Mobius took them through his doorlike portal, straight back into the heart of Tvania. Both Stephen and Christine were loaded down with duffel bags full of equipment and supplies, hers medical and his magical. He'd brought as many books about supernatural ailments and curses with him as he could find in the Sanctum's vast library. Christine was lugging everything Stephen had asked her to bring, plus some things he hadn't thought of; rapid tests she'd nicked from the lab that didn't need machinery, IV fluid with a line and collapsible stand, all kinds of stuff. He was surprised she hadn't decided to bring an entire life support system with her.
"You didn't say you were bringing your friend," said Mobius.
Before Stephen could pipe up, Christine answered for him. "I volunteered," she said, giving a wry glance his way. "Two heads are always better than one."
He inwardly thanked her for not making him look like an asshole.
"I really wish you could have figured out another way to tell me to get you, Dr. Strange," said Mobius as they made their way down the street. "I don't know if I'm going to be able to sleep tonight."
Christine stopped on the cracked asphalt and gave Stephen a quizzical look. He wanted to slap Mobius on the back of the head for ruining his cover.
"Well, it was the only-uh-" he stammered.
Christine chimed in. "Well, there is this girl that can hop through universes, but apparently she can't skip any more training, so … "
Mobius turned around, looking back and forth between them as if they'd told him he had horns growing out of his head. Stephen felt a pit in his stomach again. Mobius and Christine had both blown it, now.
Mobius pointed at Stephen. "Let me get this straight. You gave me PTSD even though there is a being in your universe that could have gotten you both here, because she … can't skip class?"
"PTSD?" said Christine. "Stephen, what is he talking about? Is this about the ceremony thing?"
"It's more complicated than … dreamwalking was the only … " he let out a breath and rubbed his forehead. "I'm sure it didn't give you PTSD," he said dismissively.
Mobius threw up his hands. "You possessed your own dead, rotting corpse so you could talk to me! How wouldn't that traumatize someone?"
Christine gasped and Stephen gave her a sidelong look. This wasn't a great start for their endeavor. Not at all.
"I think I do have lasting damage from that … thing," said Mobius with a shudder. "You know why?"
Stephen just grunted in reply, and Mobius continued.
"Because I saw a dead bird-just a little dead sparrow-lying in the road today, and I immediately burst into tears. I think it messed me up. I think I need therapy. Oh, wait, I can't get therapy here, can I? Too bad."
"That's rich," he replied with a sneer. "You shouldn't have any problem with dead bodies. There was a whole burned up pile of them in the woods, that's where mine came from. How did they get there, Mobius? Huh?"
Mobius opened his eyes wide, then sighed and shrugged. "When we got here, there were a lot of … corpses. So we took them out of the beds and out of the streets and … well … "
Mobius guiltily broke his gaze with Stephen, and Christine looked as if she wanted to bolt in the other direction, far away from both of them.
"There were too many to bury, and we couldn't tell what had killed them. Most of them were in their beds. It looked like they'd died in their sleep. No wounds of any kind. No wounds on the ones in the street either. Like they'd just dropped dead."
"Not good," breathed Christine.
"Right. It didn't feel good at all. So we burned them, and the sheets they were laying on, just in case."
"So it felt like the perfect place to settle?" said Stephen sarcastically. "Your story feels like bullshit to me. It looks like you took the place by force."
"Absolutely not, I swear!" he said. "You don't understand. Look, Loki and I found out a long time ago that apocalypses were the best place to hide on the timeline. The TVA doesn't check after a world-wipeout disaster happens, because, well, there's no one left there to worry about. It's all gone. But apocalypses are scorched Earth kind of deals, usually; super volcanoes, asteroid strikes, worldwide floods, nuclear war. There's no way to live on them immediately afterwards, which I guess is the point of an apocalypse."
"So, you saw all the signs of a plague and thought, 'Perfect'?"
"No," replied Mobius. "We saw the signs and realized it was our best shot, even despite that danger. I mean, look around!"
He gestured to the blooming trees, the bustling little town with leftover livestock they must have scrounged from abandoned farms.
"We had everything we needed; shelter, food, clothes, water, some supplies to get us started. We scavenged for all of it, figured out the rest. It really was the best place for us."
"But one person got sick, right?" asked Christine.
"That's the thing," Mobius started, then turned to look at the little village dutifully carrying out their daily chores. "This whole thing is so much weirder than I expected. Sylvie thinks it might be supernatural, somehow, but I can't be sure. I don't know a damned thing about magic."
