She thinks it's a dream.
Honestly, she clings to that explanation the way a drowning person clings to driftwood—desperately, irrationally, refusing to let go even when the wood is splintering beneath her fingers. Because what else is she supposed to believe? There is no reasonable alternative to waking up two oceans and a continent away from where she last fell asleep. There is no explanation she can offer herself that makes sense.
She went to sleep in India.
And now she is back in the USA.
That's a fact.
Except her mind refuses to process that. It refuses to let the truth form into anything solid. Instead, it keeps circling something smaller, something safer, something almost laughably mundane, like a dog refusing to drop a stick—as if shrinking the problem could make it less impossible. How? How does that happen without anyone noticing? Without her noticing? Without a single memory of movement, of transit, of anything resembling the laws of reality operating the way they always have?
And sure, she'd had her own share of crazy dreams—nightmares that stitched absurdity into panic with the precision of a bad playwright. There was that one where she sprinted through her school wearing nothing but underwear because she overslept for an exam, only to wake up and realize it was a Sunday and the school was closed. And the other one—where she missed a train connection and ended up getting trafficked by a group of tattooed thugs wearing stupid dollar-sign sunglasses, the whole scenario collapsing into nonsense the moment she opened her eyes. Her imagination has never respected boundaries. But still, it was all dream logic nonsense, you know. Dreams that felt real in the moment but lost their edges the second consciousness returned.
But this—this is different. This dream refuses to break. The colors don't smear around the corners. Her thoughts don't echo or skip or drift apart. Everything is crisp, painfully coherent. That's the first thing that scares her. The second is that she can't wake herself up. She tries everything—the mental chanting, the deliberate blinking, even the spike of panic rising in her chest like a tidal wave. Her breathing splinters, growing sharp and shallow until her vision prickles with white. She half expects the world to crack open and drop her back into her bed.
But nothing happens.
Instead, her parents—alive, impossibly alive—appear beside her, their concern heavy and real enough to bow her spine with guilt and sorrow. Her mother cups her face, her father hovers uselessly nearby, both of them anxious in a way she hasn't seen in years. Or maybe she just doesn't remember. It's been eight years since she last saw them. Eight years since she buried them. Eight years since she learned how to live with the ache of absence. And now they're here—warm, breathing, frightened for her—and the guilt digs deeper, sharp as a hook. Because how is she supposed to tell them that she isn't panicking about school or the morning or the air? That she isn't even panicking about here? But because she doesn't believe they're real. Still, she lies because she didn't want to worry them. She gives them the flimsiest excuse she can reach—a sudden flare-up that came out of nowhere like some asthma attack—and lets them fuss, lets her mother rub circles into her back, lets her father mutter about doctors and hospitals. She even nods when they suggest seeing one.
Their worry is too sharp, too present, too painfully human to argue with.And far too real for a dream.
And then, of course, the blue translucent screen materializes in front of her face. Not like a hallucination—too stable for that. Not like a projected image—there's no light source, no flicker, no telltale LED glow. It simply exists, interrupting her panic like a cosmic error message she never signed up to debug.
She stares at it, breath still jagged in her throat.
God fucking dammit, brain! Could you maybe keep your weird imagination to yourself for once? I don't have time for more lunacy—
A line of text unfurls across the screen with a calmness that only makes her pulse spike harder. It was so fucking creepy.
[It's not an imagination host. You are the chosen host of the Goodwill System.]
She freezes. The room tilts, not in a dreamlike way but in a you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me way. Another message appears before she can scrape together a coherent thought.
[You must accumulate Goodwill by performing good deeds. Every 100 points will reward you with a random System Gift. And the more rewards you gain, the more it increases your chances of survival.]
"Survival?" she mutters under her breath. She tries not to look or sound too unhinged—her parents are right outside, probably debating which doctor or hospital to drag her to. "What do you mean by survival? Survive what? Did I land in some apocalypse timeline? Is this about zombies? Aliens? Nuclear fallout? A pandemic? What—"
The System, unbothered, cuts her off, as helpful as a guillotine.
[Not at all, Host. You are in one of the many Marvel universes.]Lana is pretty sure her soul exits her body through the nearest available emergency exit.[Threats include, but are not limited to: gods, monsters, aliens, demons, witches, vampires, superheroes, villains, interdimensional anomalies, cosmic beings, and—]
"For fuck's sake," she hisses, as the screen politely continues. Can this day get any worse?
[—To ensure your safety and the safety of your loved ones, you must grow stronger to face both natural and narrative adversaries.]
It doesn't take long—only a few hours of disbelief, denial, and quietly muttering profanity—for Lana Winters to piece together the shape of her situation. Or at least, the shape the System allows her to see. According to it, she is still Lana Winters in this world. Same name, same parents, same basic biographical outline—but everything else has been torn apart and reassembled wrong, like someone tried to copy her life from memory and got half the details smudged with their thumb.The details and the timeline don't match. None of them.
For one, she isn't vacationing with her maternal granparents in India anymore—no courtyard overflowing with her grandmother's hibiscus plants, no half-packed suitcase slouched against the bedframe, no lingering smell of filter coffee or the monsoon-dampness that soaked into her clothes. She isn't in California either—her California, the one she could navigate blindfolded, the one stamped into her bones. Instead, she's in New York; Marvel's New York.
