, and I can translate - or, hm - where's Thor -"

"Out looking for Asgardian survivors of this afternoon."

"Any chance you have a picture of where he'd be doing that? Maybe somebody brought an Allspeak wand."

"Don't think so, sorry."

"Well, I can translate while he soaks up English."

And then they have an Elf. "...hello," he says in Quenya, taking in the rather spectacular Wakandan laboratory and the armored man and Loki and Shuri.

"Hi Maedhros! Were you listening in while I talked to Larya? Welcome to an Earth, this is Tony Stark, that's Shuri."

"Yes, and to the language demonstration. This place is very pretty. I'm impressed with the designer."

"I didn't know you'd want the language demo but would've invited you expressly if I'd suspected. How's crypto doing this year in space Arda, I know it's never come up in Valinor but maybe you've had to invent it smart quick for war reasons and got it good?"

"- I'm reluctant to answer that. Why is it relevant?"

"Need to decrypt a thing. We can ask someone else if it's too sensitive."

"I think we'd be happy to attempt to decrypt a thing unless it's bizarrely similar to the Enemy's messaging protocols."

"That would be very surprising. Where should I drop it off, can you do pictures?"

His face is replaced with an image of a bombed-out field.

"Is that your planet? Bit of a fixer-upper."

"It would be convenient for you to learn English if you can do that expediently but I'm reluctant to translate that," Loki tells Maedhros.

He brings his face back. "I do have very easily hurt feelings."

"A regular delicate flower, yes. He says 'is that your planet? Bit of a fixer-upper.' This is not an example of an Earth diplomat, if you were wondering."

"Oh good, one always gets more done when they're the only diplomat in the room. How do I say 'the trees grew back fairly quickly during the first century of bombing runs, but then the Enemy inferred that we might find that reassuring or encouraging, and switched to using some kind of complex defoliant"?"

"I don't actually speak much English, and my translation solution won't let me produce something that sounds like it for you because you don't either. Tony, he wants to know how to say -" She repeats the sentence.

He repeats it. "That's super charming, do you have soil samples -"

"He says 'that's super charming, do you have soil samples'. I did not think to bring any, if you want some I can get them but it seems like a project for later. Maedhros, when I go to this location will someone... scurry up to me and accept tasks, or... what?"

"They'll be monitoring it, you can leave instructions and come back later. They find you nervewracking to be around since it'd be so easy for you to have them tortured for eternity."

"Well, I'm working on that. It's a safe place to leave a thing, bearing in mind that the Enemy definitely mustn't find out that there are other worlds such as by intercepting the thing to be decrypted?"

"It's as safe as anywhere in Endorë is."

"Okay. So if you guys have the diary handy gimme something to write a letter about it in Quenya on and I'll deliver it."

"I'll make a copy, that way we can also take it elsewhere if this isn't getting results fast enough. It self-destructs after three failed attempts but that shouldn't be a problem as long as they copy it a couple million times before trying anything."

"I'll make sure to specify."

"It's pretty standard, I'm sure they'd think of it." She hands Loki a hard drive.

Loki doesn't need to commit this one to strictly physical medium; she jots out an illusion letter in Quenya on the hard drive itself in little letters. She drops it in the field and comes right back.

"Do you know people in charge of countries or planets back in your universe, are they gonna mostly be the same people?"

"A few ambassadors, and they might, but they might know my local whatever the fuck he is."

"Yeah, they might. Also pretty busy running around keeping their societies from collapsing. I figure we should use the firepower of more than two planets for this, but I don't know who we'd talk to about getting anyone else on board, and we can't leak it."

He isn't running around keeping his society from collapsing. He could. He'd be pretty useful in New York right now, clearing the streets of abandoned cars and putting out fires and, well, boosting morale.

But it doesn't matter. It's never going to have happened anyway.

And it would suck. 

"What does Elf on the shelf need to get up to speed with English?"

She looks at the Elf on the shelf. "Can I basically model you as a regular you on this one or does being uploaded help? Would being fed an electronic dictionary help?"

"On this hardware I don't have significantly more attentional capacity than I had when I had a body. I could make a great deal of use of an English-Quenya dictionary."

