"Madam di Pippo, I understand your fears. The creation of a Planetary Defense Force, which I have been advocating ever since the costly One Day War has ended only a few weeks ago, might at first glance contradict with some of the core proposals of the Outer Space Treaty. The creation of a fleet, and a mobile defensive platform, outside of Earth's orbit was a frightening prospect indeed to those who drafted said Treaty. Fifty years ago, Madam di Pippo. Fifty years ago, the only contestants in the Space Race were the nations of Earth. But as we all now know: We. Are. Not. Alone! Other beings in the universe have had a Space Race of their own, and I don't have to tell the honored members of UNOOSA that, clearly, they are much further ahead than us! When aliens came upon Earth's doorstep, armed with technology only a select few of us can hope to equal, the solution of the World Security Council was to launch a nuke upon inhabited soil! The main goal of the Outer Space Treaty was to prevent the use of nuclear weaponry in space, what use is that treaty now that there are people in power that will not hesitate to launch such weaponry within our own biosphere?! I say a change is needed! Thanks to the efforts of Titan Solutions, the United States Military, and the hero group known as the Avengers, the very technology that threatened all life on Earth, can now be used to instead launch humanity to the stars! A Planetary Defense Force, standing like an aegis above this beautiful planet we call home, ready to beat back the alien scum of the galaxy with their very own weapons! With the help of the UNOOSA, we can make the safety of our planet against space-related threats, a reality!" I roar, and cheers and applause greet me in waves as I slowly let my gaze roam across the assembly hall inside of the United Nations Office at Vienna.
Representatives of around 130 countries are standing in their seats, applauding my proposal, and I give polite little bows of my head to the key players in the room, those with the connections and the influence to push through my ideas (they're each highlighted in my vision through the contact lens I'm wearing, through which Phineas is both watching and aiding me).
"Thank you, Mister McCole, for that inspiring speech. Please return to your seat again, if you will? At this point, I feel that this Assembly has been informed enough to the point that we can now hold a vote on whether a Planetary Defense Force may or may not be created. If this assembly agrees that a PDF is outside the limits of the law, then there shall be a vote on whether or not the laws should be altered in order to allow such a Force. If this assembly agrees that a PDF is within the limits of the law, then we shall move on to the particulars of such a Force, such as jurisdiction, logistics, and development." Simonetta di Pippo, the Director of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs says calmly, her voice cutting through the general noise of the completely filled assembly hall.
This was one of the multiple reasons why I had allowed the Invasion to go on for as long as it did, and why I made sure to publicize the footage of the Chitauri army on the other side of the portal: I needed an army. As a base, Othrys was damn near perfect: defensible, durable and filled to the brim with weaponry, not to mention the superpowered people in my employ.
With the forces at my disposal, I was fairly sure that, outside of Wakanda, I could conquer just about every nation in the world fairly easily.
It wasn't enough.
Thanos was considered to be one of, if not the, most powerful being in the universe. But he wouldn't have been able to cut a swathe of death and destruction throughout his corner of the universe if he went at it alone, or even with the Black Order at his side.
No ordinary individual could stand against him (though maybe other top-tier beings could, like Ego, or a fully powered Surtur), but an army (especially when comprised of races like Kree and the Sovereign) could halt him in his tracks, keep him confined to a single planet or station.
But he had the Outriders, the Chitauri, and the Sakaarians (maybe a payment from the Grandmaster to have Thanos leave his little pocket of the universe undisturbed?) under his control, while using several powerful individuals as proxies in his shadow wars. That sheer military might was what elevated him from a simple (if powerful) madman to a dreaded warlord.
If I wanted to stand a chance against the Mad Titan, then I needed a counter to his vast armies as well, and I couldn't rely on the purple fucker to land in Wakanda again in order to engage in an infantry-only battle against the Wakandans.
No, I needed an army of my own, a big enough thorn in the Titan's side that I could move relatively freely, pursuing my own agenda.
The Planetary Defense Force would be that army.
Not overtly, of course, but someone had to reverse engineer the alien tech, build the ships and the station, organize the forces...
On top of that, I didn't even need to directly control the PDF: when someone from outer space comes knocking, chances are both me and Earth are gonna want them dead and stripped anyways, so really, I just needed to point it in the right direction and allow it to cause trouble for whoever opposes me in the future.
As I sit, I easily hide my smile as the Council almost unanimously agrees to the creation of a PDF (it seems China and their allies are feeling more for creating their own space force under their own supervision, rather than sharing anything with the other countries), and people start furiously debating the supervision, composition and jurisdiction of such a force. And we haven't even gotten to logistics and armament yet! This might take a while, but I got time.
No matter the outcome, it would be in my favor anyways.
It takes pretty much the entirety of the rest of the day, but the general outlines are finally starting to take shape (realistically, it could've taken years until all the bureaucratic bullshit was out of the way, but the mountainous motherships of the Chitauri that were still haunting everybody's thoughts had lit a fire under their collective asses). A research team will be formed out of all the countries that had something to bring to the table (Wakanda, of course, took the lead in this). Together, they will go through the cache of the Chitauri tech, and try to create space-worthy technology for Earth's use. Once it is created, vetted and approved, it will be sent into Earth's orbit using a combination of Stark-Nasa tech and Cross Technologies. Anything that will be sent up will not be allowed to possess any targeting systems aimed at Earth.
Weaponry for the platforms will be provided by Titan Solutions, whose scientists will play a major role in making the alien technology understandable for the international research team, since it is commonly accepted that my Think Tank is the only one with the smarts to actually make any sense of the Chitauri materials (of course, the people I will put on that project will secretly forward both their own findings to me, as well as what the other countries will end up doing with it, but the assembly doesn't need to know that).
The crew will be comprised of volunteers. Volunteers can only come from countries that have both signed the (now altered and improved) Outer Space Treaty, and have contributed to the unified reverse engineering team. Volunteers can come from any branch in the military, but have to have a service record of twenty years at least, and which is absolutely impeccable to boot.
Briefly some countries try to push back, saying that due to that requirement only some of their older soldiers can enlist, which will negatively affect their combat prowess, but at that point I rise up again.
It is a testament to the fame from the One Day War I'm still riding high on, when the entire assembly immediately falls quiet without prompting from me. Despite the fact that I had only been invited as a guest speaker (and as such, really shouldn't be talking right now, much less simply hold the proceedings in such a way), Madam di Poppo motions for me to speak, getting a polite smile from me.
This was the reason why I had stepped to the UNOOSA specifically in order to campaign for the PDF: every single branch in the world government wanted to get involved with the alien technology which would revolutionize Earth's tech-level by decades at least (not to mention the sheer wealth of resources that awaited the first nation that could make space-faring viable, even if the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibited any nation of Earth from claiming any celestial bodies for themselves).
Some of those branches were pretty powerful, but UNOOSA had always been something of a fringe-branch of the United Nations. They played their part during the Cold War, campaigning against both sides from using the Final Frontier as the next stage for modern (read, nuclear) warfare, and to be fair in that regard they had been pretty successful (though technically, the Rods of God-delivery system was still legal). However, when mankind turned away from the stars and started to cut funding to space exploration, the UNOOSA naturally shrunk as well.
Now though?
