“Ben, they can negotiate with the Phoenix Force as equals, they don’t need you to do it. They moved the M’Kraan Crystal from another galaxy to right over there. You know how much power is in that thing, but they DID it.

“Sama cut a Celestial in two. Leisurely. I can confirm that her and Briggs are Names of Terror in the many realms of Limbo. Nobody wants to mess with them. Hells, why fools are still coming out of The Mess to Terra just baffles the crap out of me after some of the stuff they did there, and most of what they did I don’t even know about, probably because no one still alive witnessed it.

“And you know what? I’m fine with that. Because there’s so much crap coming, that is the totally correct response to all the random crazy stuff going on.”

“Huh. Wow. I thought I was the final defense...” he mumbled, rather shocked at the implications.

“I don’t think they wanted to overshadow you, and you needed to build some self-confidence in your role.”

“No, no, that’s... actually kind of liberating. Not being the most powerful. Wow, I know they have a reputation, but if they have more potential power than I do, and don’t use it... that’s some massive restraint they have there.”

“Agreed.”

“But... they don’t actually have that kind of power, do they? I mean, they can stop a lot of stuff, reality is so hard around them I can’t do anything to them, and then it just ripples out and unwinds whatever gets changed, but that’s not the same...” Ben squinted as he thought about that.

“They use tools, of course. There’s only a couple that operate at that level.”

“Oh? Which ones?”

“Cosmic Cubes, and the Infinity Stones. Maaaaybe a magic Book or something, but that would be a Caster thing.”

“Cosmic Cube... wait, didn’t the Crux come up with something like that a while ago?” He glanced back at Terra, squinting, trying to read something.

“Yup.” He looked back at me. “Lost it, didn’t you? Imagine why that might have happened.”

He glanced toward Russia first, then the West Coast. “Thunder and damnation,” he murmured quietly. “But... that happened after Galactus came...”

“Yeah. That’s why I think they have the Infinity Gems. If you go back into their casual histories, there’s time periods they were both absent from Terra on a regular basis for weeks or even months at a time.” I pointed out into the stars. “They found a Kree or Skrull ship, and went out into the stars, looking for the Stones. They found them, and they brought them back here, I’m 99% sure.”

“I don’t know what those are,” Ben admitted, squinting at nothing in particular.

“Good. You’re not supposed to, nobody is. Tools, very powerful, and in the hands of two people who know how to use tools very, very well.”

They had taken possession of the Terran Cosmic Cube, made in the comics timeline by Hydra. There would be no casual shenanigans and idle reality-bending by madmen and idiots using the things. Oh, drat, so many stupid storylines ending up nixed.

Thanos’ huge rise to fame and power wasn’t going to happen if they had the Stones. He would never encounter them, never seek to make something from them. They would remain quiet and unknown, until someone actually saw them in action.

Adam Warlock, wherever he was, would never encounter the Soul Stone. That was going to have some implications, because he wasn’t going to have access to the knowledge and skills of all the souls in the Stone to train himself, or to use against his enemies.

Also, the High Evolutionary had never gained appreciable power in Transia, or on Mount Wundagore. Indeed, Wundagore was a Sealed Black Site after WW2, as Chthon had been bound underneath it long ago, and presumably still was. I knew that because it was Morgan le Fey who had bound Chthon there way back when after she was unable to control him.

Demon lord of black magic and author of the Darkhold, go figure. Sometimes le Fey could be such an arrogant twit...

In today’s world, the place was surrounded by a fifty-foot wall, and vivic flames burned all over the mountain. Chthon’s power was being slowly but surely leeched away, removed from the soil and the land, removing its mystical properties. The clay the Puppet Master had squirreled away was some of the last of the magical stuff left from the country, and the forests of the place had been systematically cut down, burned, and replaced with uncorrupted trees for exactly that reason.

Crazy what you could do when you controlled a huge chunk of a continent. Sunny had participated in defenses against five separate attempts to raid the mountain, find the Darquehold Cavern where the Darkhold had been penned, and somehow free the demon beneath.

If I was correct that I was in the body of Jessica Drew, that meant I had a Wundagore Connection. Wyndham, the High Evolutionary, was partners with her father and had once ‘owned’ Wundagore, before Briggs moved to take it and wouldn’t take no for an answer. The obsessed geneticist had bases in England, New York, in space, and had tried to set up shop on the moon before Sama chased him off it.

I had asked why they kept him around, deranged and obsessed genius that he was. Sama had informed me that they raided his computers and research on a regular basis. He did indeed operate at the high end of the genetic spectrum, and had come up with some powerful technology they had yoinked from him... and which they kept very strongly out of the hands of others.

