Loki Laufeyson groaned to himself as he lay on his bed. Of course. He was supposed to be meeting Dr. Jane Foster this morning, but of course with his bad luck he got in an accident instead as he was heading in toward the lab. It wasn't really his fault at all, either, which made it even more typical. Somehow bad luck just followed him. It was extremely annoying. He'd been driving his rented Harley and must have been in someone's blind-spot as they were coming onto the highway because they hit him almost immediately after merging. Thankfully they hadn't been up to speed, and he was lucky enough to only get a dislocated shoulder and some bruises.
He was so embarrassed though, and he didn't really know why. But he was. Too embarrassed to come in as planned- so he'd made some bullshit up about there being a lot of paperwork. He would just sleep it off and in the morning he would feel like less of an ass. Though how that made sense...he did not know.
"For someone with my IQ I am so stupid sometimes," he said to himself as he stared upwards. "Why am I even here?" he asked the ceiling.
It was true that he was looking forward to meeting Dr. Foster- she had made some fascinating discoveries- but they could have just e-mailed back and forth. In truth, he was just...bored. There. That was it. He was so. Fucking. Bored. He'd graduated MIT when he was eighteen and had then won awards and scholarships and all sorts of things that a young man who had a passion for science had just eaten up. He'd been offered his first job as a professor when he was twenty-one, and he'd been doing it for six years. He liked teaching, weirdly enough since he was in fact quite shy and reserved. But it was the same, over and over again. Same kinds of people. Same kinds of situations. He felt like he was stuck in Groundhog Day. So he'd decided to take Dr. Foster up on her invitation to spend a few months in New Mexico studying with her. A change of scene had sounded perfect.
Now he lay on the bed and threw his hand over his eyes. "This is ridiculous," he said to himself. "I am not going to just stay in my room all day." Although it was tempting. Ugh. No! He was going to go explore this desert place with it's weird sand and it's dry weather. He was going to explore the shit out of this place.
He rose, filled with new determination, grabbed his sunglasses, and headed out.
New Mexico was so different from Boston. The people, too. Everything was much slower and more relaxed here.
He wandered a few blocks around his lodgings, The Ironic Sailor (a quirky nautical-themed B&B), going into a few of the shops here and there. During his walk though he had a new idea about the theory of hypothetical other dimensions, and he spent the next few hours in a coffee shop, writing notes in the little notebook he carried everywhere for these reasons.
Later that night he would remember that at one point his attention had been drawn by a woman in her early twenties as she sang quietly to herself while walking past him to get to a table. He had thought she was talking to him because she had said, "Hey I don't know you- and this is crazy, but here's my number. So call me maybe." And he'd been so surprised that someone would say that to him, let alone a pretty girl like that one, that he'd just been speechless. Which turned out to be a good thing because she hadn't been talking to him and he would have made a fool of himself by answering.