It started as a necessity. It became a habit. Now, it was an addiction.
Over the next three weeks, the basement of The Citadel—specifically the Quantum Containment Chamber—stopped feeling like a laboratory and started feeling like a train station. The air permanently smelled of ozone and things that human noses weren't evolved to smell: burnt cinnamon, ionized blood, and the metallic tang of radiation.
Lucian wasn't sleeping. Why sleep when you could calibrate the Quantum Displacement Collar (QDC) and step into a world where the laws of thermodynamics were merely polite suggestions?
He was "shopping."
The Rick Sanchez intellect in his brain was insatiable. It looked at the periodic table of his home reality and scoffed. Only 118 elements? How quaint. How limited. To fight gods like Thanos, he needed materials that didn't just obey physics, but bullied them.
Jump 14: Earth-449 (The Crystalline Grave)
Objective: High-Efficiency Energy Storage.
Lucian stepped out onto a glacier. But it wasn't ice. It was diamond. The entire planet had been subjected to extreme tidal forces from a dying binary star, compressing the carbon crust into a planetary diamond geode.
The wind howled, carrying shards of crystal that could shred a tank. Lucian, encased in his prototype Mark-Sigma Nanotech Suit (still in its raw, silver-grey primer phase), didn't flinch. The liquid metal skin hardened instantly upon impact, ringing like a bell.
He wasn't here for the diamonds—diamonds were boring. He was here for the Singularity Shards at the planet's core exposed by a massive tectonic rift.
He stood at the edge of a canyon, looking down at pulsating, violet crystals that hummed with gravitational potential.
"Beautiful," he muttered, his voice amplified by the suit. "Crystallized gravity. I can put a black hole in a pistol with this."
He deployed his drones. They descended, cutting three large shards free. The planet groaned, the ground trembling as the gravitational balance shifted. Lucian didn't run; he simply calculated the collapse vector, grabbed the containment unit, and tapped his wrist.
Flash. He was gone before the mountain collapsed on where he had been standing.
Jump 19: Earth-811 (The Sentinel Wasteland)
Objective: Adaptive Logic Circuits.
This world was loud. It was a hellscape of purple lasers and screaming metal. The sky was choked with smoke. In this reality, the Sentinels—giant mutant-hunting robots—had won. They had exterminated the X-Men and then turned on humanity for harboring the genetic potential for mutation.
Lucian materialized inside the hollowed-out skull of a Mega-Sentinel, a building-sized robot rusting in what used to be Chicago.
He wasn't here to save anyone. Everyone was already dead. He was here to scavenge the Master Mold Processor.
He jacked his interface into the giant robot's decaying brain. The code was aggressive, predatory. It tried to bite back, to infect his suit.
"Cute," Lucian whispered, his eyes darting across his HUD as he counter-hacked with a bored expression. "Your firewall is based on binary logic. I'm hitting you with quantum algorithms. Sit down."
He ripped the core processor out—a glowing orange sphere of self-learning silicon. This was the key to making his Sentinel Defense Grid back home not just smart, but intuitive.
When Lucian returned to The Citadel after the Sentinel jump, he collapsed.
He didn't stumble; he hit the deck. His nose was bleeding—a thick, dark stream that wouldn't stop.
Elena was there instantly. She didn't shout. She had stopped shouting a week ago. She just moved with practiced efficiency, dragging him onto a medical gurney and injecting a stabilizer into his neck.
"Your cellular degradation is up 4%," she said, looking at the monitors. Her voice was flat, clinical. It was the only way she could handle it. "You're irradiating yourself, Lucian. The QDC protects you from the void, but every time you punch a hole, you catch the breeze."
Lucian lay back, staring at the ceiling of the submarine base. The lights blurred.
"I got the processor," he rasped, grinning with blood on his teeth. "The defense grid… it'll be able to predict attack vectors before the enemy even fires."
Elena stopped adjusting the IV drip and looked at him. Her eyes were red-rimmed. "You're building a kingdom for a corpse. Look at you. You're twenty-two years old and you look forty."
