“Yeah. It’s one of the signs of evolution stopping, actually. The Kree and Skrulls are the same way. They have ship designs dating from before the Ice Age that literally haven’t changed because the tech hasn’t improved significantly since then, and fighting races at the same or inferior tech levels hasn’t helped. The Skrulls get some utility tech out of imitating and replacing other races, but it hasn’t really raised their ceiling,” I pointed out for him.

“So, the Xandarans meeting with us... could really be beneficial for them, too,” Tony Stark murmured, finally realizing that.

“More to the point, we don’t know what interbreeding will do for either of our races. Xandarans are physically stronger, tougher, more durable, longer-lived, intelligent, and even have mild regenerative abilities when compared to humans. Their Bronze Age was literally a hundred thousand years ago, and they’ve tinkered with and improved their genetics as an entire race.

“But... they didn’t naturally evolve spiritual abilities, their magical potential is rock bottom, and they know nothing about chi at all. Mutants, mutates, and Powered super-types are the product of aberrant genetical engineering or total accidents from outside mutagens, not a thing that just happens to them. They also don’t have anywhere near the number of alien gene-tweaking or bloodlines, divine beings messing around with our women, or similar things that went on in our past.

“To say they are very interested in what our two peoples might be able to accomplish together is not an exaggeration. The only problem is that we are in their equivalent of their pre-Unity/Warring Nations period, and they wince just looking at us. Without Sama or Briggs, they wouldn’t want to deal with humanity, it would be much too dangerous for both of us.”

We had been moving forward over the scraps, and were now hovering outside the atomic inferno that was a solar furnace. It was melting down anything and everything inside it, separating everything out with gravimagnetic fields that could isolate individual Isotopes perfectly, and issuing streams of matter out the far end of various types of stuff which were being quickly and automatically shunted off to the fabricators and assemblers for immediate processing into needed items.

It was a busy, busy place, with drones, bots, and meks zipping back and forth with loads going here and there, feeding stuff into other stuff to make more stuff.

It all covered a lot of cubic miles already, and production was doing nothing but increasing.

“You know I had to invent a whole new line of stealth tech for them?” Tony spoke up, after we sat there watching it all for a minute. “They have a whole line of dimensional-shifting stuff which is really good at the job, but they didn’t have anything to, say, mask what was going on here, or really obfuscate the changes we were making on Xandar itself, on a massive scale. That kind of sneaky underhandedness and misdirection just isn’t in them. On the flip side, they’ve got some of the best sensors for detecting that kind of nonsense, and they do have cloaks against Terran-scale tech, but it doesn’t work well against, oh, the Skrulls.”

“Barb was talking about the mind games you and Ebersol were playing against spies.” I nodded at the closest Cloaking Beacon, broadcasting a massive illusion of ‘Nothing Happening Here, Thank You’ to anything below Celestial technology. There was no hiding that a planet had been moved, but nothing seemed to be happening around it, and even the Acanti swooping by didn’t seem to be doing anything. “Doc Bronze and Reed getting those working was what really tipped things for our deal with the Xandarans, and they’ve been really impressed by the brainpower of your trio, too.

“By the way, how’d the idea of a Nova Force Power Armor go over?” I asked him.

“Like glittering, jeweled lead rocks,” he admitted with a sigh. “They wanted me to build the things, they really did, and Queen Adora believes I could do so. But that also meant that the tech could fall into the hands of their enemies, and that would be a stepping stone to draining away or subverting the Nova Force entirely. Given that risk, she quietly asked that I abandon the line of research, and even submit erroneous lines of pursuit indicating that it could not be done.”

“She truly is a very wise ruler, not willing to make such short profitable sacrifices to potentially cripple them for the long-term, even if it costs lives.” I had to admire her ability to judge the consequences.

“Fix and I put our heads together and tried to come up with a way to do it, but Barb cracked every one of them once we had a working sample of any kind, without any assistance from us. I could only assume the Skrulls and Kree, who’ve likely been studying the Nova Force for thousands of years, could do the same.”

“If not, they’ve got planet-sized computers that can do so,” I confirmed.

“Dealing with enemy space empires is very frustrating,” Tony swore. “Overcoming a hundred millennia headstart should be easier.”

Okay, I had to smile at that.

POP!

I groaned. Gawdammit, who the frak had-?!

Markspace lit up in just moments, everyone commenting on weather phenomena breaking out around the whole world. It appeared that... snowstorms had started around the entire planet?

Oh, Gods and Totems. The... demons of Muspelheim had shattered the Casket of Eternal Winter in Iceland and were using the worldwide storms it created to wage war against Midgard, drawing the Asgardians, their age-old foes, out of Asgard and into the fight.

Surtur was making havoc in the heart of the galaxy, too, trying to gear up for Ragnarok. Which meant... the Corbinites were having to flee their homeworld, which meant Beta Ray Bill might be coming about...

Well, time to make this very short and very sweet as far as ‘Eternal Winters’ went.

-Yo, Isabella, want to really get some juice for that Winter Core of yours?- I /asked her.

