Chapter 3
Thor and Sif were crammed together behind a flimsy desk to watch this video, with the two other men, Victor and Casey, standing around and making occasional comments. Mobius had retreated to another desk to peruse files.
But despite the great importance of the information being imparted upon him, Thor found it difficult to concentrate. His mind was rather being occupied by the presence of this murderous, yet amnesiac cartoon clock hopping on and around the computer screen, occasionally pausing the videos to ask questions. Question which both he and Sif could not answer, whereas Victor and Casey made it clear the answers were too obvious to even merit the interruptions.
Timelines, branches, variants, next events, an unholy timeline, probability, timeline stability, incursion events, android lizards, interdimensional war, something called a Kang. He had no doubt all of it was of utmost importance, but the coherence eluded him. What he got so far was, after next events, timelines usually branched into more timelines and this created variants of the people of the original timeline. Have this happen enough time and the variants become more and more different. Possibly female.
Sif’s frown had grown deeper and deeper with each video segment. She slowly raised her hands. The cartoon clock paused the video and pointed at her with a smile.
Victor interrupted nervously. “May I perhaps be so rude as to ask quite an impertinent question?”
Sif cocked her head when it became clear he was addressing her. “Okay.”
“You see, I’m an inventor,” he stammered. “So this is an occupational interest. I was wondering whether you have full sensation in that arm.”
She lowered her prosthetic arm and stretched her fingers. “Actually, I do.”
“Fascinating.”
The murderous cartoon clock cleared her throat. “You had a question, miss?”
Sif scrunched her nose. “Perhaps I misunderstood, but did you use to destroy entire realities if they took a wrong turn? And how many timelines would that have been? Why would you do that?”
The clock waved it away. “To prevent interdimensional war, of course, silly.”
Oh, right. Mobius had said something about timelines threatening each other’s existence and that they could not exist at the same time. But destroy? “Is that not overkill?”
“Yeah, not the best chapter out of our history book.” Mobius came up behind them with a tray of paper coffee cups and started handing them out. “There was a lot of brainwashing. Pretty sure we all had our memories wiped at least once, and the promotional videos were very convincing.”
“But from a practical point of view,” Casey said. “The time loom would’ve done the job for us anyway and taken us with it while at it.”
A security guard lady who seemed to be tailing Sif stopped by to take one of the cups. “Great options.”
“Well, in neither scenario would there be a dimensional war,” Casey said. “Which was the point.”
Mobius scoffed. “And only at the cost of free will. Bargain, right?”
“It was horrible,” Casey said. “But to be frank, it was triage.”
Victor said, “According to your theory.”
“Which is solid.”
“Which I do not deny, but that does not make it irrevocably true.”
The confirmation he was not currently in a den of monsters was enough for Thor. He was not here to debate philosophy. “Could we go back to the part that ties back to my brother being a tree? Or inside of it, being a timeloom. Or being a tree and a time loom.”
“Here is what I’d like to know,” Sif said. “Why? Why would he do this to himself? What did he have to gain from it?”
Mobius clumsily set down the last cup and breathed in. “Let’s ignore all the science and the magic for now. This is the bottomline, before the choices were a free multiverse and inevitable multidimensional war, or we could have peace and just the one timeline. Now, we have both a free multiverse and peace. That’s all we really know. We have to assume that was the goal.”
“Yes, but why would he do that?”
Mobius frowned at her. “So we’d have a free multiverse and no multidimensional war.”
“But what were his reasons?”
“So the multiverse can exist without causing a multidimensional war?”
“But now he’s stuck inside a cosmic tree,” Sif said. “So what did he think to gain from it?”
Mobius smiled wryly. “Presumably, the prevention of interdimensional war while still giving all timelines the possibility to exist.”
“I just don’t get-.”
“Clearly.”
Even the homicidal cartoon clock giggled. Thor might’ve laughed too, if he understood more than the general premise and the tone of voice. Besides, he was a bit busy comprehending yet another load of unexpected information.
Sif waited patiently for the sound to die down. “What I meant is, the Loki I know-.”
Mobius lifted an eyebrow. “I don’t think you do.”
Someone cleared their throat. Every head in the room turned. All the TVA’s people present- even those minding their own business- looked like children caught with their hand in the cookie jar, varying mixes of contrite and defiant.
“Seriously.” The female Loki sat on the steps by the entrance. “All of you? Every single one of you is in on this? Like, I tell you not to do something and all of you suddenly feel compelled to do it?”
“Well, that would be a mutual thing then,” Mobius said calmly and with good humor. “I didn’t know you still came around here.”
“Not until I learned about your idiot plan.” She tilted her head. “I just gotta ask, did thunderbrain try to walk right into the time radiation yet?”
Mobius chuckled. “Yes.”
Sylvie pulled up her knee and stomped on one of the steps. “If it were that simple, don’t you think I would stop by for weekly tea? Bringing this man here was pointless.”
“I’m right here,” Thor pointed out, walking over. “In case you want to speak to my face.”
Sylvie stared at him as if he’d been speaking in reverse, just for a moment before she ignored him and addressed Sif instead. “Some people call him the god of free will these days. A bit dramatic if you ask me, but that is what it comes down to.”
Sif knitted her brow. “What are you trying to say?”
Sylvie pushed herself to her feet. “Would you want to live in a world where free will equals death, or worse?”
“No, not really.”
“Good, then don’t undo that sacrifice.” She turned to leave.
Mobius hurried over and stepped in her path. “I just don’t understand.”
This time, no blades were drawn. “Because you don’t want to.”
“No, come on. Explain it to me.”