"So you needed someone that was an expert in the natural and the supernatural?" asked Stephen.
"Exactly," he replied.
"Well, you got the right man," said Christine hopefully. He knew she was hiding how scared she was.
"You got the right people," he corrected her, and she gave him a quick, appreciative smile.
Inside the house, Sylvie stood in the hallway, warily watching them approach, but making no move to greet them or help Stephen or Christine with their bags. After a moment, she ambled up to Christine, looking her up and down, sizing her up as Christine laid her bag down on the floor with a thump and a sigh.
She held out her hand for Sylvie. "Doctor Christine Palmer. And you're-?"
Sylvie ignored her greeting and handshake. She turned to Mobius.
"This one's a doctor too? Mobius, we don't need one and a half doctors." She rubbed her brow and tossed her hair with an annoyed shake of the head. "If you were going to get another healer, you should have found a shaman, or a witch doctor, or a völva.*"
They all stared at her in stunned confusion.
"I'm sorry, a what?" said Stephen.
"A … völva," she repeated slowly, embarrassingly loud, as if they were all deaf.
"Is-is that what I think it sounds like?" muttered Christine to Stephen. He could only shrug.
Sylvie rolled her eyes so hard it looked like it hurt. "A völva is an Asgardian witch doctor. And they'd be a hell of a lot more useful than another human."
"Wow, you're just always on, aren't you?" asked Stephen dryly.
"I'm on until I can trust you enough to turn off," she replied, even drier.
"Sylvie, why don't you help these guys get this stuff upstairs, huh?" asked Mobius, gesturing to the bags. "This crap is heavy."
Sylvie picked up both very heavy duffel bags at the same time and threw them over each shoulder as if they were full of cotton balls, then pushed past them all and up the creaking staircase.
"Damn," whispered Christine as all three humans made their way upstairs after her.
She sucked in a breath when she saw Loki in bed, just like Stephen had.
"Let's start with the medical stuff, first," she told everyone. Stephen was thinking exactly the same thing.
He let Christine take out the supplies. They helped each other dress in disposable gowns, gloves, goggles, and masks, then went to Loki on either side of the bed. Christine began to examine him; his eyes, mouth, pulse, heartbeat, and then took off his covers and gave him a full body once over. The man was just skin and bones. His ribs stuck out on his chest like the poles on a camping tent. Sylvie paced anxiously on one side of the room while Mobius sat quietly in a chair in the corner. Birds chirped happily outside, so beautifully it was almost insulting to the situation they were in.
"My mind keeps going to some kind of brain tumor," said Stephen, "but I know that's just the surgeon talking. Looking for something to cut out." Stephen examined his head for any obvious injuries-bruises, old scars-but found nothing. He gently pressed on his skull but everything felt like it was in the right place.
"No fractures," he said to Christine. "Did you bring an MRI machine with you in that duffel bag?"
"Ha, ha." she said sarcastically. "I might be stretching, but my first thought, after head injury, of course, was some kind of prion disease." She took another look inside Loki's open mouth. "It's got to be neurological, if there's no cranial damage."
He raised an eyebrow. "Prion disease? Like Creutzfedt-Jacob? Mad cow?"
She nodded. "It causes severe neurological degeneration like this."
"Right!" said Stephen, growing more excited that they might have solved this puzzle so early. "And there's tons of deer around here. They're a natural reservoir for CJD."
Christine sighed. "You're thinking of Chronic Wasting Disease, not CJD, and that's not transmissible to people." She shot him a warning look. He probably shouldn't act so enthusiastic about a horrifying disease around the patient's loved ones, especially if he could barely remember which one was which.
Stephen moved to her side of the bed to talk to her as softly as he could, so Mobius and Sylvie couldn't hear.
"If it's CJD, that gives us good news and bad news then, correct? The good news is it's not infectious through regular contact."
"And the bad news," she continued for him, "is that it's untreatable and incurable."
"Yeah." He stood again and thought about it a bit more. "Maybe it's a virus? Rabies can look like this, right?"
"Rabies?" whispered Mobius, eyes wide.
Christine shook her head. "No, I don't think he would have lasted very long. And I didn't see any bites on him. Sylvie, have you been able to feed him anything at all?"
