Then last but not least was my fellow half human half alien white woman Carol Danvers, Captain Marvel. She was another hybrid Alexandria Legend, with strength, beams, and such. She could absorb most forms of energy but I'm pretty sure Blue Marvel was actually stronger than her, for his intellect allowing him to better use his powers primarily. She paired very well with Spectrum however, but the time it would take to make her stronger than him was prohibitive for the most part.
I was actually a little confused at how T'Challa fit within the team. He was barely above a normal human without his technology, but I presumed he had a lot to give the group with just that. I double checked and he was not just the King of Wakanda but also the King of the Dead. He had various necromantic powers, which I figured were somewhat different from what Strange called necromancy as he didn't need to sacrifice anyone to use his powers. He also could manifest spiritual constructs and had some form of cosmic senses. How he'd hidden that from me at first I didn't know. Still a slightly odd fit for a team of Superman styled heroes, but I wasn't going to complain about having access to Wakandan technology.
Together they formed my new teammates. I got a few warm welcomes, they had seen my work during the Celestial Destructor attack, but technically I was here to predict threats before they could happen. It was a little hard to find specific threats given how many there were, but I would do my best. They were also looking more for high level threats rather than clearing out any given city, the sort that threatened the world or even larger. That wasn't to say they wouldn't help with another lesser crisis, but that wasn't the main objective.
We also had a ton of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents with power armour, jetpacks, and beam rifles of some sort. Other things like jets, spacecraft from the nearby Alpha Flight, and generally top of the line gear of every other kind.
"So, any disasters before we get to the rest of the meet and greet?" Monica asked.
I checked. Thanos was on Earth searching for a cosmic cube, but not only was it no longer there it would be a while before he assaulted a facility. A few minor incidents were going to happen, but they were largely handled by local heroes.
"Nothing we really need to worry about. We could still intervene if we want, but they're low priority, lower than our scale actually." The Ultimates had made a rubric for how important something was for me to better find incidents, these were all sub-zero level threats so we didn't need to respond to them. Thanos would only reach a higher level in a week or two, he wasn't very strong compared to his peak with the infinity stones, so we could afford to ignore him for now. Any other threats were beyond my ability to spot, though once I finished analyzing the brain scan of Ulysses that might no longer be the case.
Similarly the brain scans of the Ultimates were going to be incredibly useful. T'Challa had combined alchemy and science to create a new realm of physics, Shadow Physics. Adam was the world leader in anti-matter research, aided by how much of it he had access to but he was still the best at it. Just their knowledge alone was basically two Tinker Shards. This world was a treasure trove of information.
Carol, America, and Monica were more mundane but decently intelligent, just nothing particularly useful to me. The Ultimates were all pretty good people though. Not impossibly good, but probably better than me. I had that much self awareness at least.
"T'Challa, would I be able to study some of your tech? Even just the surface scans I'm getting of your suit are fascinating."
"Do you always open conversations with others about what you could learn and take from them?"
"I don't think of it as taking, I think of it as sharing. I know quite a bit about various fields of science and I'd be happy to share my knowledge with you, I just don't know what you'd be interested in."
"And let me guess, you want some vibranium for yourself too?" He wasn't thrilled with me, I reminded him of too many people who had tried to take advantage of him and his status, as well as his access to vibranium.
"I'd like to study some, but if anything I'd be happy to provide you with more once I can replicate it myself. I'm not actually sure if I need it either exactly, but who knows. Anything could be useful under the right circumstances."
"Many have tried to before, but they've so far failed. I wouldn't say no to more vibranium if you can manage it however."
I really wasn't quite sure what I'd do with vibranium, any of the variants he knew about other than perhaps the mystically charged vibranium. But that would be quite the journey to be able to make it since I'm still so new to any kind of magic. I'm still learning the basics of the first path.
"Do you just scan everyone you meet?" Monica asked me. I blinked for a moment before responding.
"I guess to me it's similar to just looking at someone. I just have more senses than most people, so I try to refer to it in a way that makes sense. A scan indicates the kind of data I'm gathering and gives you a good idea of why I'm doing it. I'm both a hero and researcher, but most of what I research is more powers."
"I mostly stick to researching the powers I already have instead of trying to get new ones. That doesn't tend to go well." Adam said.