"We have those but I didn't bring them with me, this was an unplanned excursion, but I'm sure they have all-English dictionaries, all-English text corpuses..."

"I will see what I can do with those. Thank you."

"My pleasure. Shuri, you're our hostess, what have you got in the form of English for him, dictionary and corpus and so on, so nobody has to stand around correcting his grammar for quite that long -"

"I can give him books for English-language learners?"

"...if they're starting-language-neutral somehow, sure, load him up." She translates the suggestion for Maedhros.

He finds it unobjectionable. And spends about ten seconds thinking it over, before saying hesitantly in English, "what a human language."

"Okay, that's cool. How does one get in on the brain-on-a-computer, if they happened to be interested?"

"Elves are computers. Humans aren't."

"Not yet we aren't."

"Feel free to work on it but the chips were designed by an omniscient creator deity and nobody's gotten them working on anybody who doesn't develop them in utero yet. There's lots of nice upgrades available on wetware, you just have to use more magic."

"You made it sound like all the other Earths were missing both me and Wakanda, though. So - who does that even leave to work on it?"

"I dunno, whoever invented the chiplocked computer? Different kind of chip. I think it was a demon. I wish I had mine, those are great."

"Demons?"

"Demons are a species with principally cosmetic relation to the religious concept of the same name. One of me is a demon, and also my boyfriend because we're narcissistic like that, and he's the one who's been conjuring my letters; demons can create arbitrary material objects. This has the obvious infosec problems, so a demon invented a little brain implant that can encode information with the way your brain works while you brain-computer-interface the information onto your device, and to let you access the encoded information checks that your brain continues to work that way many times a second. The information is never recorded unencoded, the encryption is breakable only by you operating your brain as the chip is trained to understand it. Demon-proof crypto."

"Clever!"

"So is the 'running out of finite resources' thing just completely false in your universe."

"Oh, yes, absolutely. There exist finite resources? Like, 'one wish per person' and 'we don't have that many subtle artists and can't overprioritize them in the Materia evacuation but we're trying to see if we can convince any of them to donate gametes to Amentans' and 'if too many precogs are doing things at the same time they bump into each other and don't work any more' and stuff. But space and matter, those we have."

"If you'd showed up an hour earlier maybe you could have taken Barney out for coffee and a lecture about demons."

"Barney?"

"Big, purple, mistakenly proportioned."

"I'll make Cam explain later. I'll bear it in mind if we wind up in a situation where that makes sense."

"What is the plan."

"We beg him to come do famine relief and then ambush him."

"I don't like that plan."

"Well, we won't bring you."

"If it fails the prospects for future famine relief are not encouraging."

"Loki says her extradimensional buddies can take him, so there's no long-term where we're stuck here with Thanos. And - if it'd been ten percent maybe it'd be unclear whether we should risk making things worse. Fifty, not so much, how much worse can things get?"

"Much worse."

"Please excuse him, he's been tortured by an evil god for entirely too many subjective centuries."

"Honestly I think we could do with more doom and gloom around here."

"Anyway, my buddies can definitely take Melkor, taking Melkors is standard operating procedure. Thanos is actually more than a speed bump with all six stones, stones are a big deal even with a few hundred universes cased for goodies."

"Well, we'll get a peek at Nick Fury's diary and see what he's got."

"Yup. Maedhros, when do you think I should go check if they've managed anything?"

"I don't know anything about the complexity of the task but likely not for a few hours, at least."

"Okay, I can be a few hours patient."

Engineers get back to work on whatever they were working on before retrieval of Nick Fury's diary. The conversation is whispered and fast-paced but seems to involve vibranium nanites.

Loki sends another update letter. Asks Maedhros if they have anywhere that would benefit from healing magic nowish.

"Not that I know of, not more than people here -"

"There is an endless supply of people here you could tap but not if it's gonna keep you up at night, plan's undoing all this."

"Yes, that's why I asked about ones in Arda, which is likely to continue to progress forward in time, so if Sauron's been doing cute things with prion diseases I'd like to know, but if it's quiet now that's fine."

"It's been quiet for the last several decades."

"How long has this war been going on?"