I only talked with my newly acquired relatives for about half an hour before the ranger came and chased everyone out. In other words, the nurse on duty came in and escorted them all out.
The family truly impressed me.
John—the father of Max... which meant my father now. Damn, I needed to get used to that. A tall, fit brunette with kind eyes.
Anita—a gorgeous brunette with everything in all the right places.
Barbara—a blonde with a strict gaze and an equally strict suit. Add in a certain Tracy, who was somewhere on a business trip at the moment. I looked at John with envy.
My sisters made me "question" whether we were really related. Maybe I was adopted after all?
Under the barrage of hugs and questions about how I was feeling, a warmth settled in my chest. I had a family in this world, one that would stand on my side no matter what happened.
I remembered my family from my previous life. Harsher people, but still capable of giving the same feeling with a single approving nod and silent support.
My heart tightened with longing for my parents and brothers, and it almost immediately passed, as if someone had flipped a switch. I felt a tear roll down my cheek and wiped it away in surprise.
Damn, here I was crying like some delicate little lady. No, I'd decided—this was a manly tear. It did not matter that there was practically a whole stream of them. It was just one particularly large tear.
With feigned cheerfulness, I looked at the television hanging near the ceiling, tilted so it could be watched without lifting my head.
Alright, where was the remote?
I found it on the bedside table.
Grabbing my treasure, I turned on the TV. I flipped through the channels, searching for the news, found what I was looking for, and then discovered the deepest depths of hell.
A girl on the screen was talking about how amazing Oscorp was and how much they helped the city, especially compared to everyone else. And what a wonderful man Norman Osborn was.
"What? M-Marvel!?" I burst out indignantly.
Damn it. Why couldn't it have been somewhere more reasonable? I would have preferred a world of magic. No conveniences, sure, but with magic. I could have made some awesome isekai life for myself, with a harem and the spread of justice by delivering righteousness straight into the chest of everyone who needed it, just to reach their hearts.
Damn it!
I kept watching the news for another fifteen minutes, hoping it was all just a bad joke and that some idiot with a camera would jump out yelling, "It's a prank!"
But time passed, and no idiot appeared. He did not show up, did not manifest, and shamelessly ignored his role entirely.
Alright, what did I actually remember about the events?
I scraped at my memory and realized I did not remember all that much.
"The movies!" I perked up. There was that purple guy, the one who went, "I am inevitable," and did that finger snap. Well, the snap sound was from something else. But he definitely snapped his fingers.
That did not change the situation.
At some point that freak was going to come around, smashing everything and cutting half the universe down to zero. Along with his lackeys.
And a worm of doubt stirred in my soul. Could a few stones really affect the entire boundless universe, where even our galaxy was no more than a grain of sand?
Then I remembered the battle in New York and froze in horror.
I lived here.
At least somewhere nearby.
And they hit us with a nuke!
My chaotic thoughts galloped away like a mad herd heading for water, leaving me in a daze.
What was I supposed to do?
Where was I supposed to run?
I needed time to grow stronger, and from what I understood, quite a lot of time. But what if war came tomorrow and I was completely unprepared?
Meanwhile, the television kept going, and then it showed another well-known figure.
Obadiah Stane was organizing some kind of charity auction.
A fairly youthful-looking man around forty-five spoke with polished charisma and smiled at the camera while lightly flirting with the reporter. And it had to be said, the journalist was clearly not against it.
"...Allow me to introduce my niece, Anita Stark. Incredibly talented, and I am not afraid to say it—a genius of the kind not born every generation..."
Why Anita instead of Tony?
On the other hand, there were upsides everywhere.
Besides replacing a grown man with a pretty woman, there was another advantage.
The events of the movie happened when Stark was around forty, maybe older, and this girl did not look older than twenty. I would need to confirm that later.
And that meant I still had some time in reserve.
Probably...
I closed my eyes and mentally tried to put together some kind of plan for the future. But I still did not know a damn thing. There was not enough information to plan anything properly.