"Of course I've been able to feed-" she began defensively, then stood down a little with an exasperated look from Mobius. "Yes," she continued. "I can feed him some bone broth every day. Someone found these little chalky, fruity vitamins so I crush one of them up and dissolve it in the broth. That's all I can get him to swallow, though."
"Can't be rabies, then. People with rabies have hydrophobia," she said. "They can't stand to swallow water, or anything at all, and then they basically starve themselves."
"Oh, yeah," he mumbled. "Maybe, um … tetanus?"
Christine gave him a look as if he was a complete idiot.
"What? Why not?"
She took one of his arms, held it up, and let it flop limply back onto the bed. Stephen stared at her, uncomprehending.
"Stephen, really?" she asked. "If it was tetanus, he'd be stiff as a board."
"Right, right, yeah, obviously," he said, utterly embarrassed. "It's been a while since med school."
"World renowned neurosurgeon, terrible pathologist," she joked.
He couldn't believe he'd forgotten so much. He could diagnose antimony poisoning from a bullet by looking at an MRI, but completely forgot what tetanus looked like? It made him feel like he should have shredded his medical degree. Christine had obviously done her homework while Stephen had doodled in the book margins until he got to the classes he really liked.
"This is useless," Sylvie muttered.
"Come on, Sylvie," said Mobius, his saintly patience obviously wearing thin, "they're not going to figure this thing out in fifteen minutes. Please be patient."
"It's useless because Asgardians cannot get human diseases."
Christine and Stephen both stared at her in surprise, then at each other.
"Did you know-?" started Christine.
"No, no idea," replied Stephen.
"We don't know that for sure," said Mobius. "You were taken from Asgard when you were very young, and then you spent a thousand years away from your home planet. You can't rely on thousand year old memories of folk knowledge."
She shrugged. "It's just something everyone knows, Mobius, like that you shouldn't stare straight at the moon or that frost monsters hibernate during the summer."
"I think you're not supposed to stare at the sun," said Stephen slowly.
"Well, obviously," she replied, "but you can't stare at the moon either, because the Asgardian moon will drive you mad if you look at it too long."
"O-kay, that's weird," said Stephen, after a long, confused pause. "I agree with Mobius here, though. Viruses, on Earth at least, can mutate so much that they can infect other life forms."
"Or maybe he has no immunity to whatever is on this universe's version of Earth," said Christine helpfully.
"Well, why didn't I get it then? We're the same per-the same species," she said quickly.
"I'm not sure. Slightly different genetics?"
She glanced away, looking guilty for some reason, though he couldn't imagine why.
"I think we should just start right from the beginning instead of jumping to more conclusions," said Christine, putting her tiny flashlight and stethoscope away. She counted off her points on each finger as she listed them. "When did this start, what were the other symptoms before this, and besides your Asgardian folk knowledge, what makes you think it might be supernatural?"
Sylvie looked to Mobius, as if to ask permission to tell the story, then leaned on the wall with her arms crossed as she began.
"It happened almost as soon as we got here, months and months ago. We arrived, cleaned the place up and Loki and I … " she paused and looked at him almost wistfully, green eyes sparkling. "We were married. But on our wedding night, something strange happened. Everyone in the town had terrible nightmares that night. Every single person. I heard people screaming in their sleep. We were disoriented and terrified, trying to figure out what was happening."
"Did you have nightmares too?" asked Stephen.
"Yes," she said softly, then looked at him with more sincerity than he'd seen from her so far. "We all had the exact same nightmare."
Mobius bounced his knee nervously, like he didn't want to hear this story again. Stephen sat on Loki's bed and leaned forward, fascinated.
"All them started as nice, happy dreams. Different dreams. Normal dreams. And then, all of a sudden, you'd be in a desert full of red sand and a red sky. Then there was a huge, black storm cloud forming over the horizon, but there was fire and lightning in it instead of rain." Her eyes grew huge, her voice soft. "It was impossible to run. It was like all the horror of the entire universe was inside that cloud, and it was coming closer and closer, about to swallow you whole, and then … then it hit like a sand storm, and everyone would wake up at that moment, like when you wake up just before you hit the ground in a falling dream."
Stephen was more than a little concerned. If he still believed dreams were psychological, then he could chalk it up to mass psychosis from some bad mushrooms, but he'd never heard of anything like this.
"Did it all happen at once?" he asked. "Did everyone wake up at the same time?"
"No, it seemed to make its way through the neighborhood, from what people have pieced together. By the time I woke up from it, everyone was screaming, running around the village, asking everyone else what happened."