"I can offer you some of my power if you're interested. No catch beyond the power analyzing how you use it and your regular abilities."
"So we could just ask for anything?" T'Challa was a little skeptical of this, apparently everything I said seemed odd to him.
"Feel free to ask, I probably can do something similar. You'll only have so potent an ability though, I'd personally recommend mental powers. They're both my favorite and also likely the most bang for your buck since all of you are already pretty physically powerful."
"Even me?" He asked again.
"Well you do have that hulk-buster armour, so I'm not sure how much you really need a physical power. If you do go for one though I'd recommend adding some unstable molecules to the armour as it would carry over any durability increases most likely. Same for your main suit." He was a little surprised I knew about that, he hadn't even told the rest of the team he was developing it. He mustn't have fully learned about how many Thinker powers I had yet.
"Are you seeing me use it in the future or can you also see the past?"
"A bit of both. My postcognition is generally stronger than precognition but it's a little less reactive. I also have tons of other powers for gaining information, from simple ones like clairvoyance to more abstract intuition abilities. I sort of have all of them on to some degree at all times. Mostly I have to ask for information and then I know it. Some things are beyond my sight, like the Destructor, some magical things too, but so long as it's physical or scientific I can know it instantly. I still have to actually remember to ask about it though."
"Even your future sight?" Carol asked. I wasn't upset with them asking so much about me, I was new and I did already know them pretty well.
"Especially that. I can preset conditions and things for it to warn me about, but I've had several big fights that could have been over within seconds had I asked the right question."
"I hope you know our first approach isn't violence, it's more of a last resort or when it already looks like we can't try peace." Monica said.
"I agree, don't worry. If I can talk down an opponent that's often better than beating them in a fight. That's sort of how I got my kids actually."
"You have kids too?" Adam asked. He had three children, two sons and a daughter. All researchers just like their father. One had fallen into the Neutral Zone, the space between universes in this multiverse. I must have travelled through it on my way here, perhaps I could find his son. His other son had sort of become a supervillain trying to get his brother back. His daughter was a researcher also researching the Neutral Zone.
"Yes, adopted, but I love them all the same. Speaking of kids, I might be able to help you get your son back. I must have passed through the Neutral Zone on my way here, so I might be able to spend time looking for him."
"That would be much appreciated if you could actually find him and bring him home."
I began to search immediately, and let my eyes glow a little more to indicate the power use. The Neutral Zone itself was kind of difficult to sift through, it was hard not to slip back into a universe even with just my sight. It didn't help that there were multiple realms between universes here. A search brought me a name for it, the Superflow, a sort of conceptual space instead of a real space. Abstract beings could apparently be harmed there, but I was pretty sure I couldn't directly access it.
The Neutral Zone, or Exo-Space was also fairly hostile to anyone intruding, even just my vision. I had things trying to bite my perception itself and I didn't want to find out what would happen if they succeeded. Somewhat defeated, I pulled back for now.
"I'll need some more time studying the Neutral Zone. It's not easy at the very least, but I can still search and I'd still be glad to help. I'd brave something like that for my own kids, I'd feel terrible to leave yours there." That touched him a little bit.
"Thank you Jessica, even if you don't succeed I appreciate your support."
"Of course Adam."
"So what are your kids like? I figure everyone else is tired of me talking about mine."
"Wonderful people. Most of them are former villains who were more forced into villainy by circumstances rather than anything else. Now they're heroes working to help protect the city. Mostly from minor crimes admittedly, as actual villains are becoming almost nonexistent. One daughter was always a hero, she can manipulate spacetime, bending it like taffy. The last hasn't manifested her powers yet and I'm debating letting her get them now that I'm the sole source of powers on my world."
That caused all of them to startle.
"You're the source of all powers for a whole world?" America was highly skeptical of this. My other claims so far were still something she could believe in, but this was too far out there for her.
"A whole multiverse actually. Only on Earth I suppose. There used to be more of us, but the rest of my kind were hostile to life so I had to absorb them. If you're searching for it I'm not sure if you can see it, it's pretty far from here. Once I figure out how you do what you do I might be able to point you in the right direction."
"So you give up your powers to people, enough to make an entire multiverse of powered people? How many powers do you have?"
"The current count is around twenty trillion individual powers, with more always on the way. It's part of why I'm happy to share my powers with others, I can afford to. Plus my kind are natively able to grant them to other life, it's how we developed over the eons."