Never before had outer space played such an important role in the daily lives of humans. Conspiracy theorists nearly went to war with other conspiracy theorists over whose type of alien lizards had actually infiltrated the government (the scary part about that? The fact that Skrulls exist in this universe meant one of those groups might actually be right). Governments were running around like headless chickens, especially since a certain someone kept bringing up the WSC and their asinine ideas over the years, causing public outrage and distrust of the governing bodies. Xenophobes and racists made their voices heard loud and clear, and found a willing listener in the frightened population of Earth. Massive amounts of people began to doubt, or even renounce, their faiths, causing religious extremists to go into overdrive, either seeing the Chitauri invasion as a plague sent by God, or demons brought to Earth by the sin of man, or a hundred different ideas which would justify them slaughtering everyone who didn't agree with them.
And in that global unrest, I stepped towards the UNOOSA, this nearly forgotten branch of the UN, and told them to look towards the sky.
UNOOSA read the mood of the global community, understood the political weight I now had and immediately capitalized. They staked claim to everything and anything alien, which included retrieval of alien remains and artefacts, and future contact (either diplomatic or violent), trying to show me as prominently as possible on every single bit of PR they publicized.
Had I not dragged both the WSC and S.H.I.E.L.D. into the spotlight, then the agency and their Damage Control would've simply gone over everybody's head and made sure to snatch up all the alien goodies and hide them away from the world.
But now everybody and their mother knew about their existence, and looked at them with suspicion (due to Fury's and Carter's quick thinking, S.H.I.E.L.D. got off relatively fine, even if they had to give up a lot of their former autonomy, anonimity and liberties), so the UNOOSA's tactic worked. The UNOOSA was catapulted to the foreground of politics as people finally felt that there was a Government branch that knew how to deal with these new and unfamiliar fears that they were suddenly experiencing as of this week (the fact that the one man they knew could beat back this alien threat was throwing his full support behind this government branch certainly helped matters).
So when I spoke, UNOOSA was smart enough to shut the fuck up and listen to what I had to say.
They weren't exactly mine, but in practice it hardly mattered.
"People, people, please! I understand your fear, I do! You have all read the preliminary reports on the alien's biology, you have all seen the footage of my forces and the Avengers in combat against the Chitauri threat! We all know that our soldiers would need to be in peak physicality, should CQC ever become necessary, I agree whole-heartedly. But, should they not be at peak morality as well? The volunteers of the PDF shall stand above their peers on Earth, literally. We cannot entrust such power to those who would wield it unjustly! And hence, the dilemma. The only soldiers that can be trusted in a position of power are those types of soldiers that would not be fit enough for that very position. But I have the solution! These soldiers would need to be above the human norm, to be beyond our current limits, especially in a region as uninhabitable and tough as space. So I'm willing to create these soldiers for you! I am willing to enhance each and every approved applicant, to the level of a supersoldier!"
As the Assembly dissolves into chaos, arguments and shouting, I sit down again, rubbing my chin in order to hide my grin.
Did I just jumpstart the creation of the Space Marine?
Why yes.
Yes I did.
Have you ever tried to read up on Space Law? I have. It's a hot mess, filled with debates about definitions and hypothetical situations, trying to exert influence about happenings that are literally beyond the reach of Earth.
Yeah, not exactly the most fun reading material in the world.
Thankfully, I employ a formerly Brain Boosted Tinkerer who has turned into an AI and a lawyer who I have seen snap a ninja's neck (not entirely sure how that translates to better lawyering skills, but it was extremely awesome so there), so after the meeting at Vienna has finally come to a close I'm more than happy to portal to Jeri's office, dump a two feet tall stack of documents on her desk, give her a jaunty wave, and then quickly portal towards Othrys before she can tackle me through a wall (Phineas has watched the meeting in real-time and has already downloaded all the relevant files as he immediately goes to work).
With Titan Solutions being so intertwined with the creation process of the PDF at multiple stages, Hogarth should be able to find ways to absolutely shower me in absurd amounts of money, especially if Phineas is helping her out, condensing all the information for her and keeping his eye on the competition (which at this point mostly consists of Stark and Killmonger, though Roxxon and Rand are fighting for a part in the millions of different things that will be required for the creation process and the upkeep of the PDF).
Letting the mystical glow of the portal snap shut behind me (cutting off Hogarth's angered "Michael!") I walk down the hall on one of the multiple research floors of Othrys (which are all located underground, with more being dug and furbished as needed). I have two projects to check up on, before I can continue with my own research.
Approaching one of the blastdoors sunken into the wall of the hall, I wave my hand across the strip on the doorframe, which briefly lights up with a soft green glow before the heavy doors smoothly open.
Long experience at Othrys has conditioned me (and my employees as well) to immediately twist to the side whenever a door on the research levels is opened, but when I'm not greeted with a blast of fire, eldritch energies or lasers, I deem it safe enough to step inside the lab.
There are two occupants, which probably means that the third one is taking one of her many breaks in the relaxation area of the residential level (it has an obscenely large and sinfully comfortable hot-tub, which is somewhat of a guilty pleasure for many of my employees). The man is halfway inside a massive machine which seems to be the love-child of something Stark would build if he was completely shit-faced drunk, and metalwork that even Sakaar would think of as ugly. Off to the side, writing furiously in a notebook as brown eyes kept flicking up at a glowing cube, sits a woman, eyebrows pinched and her tongue occasionally slipping out.
"Hello Dr. Selvig, Dr. Foster. How are things coming along?"
After the battle had come to a close, an exhausted and mentally shell-shocked Selvig had briefly been taken in by the Avengers before he made his way back to his own home again, as the heroes were simply far too busy with cleaning up the ruined city and tending to the many injured to bother caring for a the man who was seemingly fine.
Selvig had thought so as well… until he woke up one day in his living room in only his underwear, with no memory of how he had gotten there or why his walls were completely covered with scribbled advanced formulae and nonsensical drawings.
So when I reached out to him, offering him the solution to the alien clutter that was slowly starting to overwhelm his brain, he jumped at the opportunity like a drowning man throwing himself to a life-vest.
The Brain Booster had an… odd effect on him, compared to the rest of us. Where with us, we simply understood more, the world unfolding around us as we comprehended it in ways we could never have imagined before the enhancement, Selvig instead seemed to suddenly know more.
It was as if Loki had driven a spike of knowledge inside Selvig's brain, geared towards creating the portal using the Tesseract as a power source. Of course, there was quite a disconnect between that level of knowledge and what Selvig had already possessed, but those gaps in his knowledge had been shored up by Loki keeping him on track and pushing him along. Now that Loki wasn't controlling his mind anymore, however, that tightly packed bunch of information was unfolding (all that general knowledge which Selvig should have known before he attempted anything even remotely close to what he had achieved with the Tesseract), which brought it into conflict with the natural limitations of Selvig's brain.
So it had started to push other things to side, spreading like a cancer, or an ink-blot in water, which is why Selvig started acting increasingly erratic, until eventually he would end up running around Stonehenge completely buck-naked in a year or so (he had gone completely ashen faced when I told him so in the most serious voice I could manage).
With the Brain Booster there was suddenly a lot more… room, for lack of a better word, and all of that alien knowledge now finally had a way to fit inside Selvig's enhanced mind, a rush of memories and information that weren't his own rushing in like a tidal wave, if the scientist's pained screams were anything to go by.
Thankfully, the pain subsided after a few hours, after which came the really intriguing part: it seemed that Selvig's brain started filling in the gaps between his alien-gained knowledge and his own level of expertise (he compared it to the way the brain automatically fills in and corrects parts of our vision, though he admitted it was a poor analogy to the miracle that was happening inside his head), meaning that instead of just knowing how to build stuff that he hadn't even known existed last year, he now started understanding the principles behind the stuff he had built for Loki.