A city thrumming underneath her, vibrant in a way that feels wrong because she knows what comes next. What always comes next in this universe? Aliens. Gods. Killer robots. Reality-warping nonsense. Far too many world-ending events are scheduled like they're on some twisted annual calendar. And let's not forget the dragon fossil. God, the dragon fossil. She tries not to think about it—truly tries—but it drags itself into her thoughts anyway—an ancient skeleton unearthed under New York, massive and impossible, a reminder that in this world even the past refuses to stay sensible. Fuck! She shouldn't have watched the Defenders.
And then there are her parents.
Her parents—dead in her world for eight years—are suddenly alive again. Breathing. Laughing. Calling her for breakfast. Bustling around the apartment like nothing bad has ever happened to them or to her. She's seen them dozens of times now in this borrowed body, but each time feels like being hit with a defibrillator. Her chest tightens with grief and relief tangled so messily together that sometimes she has to excuse herself and lock the bathroom door just to breathe. She doesn't know whether she wants to collapse into their arms or run away screaming.
Oh, and here's the kicker: It's 2002.
The year she's actually supposed to be born in her original world. Yet here she is, wandering around with the awkward limbs and hormonal minefield of a fifteen-year-old body, because apparently the System decided puberty was the new peak aesthetic. Or maybe some cosmic being somewhere has a deeply questionable sense of humor. Who's to know?
"God," she mutters more than once into her pillow. "Someone out there is making a joke out of my life for shits and giggles."
Because that's what it feels like: a cosmic prank with no punchline. A setup without payoff. A weird, twisted mockery of everything she worked for. But fine. She forces herself to look for silver linings, even if they are paper-thin.
The good news—if she squints hard enough to call it good—is that she hasn't been dropped into a damned apocalypse. There are no mushroom clouds on the horizon, no killer robots marching across the skyline, no alien armadas blotting out the sun. Not yet. According to every scrap of information the System dribbles her way, she has time. Time before the big disasters. Time before the headlines turn into prophecies. Time to accumulate this so-called Goodwill the System keeps raving about and collect whatever bizarre upgrades and buffs it promises as rewards.
Time to survive the shitshow.
But the bad news—God, the bad—where does she even begin? There's so much bad news she could write a thesis. Hell, she could write a whole dissertation and still not scratch the surface.
This universe, this timeline, this glossy, technicolor reality… it might as well be a death sentence wrapped in bright colors and comic panels. A place where skyscrapers are basically target practice, where the phrase "mass casualty event" might as well be part of the city's seasonal calendar. Even if nothing catastrophic happens in the next few years, it eventually will. It always does here. And when it does, she'll be stuck in a world crowded with beings who treat physics like a suggestion and treat consequences like optional DLC content.
And the worst part?
She can't even be sure which Marvel universe she landed in. Because the System refuses to specify which Earth she's on in the multiverse roulette.
So, for all she knows, this could be a What If…? branch where one wrong butterfly flaps its wings and suddenly the Sun explodes. It could be a universe where Celestials use Earth as their personal ant farm. Or where the One Above All wakes up in a bad mood and blows up a galaxy. And honestly, it doesn't even take a cosmic powerhouse to destroy everything—there are plenty of threats right on Earth that could level cities before breakfast. Destroy worlds, really. Mutants. Inhumans. Sorcerers. A cult trying to resurrect an eldritch horror. Aliens who've simply decided Earth looks punchable today.
And it doesn't even have to be a villain. In this world, a hero having a bad day is enough to crack the planet open like an egg.
Or worse—far, far worse—she could be stuck in a fanfic universe. The kind written by a sleep-deprived thirteen-year-old on Wattpad who thinks trauma builds character and that "slow burn" means "set everything on fire and walk away." Where romance is mandatory and the plot bends itself into knots just to put her in danger because "it adds angst."
But given her luck so far, she wouldn't even be surprised.
And then there's the System. The shady, infuriating, tight-lipped Goodwill System that kidnapped her across realities and tethered itself to her life like some cosmic parasite with a customer service attitude. The rewards are random, it says. Random—meaning she might get something useful like a regeneration ability or a magical artifact… or she might get something utterly stupid, like a stick of gum or a paperclip or a peppermint Altoid or a "congrats, you didn't die today!" badge. Every time Lana asks for specifics, it just feeds her vague answers wrapped in the same infuriating tone. Saying it all depends on luck. As though it ought to put her mind at ease or answer all her questions. Screw that!
Still, it has to be powerful—terrifyingly powerful—to rewrite an entire family into this world's structure without anyone noticing. To make sure she isn't flagged as an anomaly by the TVA radar or the Ancient One's gaze.
But apparently not powerful enough to give her a straight fucking answer.
If only it would be a little more forthcoming with the details, she might feel less like she's standing on the edge of an active volcano with no shoes and no briefing. Maybe then she could map out an actual plan. Maybe she could stop imagining all the ways she and her family could die gruesomely in this borrowed life where the average Tuesday includes building-sized robots punching each other.
And really—the question that eats at her the most, gnawing at the inside of her skull with dull, relentless teeth: Why her? What made her worthy of being dragged into a universe where "death by alien invasion" is a perfectly normal statistic? What part of her screamed, "Yes, this one! This clueless gremlin! Make her the host of a cosmic gacha machine!"?