"Poof," she says, with a little explosion of green light from her fingertips, like a firework going off in the air in front of them. Not as good as Loki's tiny fireworks display, not that she'd ever admit to it.

"The Time Variance Authority," she says, the words coming out crisp and hard. "The protect the sacred timeline. Their words, of course, their mission, handed down to them by some god-like authority they never once questioned. When someone in one of the infinite timelines does something that caused a disturbance, they go to that timeline, arrest the variant causing the issue, and erase the rest of the timeline. Like it never existed at all, except for the variant they took from it."

It still hurts, thirteen hundred years later and although she works to keep any of that from her voice, she knows she isn't as good at hiding it as she'd like to be.