The sheer versatility it granted him… I would probably put him on either equal or even greater footing than Radcliffe when it came to mechanics and electronics (Sterns was still in a league of his own though. A few days ago I was walking through the hanger, and I swear to God that Oliver was looking at me somehow), despite the fact that Radcliffe had been Brain Boosted for almost half a year now.
Selvig had been more than thankful to me after I had prevented him from going insane, and allowing him to understand all that miraculous knowledge inside his own mind, that he was more than willing to immediately start working on the Tesseract for me (he was the expert on it, after all, and all my other scientists were currently occupied), no questions asked.
He was so thankful, in fact, that he hadn't even objected to me getting into contact with Jane Foster, even offering to call her himself. I had half-feared that I would be too late in contacting her, since Thor was still on Earth this time around. If she had come to New York in order to seek contact with him, she might have already moved into Stark Tower, especially since I remembered that, due to Darcy hacking the computers at the observatory in Tormsø, Jane would know by now that Thor had participated in the Battle for New York.
So I had to sweeten the deal.
Unfortunately, the deal would have to be so sweet that I couldn't simply offer it to her over the telephone (no matter how secure Sterns and Phineas could make it), so I simply teleported over to Norway, arriving at the observatory in person (due to me harnessing and freezing a Leviathan, not to mention the fact that a massive hole in the sky had opened to let said alien and its brethren through in the first place, a lot of people believed in magic these days, so I didn't really feel the need to hide my teleporting anymore).
After calming down a startled Foster (and ignoring the googly-eyes that Darcy was sending me), I sat down with the scientist and her intern as we started talking business together. Foster and Darcy had already figured out that they had been stashed there by S.H.I.E.L.D. so that Thor wouldn't tear down Western Civilization as we knew it should Foster have been caught in the cross-fire of the Invasion.
However, with the actions of the WSC coming to light, neither woman felt entirely comfortable dancing to the spy agency's tunes (though they hadn't exactly been comfortable with it in the first place), though Foster admitted that she'd be somewhat disappointed to leave the high-tech observatory behind.
Until I told her that I would built her an observatory at Othrys made completely to her exact specifications, sparing neither cost nor efforts, or even launch my own telescope into Earth's orbit if she wanted me to.
As I told the two star-struck scientists with a gleaming smile: "I'll spare no expense."
Still, while Foster was tempted at my offer, all it took was seeing her eyes flick back towards the screen showing Thor lighting up the sky with Mjolnir during the One Day War to know that she still wasn't completely convinced.
Which was where the second part of my deal came in.
"Dr. Foster. How would you like to visit Asgard?"
"W-what? What do you mean, not even Thor can return-"
"So imagine how grateful he would be if you were the one to return him to his home and family."
At the flabbergasted question of how I could possibly help her return the Norse God home when he himself couldn't do so, I had merely smiled and offered her the Brain Booster, as well as the opportunity to work on creating a stable Einstein-Rosenberg, essentially building our own Bifrost.
"Selvig will be so happy to see you again. If it wasn't for me, then the shit that Loki did to him would've driven him insane, you know? I really think that seeing the two of you would do him a lot of good."
And that had nailed the final nail into the coffin, and after taking about twenty minutes to pack their things (Foster was done in five, but Darcy had misplaced her hairdryer and had somehow roped both me and Foster into helping her find the damned thing) and a step through a glowing tear in space and time, Doctor Jane Foster stood upon the doorstep of Othrys.
Turning around at my greeting, Selvig gives a happy wave, his other hand still firmly lodged in the guts of… whatever it was that he was currently building.
"Oh hi there Michael! Everything is going fine, better than fine, in fact! Give me the rest of today, and tomorrow I'll have this puppy up and running! It'll be capable of containing and channeling the power of the Tesseract without any issue! After that, I should be able to get started on making it into a portable version, and after that we can really get started on the space-related shenanigans! Jane can fill you in on that part though." And with another huge smile, Selvig dives back into his Tesseract-powered battery-thing.
Turning towards Foster with a raised eyebrow, I see how the astrophysicist merely rolls her eyes, though a fond smile crosses her face.
"He's been like that ever since you gave him his own lab and all the tech he could ever ask for. He hasn't stopped grinning ever since I saw him, and I've even had to drag him away from his project and damn near force-feed him because he forgot to eat!"
After looking at my inquisitive face for a few moments, Jane's expression falls as a blush comes to her cheeks.
"Fine. Darcy had to feed the both of us. But it was just this one- alright fine, it was three times, but I was about to go eat a sandwich anyways, I promise!" Jane says in a heated tone, her blush only increasing at my deep laugh as I walk over towards her.
"It's fine Doctor. I figure just about every scientist here at Othrys has been where the two of you are now. You'll learn to deal with the new impulses in time, if only because eventually Phineas will send a drone to bug you until you eat."
"He does that?!"
"Oh, sure. He'll start with a small drone, which will just follow you with this incredibly annoying humming sound, kinda like a gigantic mosquito. If that doesn't work, he starts poking you with it, and after that, he'll switch it up to small shocks instead. If that doesn't work, he'll bring out a drone carrying a flame-thrower." I say, and looking at Jane's horrified expression, I only manage to keep a straight face for two whole seconds before I burst out into laughter.
"I'm kidding Doctor Foster, I'm kidding!"
Well, kinda. Phineas only threatened to bring out the flamethrower after shocking Burstein and Hansen hadn't worked, but since both scientists were fireproof (Burstein had of course taken the Amber Armor, whereas Hansen had immediately enhanced herself with the perfected Extremis formula she had been slaving over for more than a decade) I wasn't entirely sure just how useful that would've turned out to be.
"Darcy will have her hands full in order to keep the two of you properly fed and watered, but rest assured Jane, nobody here would try to keep you or Erik from their research. This is Othrys! There are no limits to the SCIENCE! we perform here!" I say with a wild grin as I throw my arms wide, causing Jane to (thankfully) chuckle at my antics.
It's imperative that the woman enjoys working here: she's my get-out-of-jail-without-a-hammer-jammed-up-my-ass card. As long as she's here, working for me, then I'm (relatively) safe from Thor. I'm not entirely sure how the God of Thunder views me right now (considering that Loki immediately thought I was from Muspelheim, I don't exactly have my hopes up), but kicking his brother's ass certainly wouldn't do me any favors in his eyes.
I'm fairly certain that Heimdall is incapable of seeing the Infinity Stones (if he could see the Space Stone, then why not portal Thor directly on top of it, instead of sending Thor to Loki's location in order to beat the whereabouts of the Tesseract out of the Jotun?), but there was no way for me to verify my theory.
Even if turned out that he couldn't, then he still could've spotted the Hysminai taking the Tesseract (he probably wouldn't really care for the Scepter, which is another point in favor of the theory that he can't see Infinity Stones, or Asgard would've place a bigger priority of retrieving the Scepter as well) and tracked them back towards Othrys.
And even if Thor didn't get any leads from Asgard as to whose door he needed to bust down in order to return home and restore peace to the Nine Realms, then there still was Tony Stark, who most certainly was having his own suspicions, even if he was smart enough to realize how fragile global relations had become overnight now that alien invasions no longer merely belonged in sci-fi movies.