"What could you even have left to gain?"
"You'd be surprised. Every hero here has had unique and new powers compared to what I'm familiar with. Even if I can replicate the outcome of your powers, or something similar enough to be hard to tell the difference, I don't use the same mechanism. Sometimes that can make all the difference. All of my powers up until I came here were reliant on physics, now I'm slowly finding both new physics and mystical capabilities that I'm slowly integrating into myself."
"So somehow even with trillions of powers you couldn't do what I can do?" She asked.
"Nope. I can do something similar, but you can do more than I can. I can't time travel as well as you can, plus you seem to have a simpler search mechanism for finding worlds. That doesn't even touch on whatever you're using to actually allow you to do it all, nor how it's both able to enhance you physically while also granting you portals. You can also reach further than I can with your portals at least across a single universe. You might need to travel out then back in, but I can hardly cross the solar system in a single jump."
That gave them some pause as they thought about how even one of them was beyond me in such a way.
"For all my immense power, I'm still not all that powerful on the scale of this world. I've got what's practically limited reality manipulation, but it's relatively short ranged compared to the strongest beings here. I'm not even sure how strong I am compared to others of my own kind back home. I may have defeated a few of us, but there could easily be stronger ones. Especially given how quickly I'm growing now that I've left my homeworld."
I was a little annoyed that we'd gotten off the topic of the kids, but I supposed this was an important thing to get over. I could gush over all their little achievements they've made so far later. Plus I could give them live updates later, it's not like I was going to run out of time.
I was having another lesson on magic with Doctor Strange several days later. We were finally getting into the second path, eco-centric magic, the use of the energy around you, when I got a call. I split my consciousness so I could continue focusing on the lesson, basic shields and bolts were still pretty cool when they were actual magic.
"Michelson, we've got an alert from the Inhumans that Thanos is on Earth searching for a cosmic cube, can you confirm this?" I was glad Carol was actually checking in with me. I was a little worried she would jump at the first possible vision he had.
"Yes, but he's only at tier one for threats right now. He'll be searching for another week or two, we can easily stop him anytime before he finds the facility."
"I think you're underestimating the Mad Titan's power. We can perhaps contain him, but it certainly won't be easy."
"Just let me frontline, Thanos is strongest in the same ways I am. Unlike the Destructor I can beat him because he still to some level relies on physics. Any damage he does to me will only be cosmetic."
I'd been studying him since I'd found out about his presence here. He was phenomenally powerful, but most of his preferred methods were physical in nature. He'd rather punch his foes into dust than cast an incantation if he didn't have to. So long as I appeared to be giving him a good fight he would likely continue to punch and kick instead of searching for a way to truly take me down. He was too used to fighting enemies like Thor or the Hulk, who he could actually wear down. I couldn't replicate his powers, it seemed to be some sort of fundamental difference in him that was hard to separate. As it was however I could handle his planet shaking blows all day so long as he didn't decide to get exotic with it, I had an unlimited amount of flesh to replace my own body with.
"He can't be killed you know? Death wants nothing to do with him. We will have to capture him."
"Just because he can't die doesn't mean he can't tire out. Plus if we hit him hard enough he can be knocked out. His regeneration, while absolutely able to restore him, still takes time. Time we can use to lock him up. Also we have time to find as many allies as we want."
"Why didn't you bring him up to us?"
"You said to not bother you until it hit at least class two. Which given Thanos is trying to find an artifact that isn't there is going to take a little while. We can designate some people as extra threatening to give us more warning time in the future if you want."
"Alright. Meet on the Triskelion within the hour, we've got planning to do."
"Got it. See you soon." I hung up and my minds became one again. Doctor Strange looked at me with a raised eyebrow.
"Don't you need to get going?" He asked. It was a little weird for someone else to be pulling my mind reading trick. Maybe he just heard it through the airwaves.
"I've got nearly an hour left, and the best time to go after Thanos isn't even today."
"She doesn't know that. You can always come back, I'm a little concerned he's here too. Plus, eco-centric magic is coming to you easier than ego-centric magic did."
