Wedding ambush

Loki was an average man, average height, with pale white skin, dark hair, and blue eyes—your standard white guy package. Honestly, most people remarked that the most untrusting thing about him was that he didn't really fit his name. As he was the most honest guy anyone tended to know. Which was the opposite of what the god Loki was, the title of the god of mischief and all.

So his parents were wrong when it came to naming him. Though in their defense, they were fortunate tellers, and the name has been more in the hope that him having the name would stand out on a job application and make him a bit more tricky to survive the backstabbings of corporate politics. As they both had worked in such an environment and wanted to give their son the best hope of surviving it.

It seemed to both work and fail at the same time. It worked in the way that his rather unique name got him remembered after the interview, especially with the Marvel movie craze at the time. It didn't work in that he wasn't really all that cunning, so when the DEI hiring standards came down and made sure he would be low on the totem pole, he had no idea how to get around them.

So there was a stuck entry-level job in the mailroom. Sitting out everybody's mail every work day from his early twenties to his early thirties. It wasn't an exciting or glorious job, but it was his, and he tried to do the best he could. Despite that fact, his hard work would likely never be noticed. Though it was more for him, one of the only good things keeping him going was that he had made a standard at work and kept it.

Him knowing he was doing a good job even if no one else did gave him the strength he needed on those harder days. Though in the end his hard work did pay off, as he had always tried to make sure all the letters were going where they were supposed to go despite nobody else caring in his department, as apathy had sent for the rest of them a long time ago.

So he was the only one that had noticed that a fancier envelope had been mislabeled and was going to get thrown into the trash. He got to it first, and when he saw the band on it, he hand-delivered it to be sure it got delivered, as it was a fancy wedding invitation for one of the upper management. They were happily quiet with his handling of the letter, as he had his wife would be in deep shit if they missed the wedding.

So as a reward, he was invited as a plus one. Which might sound like a great opportunity to try and make connections. It wasn't as if this manager were a DEI hire, and so would the other attendees probably be, so he would be the butt of jokes the entire time while standing around in an uncomfortable tux. Sadly it was an offer he couldn't say no to without insulting the man, so he got a tux and went to the wedding.

He got there in a rented fancy car; if he had shown up with his old beaten car, he'd get made fun of even more and get in trouble with the manager for not upholding the standards of the wedding. Though he had every intention of leaving the wedding early. As more than likely no one would notice the one white guy at the party leaving after they all had gotten drunk on wine.

Once he was allowed inside, it was, of course, not what he had expected; it was worse. As not only were there a bunch of Black DEI hires. There were Indian, Asian, and Latino DEI hires as well. Not to mention what seemed to be a platoon of lesbian Karens from HR. He spent the whole time having to laugh at every joke made at his expense and having to agree that his existence as a white straight male made him evil to the core.

So, suffice it to say, he was tired of all their crap but couldn't say anything with the power dynamics at play. So eventually decided, "Screw it, I'm going to drink as much of their fancy wine as I can." Hopefully the buzz would make the whole situation more bearable. Loki would have no idea of the consequences of that particular decision.