The world would recover, even grow more unified, from the Chitauri attack, under my guidance, but for now it was imperative the heroes of Earth presented a united front to the global community. That didn't mean that he would simply forget about it, and in all likelihood he would eventually point Thor in my direction, if only because I was probably seen as the authority on anything supernatural at this point (ordinarily it would've been S.H.I.E.L.D. instead, but since nobody quite trusted them anymore these days they didn't count).
So yeah, when the Norse God of Thunder came knocking on my door, it would be nice to have his girlfriend stand at my side and vouch for me.
Thankfully, the combination of working with Selvig in the most high-tech environment she had ever seen, with all the money and equipment she could ever ask for, her mind enhanced in ways she hadn't known were even possible and with the Tesseract in front of her seemed sufficient to have the brilliant scientist firmly on my side.
That being said though…
"Oh! Before I forget, can you please tell Chiron that I will be going into the city tonight? I have another… you know… date." Jane says, tugging at her sleeves as her face glows so brightly, if I didn't know that she doesn't have Extremis, I'd think she was ready to spit fire at any moment now.
Yeah, despite gladly working and living at Othrys, Jane had still managed to connect with Thor. The God had been ridiculously busy assisting with the clean-up, but Jane had tracked him down nevertheless, and the two had embraced and kissed right there on the streets as if they were two long-lost lovers.
While the God was clearly disappointed when Jane told him that she wouldn't be moving into Stark Tower as well, the scientist had immediately cheered him up when she offered to go on a date with him. Of course, Thor, being Thor, had a quite… peculiar idea as to what exactly counted as a 'date'.
As a stricken Jane told me with wide eyes that first day after she had returned from tracking down Thor, the warrior God's idea of courting a lady was taking her to an active warzone and holding a competition over who got the most kills (incidentally, this custom is why most Asgardian men are somewhat weary of approaching Lady Sif, since the last guy who did so a few hundred years ago had come back to Asgard damn near in tears when she got more than twice his amount of kills without even breaking a sweat).
After calming down the scientist somewhat (and promising that if she went to an active warzone with Thor, I'd have Melvin cover her from head to toe in the finest Amber Armor) I sent her off to a surprised Elliot, telling him that he should give the woman a crash course on Asgardian courtship and customs.
Giving a nod at Jane's earlier question, I mock-glare at her.
"Do you have to humor the kid like that? He just drives the boats for God's sakes! Just because me and Phineas have Greek-based codenames doesn't mean everyone who works for Othrys absolutely needs one as well."
"Well, he thinks it's cool, and I just don't have the heart to tell a bright kid like him that he has gotten his myths mixed up, you know, since Othrys was never in the Underworld." Jane says with a small smile, before she looks over at the Tesseract again.
It takes me a few moments to realize that she's completely forgotten I'm there, so I snap my fingers in front of her face (by adding a small amount of chi, the snap sounds more like a loud gunshot instead), nearly making Jane fall form her chair in shock.
"What?! What is it?!"
"Selvig told me that you could explain more about where you are at regarding the space-bending qualities of the Tesseract. You know, before we started talking about your boyfriend?"
"H-He's not-"
My grin cuts off her sputtered response, so instead she merely gives up and settles for glaring at me as she opens her notebook with a snap.
"Well, if you must know, I'm starting to understand the basic principles of how it interacts with local space-time. Mind you, I have absolutely no idea how it does so in the first place, but I've been able to log it's energy signatures corresponding to various differences in the fields surrounding the Tesseract, ranging from mere radiation, like gamma, and even gravitational! It's amazing! I'm so close to triggering targeted changes, I just know it!" Jane says with an exited grin, as her hair whips around her head as she jumps up from her chair and start pacing.
"Don't worry Michael. Once Erik has set up his battery, there will be far larger quantities of energy that we can safely work with and study. Once we reach that stage, with the studies I have done so far, it shouldn't take us to long to start experimenting on how to create a stable Einstein-Rosenbridge in a controlled environment!" Jane says with an exited grin as she turns to look at me, so I just laugh again as I hold up my hands in a placating gesture.
"Very well then, I'll leave you Doctors to it. Please make sure to eat and rest enough or I'll have Phineas do something far worse than merely bringing out the flamethrowing drone." I say with a grin, which only grows sharper as Jane stops in place, looking at me with wide eyes.
"What… what will you do?"
"I'll tell him to snitch to Darcy instead."
There's a dull 'thump!' from my right, even as Jane's eyes widen in horror, and turning to look over towards the monstrosity that Erik has been building, I can't quite contain my amusement when I see him rubbing the newly-formed bump on his head with a wince as he turns towards me, his face white as a sheet.
"You wouldn't dare…" he whispers, prompting a loud laugh from me as I walk out of their spacious lab.
"Remember Doctors! Take care! Literally!"
And with those words, I'm back in the Hall again, and I immediately make a right, my long strides quickly taking me to my location. As enjoyable as it had been to talk to the two scientists, there was a lot that I wanted to get done, and I wanted to get it done fast.
I actually had a bit of time before the next major development kicked off due to snowballing away quite a few films by now (Age of Ultron, Iron Man 3, Black Panther to name just a few), meaning that the next big crisis would be the Convergence, and the attack of the Dark Elves. After that, I had another year until Ego's Expansion, and since his Seed was currently inside my house, I'd much prefer it if it didn't suddenly turned into a hundred-feet tall glowing piece of chewed up gum that has been stuck underneath a student's desk for years.
However, my main concern wasn't with which movies would and wouldn't happen. No, it was far more immediate than that.
How long until my actions cause Thanos to get up from his chair early?
In canon, Thanos wouldn't come into action personally for another six years from now, after which he would strike hard and fast at whoever possessed the Stones, collecting them all in the span of a mere two days.
Should he stay on his chair, then great! I'm pretty sure that even without cracking the two Stones that I have now, I'm capable of taking each of his generals in personal combat (not that I'm counting on them actually going at me one by one, but it's the thought that counts), meaning that there's very little in the universe that would pose a genuine threat to me.
If he gets up, say, somewhere within this year… I (and half of the universe) would be fucked.
Briefly, my steps come to a halt when I contemplate something truly daring.
What if I went after Thanos now?
Not now now, of course, but after I have completed my two major projects, and integrated the two Infinity Stones into my arsenal? I'm pretty sure that with the right tools, some planning, and the Space Stone, I could create Relativistic Kill Vehicles (or at the very least the Rods of God), which is virtually no defending against, since it destroys you and everything in a hundred mile radius around you down to the sub-atomic level before you even know it's headed your way.
Thanos probably doesn't know that I exist, yet, whereas I am both fully aware of the danger that he represents as well as his general location in the universe. Honestly, the best thing that I could do was take the initiative, and make my first attack either a killshot, or a crippling move before Thanos could figure out that there was someone out there in the universe who was jeopardizing his great Plan and act prematurely.
Should I…?
Could I…?
The risks…
The rewards…
Troubled, my steps slowly continue again as I keep mulling over this daring plan over and over again, weighing seemingly endless lists of pros and cons against each other. Eventually, I arrive at the wing of the research level that I had been heading towards, and I decide to put the whole plan out of my mind, for now at least.
Even if I decided to go for that plan, I would need full mastery of the Space Stone, which I don't have yet.
Better to focus on the here and now, and keep that plan in the back of my mind for whenever the opportunity might present itself.