Also, he was on The List, and they regularly sent off questions on genetics, evolution, diseases, and the like to him, along with subversive genetic infiltration events to stop, which he was keen to do.

When he got all uppity and went nutters, Euroforce shut him down, and he ran away to pursue a different course of evolution, swearing at them for disrupting his crucial and neccessary work, it was all for the good of humanity, etc.

His biggest weakness was him being a Useless Genius: His greatest ability, the one where he could evolve and devolve himself, didn’t work on anyone else, and so was exactly worthless. His ability to do so to others was unstable and temporary on humans, and we weren’t exactly concerned with his ability to make anthropomorphic cats.

All his other super-science stuff was nice but routine, from making decent weapons to power armor to space ships and teleportation tech. It had all been yoinked and used, and his ‘atomic steeds’ were actually in fairly widespread use among some elements of the Winter Guard and Tribal Braves. True airborne cavalry was a nice tool, after all.

Even the Wakandans used a variant of them. It was a good design, after all.

“What is that idiot doing here?” Ben asked, eyes looking in the same direction as me, watching a sleek ship as it came into the station’s control area.

“My guess is he deduced the project to move Venus, and wants to be given control over the terra-forming and evolution of the species introduced there. He’s coming to make his case here.”

“Is anybody that dumb?” Ben had to ask.

“Mad science geneticist with kooky ideas untested vs alien civilization renowned for its virtue and super-science, with practical experience terraforming countless worlds. Who should I put in charge?” I tapped my cheek as I pursed my lips. “Gee, Mr. Parker, I dunno. It’s a tough question, like, y’know?”

He shook his head as he grinned at my vacant expression and voice. “The High Guard has me reading up on battle reports and files of stuff, just in case I need to undo something big.” He pointed a stern finger. “This knucklehead does human experiments and forced evolution. Some of the stuff he’s evolved, and then killed out of hand, is downright horrid!”

“Yes, he’s a total example of what obsession with one idea can turn into. He may be able to submit stuff for consideration, but it’s all going through Xandaran filters for viability, and they aren’t looking to introduce alternate sapient life forms. It’s a new colony site, not a Petri Dish for rogue geneticists.”

“Let him go to Mars if he wants to make his demented lab,” Ben growled.

“Buut, Mistah Parkah, theh’s a puhfekly good lab raht theh! You just gotta cleah a few millions o’ inefficient base humans outta the way is all...” I swept my hands at our homeworld, and he huffed even as he laughed.

“How does our species even breed bastards like this,” he sighed, watching the ship come in.

“Totem of More Headaches for the Righteous?”

“Someone needs to beat that Totem up. I choose you,” he replied with a grunt.

“I will get right on that, soon’s I get rid of this headache.”

“Must be some headache.”

“Yeah. Killing a billion sapients is a head-throbber. I have to edit down my Awareness of them, or I’m going to be actively recalling them dying for the rest of my life. All those threads of Fate getting snipped and going cold...”

“That sounds utterly horrible, Dynamo...”

“And you wonder why geniuses go nuts, are nuts, or wanna go nuts.”

He put an arm around my shoulders and gave me a hug. “How long is it going to take you?” he asked softly.

“It’s a billion souls. Months, at least.”

“I think I can speed up time around us a bit, help you with that.”

I looked out at the stars. “That would be real nice, Mr. Parker. What are you going to do with all that time, though?”

“I figure I’ll look at every star in the Milky Way Galaxy.”

“Should bring May in for that. Be quite a tour. Gotta take notes.”

“Not a bad idea. She’s better at notes than I am...”

============

A temporal knot?

Briggs looked up from his work, and tossed his vision skywards as one of the Stones on the Amulet he wore under his tunic glowed purple.

There were Ben and May Parker, sitting on the surface of LaGrange. They were looking at the sky in an accelerated time bubble, conversing telepathically as they considered the stars, probably with Cosmic Awareness.

Dynamo was sitting on Ben’s other side, his arm around her, but she wasn’t looking at the stars. She was looking at nothing, her unmasked face having that expression of regarding something extremely depressing, and dealing with it. Her lips were moving, and a blur of names, none of them human, were echoing silently about her, never to be forgotten, only sealed away.

Briggs reviewed her report, and belatedly considered what that level of destruction inflicted on others might mean to someone with Cosmic Awareness... at least, someone who hadn’t completely shut their empathy away.

He sighed, having all too much knowledge of just what exactly the mental cost of that kind of thing could be. Sometimes, too much Awareness was a horribly heavy burden.

But he knew she was just as crazy or crazier than he and Sama, and she would be able to deal with it... or she would adjust herself, somehow, until she could.

Endure in its smith-hammer form began to rise and fall again. There was always more work to do...