So for now, the first and only item on my plan was simple.
Adapt to this world.
The time until my discharge passed unnoticed. In truth, my stay in the hospital blended into one continuous stream, a gray wall rushing past with only rare flashes of new impressions. My sisters and parents visited almost every day.
Yeah, my local father had three wives. And that was not some delusion or eccentricity, but a grim necessity.
On the local equivalent of Discovery, there had once been a program called The Extinction of Y. Yep, that was its cheerful title.
But that was not the point.
The point was that around the end of the seventeenth century, the birth rate of boys began to decline. At its peak, the gender ratio reached one to fifteen by the middle of the nineteenth century. What happened in those times could not be described in words, and if you somehow did manage to whisper it, you would want to take those words right back.
As an example, World War One happened in the nineteenth century here, and the reason was a campaign "for men." And that was not a joke. Germany alone lost a third of its population back then, and the whole world stood on the edge.
I suspected that if things had continued like that, humanity would have faced a very ugly future.
Yeah...
The men of that era deserved monuments. And every statue should hang down to the knee, because only heroes should be built that way. I simply could not imagine what kind of insane libido a man had to have to maintain population growth with a ratio like that. Yeah, apparently, hearing the word "sex" alone would have to give you an iron-hard erection.
I chuckled at the thought.
Anyway, that was when the practice of polygamy appeared. Harems of fifteen to twenty women were far from rare, and often there were even more.
Later, the situation improved, and in the present day the boy-to-girl birth ratio was roughly one to seven. There was even a special law stating that a man should have no fewer than five wives. Seven was even better. More than that earned you the title of Hero Husband and a bunch of perks from the state.
"And John has only three?" I wondered. "What's the catch?"
An interesting point was that men had become the "protected" sex. Not the weak sex—no, two hundred years could not erase millions of years of evolution—but the protected one. Because uncontrollable men somehow managed to die even in places where it should have been impossible to die. That was how professions appeared that men were strongly discouraged from entering.
And in general, men had been pushed into easy, low-risk work. A direct quote from the show was:
"...or better yet, let him stay at home and stop wandering around where he shouldn't!"
This is completely fucked, gentlemen! What the hell kind of nonsense is this!?
Then a thought hit me in the head—I would have to have at least five wives. In every sense of the word.
There was definitely something appealing about that, a lot appealing, actually, but there was obviously a trap here. I did not yet understand exactly where it was, but I could smell the setup.
"God damn it!" burst out of me louder than I intended.
Doctor Strange happened to walk in at that very moment and shook her head in disapproval.
I had just realized one very simple thing.
If I wanted to power-level, the most direct path for me was a risky profession. Police officer, soldier, maybe mercenary. Though I did not want that one—those types usually lived brightly, but not for long.
But with a "recommendation" pushing me toward easy, safe work, there was no way they would take me into the army or the police. And even if they did, they would probably make me a secretary.
That train of thought vanished into the far distance the moment my gaze caught the carelessly unbuttoned top of the doctor's blouse.
She leaned toward me with a languid arch in her posture and asked me something.
The teenage hormones hit me like a truck and instantly brought everything necessary for urgent reproduction to full combat readiness.
I remembered reading some novel once where the author had ended up in front of temptation just like this, but his willpower had been iron.
Meanwhile, here I was, fully aware that my willpower was brass at best.
Or maybe the libido of local men was just this hyperactive?
"Do not provoke me, woman!" My voice cracked like a rooster's.
A moment later, she laughed in a rich soprano and sat down on the same chair that had apparently never moved from that spot, since even the janitors kept putting it back there.
"Alright, man," she replied, shooting me a mocking look.
And I realized that life in this new world definitely would not be boring. My body had reacted way too vividly. Hormones were one thing, sure, but I did not remember blackouts like this in my past life.
"Your tests are fine. The examinations found nothing dangerous or suspicious. You're being discharged tomorrow!" she informed me.