Again waving my hand in front of the strip in the doorframe, I'm still too deep in thought to perform the customary 'twist to the side' movement that has become almost mandatory these days, and a blinding ray of white-bluish light slams into my chest, completely ruining my nice shirt and jacket, causing thin trails of smoke to drift from my unbreakable skin.
Giving a sigh at the fist-size hole in my fancy clothes, I look inside the bio-technological wing of Othrys, pinning the two scientists with a flat stare.
Hansen at least has the decency to slightly wince when she meets my stare, but Burstein is far too enthusiastic to even notice, nearly bouncing over towards me as he grabs one of my sleeves and starts dragging me to the raised table he and Hansen had been sitting at.
"Oh Michael, you are just in time! I have got to show you this, come on!"
I steadfastly ignore the meters long, fleshy roots and alien flower that take up an entire corner of the lab, as well as the cowering and hissing plants that have all pushed themselves as far as possible in the opposite corner.
Neither scientist even seems to notice, so I pointedly ignore it as well.
Should the plants end up trying to run away, I'll just have Phineas drown this entire floor in weed killer or something.
Looking at the fleshy, glowing growth that's sitting on a glass plate in the middle of the table as Burstein points towards it with pride, I stare at it for several moments, before I shrug and give up.
"Alright, I'll bite. What the hell am I looking at?"
"I have… no idea!" Burstein says with an enormous grin, though it falters somewhat when I turn to look at him with an unimpressed stare.
"You've been at this for two months… and you still don't know what the hell it is?" I ask in a low tone of voice, and Burstein is quick to throw his hands up in a placating gesture, swallowing somewhat nervously.
"Ah, perhaps I misspoke? You see, what I was trying to say-"
"We know what it does. We even have some very vague ideas on how it does it. But considering that every single botanist on Earth will tell you that what it does, and how it does it, is blatantly impossible, yeah. We have absolutely no clue what the hell it actually is." Hansen speaks up instead, looking at me with irritation clear in her eyes, probably due to the fact that she has only slept about three hours on average each day for the past week, if Phineas is to be believed (and considering he has eyes and ears nearly everywhere inside the base, I intend to believe him alright).
"Alright then. Let's start at the beginning. What does it do?"
Burstein is the one who answers my question.
"It deals with energy. Storing it, producing it, channeling it, expelling it, it is capable of all four. Now, this is remarkable in and of itself, but here's the really interesting thing. If we add energy to it, any type of energy at all, light, heat, electromagnetic it doesn't even matter. It converts that energy either into pure energy-" at this, Burstein briefly winces as he only now notices the smoking hole in my shirt "- or converts it into matter."
Hansen immediately picks up where Burstein leaves off.
"From what we can tell, it almost acts like the biological equivalent of nanobots. It's a fully organic energy absorber and refinery, and energy-to-matter converter in one. It's like looking at a high-tech factory, made out of biomatter. This… whatever it is? Conventional science and biology say it shouldn't even be able to exist in the first place."
Placing both my fists on the table as I stare intently at the piece of Ego's seed that Burstein and Hansen had been working on, I can't quite contain a feeling of greed overcoming me, though I thankfully manage to keep the emotion from showing on my face.
Celestials were indisputably the most powerful race shown in the MCU. Some of the threats that stand on equal footing with them in the comic books might exist in this particular universe as well, but I rather doubt it.
Even if they do turn out to exist, they, like the Celestials, don't seem to interfere in the affairs of the galaxy at large all that much, and I certainly don't intend to scour the cosmos in order to track them down.
Still though, in front of me lies Celestial-flesh, and my scientist are seemingly getting closer in understanding (and thus dismantling) the awesome power locked inside.
"So it's like a battery and a matter generator in one. What more can you tell me?" I ask, and Burstein picks up again.
"Well, we have figured some uses for it at least. Like I said, it is capable of storing virtually any kind of energy inside its cells. We didn't want to risk damaging the test subject, so we never went overboard in trying to see just how much energy it could convert and then store, but before it discharged when you opened the door, this little piece was capable of holding the energy of a dozen car batteries!"
"Once we figure out how to clone and grow the biomatter, we should be able to create a structure that can function as an enormous battery and generator in one. Put it on top of a house and just by using solar radiation, it would be able to power it for about a month, depending on size. Or, throw it inside a nuclear plant. It will scrub the entire place of harmful radiation, storing it as pure, clean energy instead, which can be extracted and used as a powersource." Hansen speaks up, and despite her exhaustion, there's a gleam of excitement in her eyes as she looks over the fleshy root of Ego's Seed.
"Michael. Harnessing the power of this plant… the possibilities are endless! Hell, combined with what we have here, we could send a large structure of this to the sun and create a Dyson Sphere!" Burstein speaks up with a massive grin, before Hansen takes over again.
"And that's just the energy side of things, the most basic ability that this organism has. But the way it interacts with matter! Hey Phineas? Could you bring up video-log A/0034, April 23rd?" Hansen spoke up, looking at the ceiling.
There's a short blink in the LED-strips that cover the ceiling in a crisscross pattern, before a hologram is projected in front of me. It's a 3D-video, showing both Hansen and Burstein as they are standing behind a highly durable safety screen (Burstein's invention), looking at the far end of the room.
A piece of the rootsystem, about as long as my arm, is lying on the floor, while a brightly glowing… something is suspended above it by a slim robotic arm.
"What the hell am I looking at?"
"This is when we found out that it interacts with matter as well! You see, we started to wonder what would happen if we took that refined, pure energy and had it absorb that. Watch!" Burstein answers with excitement lining his voice.
In the 3D-projection, I see Hansen swipe her hand across the smooth glass that functions as a control panel for all the equipment in the room, and the robotic arm lowers the glowing piece of flesh (the scientists probably just took a piece of Ego's roots and pumped that full with energy beforehand) onto the root lying below.
The two came into contact with one another and-
"Whoah."
-the root that had been lying on the floor sucked in the light coming from the flesh that had been hanging above it, and immediately ballooned in a flash of light and motion.
Where just a second ago it had been only the size of my arm, it was now bigger than Susan, covering the far wall of the lab as Burstein and Hansen slowly picked themselves up from where they had thrown themselves to the ground.
Hansen paused the footage with an enormous grin as she turned towards me.
"It made more of itself Michael! The whole energy thing, as revolutionary as it is, that's only the means to an end for this thing! Its true purpose is expansion! All the energy we kept feeding it was turned into that pure form of energy, but the reason it does that is because it needs that particular type of energy in order to create more of itself! The conversion rate of mundane energy to the type of energy it needs to create matter out of it is too low to be sufficient however, but as you can see, we found a way around that."
"Please tell me you aren't planning on pumping that plant full of pure energy, right?"
"What? No! No, of course not, are you insane?! If it grows large enough, then it would absorb enough energy that the conversion rate doesn't matter anymore, it would still be able to grow more of itself! It could go critical, Michael, to the point it would simply cover our entire planet!" Burstein hurriedly speaks up.
'I already knew that, but it's comforting to know that the two of you are now aware of that little issue as well.' I think to myself, before I turn to look Burstein straight in the eye.
This was the reason why I wanted Ego's Seed so badly.
"Can it be spliced with another organism?" I ask lowly.
Hansen blinks incredulously at me, clearly wondering why the hell I'm asking them that question when they have just revealed to me that there's an organism in my basement that defies all conventional biological knowledge, but Burstein has known me for longer.
He knows where I'm going with this.
