"Well, look at that. The legends were right."
Rosen stood in the center of a rusted-out warehouse in Queens, the air thick with the smell of ozone and old dust. He wiped a smudge of grease from his cheek and grinned at the object sitting on his makeshift workbench.
It was the "farming tool" from the British Museum. Or rather, it had been. Now, it was a pulsing, reshaped sphere of dark grey metal—a Vibranium Energy Core.
The process hadn't been easy. Vibranium was notoriously stubborn. In the movies, Wakanda used specific sonic frequencies to mold it. Since Rosen didn't have a Wakandan instruction manual, he'd had to improvise. He used his Intermediate Engineering knowledge to cobble together a crude ultrasonic workbench from scavenged speakers and industrial servos. It looked like a science fair project gone wrong, held together by duct tape and prayer, but it hummed with a bone-rattling frequency that set his teeth on edge.
But the real breakthrough came when he hit a wall. The sonic vibrations weren't enough. Out of frustration, Rosen had blasted the metal with a stream of raw Arcane Mana.
To his surprise, the metal had... yielded.
"Vibranium is tough physically," Rosen muttered, tapping the core with a screwdriver. "But magically? It's soft."
Under the pressure of his mana, the indestructible metal had become pliable, like stiff clay. It didn't melt; it just relaxed.
This revelation made Rosen pause. He suddenly thought about Vision. The synthezoid was made of pure Vibranium, yet in Avengers: Infinity War, he had folded like cheap cardboard the moment Corvus Glaive stabbed him.
"Maybe it wasn't just the glaive," Rosen mused, a cynical smirk playing on his lips. "Maybe hanging around Wanda—a walking nexus of Chaos Magic—actually softened his molecular structure. A gentle embrace really is a hero's grave. Poor Jarvis. Better I bear that burden than you."
He shook his head, pushing the thought away. He had work to do.
The Magic Failure
Rosen picked up the reshaped core. It was perfect—dense, cool to the touch, and geometrically flawless.
"Okay, let's juice it up."
He gripped the sphere and began to funnel mana into it. He expected it to drink the energy like a sponge. Instead, it was like trying to push water through a straw.
The mana trickled in agonizingly slowly. Even with his Staff of Antonidas (which he'd bought specifically for this) boosting his output, the core refused to hold a significant charge.
"Damn it," Rosen cursed, slamming the core down. "It's stable, sure. But the conductivity is trash. It holds less mana than a cheap potion."
He ran the numbers in his head. Based on the power consumption of the Goblin Mech he was designing, a mana-charged Vibranium core would run dry in about four hours of standard movement. In combat? Maybe twenty minutes.
"It's useless," he sighed. "Vibranium hates magic. It disrupts it rather than storing it."
He slumped against the workbench, staring at the ceiling. He needed an energy source, and his best bet had just turned into a paperweight.
Unless...
Rosen sat up straight. Vibranium wasn't known for storing magic. It was known for absorbing kinetic and physical energy.
"Wait a second."
He grabbed a heavy-duty industrial power cable he'd stripped from the warehouse's main breaker box. With a grin that bordered on manic, he clamped the leads onto the Vibranium core and threw the switch.
HUMMMMMMM.
The lights in the warehouse flickered and died. The hum of the city grid outside seemed to dip for a split second. But the core? The core lit up with a faint, beautiful blue luminescence.
Rosen checked the readout on his multimeter. The needle was pinned against the plastic stopper.
"That's it!" Rosen laughed, the sound echoing in the empty space. "It hates wizards, but it loves the grid! It's not a mana battery; it's a rechargeable super-capacitor."
It wasn't the infinite magical energy he had hoped for, but a high-capacity electric battery was exactly what his mech needed. He could charge this thing off the city grid, or even hook it up to a generator, and it would run his suit for days.
"I definitely need to have a chat with Wakanda or Talokan down the line," Rosen said, patting the warm metal. "If one tool can do this, imagine what a whole mine could do."
The Next Move
With the core solved, Rosen began packing up. He couldn't stay here. He'd just drained enough power to black out a city block; the power company—and likely the police—would be investigating the surge within the hour.
"I need more Vibranium," he listed his mental objectives. "Which means I need Ulysses Klaue."
In Avengers: Age of Ultron, Klaue was hiding out in a ship graveyard on the coast of South Africa. The movie called it "The Salvage Yard." Rosen didn't have a GPS coordinate, but South Africa's coast was long, and a guy branding people's necks probably stood out.
"Finding him is going to be a pain without a network," Rosen grumbled, tossing his tools into his System storage.
For a brief second, he considered the alternative: HYDRA.
"If I joined them, I'd have satellites, intel, foot soldiers..." He paused, then snorted. "Yeah, and I'd have to deal with a bunch of fanatics shouting 'Hail Hydra' every five minutes. Plus, that organization is a mess. Too many heads. Unless I'm the one holding the leash, it's not worth the headache."
He thought about the Warcraft Hydra—the massive, three-headed beast from the game. "Now, if I could summon one of those, I could really mess with their branding."
He finished clearing the site. The warehouse looked as abandoned as he'd found it, save for the lingering smell of ozone.
"Time to move. I need a real base. Somewhere off the grid."
He turned toward the exit, his hand reaching for the Town Portal Scroll just in case. But before he could take a step, a sudden flash of visual data hit his mind.
It was coming from one of his mechanical mice—a straggler he'd left patrolling the perimeter of Hell's Kitchen, near the docks where he'd been scouting for a permanent workshop.
The grainy, black-and-white feed projected directly into his brain. He saw two figures standing in the shadows of a shipping container.
One was clad in a sleek, vibranium-weave suit with cat-like ears—Black Panther.
The other was a redhead in a tactical jumpsuit, her movements fluid and deadly—Black Widow.
Rosen blinked, his own eyes widening in the dim warehouse.
"T'Challa and Natasha?" he whispered. "Together? In New York? What the hell kind of crossover is this?"
He didn't know if they were working together or hunting each other, but one thing was certain: the timeline was officially off the rails.