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"How are we going to defeat Thanos?"
The question falls through the air, a heavy stone, heavy and cold. The Avengers and their allies glance around the flashy room paid for by one Tony Stark. Outside and below, New York glitters on, privileged people unaware just how privileged they are, or of how slim the thread is that holds them up.
On a pouffe nearest the floor to ceiling windows, Hawkeye shifts his weight, making the thing squeak. "With the Infinity Gauntlet on an ugly purple hand, he's too strong."
Near the dead centre of the room, Tony uncrosses his arms. "Narcissism."
"Huh?" asks more than one despondent voice.
"Narcissism. It's beyond simple. You use one megalomaniac to defeat another. One fat head versus another. If we get lucky, they'll destroy each other. Gaslight each other into oblivion."
"You're already fighting Thanos, Tony."
"Ha di ha. Did you learn that in Sunday school, Cap? No -" the man turns and wiggles a hand at the air, causing a hologram to appear. "- I've recently learnt of a supervillain that matches our Grimace. All we have to do is send a strikeforce into the multiverse to lure him back here."
For lack of any other options, such a team is duly created and sent out, travelling to another world very similar to their own and carefully laying a breadcrumb trail that leads that world's Thanos equivalent across the dimensional rift. It's not easy, because the villain keeps becoming distracted by blows to his ego, his narcissism as extreme as Tony said it was.
Eventually the job is done though, and the final place begins, hero and heroines pouring into the desolate battlefield through portals to face a purple giant with a shiny glove. Near the front Tony checks the time, the orange light bouncing off the rock around him doing awful things to his facade of youthfulness.
"He'd better not be too fashionably late." he mutters.
He is not, the draw of showing off before the universal elite being much too great. A puff of black smoke, like that produced by certain mutants, but silent, appears in the lead of the army led by the Avengers. Out of it appears a man, a pale man in black robes, long fingers dramatically raising a slender piece of wood. Turning, he glances over the assembled army of Good, his snake face white as bone, his red eyes scarlet and rapidly filling with rage. When no one offers him so much as a greeting, he turns to his adversary, who has likewise changed from arrogantly keen to beat some fools, to confused.
"…What is this?" rumbles Thanos, gesturing at the latecomer.
"Excuse me?!" Voldemort flicks his robes and tilts his non-nose into the air, offended, aghast, disgusted, his voice shrill as a teenage boy's in mid puberty. "I'm the Dark Lord of the universe. What are you? Cabbage?!"
Thanos' massive jaw falls open, and his shiny glove slips off his boulder hand, landing in the dust.