Northern Alberta, Canada.
My initial fear that I'd landed in Russia, somewhere near Magadan, turned out to be happily mistaken.
As it turns out, vast desolate expanses, crappy roads leading from nowhere to nowhere, and endless snow aren't exclusive to just those; Canada boasts them too.
Nice country, by the way. Beautiful. But big.
Even though I'm a representative of a divine race and technically can't get tired or freeze to death, trudging along an empty highway for fifteen hours straight isn't exactly my idea of a good time.
And I don't have the Tesseract for instant travel. In fact, I hope I never get my hands on it, or any other Infinity Stone.
Maybe I'm being paranoid, but I have zero desire to mess with semi-sentient embodiments of mystical forces that have a nasty habit of corrupting their user's mind.
Every cloud has a silver lining, though, the long, solitary walk finally helped me curb the hysteria and sort through my thoughts.
No, I haven't suddenly started loving this world and its inhabitants.
To be honest, I seriously considered the option of triggering a nuclear war on Earth. And it was a solid idea! I won't die from radiation or hunger, and I can wait out the "hot phase" in some neighboring realm.
Thanos wouldn't give a damn about a radioactive Earth, well, aside from finding the Stones, but the main point is he likely wouldn't bother wiping out whoever survived the fallout.
Meanwhile, I could calmly figure out how to bail on this universe for good.
Brilliant plan! But since the White House is a long walk away, I'll shelve that for later. In any case, the thought of living in the MCU isn't making me cringe as much anymore, which is a good sign.
Hmm… I should probably be disturbed by the ease with which I'm ready to organize the mass slaughter of innocent sapients, my own species until very recently.
But… the thought of killing seven billion people doesn't stir anything inside me. It's too abstract, too numerical… impersonal.
And it's too easily overridden by the knowledge that Death is not the End.
But the thought of that specific, kind-hearted guy dying, the one who stopped his truck for me on the highway, offered me a lift to town, and even treated me to hot coffee? That gets a reaction. A negative one.
And that's excellent. It proves I haven't completely lost my mind and that nothing human is alien to me; I'm just… in a state of shock.
Probably. But "I'm still in shock" sounds a lot better than "Turns out I've always been a scumbag, and removing social pressure plus gaining superpowers just cut the brakes and revealed my true, rotten nature."
Anyway, by the end of my first day on Earth, I finally reached civilization. And if anyone says a bus station in a backwater town filled with bearded truckers and bikers isn't civilization, they've clearly never visited a troll bandit settlement on the border of the Nine Realms.
"And what's the name of this town?" I asked my companion as I climbed out of the truck. No language barrier issues here, divine races can understand any spoken language, with rare exceptions, and make themselves understood just as easily.
"Laughlin City. The hot dogs here are crap, but the steak isn't bad," the man answered, wrapping his jacket tighter against the fresh wind. I never did ask his name.
"I'll keep that in mind," I said, smiling as I surveyed the surroundings.
A few minutes later, I was walking into a white, barn-type building that served as a hotel, restaurant, and entertainment center.
The locals entertained themselves with fights in a makeshift cage arena in the center of the room.
Inside, some shaved-headed hulk was currently stomping on another muscular guy.
My black winter coat, transmuted from Asgardian clothing, clashed a bit with the setting due to its dapper neatness, but… largely, nobody gave a damn. The crowd was making noise, cheering the fighters, smoking, drinking, and engaging in other cultural leisure activities.
I had no money, naturally, but this place was perfect for testing the magic responsible for influencing perception and minds.
However, before I could spot a victim for a harmless experiment, a collective gasp from the crowd drew my attention to the arena.
Something interesting was happening: the man who had just been getting kicked was standing up, while his opponent looked like he'd just broken his right hand.
A second later, the guy who got up landed a left hook, throwing his opponent into the cage wall.
The other guy went swimming, losing his orientation, managed a weak step sideways, caught a leg sweep, and then a finishing headbutt. He went down like a sack of potatoes, out cold.
But that wasn't the interesting part. The interesting part was the winner's face.
The triple ring of the gong coincided with a thoughtful expression appearing on my face, while the announcer bellowed to the hall:
"Ladies and gentlemen! The winner and remaining King of the Cage, the Wolverine!"
"Well… isn't that a lucky break," my lips whispered beneath the roar of disapproval from spectators who had clearly lost money on the bets.
So… something here doesn't add up.
The unshaven mug of the most famous mutant with a keen nose was right there, a few meters in front of me, cigar already clamped between his teeth, but this was wrong.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe that features Loki is not the universe that features the X-Men. Their timeline happens in its own delirious reality, with toxic Adamantium and half a dozen contradictory plot twists.
Yet here I was, Loki, and in front of me stood Wolverine, who had just beaten some guy in a fighting ring in a grimy provincial town.
Speaking of which, this scene reminds me of something… Wait, is there by any chance a lost-looking teenage girl in a hood somewhere nearby?
My gaze quickly swept over the crowd and, sure enough, spotted a small figure wrapped up to her nose in a light dark-green coat, clutching a large bag. Her face practically screamed in capital letters that this was her first time at an event like this. And her face was familiar to me, too.