"And that's when Loki … ?" said Stephen, gesturing to him.
She nodded. "He's been exactly like this ever since."
They all sat in uncomfortable silence for a moment, the only sounds coming from Loki's death rattle and the birdsong outside.
"Probably should have started with the magical stuff, first," muttered Christine, taking off her gloves.
"Hold on, Christine," he said. "Nothing's been diagnosed yet. Did his pupils dilate with light?"
"Yes."
"Tap his knee, test his reflexes."
Christine did so, giving Loki's bony knee a hard knock, which made his leg shudder.
"One more thing. Pinch him, just enough so he'll feel it."
"Pinch him?"
Stephen nodded. She obeyed, pinching the skin of his arm with her fingernails. His trembling arm curled up and twitched away slightly.
"What does this have to do with anything?" asked Sylvie.
"It proves that his astral form is in his body."
"Astral what?" asked Mobius.
"His soul, basically. If it was outside of his body, he'd have no reflex responses whatsoever. I could possibly force him to astral project and see if there's any bad energy attached to him."
Christine moved away from the bed and he stood up, readying his energy to make the magical sigils, when he noticed Christine had a smirk on her face.
"What?" he asked.
"Oh, nothing," she said, "It's just … it looks a little silly watching you do magic in a paper gown and duckbill mask."
"Gee, thanks."
Despite his newfound self consciousness over how dumb he looked, he continued with the spell. Hovering his hand above Loki's chest, he moved downward as if he was preparing to break a cinder block in half with a karate chop with his palm. Then, like tugging hard on a rope, he brought his hand back up quickly, to ensnare Loki's astral body and bring him out.
Nothing happened. Loki shuddered a bit as Dr. Strange raised his hand, but nothing came out of his body but a long, squeaking gasp.
"Hmm," he said, "That's not right."
Everyone else in the room looked deeply concerned, especially Sylvie, who was as tense as a rubber band about to snap. Stephen cleared his throat. He'd already bungled the medical part of this case, he wasn't about to look like an idiot for the magical part.
"Let's try this again," he said, shaking out his hands, then making the same motion, a little faster and more aggressive this time. Nothing. A bit of foam dripped out of the side of Loki's mouth, but no astral form.
"Are you sure that's-" started Christine, but Stephen cut her off.
"It's fine, it's fine Christine," he said. "It just needs a little more oomph, that's all."
He rubbed his hands together, then put his palm directly on Loki's sternum, even pressing down a little, trying to feel and visualize his astral form. Then, slowly, with all the magical power he could muster without opening his third eye again, he brought his palm back upwards.
This time, he felt like he was getting somewhere. Loki arched his back as Dr. Strange moved his hand, like his astral form was aching to escape. He started to gurgle, his sunken eyes nearly popping out of his skull.
"Stephen?" said Christine.
"I've got it. Just have to reel it in," said Stephen, but no matter how far he brought his hand up, no astral form came out. Loki's back simply kept arching more and more, his gasps growing louder and more strained.
"Dr. Strange … " said Mobius warily, standing up from his chair.
"Don't worry, I've got this," he said, feeling the psychic tension around Loki's body like leather straps holding him down. "It's just a little stuck for some reason."
Loki let out a horrible choking noise, opening his mouth as wide as it would go. He arched his spine so far it looked like he was about to break his own back in half.
"Stop it!"
Sylvie's scream startled him so much that all his magical energy dissipated in a flash. Loki flopped back onto the bed, his head limply falling to the side, drool oozing out of his mouth. He coughed a bit, sending spittle all over his pillow.
Sylvie rushed to his side, tears beginning to stream down her face, turning his body over on its side and patting his back to encourage him to cough.
Christine stared at Stephen as if she was looking at a monster. He felt like one, at that moment.
" ' … sympathy and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife … ' " she whispered at him with disgust.
Sylvie held Loki's head in her arms, rocking gently back and forth-more for herself than him, he suspected-her arm curled protectively around him like a mother snake guarding her clutch of eggs.
"Okay, look, that probably wasn't the right-"
"You were trying to kill him, weren't you?" snapped Sylvie as tears rolled down her face. "You hate him. You just wanted an excuse to kill him."
"God, no Sylvie, I … " Stephen trailed off. There wasn't any apology he could give her that she would believe.
Christine stepped in, kneeling at the side of the bed and gently placing a hand on Sylvie's arm. She drew away as if Christine had shocked her.