“I’ll explain only this, before thunderbrain becomes spaghetti. That thing you’re seeing out there, it’s not Yggdrasil,” she said, as if it was remotely needed to say that. Obviously, that tree Loki had made himself was not Yggdrasil. Who had been thinking it was? “It’s only an impression left behind by what happened that day. That’s not the way to him.”
Thor asked, “Then what is?”
She looked at him with rage in her eyes. The next moment, the door slammed behind her hard enough to shake the walls.
Mobius put away his coffee cup. “I’ll go after her.”
A minute later, so did Thor.
“Come on, talk to me.”
Sylvie stopped dead in her tracks and turned on her heels. Miraculously, she seemed only mildly angry. “Can’t you just take my word for it?”
He wasn’t about to give up for no apparent reason. “Then explain to me what the problem is.”
“He made his choice. Don’t make it harder than it has to be.” She paused. “That isn’t helping. That’s cruelty.”
“Sylvie, we’re just trying to figure out what happened and if we can help him. I don’t see how that’s cruelty. In fact, I think we owe him that much.”
“No, what we owe him is…no, I’m wasting my breath. You don’t want to understand.”
“No, spell it out for me. Like I’m five years old. Because I am genuinely confused right now.”
Her expression turned uncharacteristically soft. “He can’t leave.”
“How do you know-.”
“And you can’t stay.”
“Sylvie, what are you talking about?”
“Some things you can’t get back and you just have to learn to live with it, because there isn’t a damned thing you can do about it.” She suddenly gave a start and looked as if she’d seen a ghost. “I’m done here.”
“Hey,” Thor said, suddenly coming up behind Mobius. “Is everything alright?”
As if she’d seen a ghost. Mobius - not-so-accidentally- positioned himself to block corridor while Sylvie booked it , fleeing from the aforementioned ghost. Damn it, why hadn’t he thought of that? “Did you just follow us?”
“Is she alright?”
“She’s independent enough to go where she wants.”
He hummed. “She cares about him.”
“Again, I’m not going to try and explain the dynamics between those two.” How did you tell a guy his brother had a thing for his own variant? That his brother had, in fact, the feelsies for himself. Herself? Themselves? Oh well. “But yeah.”
“So do you,” the god of thunder stated as if it were the most wondrous, well-hidden discovery.
“What gave it away? Me running this whole thing?”
“Right.” He glanced from left to right, as if the walls were anything else than plain walls. “How did all of this come about? I mean, after you abducted him, what happened?”
“Well, he was helping us figure out how to catch Sylvie.” He immediately added, “Because she was terrorizing us. She was in the right, but we didn’t much like being stabbed or enchanted.”
“I am familiar with the feeling. How did that work out?”
“First they screwed us over separately. Then they teamed up to screw us over again. They convinced us to start a revolution while they were at it,” Mobius said. “We should’ve seen that coming.”
Thor cracked up. “You should have. But that revolution…?”
“Went great. We’re a lot better now.” He sighed. “Look, going down that gangway seems to be a no-go now. I don't think there’s much else you can do. I’m sorry about dragging you into this. I thought we had it figured out, but-.”
He crossed his arms. “I’m staying.”
Cruelty would be to send him home with the knowledge but no answers. “Look, we can bring you home and get back to you once we know more. It would be minutes from your point of view.”
“I’m not going anywhere until I’ve seen my brother. I don’t care how long it takes.”
“That could be a very long time, though.”
“I don’t care.” He paused. “What you and her were getting at, back there. About why he did what he did…?”
Mobius smiled. “One big good-guy move, if you can believe that.”
Thor nodded pensively, maybe hesitantly. “I knew he had it in him. So, how is it we’re going to find him now?”
“Desk work and science, but mostly desk work.”
Brunnhilde did not question the orange doorway, nor the identity of the stranger. She called for Love to pack her bags and get out. She had done enough babysitting for the month and had actual work to do.
“We might need ten more minutes,” Thor told her and looked to Mobius. “Minutes you said, right?”
“Approximately.”
Brunnhilde walked back to the door. “Pack your bags slowly!”
“Witch!”
“Brat!”
“Alright, alright,” Thor hushed. “Love, can you come here for a moment?”
Love dashed through the door. “Are we going back to space now?”
“Not yet.” Thor crouched to her height. “It’s a bit difficult to explain, but it’s not going to take very long. You remember this man here? He’s a friend of your uncle Loki. He’s going to help me find him.”
Brunnhilde scrunched up her nose and blinked. “That little shit’s alive? Again?”
“Probably, in a way.”
Love smiled. “So can I finally meet him?”
When telling her about Loki, he’d said he was probably dead, but one could never be sure when it came to Loki. “I don’t know. I’m not sure we can bring him home, even if we can find him.”
“Then I’ll come too. That way, he doesn’t have to come here.”
Mobius shook his head. “The TVA really isn’t a place for a child.”
“I’ve seen the place,” Thor noted. “It’s desks and workshops. Not battlefields and armories.”
“We have armories, alright.” Mobius folded his arms. “It’s filled with technology that can disintegrate timelines and send it all to the end of time where a cosmic monster devours everything, and we don’t quite know how to disarm them yet. You want to have a child near that?”
“I’ll watch her really well.”
“Between untangling the mysteries of the multiverse and finding a tree made out of the multiverse? No. No, I’m not taking a child to the TVA.”
Thor frowned. “She’s family.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “How about this, we drop by with regular updates? If the good madam here doesn’t mind having an hour full of us dropping in and out of this place and experiencing it all in overdrive.”
Brunnhilde walked to the fridge and pulled out a case of beers and a carton of apple juice boxes. “Go ahead. I’m curious.”