Pop.

("Introduce yourself as, I don't know, Susan," he advises at the last minute.)

The fighting is over. There are a lot of dead bodies. There are some hovercraft from which medical people are checking which are dead bodies. There are craters in the ground. There is the distinctive scarring of a whole lot of lightning.

"Was local Thor maybe here?" she asks, not moving her lips, baffling the sound. "I'm not letting sound escape, you can answer even if you wouldn't want to be overheard."

"That sure does look like Thor. Strange didn't think he'd be among the dust bunnies, but Strange didn't see you at all so I don't have high expectations. How often can you do the healing trick -"

"Often as I want but has to be touch range."

The suit has jet thrusters, suddenly; he zips over to the nearest medical hovercraft. "Hey! This is my friend Susan, she has magic touch-range healing, can you make her useful and do you happen to know if any of the Avengers are here."

      "They were fighting over by the river. I think they may still be there. Can she do anything about the people who are -"

"Not yet but we are absolutely working on that, highly motivated, definitely have a plan. Just people who got conventionally stabbed, because it looks like there are a bunch of those."

      "We could make use of assistance."

"Great. Susan will help you out, then, and I am sorry about our being here without permission, and I am sorry about. Well. The world, and -"

The suit jet-thrusters off towards the river.

("I was gonna say Isabella," she mentions, teleporting over to the people who can find her stabbed patients.) "I can heal fast but can't identify still-alive fast -"

The doctor standing at the ship holds out her hand, palm upturned, and produces a hologram of the surrounding area with people marked for triage. "We assigned categories in the absence of magical healing but the dead are identified."

"Perfect, thanks." She memorizes it in a second's skim, then pops from person to person, starting with those in the nearest-term danger in the triage system.

There are people standing in the trees; his heat sensors, which pick them up first, can't tell him who they are, but a few seconds later they're in view and he can. 

He moves perhaps a little faster than there's any call for. "Rhodey!"

"Tony. You made it."

      "So did you. I was about to complain I was batting much worse than fifty-fifty on this dead friends thing."

"Pepper's -"

      "Pepper's dead, Dr. Strange is dead, the spiderkid is dead, a bunch of people you didn't meet - Thanos's daughter is alive and will help us out - you guys look like you did a little better -"

"We failed."

"Well, yeah, but you were screwed, right? Strange had the magic time rock, he took a look, looked through fourteen million before he found one where we win. It was hopeless, we were outgunned."

       "I nearly killed him," said Thor.

"Strange says nah you didn't."

      "I drove my axe through his body and he snapped his fingers with his dying breath - had I only -"

"You'd have thought of that sometimes, right?"

     Thor blinks wearily at him.

"If you were stabbing a dude a hundred times, you think once you'd think maybe to go for the MacGuffin?"

     "Tony," says Natasha. 

"I'm not rubbing it in I'm making a point - that wouldn't have worked either, couldn't have worked, because Strange looked and we never ever win and that means it's never really close."

"You said he envisioned one world where we won."

  "Yeah. He did. But now there's a complication - uh, I'll start with the plan and then I'll add the complication, how's that. There are some heroes we didn't know about; we go and we round them up. Successfully contacting them is going to be complicated, but technically complicated, in a way that apparently I and some Wakandan woman I've never heard of can get through if we try hard and believe in ourselves. The mold for the Infinity Gauntlet apparently still exists; while we're inventing something that can call the backup someone needs to make us an Infinity Gauntlet of our own. 

And then, twenty-six days from now, there's a nuclear war on a planet called Lemistra, because of the instability caused by all this genocide going around lately - there are gonna be a lot of those, we're waiting for Lemistra because that'll be enough time to have rounded up our new friends and not enough time for him to stop resting on his laurels and repair his gauntlet. Lemistra goes up in flames, billions of people die, they give themselves a nuclear winter and the survivors hang out slowly starving.

Nebula goes to her daddy, asks if he'll consider undoing that since, you know, it's terrible for the balance. Thanos should not know that this is happening left and right, he's gotta think it's a weird one-off in an otherwise successful campaign to bring about peace and happiness everywhere. Apparently he will show. We ambush him. One of the heroes we didn't know about, called Carol Danvers, has an affinity for the Power Stone. There's apparently a way for her to peel it off Thanos if we can overwhelm him in the fight. It's not gonna go the same as last time because we picked the location, we don't need the planet to survive the mess intact, and we have a month to assemble enough guns. 

We assemble our own gauntlet, find someone who can wield it to undo everything. This will probably be deadly, but you know, hell of a way to go."

"And the complication?"

"Where's your brother?"

"He is dead. ...I think this time he will remain so."

"Oh boy. Uh. Condolences. So on Titan I ran into this teleporting Asgardian. Teleporting girl Asgardian. With healing powers. She goes by Loki."

"That is - impossible -"

"I don't think she is your brother Mark IV - she seems - smarter? Less unhinged? But. She sure exists. She's healing Wakandans right now, I thought I'd get you all caught up so you could decide, uh, how you feel about alternate-universe sisters."

"My experience of sisters has not, so far, been encouraging."

"Yeah, about that, are you sure you're not the adopted one? Whole family of violent psychopaths with ambitions of world domination, and then you're - you know, blonde, and well-meaning -"

"My mother was blonde. And well-meaning."

       "Sorry," says Rhodey, "how is Loki's renewed status as ambiguously dead a complication in the plan you outlined?"

"Well, she's got friends who she told to come and get her, and who can resurrect people, so long as we don't have immortal souls - apparently that varies by planet, which is not how I would have expected it to vary if I'd been told it varied at all - and her friends have a lot of firepower so if they turn up then things probably go well. Or on the other hand, she's buddy-buddy with the Tesseract from her Asgard and thinks she could maybe get Thanos's space rock to defect, if we do the plan as stated but with her instead of Danvers.

Or we can ignore her and stick to the plan, Strange thought it'd work. Though he wasn't super confident in that. Actually he sounded downright pessimistic though I'm not sure that had anything to do with our actual odds."