"Sylvie," said Christine, her voice full of tenderness, "I can tell you care about Loki so much. None of us want to hurt him. I promise."
Sylvie held on to Loki's head as if she were afraid Christine would cut it off of him.
She continued, "Now, whether this thing is medical or magical, I do have something that will help him with his dehydration. I guarantee it can't do anything but help. I'm going to need to put a needle in his arm, okay, so I can put fluids directly in him instead of you trying to feed him a few drops of broth at a time."
Sylvie's glare softened a little.
"But-but I still have to feed him, don't I?" she asked, sniffling.
"Of course," said Christine. "He still needs something in his stomach, if he can manage it. Why don't you lay him down so we can give him an IV, all right?"
Wiping her nose on her sleeve, Sylvie gently let go of Loki's head, placing it back on the pillow, then went to the other side of the room and waited with her back against the wall in the corner. Christine cocked her head at Stephen in a 'come on' sort of gesture, and he followed her lead. She astonished him sometimes. Her bedside manner was impeccable. Though, he probably could have managed to do what she had, if he'd stopped for a minute to read the room.
That was the thing. He hadn't even made an attempt. Stephen tried to push the shame out of mind as he helped Christine set up the IV drip.
"Those veins are going to be nearly impossible," he said to Christine. "I … have an idea," he added gently, trying to be as humble as his damaged sense of pride would allow. She raised an eyebrow at him, like a warning not to do anything stupid.
He used a small bit of magical energy to highlight the veins in Loki's arm. They glowed with faint, red, pulsing light. Stephen pointed to the biggest one.
"That one's your best chance, I think."
"Thank you, Stephen," she whispered gratefully.
As she worked on getting the needle in without collapsing a vein, he glanced at Mobius and Sylvie waiting silently on the other side of the room. Even though Christine was the one working on Loki, all eyes were on him. Sylvie stared daggers, of course, and even Mobius wore a look of withering disappointment.
As the day wore on, the fluids seemed to be doing their job. Loki's veins had soaked up the saline like a sponge, draining the bag in an hour. She'd also given him a portable oxygen concentrator with a mask, and it was working wonders. His breathing was softer, his trembling less severe, and his heartbeat had settled a bit. Christine had come with a spare bag of saline that she decided to use then instead of keep for later.
"We can always go back and get more," she'd told Stephen.
"Oh, so now you're okay with stealing stuff from the hospital?"
She thought about it, then shrugged, "Well, it's for a good cause, right? I would even just bring him with us so we could monitor him easier, but I'm afraid someone might recognize him."
"That would be a damned bold move, Christine, bringing Loki back to New York."
By dinnertime, Loki had used up the second bag as well. He seemed to be steady, or at least leagues better than he had been before.
The rest of them gathered on the porch that evening, silently enjoying the breeze. Tempers and emotions that had run high seemed to have cooled off with Loki's improvement, but no one offered to make any small talk. Suddenly, Mobius stretched and spoke up.
"I smell something good," he said. "Come on, let's get dinner. I'll introduce you to the rest of Tvania."
In the middle of the neighborhood, in the front lawns of one of the houses, dozens of people gathered around a huge cooking fire while the sun fell in the sky, bathing the place in reddish-gold light. In the middle of the fire they'd propped up a large, metal satellite dish that they were using as a kind of makeshift cauldron. A rich, brown stew bubbled inside of it. A dark skinned man with jet black hair and a short beard, along with a lithe, pale, blonde woman tended the food together. The man tossed fresh herbs into the stew and occasionally stirred and scraped the bottom of the satellite dish, while the woman tended and stoked the fire underneath.
Mobius waved to the couple, and they cleaned their hands on their aprons and walked over.
"This is Hasan and Evgenia. They cook a great big communal meal a few times a week. They make this amazing rabbit stew with whole parts in it, whenever we get a glut of rabbits in our traps."
"Oh, aren't you vegetarian now, Stephen?" said Christine.
He shrugged, giving an embarrassed glance to the couple. "I'm not going to demand a vegetarian meal if this is what you're making for everyone. I don't want to be a bother. I can just eat the veggies in it, without the meat chunks-"
Hasan waved his hand around. "No, no, no, no! Of course not. You're the doctor, right?"
He realized gossip must spread like wildfire in such a tight knit community. He would know: he'd grown up in a small, rural, Pennsylvania town himself.**
"We're both doctors," he said, pointing to Christine. "Doctor Palmer. And I'm Doctor Strange."