"Michael… look, you didn't listen to me when I told you that trying to give yourself Jessica's powers was dangerous. You did it anyways, and it all worked out, so I'm more than happy to leave that argument behind us. But I'm telling you now Michael, and I hope to God that you're listening: this isn't dangerous."
I blink a couple of times at Burstein's words, which are at odds with the extremely serious and grave look he's sending me.
"Wait, what? It isn't dangerous?"
"No. It's lethal. Immediately, irrefutably lethal. There are only two possible scenarios if you try to integrate this creature into yourself Michael. One: you integrate it successfully, fully making it a part of you. Then either you'll be absorbing enough energy to start expanding until you resemble a fleshy blob the size of a small country, or you'll not be absorbing enough energy, meaning that you'll simply end up inert, like going into hibernation. Or two: the integration does not go successfully. Instead, it's a foreign body inside of you, which starts to feast on your very energy, everything from Extremis-heat, Jessica's powerfield, Chi, hell, even your regular bio-electricity. The best case scenario is that it starts draining you dry until you become a shallow husk, a shambling, living corpse. The worst case scenario is that you produce enough energy for it to start expanding inside of you, consuming your body like a parasite."
For a moment, the lab is completely quiet as I numbly stare at Burstein's heated gaze as I process the bombshell he has just dropped on me.
"I… see. Thank you, Burstein, for that… graphic warning." I slowly say, but the scientist isn't done yet.
"I'm warning you here Michael. Don't try to enhance yourself with this thing. Your DNA has already been altered enough times that by all rights, you should just be a walking pile of cancerous growths at this point. Please, please, don't tempt fate by absorbing something like this into yourself as well. I told you that the possibilities with it are endless: that means that the bad case scenarios are endless as well."
Looking from Burstein to the fleshy root on the table in front of me, I can't help but feel somewhat bitter. Sure, if what Hansen and Burstein had told me was correct, then this could prove a bigger revolution for the energy industry than even the arc reactors had been (I keep thinking back to Hansen's comment about throwing it inside a nuclear reactor), and it wasn't as if I had made some big sacrifice or anything to get my hands on the Seed.
Still, to be denied more power… it stung.
Turning away from the table and the two concerned looking scientists, I start making my way out of their lab, throwing orders over my shoulder as I go.
"Thank you for the demonstrations, Doctors. Please forward your current findings to Jeri Hogarth, she'll find the commercial angle for your research. In the meantime, please proceed as you have, these were some promising results, I look forwards to seeing more."
And before either one of them can react, the doors to their lab slams shut behind me, leaving me alone in the hallway.
Well, this is Othrys, meaning that I'm hardly ever truly alone.
"You doing okay there Michael?"
Tilting my head upwards in order to look at the ceiling, I give a small smile to Phineas' disembodied head, projected from the LED-strips lining the walls and ceiling.
"A bit of a set-back, sure, but I'll deal with it Phineas. Don't worry about me."
For a moment, I stand there in the hall, trying to figure out my next step. For the past few weeks, by appearing in the news as much as possible, I had cemented both the reputation of myself and that of Othrys, so now I could hand the reigns over to Hogarth to capitalize on it.
Using the reputation that I had built upon, I had managed to push through the creation of a Planetary Defense Force (though things were still very much in their early stages, proceeding with baby steps), meaning that there would be a buffer between humanity and whatever alien asshole decides to show up here, taking a lot off my plate and thus giving me more freedom to do as I want (the fact that this highly advanced force will be in my pocket is certainly a bonus).
With those two projects now out of my hands and in Hogarth's, there were only a few things that needed to be done before I could leave this planet and truly start on crossing that threshold from a merely powerful individual, to God-tier being.
The first thing that was required was actually using the Space Stone. Since Foster and Selvig were working on that front, all I had to do was wait until their research had progressed to the point that they could make portals with it (I already could make portals, but the magical focus required for inter-planetary travel was extremely tricky, and I'd rather not risk it).
Since I had to wait until I could harness one of the Infinity Stones, I wanted to master the other one in my possession as well. The biggest danger of the Mind Stone was that it could start dominating my own mind, but I had several ideas as to how to protect myself against that, especially given the fact that I had two people on house-arrest inside Othrys whose research would prove most valuable.
Once I had mastery of the two Stones, I would leave Earth as soon as possible (I wanted to have as many of the Stones as possible before Thanos started cottoning on to the fact that there even was another player in the game), so before I actually got to that point, I wanted to squeeze as much out of Earth as possible.
Helen Cho had been approached to start working for Othrys, and despite the fact that she was so eager to get started here I hadn't even needed to offer her the Brain Booster (I would once she got here), she was still under a contract that she couldn't break, meaning that she would be stuck in Asia for at least half a year.
I had originally wanted to have Hogarth look into Cho's contract, but the woman was swamped already, between the rebuilding of New York and the creation of the PDF, so I had just decided to leave well enough alone: Helen Cho would end up in my clutches eventually.
The other scientist that I really wanted to have working for me was Franklin Hall. I had thought that I could entice him by publishing some of the preliminary research my teams had done into researching how the Leviathans were capable of flight, but the man was terrified that, if he gave up his spot in studying the miniscule amounts of Gravitonium available to his research center, he'd never get it back, so he declined my offer.
I of course had immediately put Sterns on calibrating the scanner that had led me to Ego's Seed to start searching for Gravitonium instead, sending out the Hysminai to collect as much as they could. Until they returned with the Gravitonium, Hall would remain out of my reach. For now.
Speaking of the Leviathans by the way, my people found out how they flew: they were biotics.
Not literally of course, but some of the principles described in the Mass Effect games were startlingly accurate in how those multi-ton beings remained floating in the air.
An electromagnetic discharge through exotic trace elements started messing around with how mass related to weight, causing things to float. It seemed that this was engineered into the Leviathans though, since the ones we cut open showed to have generators and batteries grafted onto their nervous system, and those exotic particles certainly weren't naturally produced by the creatures.
Finding what appeared to be the alien equivalent of gills, my team came with the theory that originally, the Leviathans were deep-sea dwellers, which would also explain why they didn't have eyes, and it was generally accepted that beings that lived in the oceans were capable of becoming larger than land-based animals due to having their own mass supported by the water.
Based on what we had learned from the alien corpses, it seemed that the Chitauri stumbled on these Leviathans on an alien water-world, and enslaved them and repurposed them as their mounts and bioships (those holes in the side of the Leviathans that deployed Chitauri soldiers were cut into the creature after it reaches maturity, we found out).
However, messing with electromagnetic fields and trace elements had somewhat backfired on the Chitauri though: the Chitauri virus which was found in a multitude of the corpses (and only because I knew to look for it) had managed to use it against them, infecting the Chitauri without the need of pathogens. It instead transferred via electrostatic shock, meaning that, every time they boarded their Leviathans or used their gravity defying technology, more of them got infected.
While in humans the virus would literally end up exploding the brain in an electrostatic explosion, in Chitauri it seemed to be repurposed to work in conjunction with their cybernetics instead, having seemingly no adverse effect on the aliens.
We didn't know what the virus would do to a Chitauri without cybernetics though.
Hell, we didn't even know whether or not there were Chitauri without cybernetics in the first place.
Because we were on the lookout for any space-borne diseases (something I pushed hard to check for before anyone started securing the corpses, citing that if humans from different continents carried diseases that were lethal to other population groups, then imagine what an entirely different alien species from the other end of the galaxy could be transmitting to us), we managed to isolate the corpses and equipment that carried the virus, meaning that this time, there would be no relief workers whose head would end up exploding after a while.