"Thank you, ma'am. Thank you very much for everything," I managed to say, finally pulling myself together.
Though most of the credit belonged to the doctor. She had stopped flirting and turned serious.
"It's my profession," she said with a smile.
Then she cast an assessing glance toward my crotch and smirked.
"And find yourself a girl."
I felt myself blush and adjusted the blanket.
Damn, what ridiculous reactions I had. What a vicious woman. She could at least have pretended not to notice.
"And they say hospitals help with every problem," I said, giving her a shameless look to get back at her.
What the hell was I even saying?
Smiling mysteriously, Strange rose from the chair and walked toward the door, swaying her hips.
At the very doorway she turned dramatically.
"I'll inform your relatives."
Then she winked and left.
I inhaled sharply through my nose, realizing I had not breathed the whole time she was walking to the door.
That devil woman was gorgeous.
Ah, if only I were older.
I had no illusions that she would sneak into my room at night and that we would "make some noise." She was not only a professional, but for all her arrogance, she still had standards. And by those standards, I was far too young.
Teasing a hormone-ridden teenage boy, though—that was apparently just too amusing.
I flopped back onto the bed, ignoring the way the blanket lifted over my crotch. Ten minutes later everything returned to normal. Some bodily reactions were practically impossible to control.
My thoughts, however, were far away. I was trying hard to remember everything I knew about the Marvel universe, pulling out every fact that might help me survive and protect my newly acquired family in this world.
And the more I thought, the more I understood that very little could be said with complete certainty.
Once, while looking into multiverse theory, one of the real theories in physics, I confidently clicked the top search result, sure it would take me where I needed to go.
To cut it short, after spending a few minutes scanning the site and reading the text diagonally, I remembered one number.
199,999 Marvel worlds.
Which one had I ended up in?
And I had an enormous suspicion that even that many parallel worlds were just a spit in the ocean. If you did not overcomplicate things and compared Earth's theories with multiverse theory, then the number of worlds was literally infinite...
My eyes began to close. The day had been exhausting after all.
And on the edge of my fading consciousness, one thought flashed by.
"After this, knowledge won't work."
Doctor Strange!
It sounded proud and weighty.
Stephanie turned on some music, walked to the table, and poured herself more wine into a glass. Just a plain glass. A sacrilege, really, but there had not been suitable drinkware for good wine at work, even though good wine itself had apparently been available. A grateful patient had gifted it to her.
The full bright moon cast its blue rays through the office, illuminating the room and the lonely figure at the desk.
Stephanie took off her shoes, stood up, and walked barefoot to the window, gazing at the city at night. Even now it still boiled with life, a life that passed her by.
Once, she had made a choice.
A choice not to develop her relationship with a man, but to climb the career ladder instead. What could she say? She had been young and saw only extremes.
It was hard to fix mistakes, especially when you first had to admit them.
She returned to the desk, poured herself more wine, then walked over to the Thorens TD 125, the best vinyl turntable she could remember in her life. She chose a classical record and, after returning to her chair, poured herself more wine again.
Her head was already swimming, but her thoughts seemed so vivid and clear. And it also seemed to her that the path she was walking would lead to nothing good.
She drifted into a half-sleep where vague images and cries broke through the boundary between sleep and reality. She ran, fought, won. She possessed power capable of crushing entire worlds. She could do almost anything.
But in all those battles and triumphs, she was always alone.
No, she had friends and comrades. But she had no one close. No family.
At that same moment, in a room at night, a tear rolled down the cheek of the young woman sitting in the chair with her eyes half-closed.
The woman opened her eyes and took another drink of wine.
"To hell with it!" she hiccuped drunkenly.
Throwing the glass at the wall, she marched decisively toward the exit.
In the end, she would have her little piece of feminine happiness in the form of a child. She even had a candidate for the father of her future pride.
She giggled drunkenly, imagining the look on the boy's face.
Something inside her made one protesting attempt to stop her, but the alcohol smothered any resistance.