I wasn't too surprised at that. My biggest hurdles were in finding my spiritual energy and actually using it instead of mental energy. Especially so soon after learning so much more about the psychic field. I was a lot unsettled to learn souls existed, but my original timeline self had confirmed that our method of resurrection was pulling their souls along with them. I might have to check that world's afterlife to make sure I wasn't causing some other type of issue though. Here I would almost certainly be upsetting the afterlife, but this world was also far more resistant to paradoxes.
The timeline is still altered, but it did so smoothly instead of the jarring changes I experienced on Earth Bet. I wasn't even sure if I was able to sense the timeline changing here. I was as a result of the differences able to time travel much further here than I could back on Bet, likely thanks to all the time travel shenanigans people got up to here regularly. It was like trying to tunnel through mud instead of rock. Not easy, but easier.
"Alright. Do you want to come with me or do you want to just get updated by me?"
"I'll do some research here, gather my gear and prepare in case I'm needed."
I wanted to reassure him, but at the level of magic I was at I was hardly able to defend myself. I was still better off knowing rather than not, but I didn't know nearly enough yet. I wasn't even a full master of the first path. I had completed it, learned the basis for all other magic, but to truly master it would take walking the same path until it was more familiar than the air I didn't breathe. I nodded and was off without a trace.
I was a little annoyed that Captain Marvel had overruled me and decided we would be attacking Thanos as soon as possible. We had acquired some help from A-Force, another team Captain Marvel was on. She-Hulk, quite the Brute, Dazzler, a musician who happened to have weak powers… I wasn't quite sure why she was here. Singularity, a living black hole that I was frantically studying, Sister Grimm, a mage who was primarily good for her staff that could do any spell once, Medusa of the Inhumans, she could telekinetically control her hair, even flying by it somehow. Last but not least for A-Force was Thor, Jane Foster specifically.
Then we had some stragglers who had answered the call. War Machine, James Rhodes. a man trusted by Tony to use Iron Man armour technology. His suit was grey and silver instead of the red and gold look Tony himself preferred. It wasn't brand new, but it was still high quality power armour and he was a hell of a pilot. Last and actually least this time was fucking Hawkeye, Clint Barton. He was a dude with a bow and arrow. I know he had a couple vibranium arrows, and he was a stupidly good shot with a bow, but still. He was just a guy. I was pretty sure his bow couldn't even pierce Thanos' eye, how was he hoping to be anything other than a liability here?
Oh well, he was courageous enough to fight a godling with a bow, I had to admire that a little. But I think it mostly circled back into foolishness. Brave, yes, smart, no. Carol was giving everyone a small speech.
"Alright everyone. Thanks to the Inhumans as well as Anima we have live surveillance on Thanos. He's on Earth looking for a cosmic cube that was at a pegasus facility. In another week he's going to attack the facility and put lives in danger. With this heads up we won't have to risk that, we can strike him when he least expects it."
I was indeed watching Thanos heading back to his hideout, another dead end in his search. Given how threatening he was I could somewhat understand attacking him early, it's not like the guy wasn't trying to destroy all life or something at any given time. He took off parts of his suit to tinker with them a little. Small t tinker, he was just smart enough to invent impossible technology. It was beyond my understanding, though his belt looked like it had a cube shaped indent on it. Not quite an infinity gauntlet but if it could channel the power of a cosmic cube that could be quite the problem.
If, you know, there was a cosmic cube for him to get. Dazzler of all people walked up to me. I was half paying attention to Carol outlining the plan again, which boiled down to get in there and hit him.
"So new girl, what's your role in this fight, intel support?" She hadn't been to the Destructor fight it seemed. She did at least know my name. Not that she used it.
"Frontlining actually. Well also support, from healing to intel gathering."
"So you're pretty durable then?"
"I'm the most durable person here. I'll be doing my best to keep his attention solely focused on me to keep the rest of you safe." She looked at me in a new light, but was a little skeptical of my claim, mostly because She-Hulk and Singularity were here along with Blue Marvel and Ms. America, and Captain Marvel. All of whom were well reputed for their durability. But Thanos would have to go through me a drop of blood at a time. Assuming he could overpower my defenses, which I was assuming he indeed could do, it would still take him forever and a year to kill me.