Of course, if the electromagnetic/static fields that were created by an infected could be controlled without the subject dying, then it would be another boost to my powers, but I wasn't entirely comfortable with studying viruses to deeply (again, same reason why I didn't want to mess with Kilgrave's virus, I really don't have the time to deal with a Zombie Apocalypse).
However, until I had enough Gravitonium to have Franklin Hall working for me, most of this research gave some interesting insight into humanity's enemies, but was ultimately not something that was directly useful to me.
So what else was left to me, now that the two scientists I had wanted within my clutches would only arrive in a matter of months at best, and the powers of the Celestials seemed to be out of my reach.
Well, I had already studied two alien races.
How was the third one coming along, I wonder?
Course decided, I open a portal to the Kree City, where Radcliffe is practically living at this point, together with Kitsworth and Skye (though the younger woman has often asked for a portal back to Othrys, having an occasional 'girls-night out' with Jessica, which as of last week now also includes Darcy Lewis). Radcliffe is, as usual, sitting behind a desk, staring intently at an enormous monitor on which displayed rolling texts of data are displayed, coming from the legion of surveillance drones that are mapping the entire city (we have only lost a dozen or so to hidden traps, so things were going pretty well to be honest).
Skye is nowhere to be seen, but Kitsworth is sitting in a great plushy arm-chair as she's leisurely leafing through a notebook on her lap, a steaming mug of thee in her hand as she occasionally looks up at the enormous holographic screen on the other end of the room covering the wall, filled with alien signs.
Turning towards the woman with a soft smile, I clear my throat, making both the scientist and his girlfriend nearly jump from their seats from surprise. Watching as Kitsworth's eyes land on me, I can't quite keep my gaze from shooting towards her bald scalp, a thick scar going from above her forehead all the way down to the nape of her neck.
I hadn't wanted to give a cancer-patient any version of Extremis, which meant that we would have to surgically remove the malignant growths in the woman's brain. Normal medicine hadn't been capable of safely removing said growths because it was too deep inside her brain, but Othrys was pretty far removed from normal medicine at this point.
Using Pym Particles, remote controlled cutting tools of the highest quality and both Sterns and Phineas at the wheel, so to speak, we had first shorn Kitsworth's hair off, then cut open her scalp, and subsequently lifted the top part of her skull off as well. With direct access to the woman's brain, the Pym-shrunk tools went inside of her brain, directed by Phineas who was performing a continuing deep-scan of the organ, giving Sterns a real-time feed of where his machines were. With targeted lasers and cutting tools, the growths were disconnected from the healthy tissue, shrunk down and stored inside the microscopic machines.
After another deep-scan in order to check for any cancer cells that hadn't become tumors yet (thankfully there weren't any), a weak regenerative serum was applied to the slightly damaged structures of Kitsworth's brain, the machines were extracted, the skull put back into one piece and fused together using what could be compared to the biological equivalent of cement, after which the skin was placed back and sealed with bio-gel as well.
Eventually, Agnes' hair would grow back, and there would be not trace left of the woman having ever undergone surgery to be saved from cancer.
If it weren't for the fact that the operation had lasted nearly 24 hours, requiring detailed and continuous attention from the smartest man on the planet, this procedure could save thousands and thousands of lives all over the world.
As it was, all that we could do was sell the cutting tools and the deep-scan equipment to hospitals and the like. It wasn't a perfect solution, but in the hands of the likes of Strange, a lot more lives now had a fighting chance, which gave me the first thing in a while to feel wholly good about.
"Oh, hello Michael. Nice of you to drop by." Agnes says with a bright smile, one which I answer in kind.
"Hello Agnes. Doing a bit of reading, I see."
"Well, it's more frustrated staring at this point, but I am making some headway at least. Some." The woman says with a chuckle as she holds up her notebook, which is filled with lines and the same alien scribbles that are projected on the wall behind me.
Seeking for a challenge now that she had agreed to stay with Othrys (and subsequently, Radcliffe as well), Agnes had taken it onto herself to get started on decoding the Kree writings. Energy readouts and composition scans could tell us a lot, but the more detailed aspects of Kree technology would remain forever out of our reach if we couldn't even read the instruction manual.
Of course, putting Sterns or Phineas on the Kree language would mean I'd have a basic cipher at the end of the week at the very latest, but there was no immediate hurry, and it kept Agnes busy, so I figured I'd just leave her to it. She uploaded all her findings anyways, should it become imperative to me to learn the Kree language, then I could always forward what Agnes had discovered to my Think Tank, which would speed up their own descriptions by a lot as well.
Giving a thankful nod to Kitsworth, I turned towards Radcliffe, who was looking at me with an exited grin on his face as he sat nearly bouncing in his seat.
What is it with my scientists when they have both an increased intelligence and advanced alien stuff to play with? It's like watching a kid on a caffeine high, honestly.
"Michael! I did it! I understand now!" the scientist laughs as he jumps up from his seat, grabbing a glass sheet from his desk as he approaches me.
With a gesture, a bunch of screens jump up from the plate, most of them showing spectrometer analyses, material compositions and… a DNA strand?
Looking at Radcliffe from the corner of my eye, I wordlessly prompt the man to start talking, which he does with great enthusiasm.
"When I checked Skye's blood like you asked me to, I noticed these irregularities in her DNA. At first I thought that she was merely enhanced through gene-editing, like Jessica was. But then Skye told me that she had never experienced any superhuman senses or powers, so I began to dig deeper. I started comparing her DNA to a human baseline, Jessica, you and most of the Extremis and Amber Armor enhanced within Othrys. And I discovered something amazing: there are no signs that Skye's anomalous sequences were added later in life, meaning that she was born with them. But they just scream 'artificial' to me, meaning that someone managed to create targeted changes in Skye's parents or grandparents or whatever, which were genetically transmitted onto her!"
To me, this is old news, but to someone who was unaware that the Inhumans were created by the Kree, I guess it was somewhat of a revelation.
"And here's the amazing part! Those sequences in her DNA-template? They aren't doing anything. They're just waiting for a trigger, after which they will activate. Into what, I have absolutely no idea, but I can only imagine that it will be something akin the superpowers the people at Othrys and in the Avengers have displayed!"
Seeing the man nearly hopping on his toes, I can't quite contain a grin at the sight of the happy scientist.
"That's not all, isn't it?"
"Nope! You see, and this is the really amazing part, which I could not have figured out if Agnes hadn't made some headway in deciphering the writing on the Kree-artefact you brought to me. We don't know what is written on the object exactly, but the text is positively riddled with mentions of 'rebirth', 'awakening' and 'activation' and all that crap. With Skye's bloodwork in mind, I started performing every possible test I could think off on the device, and the readings that I got form it confirmed my suspicions: something is inside of it, and whatever the hell it is, it can act as the trigger for the changes in Skye's DNA! Michael! The Kree have experimented on ancient humans! They gave us superpowers!"
I make sure to play up my surprise at Radcliffe's revelation, even though I of course knew this already. However, since nobody that was either Inhuman, Kree, or a trans-dimensional traveler ought to know this information, I had to act suitably taken off-guard by the revelation that aliens have experimented on humans thousands of years ago.
"Whoa. That's amazing Holden, good job. Have you told Skye about it?"
"Has he told me about what?"