"I can roast some vegetables for you, doctor, don't worry. We've got amazing carrots, and bell peppers, and purple heirloom corn, potatoes, sage, rosemary-"
"Gosh, wow, that sounds great," he said, feeling more than a little ashamed for ever thinking this place was a mirage that Loki had invented. "Thank you."
"Evgenia," he told his partner, "roast some of the corn, it will grill fast, then get some veggies and spices, put them in tinfoil and roast them in the coals. Very hot," he added, giving her a peck on the cheek.
"We're all very glad you're here," Hasan told Christine and Stephen with a warm smile, then went back to his stew.
Stephen noticed Sylvie had wandered off through the crowd and caught sight of her talking to a sturdily built Black woman with a short afro. The woman handed her a jar of amber liquid: probably broth for Loki. Sylvie's friend spoke excitedly to her, giving Stephen and Christine glances as she talked. Sylvie, to her credit, seemed like she was trying to put on a hopeful façade. She smiled and nodded, though her eyes radiated sadness. As soon as the Black woman turned to talk to someone else, Sylvie walked back towards the other three of them, then past them, to the house.
"Sylvie, don't you want dinner?" said Mobius.
"Would you save a bowl for me?" she shouted over her shoulder, never stopping.
After a few awkward minutes of trying to tactfully avoid the villagers' questions-what did Dr. Strange think Loki had come down with, how long would he take to heal, could Dr. Palmer take a look at the thing on their back and tell if it was infected-the dinner bell finally, thankfully rang. Everyone crowded around with their own bowls, but Hasan put up his hand for everybody's attention.
"Mobius and his guests first! Make room!"
The people obeyed, parting the crowd so that Mobius, Christine, and Stephen could go to the front. As they filled their bowls, and Evgenia handed Stephen his roasted purple corn on a sharp fork, Stephen gave Mobius a little nudge.
"Hanging around the prince and princess has its perks, huh?"
He smiled. "Not many, but a few. He's more like a chief, I guess. Everybody is pretty fair to everyone else. They vote on stuff they can't agree on and come to me or Sylvie for tiebreakers, since Loki is … well, indisposed."
"It kind of reminds me of a hippie commune," said Christine.
Mobius scoffed at that. "Hippies would never have fought as hard as we did to get here. We finally got a slice of Earth back. We earned it."
The three of them took their seats on a log a good distance from the fire, watching Hasan and Evgenia happily feed their neighbors. It was hard for Stephen to imagine them fighting anything.
"They're all human, then?"
"Yep," said Mobius, through a mouth full of rabbit meat. "Except for Loki and Sylvie, obviously. We came from all different parts of the timeline." He nodded to the Black woman who'd given Sylvie the broth and Chelsea, the one who had greeted him the first time, who were laughing uproariously with each other over some inside joke.
"Beatriz was a Brazilian seamstress from the early 1900's. Chelsea was a journalist living in Austria in the 2050's. Evgenia was from the eighth century, from the Rus' States … modern day Russia. And Hasan was a meta-scientist from the late thirtieth century who was involuntarily migrated to TerraPort 72-Toronto to you guys," he added.
Stephen's eyebrows shot up. "Wow, that last one's … interesting."
"Yeah, he tried to explain to me what his indentured servitude was, but I didn't really get it. He said they were trying to perfect quark technology so that invertebrates could gain sapience."
Christine and Stephen both stopped chewing.
"Like … they wanted to make lobsters and spiders that could think and feel like people?" asked Stephen.
Mobius nodded.
"Why?" whispered Christine.
Mobius shrugged. "That's what I said. He didn't understand why I didn't think it was a great idea."
"Ant-Man," Stephen whispered to Christine, making her chortle.
"What about you, Mobius?" asked Stephen as Evgenia served him a steaming hot plate of delicious smelling vegetables. "Sounds like a very futuristic name."
He gave them a smirk that quickly faded. "I uh … kept my TVA name. My real name is Jeff Boyd. Born in 1942. Atlanta, Georgia. The TVA took me in 1996, right after I finished my shift at the Yamaha Waverunner factory in Newnan. They told me I had sneezed flu virus all over someone who was going to give the flu to Bruce Banner's dad and kill him. I have my memories intact now-Sylvie's to thank for that-but they're all just sort of … disconnected. I still don't feel like a 'Jeff Boyd', you know?"