So long as he didn't switch to attacking my soul or mind directly. I could probably hold off his mental attacks long enough, but I was squishy on the spiritual side of things. But I didn't bring up my weaknesses here lest he rip the information from one of their minds. I was well aware that they weren't resistant to psychic attacks. I was still working on defenses for them, but Tony hadn't shared all of his data yet, he wanted to see how long it would take for me to make my own version with only partial data. Another reason I'd hoped we could delay for another few days. Not to mention my magic was coming along swiftly according to Strange.
"Also transport." At Carol's cue I opened portals for people and then we were through.
"Thanos, surrender!" I shouted. Not that I expected it to work, but it would hopefully make him pay attention to me. I was also slowing time to react better. Last but not least I was doing my best to dampen the psychic field around his head. He was resistant enough that it wasn't actually knocking him out, but I had a feeling it wasn't a passive resistance. I could see him in the future firing a beam into me with lesser probabilities that he targeted the rest of the team.
So I pulled on the timeline where he shot me using Fateweaver. The blast was more powerful than Scion's own, but that didn't matter, it was just raw power. Even as tiny bits of flesh burnt and flaked away under his onslaught I just marched forward. When I got close he swung in for a punch which I cleverly blocked with my stomach. The force of the impact tried to launch me, but instead I held steady and socked him in the jaw with enough force to shatter continental plates.
He just grinned and tried to snap my knee. It worked, somehow he was simply able to bypass my layers of durability, but it snapped back into place almost as fast as it had broken. I was actually holding my regeneration back a little to make him think the fight would be hard but winnable. An anti-matter blast from Blue Marvel got him to look away and I cracked my fist into his ribs, I didn't break them but they creaked all the same. I'd upped the force a bit, but clearly not enough. As blasts rang down on him I sidestepped all of my allies' incoming attacks and interposed myself between any of his outgoing attacks.
For all that I wasn't taking him down just yet I was keeping him contained. I kind of wished it was just the two of us actually. I had more mobility than Thanos and I itched to use it to its full potential. But here I was playing punch-bot. It seemed to be working, he was beginning to be hurt faster than his own regeneration could handle it. All the while I was subtly testing his defenses, seeing whether or not a given power could believably target him. Unsurprisingly I could hit him with just about anything, he just didn't care.
Thanos knew I was trying to hem him in, so he pointed his arms in two different directions to try and force me to choose between Black Panther and Dazzler. I chose both. At super speed I stepped in front of the beam headed for Dazzler and then before the other one could impact T'Challa I swapped out locations with Trickster's teleportation Shard. Black Panther got in a slash before I swapped us back.
"You want to get to them, you've got to go through me first."
"If I must."
He grabbed my shoulder with his left hand while charging up a beam in his right, which he slammed into me before letting it loose. He'd calculated exactly what it should take to shoot through me. But he was working on the assumption I wasn't adaptively letting his hits do just enough to leave marks. All of his probing strikes were given the wrong information. Thus, his beam cut into me but not through me. I enjoyed his shocked expression. Screw this, they were holding me back.
"My turn."
I gripped him around the waist and flew straight up, leaving about half of our team behind. Most of the Ultimates could fly, as could Singularity and War Machine, but beyond that they were ground bound. He gripped his fists to drop a hammer blow down on my head but he found a shield spring up in his way. It should have been unbreakable, I'd used the Siberian as part of the model for this shield. It shattered anyway. I launched him into the air by letting go to fire up a beam of un-light while he couldn't dodge. I was manipulating the air around him as much as I could to prevent him from getting any maneuverability or purchase. Even a clap from him would normally launch him back, which he tried to no avail.
Fired straight up to ensure no accidental casualties the beam enveloped him. But even with all my power behind it I still had to keep him aloft in the beam with telekinetic force to give him more time to cook. His durability was no joke. I knew he would be tough, but this was more than I was expecting. Letting the beam die down I summoned my sword to my hand and speared up into his heart using Sting. He still needed his blood to pump for him to act. Somehow there was resistance. But he was dead all the same, and so long as he had a body to regenerate from he would come back locked away. I then sent the sword back where it came from as I carried him down to the heroes below.
"Sorry, he was catching on to the plan. I didn't want him to try and hit all of you with magic or a psychic attack."
There was shock amongst most of them, especially those not in the Ultimates. They are least understood I was powerful even if they hadn't fully understood it just yet. I also cleaned up all of the wounds I had let develop to try and trick him, as well as fixing up my costume. I had actually gotten Reed's permission to use unstable molecules for it, and it was indeed worth it to not have to fix my costume really at all. It regenerated with me.