-It is snowing in Brazil. I have already given my people the day off to enjoy it, and to buy some warmer clothes. Will this interrupt our building snowmen in the campos?- she /answered, completely unruffled.

-Probably, although I think you could keep the snow around a bit longer if you wanted to. The Cask of Eternal Winter has been broken in Iceland right here,- I /sent her the exact location, -and there are a bunch of Demons from Muspelheim and some Frost Giants there. I’ll send Bobby Drake over to help you, if you don’t mind.-

-A wonderful opportunity, then.- Isabella was naturally not very worried about this. -I think they may be surprised at how good I am with fire AND ice magic.-

-Take pictures of their expressions!-

-I shall! Let me wrap this up before the situation gets too horrible for normal Terrans...-

“Uh, magic snowstorms breaking out all over Terra?” Tony asked, looking back in that direction.

“We’ve got it handled. I’m heading back to beat up some frost giant and demon armies now. The Asgardians are going to be pissed when they can’t show us up, or something.

“Stay here, keep at it, keep fine-tuning. There’s more shit for you to handle on the way, and it’s not something you can beat on with fists. You’re the master of prep, so prep, oh Master Armorer!”

I Teleported away precisely to handle some of the fist-beating stuff with great energy, as the High Guard, Champions, Avengers, Euroforce, Defenders, Tribal Guardians, and a whole lot of armed forces were moving out to do. Tony Stark looked at the hugest production line ever constructed in Solspace, and thought about ways to make it bigger and faster...

----------

Isabella was by far the greenest in soul of the Duplicates. She knew it, and it did not bother her in the slightest, because she was what she was.

Sure, no Holy magic, which was really nice when fighting Evil idiots, but really, you didn’t NEED Holy magic to fight chowderheads, it just helped against the real bastards.

Getting the Ice Magic Metas and the normal Elemental stuff worked out perfectly well in many circumstances, and Ice and Force magic were wonderfully complementary in many, many ways.

The demonic troops in their charred armor and stuff were plenty surprised when crystalline Rays of icy force slammed into and through them, leaping from one to the next and shattering them into frozen chunks with completely uncaring regard for how resistant to mortal magic they should have been.

Seeing several dozen of their own exploding into frozen chunks of cubed fiend, the surviving demons screamed alarms, looking for signs of an attacker in the howling ice storm all about.

Alas, it was indeed a howling storm, and they couldn’t see for squat. Four more Rays came down and treated them to despair as they tore through the wildly evading demons, who largely didn’t manage to evade at all, and soon enough their shattered bodies were scattered over the frozen ground, helping keep it cold.

The Frost Jotuns came looming out of the cold. A hundred feet tall, with pale skin and beards frozen in icy falls, they stared through the storm, clubs made from mighty tree trunks in their hands, ready to bash and strike.

A foot slammed down to the ground next to three of them. They blinked, and stared at it as they fought for their balance, for the ground had jumped at its crunching impact as it came down.

Their heads... came to its knee.

Despite themselves, their heads all craned back, to where the vast and icy body vanished into the swirling snows and ice above them.

They couldn’t even see its head, only the spiked and armored ice that coated the monstrosity...

A massive hand darted down with incredible speed, seized one of the Jotuns about his chest and arms, pinning him and lifting him effortlessly off the ground. He didn’t get too far, as another massive hand wrapped up his kicking legs, held him, and the other two Jotuns backing away saw their brother being swung like a club... at them!

The impacts were very loud, and mighty Jotuns, to which a normal human might come up to their ankles, went flying as bones broke loudly, and rocks cracked and crushed on impact. The Jotun in the massive hand didn’t really get to scream much before he was unconscious, and then his bloodied body was hurled negligently away into the distance, covering at least a couple miles before it collided with a sympathetic mountainside and fell crashing to the ground.

He was joined a minute later by both of his cousins, neither of whom possessed the fortitude or will to get back up.

Isabella had no problem seeing through the storm, of course, and sent a big phantasmal thumb up at Bobby Drake, towering as high as a full kaiju and naturally dominating the whole area.

Then she opened her Core and drew in the ice magic here.

It was good stuff, this Eternal Winter stuff, gushing into the sky and spreading out rapidly to plague the whole world. Given time, it might even reach to other worlds, and could even start acting on the sun itself, truly an Eternal Winter.

It was nourishment for her Winter Core now!

She was far behind most of the others in Core development, because the hot, bright energies were the easiest ones to harvest. She basically only had her own Reserves and Cold Magicks of various kinds to pour into her Core, which she did diligently, and she visited the Cold Nodes of the world regularly to indulge there, too. There were even a couple places in other worlds where the power of cold swirled, and she visited them, as well...

This, this was good stuff, like sunbathing in ice magic. She promptly sucked it all in, showing them the hunger of a Winter Ultra Core.

The raging snowstorm about her began to falter and settle as the power here was drawn inside her, crystalline white Sigils, Seals, and Patterns materializing around her and flowing into her Core, disrupting the very center of the worldwide blizzard outbreak instantly as Isabella glided towards the ground.