"I look distinguished," he deflected, trying to sit up, but a wave of nausea slammed him back down.
"You look like you're dying," she whispered. "What happens when you go too far? When you jump somewhere and the collar breaks? Or you land in a sun? Who runs the company then? Who saves the world?"
Lucian closed his eyes. The intellect roared in the back of his mind, demanding more data, more progress. But the human part of him—the small part that remained—felt the cold metal of the gurney and the warmth of Elena's hand on his shoulder.
"One more," he lied. "I need one more thing. Then I rest. I promise."
Jump 23: (Earth-Psi-9)
He needed to be immune to mind control. He knew the Scepter was coming. He knew Thanos had the Mind Stone. If someone could turn Lucian Rothschild against his own technology, the game was over.
He needed Psych-Metal.
He found it on Earth-Psi-9. It was a reality where the Cold War hadn't been fought with nukes, but with telepaths. The Soviet Union and the US had engaged in a psychic arms race, resulting in a world where privacy was nonexistent and thoughts were currency.
Lucian materialized in a high-security vault in the Ural Mountains.
The air here felt heavy. It wasn't atmospheric pressure; it was the psychic weight of a thousand minds pressing against his skull. Even with his basic mental training, he felt a headache blooming instantly behind his eyes.
"Intruder," a voice echoed. Not in the room, but inside his brain. "We see you. We see your fear."
"Get out of my head," Lucian gritted out, activating the Sonic Dampeners in his suit. It helped, but not enough.
He moved fast. The vault contained ingots of a dull, grey metal: Promethium-Beta. In this world, it was used to line the helmets of the Psi-Corps elite to prevent feedback loops.
The doors to the vault blew inward—not from explosives, but from sheer telekinetic force.
Three figures floated in. They wore crimson uniforms and featureless chrome masks.
"Halt," the thought-command slammed into Lucian like a physical punch. He fell to one knee, his nose bleeding again.
They are rewriting my motor cortex, Lucian analyzed, panic flaring. They're telling my lungs to stop breathing.
He couldn't move his arms to aim his weapons. His own body was rebelling.
Think, lucian Think.
He couldn't fight them physically. He had to fight them conceptually.
Lucian focused. He didn't try to block them. He opened the floodgates. He dropped the mental barriers guarding the Rick Sanchez intellect.
He projected a raw, unfiltered data stream of his own mind directly at them. He showed them the Multiverse. He showed them the screaming void between realities, the complex thermodynamic equations of a dying star, the nihilistic vastness of infinity.
It was a cognitive basilisk. A data-bomb.
The three telepaths screamed. It was a horrific, wet sound. They grabbed their heads, collapsing as their minds shattered under the sheer weight of Lucian's comprehension of the universe.
Lucian gasped, air rushing back into his lungs. He scrambled forward, grabbing two ingots of the Promethium-Beta.
He didn't wait to see if they recovered. He tapped the QDC.
He rematerialized in the Citadel, but he didn't stick the landing. He crashed into a rack of tools, sending wrenches and hydro-spanners clattering across the floor.
He lay there for a long time, clutching the dull grey metal to his chest like a drowning man holding driftwood.
He was shaking. Uncontrollably.
He had won. He had the diamonds for the lasers, the processor for the AI, and the metal to make a helmet that could block a god.
But for the first time, Lucian Rothschild felt terrified. Not of dying, but of what he was becoming. He had just weaponized his own intelligence to drive three people insane. He was turning into the very thing he was trying to protect the world from.
Elena didn't rush over this time. She stood in the doorway, watching him pick himself up.
"Did you get it?" she asked quietly.
Lucian placed the metal on the workbench. His hands were stained with grease and dried blood.
"Yes," he said, his voice hollow. "We're ready. The Avengers can have their alien invasion. I have everything I need to win the war that comes after."
He looked at the calendar on the wall.
May 2012.
"Wake up Morpheus," Lucian said, wiping the blood from his lip. "And prep the jet. We're going to New York. I want a front-row seat to the end of the world."