"Why were we even here if you could do that?" Dazzler asked, gesturing to the hole in the clouds above us. And Thanos himself I suppose.
Carol was asking herself the same question, so I came to her aid.
"I'm still new to this reality, so it's understandable that Carol wanted extra support in case I couldn't live up to the hype. Without me you would have all been necessary. With me you still gave me time to test various ways to take him down precognitively." I did my best to make them feel worthwhile, but honestly I wasn't scared of Thanos in the slightest. Not while he was willingly fighting me wrong the whole time.
If there was a next time, and there probably would be given he had an eternity to escape and try again, he might come at me with magic. So I had to prepare. I had to prove I was worthy of looking at the forbidden magics. Hell, I had to prove I was worthy of regular magics still. I had found that a few of the sorcerers who had been at the battle had innate biological access to magic, which I was very carefully experimenting with via precognition.
Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch, wasn't a mutant like I had thought, but her connections to magic were at least partially biological. As much as any magic seemed to be. Her reincarnated son, William Kaplan, Wiccan, also might have ties between his mutation and his magic. Daimon Helstrom was the son of a demon who may or may not be actual Satan. He definitely had ties between the two, but I was holding off on any testing as I'd promised I wouldn't interfere with dark magic until I was given the okay by Strange. Last but not least, Magik, Illyana Rasputina was tied to a realm called Limbo by her mutant powers. Again I had a problem, Limbo was a realm of demons, and was also dark magic.
Honestly it seemed like every damn hero used dark magic so I wasn't quite sure why Strange was so worked up about it. Even Sister Grimm, Nico Minoru, used blood magic which seemed to be tied to dark magic. Was the fourth, forbidden way of magic just something fundamentally different or was it just that he felt it was too risky for an initiate? Back to the present I was experimenting on Thanos' body. It was unreal what was going on with him. Literally.
He was slightly out of sync with reality, it's what let him break an unbreakable forcefield. He wasn't of this reality, or had been so infested by extraplanar energies that he no longer counted as from here. Energies from outside the multiverse, things like his infinity gauntlet or cosmic cubes he had held and channeled before. He was seemingly unconstrained by the limits of reality. If he worked hard enough he would achieve his goals, no matter how impossible they were. I wanted that for myself.
It wasn't a flashy power, it was subtle, like precognition or telepathy. It would give me an edge over all that I faced, so long as I could even wield it. It wasn't unlimited power either, it just let the laws of reality bend and break when you pushed too hard against them. He had no limits to his power, not really, he just had yet to fully realize them. No matter how far he went that would always be true. Small chunks of flesh were taken from him for further study. Even now I could see some cosmic energy repairing his body.
This wasn't what Carol Danvers had been expecting on her first mission with Anima. She'd heard the girl's claim to have trillions of powers, but she hadn't realized she was stronger than Thanos in a fist fight. She had played him by letting it look like she was always on the ropes, about to go down if he could just land one good hit. But she never was.
It was somewhat humbling to see that casual power, where when she thought the others might be in danger she took him out within seconds. Most of that time was even spent getting him away from the rest of them so she wouldn't hurt them in the backblast. Most of the team was left unsure of why they were even here, but Anima was trying to reassure them. Carol wasn't even sure why she was here. Why did Anima even let her make the decisions?
Steven Strange wasn't surprised to see his pupil back so soon. He'd been watching her fight with Thanos and knew when she would be returning. That didn't mean he wasn't at all surprised by the result, he hadn't expected her to win like that, not so quickly anyway.
"I'm surprised you want to know magic when you have such power." He didn't bother to hide that he'd been watching, and she wasn't surprised he had been either.
"As I said, I was nothing against the Celestial Destructor. My physics dependent powers found no purchase on a being that far above me. Thanos still relies at least a little on physics. You offer the path to power that transcends physics, even the highly advanced physics I have access to."
He nodded. It fit with what she said before. They both sat down on the provided mat, legs crossed.
"Now, back to where we were. While the ego-centric path to magic looks within yourself, the eco-centric path looks around you for power."
He could feel her reach out with her own magic and touch the magic that surrounded them. He'd made sure to not leave any artifacts within the training space but even so he could see her seeking them out. He'd warded the area ahead of time as well, just in case she was a little too curious.