The Ancient One sat in her meditation hall in Kamar-Taj, once again sorting through the threads of probability in search of threats to her world.
People no longer even remembered her name. They simply called her the Ancient One.
But Yao remembered.
She remembered the name her parents had given her.
The green light of the Eye of Agamotto illuminated everything around it. Hundreds of years of the same thing. She had accepted it long ago. She had wanted to abandon it all long ago. But duty continued to bind her, and a will of steel forced her to rise again and again and continue the fight.
But she had been fighting for so long.
She was tired.
The habitual act, repeated hundreds and thousands of times before, required almost no attention, allowing her mind to drift into its own thoughts. One stream of consciousness checked the life line of the one who would eventually replace her and finally allow her to rest.
Which made her surprise all the greater when the once-stable probability line leading to her desired outcome trembled and began to blur, splitting into dozens of new possibilities, only a few of which led where she needed.
The search for threats was decisively pushed aside.
All her attention focused on Stephanie Strange.
What had happened that she had suddenly slipped off the path laid out for her?
After several minutes of searching, the Ancient One saw it.
She saw a heavily drunk Stephanie sneaking into a boy's hospital room and... having a very good time there, both in body and in soul.
And then she conceived.
She conceived his child. After that, she no longer drove recklessly, cherishing her life because little Maxwell had appeared in it, obviously named after his father, who, incidentally, had no idea the child existed.
Then the happy mother avoided the accident and never came to Kamar-Taj, and history moved down an entirely different path.
The Ancient One would never have admitted it to anyone, and could barely admit it even to herself, but as she watched Stephanie's happiness, she envied her. She wanted a piece of happiness too—or at least peace, for all of this to finally end.
She would have left everything as it was. Let at least her never-to-be disciple have a good life.
But duty stood above even personal desire.
Stephanie had to become the Sorcerer Supreme.
Fearing that any direct influence on Stephanie might later be discovered once she became a sorcerer, and unwilling to take even a small risk, Yao decided to act on the boy instead.
Still, out of curiosity, she chose to look at his fate first.
A woman was always still a woman.
Then, shocked, she shut off the Eye.
"That's impossible..." she murmured, trying to comprehend the fact that someone could be shielded from the Eye.
At first glance everything looked fine, with no visible abnormalities. But the moment she tried to examine his probability lines, there were none.
The Eye could see him only indirectly when he intersected with others, but he himself was absent.
Yao would figure that out later.
For now, she would have to do things the old-fashioned way.
A snap of her fingers opened a portal inside the hospital storage room.
Another snap, and Yao took on the appearance of a nurse.
A nurse who would discover the drunken Stephanie near the boy's room and, clucking sympathetically, escort the very drunk doctor to the staff room, where she would put her to sleep.
Yao smiled sadly as she closed the portal upon returning from the hospital.
"Forgive me, Stephanie."
The Ancient One did not understand what was wrong with the young man, and it did not interest her very much. Over her long life she had grown accustomed to encountering truly incredible things and had long since unlearned surprise.
She felt no threat to Earth from the boy, and that was enough for her.
Still, she would set up some wards just in case.
I woke up in the morning with a profound sense of being utterly screwed over.
I frowned and listened closely to my body, but found absolutely nothing. I opened my eyes, looked sleepily around, and found nothing again.
Shrugging, I threw the nagging feeling out of my head.
After all, the disappointment had already happened, whatever it was.
Today was an important day for me.
I would even call it epic.
I was getting out today!
An image floated into my head of Davy Jones roaring, "Release the Kraken!"
I snickered at my own thoughts.
Still, there was some truth to the comparison.
It was 6:30 in the morning. Far too damn early. And the best part—I was bursting with energy. My mood was through the roof.
And in general, it was time to change my scrawny image.
While lying around in the hospital, I had gotten familiar with modern social trends. Well, not trends so much as established facts.
A skinny, weak-looking man with an almost feminine figure was a fully formed stereotype in this world.