Turning around at the slightly out of breath voice behind me, I smile as I watch Skye jump from the lowest ramp onto the floor (which is free from dust and sand, since both Skye and Agnes had started to go crazy from the unkempt appearance of their temporary abode, so the older woman had roped the mutant into helping her sweep the floors and stuff like that, giving the antechamber we were in an almost homey feel).
"Hello Skye, you're just in time."
"Just in time for what?" the girl asks as she approaches us, dusting off her hands and greeting us with a happy grin.
"Tell me Skye… how would you like for me to unlock the superpowers that have been hidden inside you from the day you were born?"
"…"
"…"
"… what the shit?!"
It had taken a bit of time to get Skye caught up to speed (mostly because she kept interrupting us with questions, forcing me to reveal tiny bits and pieces of her past to her in order to keep her compliant, while hiding enough so that I can use it as leverage against her at a later date, should the need ever arise), but once she got the general gist of it, she had immediately signed up for superpowers.
While things were better now that she had Darcy to connect with, Sky confided in me and Radcliffe (who was turning into a sort of weird, mad-scientist type kind of honorary uncle for the young woman) that girls-night out with Jessica had always been, while a lot of fun, also a bit skewed, due to Jessica being so much more powerful than Skye.
While there were unpowered humans living in Othrys, mostly the family of the people that worked for me, Skye felt that she was far more at home in the active-duty department, where her baseline humanity was something that made her feel very much out of place (though once Darcy showed up, the two women quickly bonded over Tasers, which meant that I couldn't sleep for days).
So superpowers?
To quote Skye: "Oh hell yeah."
We didn't make her go through Terrigenesis immediately of course. Radcliffe insisted that he first clear a controlled environment back at Othrys, and he wanted a second opinion of Sterns amongst others in taking a look over Skye's DNA. I had also assured him that I would order everyone in my Think-Tank on decrypting the Kree language in their spare-time (Agnes didn't seem to mind the extra hands in deciphering the nonsensical scribbles), which would give us a greater amount of knowledge on the Diviner.
But at the end of this week, everything would be in place for Daisy Johnson to undergo Terrigenesis.
The thing was, due to the DNA inside her being only the trigger-sequence for the whole process, with the eventual changed sequences being completely random, there was every chance that Skye might develop different powers this time around.
Hell, she could turn into the female-version of the Thing for all I know (which is why I agreed to the mass of safety precautions that Radcliffe had insisted on, a mix of pride and worry in his eyes whenever he looked at the eager Skye).
After acquiescing to the scientist's demands, promising that I would do everything in my power to ensure that Skye would emerge from the experience as healthy as a horse (though hopefully not looking like one either), I finally make my way back to Othrys, heading towards my own labs.
Kree-technology, Celestial biology, Chitauri reverse engineering, creation of a Planetary Defense Force (indebted to, and subtly controlled by me), harnessing of the Tesseract…
The only thing left was what was currently stashed inside my office, and I can't quite contain a tired smile when the blast shield doors open smoothly before me, my eyes landing on the object in question.
Dropping into my reinforced and highly comfortable office chair, I roll over towards my desk, on which sits one of the most important objects currently on planet Earth.
Light gleams across the golden surface of Loki's scepter as I shift underneath the bright lamps of the lab, my eyes intently fixed on the blue gem behind the wickedly curved blade.
After the Invasion had ended, I had wanted nothing more than to take my two Infinity Stones and study them to my heart's content, locking myself inside Othrys' labs if I had to.
Unfortunately, I simply hadn't had the time. The PDF was only one of numerous things that I needed to get started on now that I was still the hero of the planet, my fame at an all-time high. My days after the Invasion were filled with making public appearances during the clean-up of New York, giving interviews and addressing the UN and approving of the deals that Jeri had managed to secure for me, ranging from retrieving aliens to rebuilding Manhattan.
Due to the largest amount of damage being done to the city-center, a lot of commercial buildings and businesses had been damaged, which had put an abrupt halt on international business, though communication and electricity steadily started returning to the city. In some cases entire databanks had been wiped away, either by Chitauri weapons or by a Leviathan simply wiping away an entire floor housing servers.
In short, Manhattan needed to be rebuilt, and it needed to be rebuilt fast. It wasn't just a point of pride for the U.S. (though that certainly factored in as well) but also simply good business sense. You can't trade with your oversee partners if your HQ has been deemed a structural hazard due to an alien bioship having crashed into it.
Of course it didn't go unnoticed that Othrys had gone throughout the entire Invasion without a scratch. It wasn't an entirely accurate assesement, since Phineas later told me a small group of Chitauri had landed on the island during the battle, who had managed to fight their way towards the walls of Othrys after the jungle had claimed about half of their number. Their energy weapons had scorched parts of the outer wall, but it was an easy fix, so when the people looked from the rubble of Manhattan to the gleaming ode to strength and durability that was Othrys, a lot of them had the same thought.
'I want that too.'
Which is why Hogarth was flooded with calls from just about every company whose main building had suffered under the Chitauri attack. It was far too much for both me and Toomes to handle (the man still had his hands full with hauling off and securing the aliens and their tech), so I made sure to ask Toomes for local construction companies, who I had then trained by some of my own workers in the use of powerloaders and ferrocrete which I sold to them.
Then I sold designs for new buildings to the companies who wanted a Titan-approved new headquarters, who I in turn advised to hire the local construction companies which I had supplied with advanced technology in the first place.
They didn't really have a choice, since the designs I gave them would be impossible to realize without the durability and structural integrity that the materials Burstein had developed could provide (he had also managed to create highly durable versions of both glass and plastics, due to the way he layered their molecular structure in a similar way to the Amber Armor).
In a few months' time, the center of New York would look like it belonged on the setting of Warframe or with the Forerunners from Halo.
I'd like to see the alien that visits Earth in a few decennia who would still have the balls to call it a mere backwater.
Mostly because by that time, I'll be Earth's God-Emperor, but that's neither here nor there.
For now though, I put all that business crap out of my mind as I gleefully rub my hands together, leaning forwards to the brilliant gem embedded in the alien weapon in front of me. I know that there's a lot of research that I still need to do before I can use what lies within to the fullest extent, but now I can finally-
The doors to my lab hisses open and I can hear two sets of footsteps approach me. Looking over my shoulder, I see Sterns and Jessica approaching me, and neither one of them look all that happy. It's Jessica who speaks up first.
"Michael. We need to talk."
…
Ah, shit.
Fun Fact: Marvel got around a law that increases taxes on toys that resemble humans by claiming that X-Men figures were mutants, not humans.
AN: Sorry this took a bit longer to get out, my parents are moving and I spent much of the weekend helping them pack their stuff. Originally I had wanted this story to end with Michael having finished all of his projects and taking off into space, but the chapter was getting way too long, so I cut it off here. The good news is that it means that I have the first part of the next chapter already written. The bad news is that next week, I'm extremely busy (I have helped organize no less than three activities, so… yeah) and my parents are nowhere near done getting everything ready for the big move, so next weekend I'll probably still be helping them out most of the time. I'll try and see whether or not I can update next week, but otherwise it'll probably be sometime during the week after that.
As awlays, major shout out to my amazing Patrons, AndrewDC_MAC2, Miu, justlovereadin, Carn Krauss, ReapeScythe, Thordur hrafn, Daniel Dorfman and Samuel Carson! Thanks for your support! I cannot thank you guys enough for willing to support me as you do, so thanks again!