"Now that you can feel the power around us, try and shape it into a shield." He could see her using her unusual trial and error approach to magic. Most simply couldn't survive such reckless abandon, they had but one body and accidentally pulling in the energy around them could lead to disastrous effects.
He would have given her more guidance, but by now nearly a week into their learning he could already tell she preferred this type of learning on her feet. So he let her jump a little deeper than he probably should have and saw her body singe as she pulled too deeply on the power around them. But before he could worry she was back in pristine condition, no signs of damage remained. Then she tried to shape the energy around her into a body shaped field, because his apprentice didn't seem to know the meaning of half measures.
This resulted in her calmly setting herself on fire a few times before he intervened.
"Like this." He did the correct motions and channeled the energy around him into a simple disk shield, never pulling it into himself like she had tried to do. She immediately managed her overly complicated shield once she had seen his own simple but high quality shield. He saw her drop the effect once she realized she didn't know how to make it move with her when she bumped a hand into it.
That led to her summoning a dozen shields like his, but with less control and strength. They orbited around her. Were she a normal student she would be more than a prodigy. She would also have killed herself by now, a few dozen times over. She played around with them for a bit, experimenting with shapes, sizes, and their construction.
He'd asked her a while ago how she was managing this so quickly. She had said she had built what she called a general purpose magic 'shard' which allowed her to cast wordlessly and without motion, as both were being performed by the fragment of herself. Then she had created several more magic shards to allow simultaneous casting of either the same spell many times over or different spells. Then she tried something he hadn't seen before.
She formed a shield purely from her internal reserves. Normally that would be painful if not suicidal, there was only so much magic within a human body. But she wasn't truly human was she? For her she simply had trouble refining the energy inside herself into a matching resonance to that around her. At first she seemed to not care for the extra effort required before she snapped it into place like she knew how all along. It was taking her fewer and fewer attempts every time she learned something new.
She had admitted it was both her learning and her precognition learning about how magic worked, letting her simulate her experiments before she actually performed them. She obviously had a woefully incomplete picture of magic as a whole, but this wasn't the first time she had simply formed new novel magic simply because she didn't understand the conventions. Her shield wasn't particularly strong, or special, although it was purple instead of the conventional orange. He wondered if that was her manipulating the light after it was generated or if she had altered the spell.
"Now block." He fired a weak bolt of bedevilment at her and she raised a shield in a nearly textbook response. Then came the usual craziness that she displayed with every new spell. This time shields sprung up around her like clay pigeons and she shot them down with her own bolts. She'd made her shields paper thin to break them with the weak bolts she was copying. It was fascinating to see the magic she weaved. Not that he was planning to use her variants of the spells, they would likely kill any other mage who used them.
But perhaps he could learn something from the way she mixed magics that were usually considered incompatible. He also liked that he hardly had to actually teach. It was more demonstration and replication, which was certainly simpler. He manifested simple air magic around himself, creating a gentle breeze. This took her longer to get, but within minutes she was doing the same. The next three main elements were easier once she had the first one, though it took her a little longer for her second one, water. The difference between control and manifestation was what tripped her up at first.
But again it wasn't taking her long to get the hang of things. He wouldn't consider her a Master of the second path, nor the first. But then she went and did another thing which was extremely reckless. She began pulling the magic of the elements into herself, at first nothing seemed to happen, then he could tell she was harming herself by accident again. Fortunately she started with water instead of fire, but she still began to melt in front of him. Was there something wrong with him that when his apprentice began melting he wasn't worried in the slightest?
She extracted the essence of water and began again, melding it with her own until she appeared to transform into a water elemental of sorts. Her laugh was like a babbling brook. Again her next few experiments with the other three elements worked quicker. She had found a way to transform herself into the elements. He could manage the same feat, but it would be using exo-centric magic, calling on beings from beyond to grant him the power. A type of magic she had yet to learn. It certainly wasn't very comfortable, but he also wouldn't have dared to do it the way she had. She was interweaving her own essence with that of an element directly and by her own will.
Then she began another series of tests, starting this time with air essence. He wasn't quite sure what she was trying to do until she began to float. She was infusing herself with air in a way similar to his enchanted cloak, granting herself the power of flight through another method. Jess decided this wasn't enough and infused herself with water before creating several ball bearings and shooting herself with them. Her form rippled like water around them, another successful spell invented by an absolute amateur. It was kind of incredible to watch.