He paused for a moment, though Stephen didn't know how to respond.
Mobius sighed and pushed the shallots around in his stew. "No, you wouldn't, would you."
"I'm sure transitioning to a brand new life is really stressful," said Christine, giving Stephen a knowing glance. He took the hint.
"Mobius, if you'd told me ten years ago that I was going to find a magical monastery full of sorcerers who were going to teach me how to use the mystic arts to save the Earth from permanently losing half of its population, I would have tried to check you into the psych ward."
Mobius smiled. "I know, you're right. It's just that everyone else was so eager to be who they used to be. Jeff Boyd couldn't do anything interesting to save his life. He knew too much about jet skis, drank too much soda, watched basketball and baseball, and that was it. He was perfectly happy with that life. I mean, shit, he didn't even get picked for the 'Nam draft."
"Please don't tell me you would have preferred to go to Vietnam over staying safe at home," said Stephen.
"You're right, you're right, that's an awful thing to say. It's just that Jeff Boyd is so god-damned boring. I feel guilty admitting that the TVA gave me a much more interesting job-no, they didn't give me a job, they forced me to work-but it still made me feel like I was worth something, like I was doing something important."
"Well, I guess you were, but you weren't doing it for you," said Stephen through a mouthful of potatoes, watching the fork tremble in his hand, "Look, Mobius, I'm not really thankful for the accident that started me down the road to finding Kamar-Taj. I wish I could be humble and say I was, but I'm not. It was painful physically and emotionally. It broke me. I hated every second of it. I got something amazing from the experience, though: ancient knowledge and powers I wouldn't trade for anything.
"The TVA was obviously evil, even if they were trying to keep order in the multiverse, but they gave you a gift, anyway. You don't owe them anything, though. That gift is yours now."
Mobius set his spoon down in his bowl and watched the fire in silence, seemingly deep in thought. All around them, the Tvanians talked and visited with their friends, their coworkers, their neighbors, their new family. The pretty, olive skinned pregnant woman that Stephen had seen when he first arrived waddled past them, escorted by a much shorter Asian man who seemed to be doting on her. Another set of happy partners, Stephen guessed. Two young men with guitars started to harmonize on the first few bars of "My Sweet Lord". One wore a handmade fringe jacket made of strips of cloth, the other a headband of braided denim.
"Not a hippie commune, eh Mobius?" said Stephen with a grin.
Mobius grunted. "I guess I'm willing to admit the hippies made some good music. Some. I'm going to make sure I get a bowl of stew for Sylvie before it's gone."
He rose from his seat, leaving Christine and Stephen alone on the log. The mosquitos were starting to swarm in the cool twilight air. They danced like specks of dust across the firelight.
"I really shat the bed earlier today, didn't I Christine?"
"Well ... " she began hopefully, then made a face and nodded. "Yeah, you did."
"Unforgivable?"
"Oh, no," she replied. "But if you had been a resident and done something like that, I would have suggested to your supervisor that you go back to med school."
"Ouch."
"That little speech you gave Mobius almost made up for it. Sylvie might never warm up to you now, though."
"She's going to try to beat me up at some point, isn't she?"
He meant it as a joke, but Christine shrugged and didn't laugh.
"It does seem like Loki's illness is a magical thing, or at least supernatural." She slurped the rest of her stew and wiped her mouth with her sleeve. Stephen forgot she hadn't had a real meal all day.
"I would love for you to stay a bit longer," he said, hoping he didn't sound desperate. "But if you want to go, I can tell Mobius."
"No," she replied. "I want to stay. I can't let you go acting like a jackass again, can I?"
"What would I do without you, Christine?" he asked, only half kidding.
"You'd probably be fine," she said with the smallest exasperated sigh. She really knew how to rip his heart out, one tiny piece at a time.
* a völva is an ancient name for a Viking (Norwegian) witch, not canonically Asgardian. Yes, it's pronounced like the body part.
** In the comics, Dr. Strange grew up in Philadelphia, not in the countryside, but in Multiverse of Madness, he mentions that his sister fell through a lake and died ... having grown up in a rural area, this sounds like a very rural way to die, to me. It also becomes a somewhat important plot point later on.
(Edit: actually he was born in Philly and raised in Nebraska according to the Marvel wiki, even though the Wikipedia article says he grew up in NYC. I'm keeping his rural Pennsylvania origin intact though.)