I did not want that.
So I jumped out of bed and started working out.
However, the very first attempt in the form of push-ups brought reality crashing down.
Three.
A whole three push-ups.
After that, I lay there with sweat pouring off my forehead.
"Why are you so weak?" I whispered indignantly. "Seriously, how could you let yourself go this badly?"
I caught my breath and decided to try squats, already bracing for the worst.
By the tenth squat my legs were trembling, and I was once again drenched in sweat.
That was exactly how Doctor Strange found me when she entered the room.
"Oh!" she said, looking at me with amusement.
I sprang up like some eager young hero, hiding my shaking knees.
"Good morning!"
She winced slightly at my shout.
"Don't yell," she asked, almost pleadingly. "I brought you a referral for psychological counseling."
I took the paper and glanced over it. It said I was supposed to visit a psychologist twice a week for about three months.
"And what is this for?" I asked, looking at her in surprise.
I did not bother putting on a shirt. I had sweated through everything, and it would be better to dress after a shower.
Then I noticed the hungry look Strange was casting over my skinny body, and I understood one important thing.
It seemed I had seriously underestimated the shortage of men in this world.
"We'll try to restore your memory through sessions with a psychologist," she explained.
Yeah, and also check whether the head injury had left me mentally unstable.
Speaking of that injury, I had finally sorted out what happened—or rather, there was nothing much to sort out. From what Kili had told me, they found me in an alley with my skull cracked open. How long I had lain there was unknown, and finding whoever had done it seemed impossible.
The police had written it off as a failed robbery. No, they had done everything they were supposed to do, investigated properly and all that, but there were no leads.
And I had a feeling the case would be shoved into a drawer.
Nobody liked unsolved cases.
The doctor left with a half-stiff gait, and this time I was denied the sight of her beautifully swaying ass.
I sighed at the cosmic injustice.
Alright.
Squats were not going to do themselves.
"One!" I said as I slowly lowered myself.
I was afraid of doing sharp, rapid squats. My body was weak, and my ligaments and joints were probably in the same condition. Sudden movements could easily get me injured.
So everything would be steady, slow, and injury-free.
Endurance +1
"Huh?"
At first I was surprised, but then I realized the message was perfectly clear.
Apparently I had already been very close to gaining that point in endurance, so the effect appeared quickly.
However, this changed my leveling plans.
For now, I would not spend my attribute points. That would be a waste of their potential. Why invest points into endurance now if a few dozen squats a day could increase it naturally?
First I would focus on physical activity and see how quickly the attributes grew. Only when their growth slowed down would I start spending points.
Although...
Intelligence, charisma, and wisdom—those attributes did not depend on physical condition, did they?
"I need to calculate and observe all of this," I muttered thoughtfully.
After all, intelligence could also be developed without the system. I had seen plenty of exercises for that back in my previous life.
But that was only one side of my doubts.
The other was that I did not understand how these new attributes would affect me.
A couple of hours later, John arrived, took charge of me, and I headed home, feeling strangely awkward about the whole thing.
As it turned out, all of us—our entire big family—lived a short distance from New York, about twenty minutes away by car, in the small town of Montclair. It was pretty, like something straight out of a picture illustrating the American dream.
I had no idea what to talk about with John, but I did not want to leave that thick, uncomfortable atmosphere hanging in the car either.
So I started asking him about the family, about the house.
I appreciated the setup. We were not living in some stale city, but we were not far from it either. You could work in New York without spending two hours commuting.
The car stopped in front of one of those typical houses.
A big one. Brick, with white corner panels, two stories.
Too large for a family of four or five.
But for a mega-family of...
Eight people.
For eight people, it was normal.
Still, I was impressed when I realized how big my family was now.
Then Tracy came by later—the third wife of John. Fairly young, but judging by her eyes, life had already shown her plenty.
Only then did it hit me that all these people lived in one house, under one roof.
This was basically a communal apartment.
"I'm home," I said out loud for some reason.