Chapter 359: What It's Like Watching a Loki Movie With a Bunch of Avengers
"You're finally here. We've been waiting forever." Thor spotted Fat Thor's group arriving and waved them over to sit down, practically vibrating with impatience to finally see this "movie about Loki" Ethan had promised.
"This is the important thing, Ethan?" Old Tony couldn't quite believe it. He'd expected something a lot bigger than watching a movie.
If this was all it was, he'd honestly have rather spent the time with his own kid.
Once everyone had arrived, Ethan stopped drawing it out. He'd only called in a handful of people — the ones he'd summoned earlier plus this timeline's own Tony, Doctor Strange, and Fat Thor.
The group followed Ethan to Old Tony's private theater. Confused as everyone still was, the projector flickered to life, and the room went instantly, silently focused.
At the sight of the familiar figure and setting on screen, Old Tony blurted out, disbelieving, "Wait — this is right after the Battle of Manhattan?"
The scene shifted. There was Loki, the cunning Prince of Asgard, gripping the Tesseract, fleeing S.H.I.E.L.D.'s pursuit — and using the Cube's raw power to tear through space itself, touching down in the middle of a barren desert wasteland.
At that, Fat Thor — who'd been lazily nursing a beer up to that point — went instantly, deadly serious. He set the glass down and locked his eyes on the screen.
Beside him, Strange assumed this was probably some parallel-universe Loki's story and settled in to watch, genuinely curious.
As the film went on, the room's emotions rose steadily — and when Loki was seized without mercy by the Time Variance Authority's agents, Fat Thor couldn't hold his fury back any longer.
He shot to his feet, roaring. "Damn it! Some bullshit 'Time Authority' thinks it can just grab my brother?! Loki — hold on, you hear me? I will NOT let you face this alone!" His voice echoed through the theater, thick with fury and resolve.
He knew, of course, this couldn't be the Loki he'd known — that Loki was already dead. But whichever version of Loki this was, Thor wasn't about to let anyone hurt him.
Ethan's voice cut through right on cue, dousing the outburst like cold water. "Sit down and shut up if you want to keep watching." Blunt, but it landed — a quiet authority behind it that brooked no argument.
Fat Thor, still simmering, dropped back into his seat all the same, eyes locked on the screen, refusing to miss a single detail.
When the TVA unveiled their device capable of resetting entire timelines, the whole room fell into stunned silence. Everyone present felt the full weight of that revelation land at once.
"Reset an entire timeline. So something like that actually exists." Old Tony's brow furrowed. Had their own universe already been reset, some number of times, without their knowledge? Could that happen to them too?
Tony, for his part, was consumed with curiosity about the Time Variance Authority itself — though he already knew he'd get his answer soon enough if he just kept watching.
Doctor Strange, meanwhile — the very man currently entrusted with the Time Stone — couldn't believe something like the TVA even existed. Everyone inside that organization apparently understood time magic better than he did.
Soon enough, Tony and the others learned the TVA's origin story straight from the film itself. The narration unspooled slowly: long, long ago, somewhere across the vast, boundless multiverse, an unprecedented war had broken out — countless timelines tangled together like some impossibly complex web, locked in endless conflict over ultimate supremacy.
The war had thrown the entire multiverse into chaos and turmoil — until a group of beings, later revered as the Time-Keepers, stepped forward.
These Time-Keepers, wielding power beyond imagination, had chosen to collapse the tangled mess of competing timelines into a single Sacred Timeline, restoring order and peace to the cosmos.
Like gardeners tending the universe itself, they carefully pruned every wayward branch of time, ensuring every life's path stayed exactly on its intended course.
But even the most perfect plan couldn't entirely rule out accidents.
Some people — through greed, through ignorance, or simply through the cruelty of fate — inevitably strayed off the sanctioned path, becoming what the system labeled "variants."
To deal with these potential threats, the Time-Keepers had established the Time Variance Authority: an organization existing entirely outside of time itself, tasked with capturing and judging anyone who broke time's laws.
The whole system existed, ultimately, to preserve the timeline's stability and prevent any single deviation from triggering a chain reaction that could collapse the entire multiverse.
Hearing the TVA's origin story, Thor and Fat Thor both shrugged it off entirely — neither cared in the slightest about some cosmic bureaucracy. All that mattered to them was Loki.
Tony and Old Tony, though, exchanged a long look. This whole thing had once again completely upended what they thought they understood about reality.
None of it made a lick of scientific sense, and the sheer lack of control over their own reality left both of them deeply unsettled. They had a hundred questions they wanted to throw at Ethan.
But the film was still playing, and neither of them wanted to interrupt — they were both far too invested in this "movie" to pause it now.
On screen, Loki wasn't taking any of it lying down — instead, he turned the accusation right back on the Avengers, pointing out they'd been using the Tesseract themselves this whole time, so why was he the one getting arrested and not them?
The judge answered coldly: the Avengers' actions were part of the timeline's necessary course. Loki's escape, by contrast, was a direct violation of it.
Facing the judge's icy indifference, despair and fury tangled together inside Loki into something close to raw compulsion. He clenched his fists, straining to summon the godly power that had once let him run rampant across the universe.
But here, bound by the TVA's own containment, his power lay useless — a caged animal straining uselessly against its chains, every ounce of his godly strength simply nullified. In the end, the judge sentenced him to be reset.
Except one voice from the gallery spoke up in Loki's defense — arguing that keeping him alive might prove useful, a tool for hunting down other time-criminals.
That man was Mobius, a TVA agent. He took Loki back to his own office.
Mobius treated Loki with genuine kindness. He understood Loki knew nothing at all about the fate awaiting him, and figured Loki deserved the chance to actually understand himself first.
He brought Loki to the archives and screened footage of Loki's entire life across the timeline, then laid out an offer of cooperation. Mid-conversation, a Minuteman walked in.
Loki seized the opportunity, stole a Reset Charge, and made a break to reclaim the Tesseract and escape the TVA entirely.
And that was the moment Loki spotted the drawer full of Infinity Stones — and felt his entire understanding of the universe collapse on the spot.
Loki wasn't the only one. Every Avenger in the theater felt their own worldview shatter right along with him.
They'd just spent everything they had fighting tooth and nail over the Infinity Stones — and here was the TVA, casually keeping a drawer full of the things.
"No way. There's just no way. This has to be some kind of hallucination!"
"Does the TVA actually exist for real? Because if it does, couldn't they just... rule the entire multiverse outright?"
"So does that mean, to whoever works at the TVA, our whole fight against Thanos over the Infinity Stones basically looked like children playing pretend?"
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