Sometimes life throws something at you that's not just unexpected, but so far outside your imagination that your first instinct is to laugh it off.
The kind of thing you'd hear in some wild story online and think, "Yeah, sure, as if that could ever happen."
For Luke, one of those impossible-sounding events didn't just happen—it crashed right into his life without warning.
Before we get into what exactly happened, let's take a moment to think about something. Imagine someone asking you: "Do you think the worlds from movies and novels are real?"
Most people would probably roll their eyes, maybe chuckle, and say it's ridiculous. Stories are made up by people to entertain others. Scripts, special effects, actors—nothing more. Those worlds exist only on paper or on a screen.
Luke would have answered the same way. In fact, a week ago, he might have even thrown in a sarcastic comment about needing a vacation if he started believing in things like that.
But then something happened—something that made all those sarcastic thoughts vanish. He found himself somewhere completely unfamiliar. And not just unfamiliar in the "I took the wrong bus" way, but in the "this place shouldn't even exist" way.
Because somehow, in a way he still couldn't explain, Luke had ended up inside a movie world.
And not just any random movie. Of all the places the universe could have dumped him… it had to be the MCU.
Now, let's take a look at Luke—the man who had been dropped into a completely new world with nothing.
In a narrow alley somewhere in New York, a man sat on the cold pavement. His brown hair, once neat, was now tangled and streaked with dirt. His clothes, already simple to begin with, were torn in places and stained from days of wear.
His blue eyes still held some alertness, but combined with his appearance, he looked no different from a down-on-his-luck beggar.
And yes, that man was our protagonist. No surprise there. If you're suddenly dumped into a strange world with no identity, no money, no phone, no documents—nothing but the clothes on your body—what else can you be but homeless?
After all, in this world, you can't just walk into a business and ask for work without proving you exist in the system. No social security number, no ID, no bank account. Even getting a temporary job is impossible without paperwork.
This wasn't a novel where the protagonist wakes up in a luxurious mansion, instantly meets a friendly mentor, or magically gets a bag of gold coins.
This was reality—brutal, inconvenient, and full of small problems that pile up fast. And for Luke, reality meant trying to survive day to day in a city that didn't even know his name.
"I really will die if this thing doesn't activate," Luke thought, staring at the strange app notification floating in the corner of his vision.
It had been a week since he arrived in the Marvel universe, a fact he confirmed almost immediately—his first clue came when he passed a small electronics shop and saw news footage of Tony Stark—Iron Man—playing on a TV in the display window.
There had been other clues, too: familiar company names, references to events he knew from the movies, and faces he recognized far too well. There was no mistaking it.
This was the MCU.
And now, he was officially homeless—living off scraps, sleeping in alleys, and avoiding attention whenever possible. At first, it had been unbearable. The cold. The filth. The constant gnawing silence.
But it was still better than starving.
Now he understood something most people never truly learned until they were at the edge.
Hunger could make a human do anything.
The small timer counted down in red numbers, each tick making his stomach tighten.
The icon itself was suspicious—almost too familiar. It looked exactly like the logo of the game app he had been developing back on Earth: a giant hand holding the Earth, as if playing with it like a toy.
Luke wasn't just some casual gamer; he had been a game developer. The project on his personal laptop had been his pet idea—an exploration and survival game where the main character started weak and had to grow stronger over time, discovering new worlds and hidden systems along the way. It was the kind of game he built for fun, not for sale.
Now that same game seemed to be staring back at him from inside his own head.
He tried to make sense of it. There was no way this was an illusion. He had already been dropped into the Marvel universe, and that alone was ridiculous enough. If something like that could happen, why not this?
Maybe whoever—or whatever—was responsible for sending him here had also given him this "app."
Luke wasn't someone who believed in gods, but he did believe the universe was big enough to have higher-dimensional beings. Someone out there had to be powerful enough to pull something like this off.