The coffee at the corner of 47th and 8th was terrible, but David Chen had been drinking it every morning for three years. Consistency mattered more than quality when you were trying to disappear.
He sat at his usual table, laptop open to architectural renderings that would bore anyone watching. To the casual observer, he was just another freelance designer grinding away in New York City, nursing bad coffee and cheaper dreams. No one looked twice at the Asian man in his early thirties, dressed in a worn Columbia hoodie and jeans that had seen better days.
No one ever looked twice at David Chen.
That was exactly how he liked it.
His phone buzzed. A text from Marcus: Meeting tonight. 8pm. The usual place.
David's fingers paused over his keyboard. Three years of careful groundwork, and it was finally beginning. He glanced out the window at the steady stream of New Yorkers rushing past, each absorbed in their own universe of problems. None of them knew what was coming. The Chitauri invasion was still two years away, but David remembered it with crystalline clarity, the terror, the destruction, the moment the world learned it wasn't alone in the universe.
He remembered because he'd lived through it before.
The memories were fragmentary, like watching a film with missing reels. His previous life, old life felt more accurate, was a patchwork of images and emotions. He'd died there, in his world, and woken here, in the body of David Chen, a orphaned architecture student who'd taken his own life after accumulating impossible debt. Their souls had merged somehow, two broken people becoming something new.
And with that merger came something else. Power. Not the flashy, explosive kind that drew attention. Nothing like the spectacle that would soon define this world. David's gift was subtler, rooted in something ancient and patient: the ability to build, to create, to imbue structures and systems with purpose and strength that transcended mere materials.
In his old life, he'd been a city planner obsessed with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Here, he was living in it, with the ability to shape it from the ground up. Literally.
"Refill?" The waitress, Keisha, her nametag read, hovered with a pot of the diner's signature sludge.
"Please." David offered a small smile. He'd learned her schedule over the years, knew she was putting herself through nursing school, knew her seven-year-old daughter wanted to be an astronaut. These details mattered. Every connection mattered.
"You been working on that hospital project?" Keisha asked, topping off his cup. She'd seen enough of his screen over the months to piece together vague ideas of his work.
"Community center, actually. In Brooklyn." It wasn't a lie. The Henderson Park renovation was real, even if it was just the visible tip of a much larger iceberg. "Trying to make it something special for the neighborhood."
"That's good work." Keisha's smile was genuine. "City needs more people who care about that stuff."
After she left, David returned to his screen, but his mind wandered to the network he'd been building. Marcus was the first piece, a former Army Ranger who'd been dishonorably discharged for refusing an illegal order, now working private security and nursing a bone-deep distrust of authority. Then there was Sarah Kim, a biomedical engineer pushed out of Stark Industries for asking uncomfortable questions about weapons development. James Wilson, a financial analyst who'd uncovered corruption at his firm and been blacklisted for his honesty. Isabella Torres, a social worker who'd seen how the system failed the people it claimed to protect.
And dozens more. All of them good people. Competent people. People who'd been broken by systems that valued profit and power over humanity. People who wanted to build something better.
David had found them, one by one, in the cracks of the city. He'd offered them purpose, resources, and something desperately rare: genuine trust. He never lied to them about his goals. He was building an organization, a foundation that could become something greater. Not to replace the existing order, not yet, but to create an alternative. A proof of concept that there were better ways.
The architectural projects were real, but they were also camouflage and infrastructure. Every community center, every renovated building, every small development project served multiple purposes. They provided legitimate income and cover. They embedded his organization into communities, building goodwill and relationships. And for David personally, each project was a canvas where he could exercise his gift.
When David Chen designed a building, it became more than steel and concrete. The structures were subtly stronger, more resilient. People felt safer in them, inspired by them. Communities coalesced around them. It wasn't magic, not exactly, but it was power, channeled through intention and craft.
His laptop showed the latest project: a mixed-use development in Queens. Six stories: retail on the ground floor, community spaces on the second, affordable housing above. The blueprints looked mundane, but David could see the invisible architecture beneath, the way the layout would encourage community interaction, the structural reinforcements that would make it stand against forces that would level ordinary buildings, the subtle design elements that would make residents feel this was truly home.
The cursor blinked on a hidden partition of his hard drive, password-protected and encrypted by Sofia Chen (no relation), one of his first recruits and the closest thing he had to a tech wizard. Inside were the real plans. Maps of New York with hundreds of marked locations. Dossiers on individuals worth recruiting. Timelines tracking major MCU events, adjusted for his imperfect memory and the butterfly effects of his interference. Financial projections for the next decade. Emergency response protocols.
And at the center of it all: the Foundation.
That's what they were calling it, for now. Simple. Generic. Forgettable. The Foundation for Urban Development, registered as a non-profit in Delaware with deliberately byzantine ownership structures. On paper, it was funded by a mix of grants, private donations, and income from David's consulting work. In reality, David had been leveraging his knowledge of the future, stock tips, Bitcoin investments made at exactly the right time, strategic real estate purchases, to build a war chest.
Money was power in this world, maybe more than the cosmic cube or super-soldier serum. It bought secrecy, loyalty, time, and influence. David had learned that lesson from watching Tony Stark, though he planned to be considerably more careful with how he wielded that power.
His phone buzzed again. This time, a news alert: "Stark Industries Announces Arc Reactor Technology for Clean Energy."
David's jaw tightened. Right on schedule. Tony was out of Afghanistan, iron suit built, beginning his transformation from merchant of death to armored Avenger. Which meant the timeline was intact so far, his changes too small to ripple outward. Yet.
The Chitauri invasion would come. Hydra was already embedded in SHIELD like a cancer. Thanos was out there, plotting. The world thought its biggest concerns were terrorism and economic instability, but cosmic storms were gathering on the horizon.
Most people would try to stop it, to prevent the disasters they knew were coming. David had considered that path during his first year here, lying awake at night, wrestling with the weight of foreknowledge. But the more he studied the timeline, the more he understood: the threats were inevitable. The Infinity Stones existed and would attract attention. Hydra had been growing for seventy years and couldn't be easily uprooted. Thanos's conviction was absolute.
You couldn't prevent the storm. But you could build shelter. You could prepare people to weather it and rebuild after. You could create systems that would bend instead of breaking.
That was David's mission. Not to be a hero, the world would have plenty of those. But to be a builder, laying foundations while everyone else was looking at the sky.
His coffee had gone cold. David checked his watch: 2:47 PM. The afternoon stretched ahead, a handful of hours before the meeting. He closed his laptop and packed up, nodding to Keisha on his way out.
The city swallowed him immediately, millions of souls pursuing their own destinies, unknowing and unkowing. David walked among them, another anonymous face in the crowd, carrying the weight of secret knowledge and hidden power.