Her spells were rough, unrefined, and probably cost more magical power than most anyone could maintain for more than a second. But she was still weaving new spells from nothing but her ideas and what scraps he had shown her. He wasn't trying to hold back on her, more that she was tearing through new spells with immense gusto. She also loved to experiment between anything he showed her which often took longer than the 'lessons' themselves.
She certainly was not boring to teach.
Adam Brashear was working on more Neutronium testing, the material from the Neutral Zone. Adrienne, his daughter, had sent him some work she had been doing on it. She was more testing how it behaved in normal spacetime, and especially how it affected people. She was worried her work was going to get shut down. He'd have to talk to Carol about the project, she ultimately had control over it right now. But before he could begin the experiment Jessica walked into his lab.
"Sorry Adam, go ahead, I was actually hoping to observe." He nodded and got the test underway. The various sensors began feeding back data. Were it normal matter it would seem like nonsense, but Iso-8 Neutronium was anything but normal.
Jessica helped him set up the next test, her eyes glowing extra to indicate she was also scanning the Iso-8 compound. Her growing confusion was a little amusing, he'd seen the same from practically everyone who understood physics enough to know that something was wrong with Iso-8. It wasn't just a shiny blue crystal, if he was right it was actually fragments of frozen spacetime.
"How can this be? Why does it form together like a cube?" She asked.
"There are currently tests being done to compare its properties to that of cosmic cubes. It's actually what Thanos was after, the cube fragments that were being studied at the pegasus facility. My daughter actually works there as one of the lead researchers."
"So it's something like a cosmic cube?"
"It's from the region of space right next to the Beyond, where real cosmic cubes draw their power from. It's not so surprising that it would have similar properties. Though I'm fairly sure the cube structure is actually a coincidence."
"So where does the shape come from then?" He was pretty sure she was just humoring him given she could read minds. Perhaps she was just being polite.
"It seems that each of the 'atoms' of Neutronium are actually frozen fragments of past universes. Multiverses even. They seem to be evenly distributed between one of each universe per cube. Which if my theory is correct it means the multiverse has been remade at least eight times. Any other times it happened we don't have any fragments of spacetime remaining. So no record of them."
"Do you think we could discover what came before through lenses made of these? Or would it be too scattered?"
"If you could see through the eye of a single particle of it perhaps, but I can't imagine you would get more than one molecule's history of the multiverse."
"But Exo-Space, the Neutral Zone, is filled with nothing but these fragments of history. Imagine what we could learn from them."
"They're also powerful in their own right. This matter can warp reality. They keep properties of the realm they come from, a realm of thoughts and ideas, rough shapes of what could be."
"How strange, that the world we live in is one in which something like this can exist." She spoke with wonder in her voice. Perhaps he would have a similar rose tinted view if his son weren't trapped in there. They got back to work trying to analyze a kind of matter which wasn't matter at all.
Carol Danvers was growing suspicious of Jessica's intentions here. She seemed to be so far beyond them that she shouldn't be bothering with them at all. The other problem was her lackadaisical misuse of precognition. She hadn't been predicting much of anything, even after they had adjusted the rubric twice to pick up more threats.
She'd told Carol that it was a good thing there weren't any threats on their level to handle. Which wasn't wrong, but with how often there seemed to be crisis events she was suspicious nonetheless. When she'd stressed her disappointment with the lack of predictions Jessica had rolled her luminous eyes and given her a sheet of paper listing more minor incidents. Each of them had been true at least, crimes that Carol was still happy to have helped with, but they really were beneath the Ultimates usual level.
Things like bank robberies, power plant accidents, and then to rub in how little she thought of the request for predictions even a cat stuck in a tree. To make matters worse she was always stepping on the toes of other heroes to do it. Spider Man swung into the bank robbery, Tony was already aware of the power plant troubles, and Ms. Marvel had even walked around the corner just as she'd gotten the cat out of the tree.
"Jessica, what was that?" Carol confronted her when she got back from the patrol. The woman just raised an eyebrow at her.
"Exactly what you asked for. You wanted any and every incident in the area you could respond to. So I gave you an optimized list that would let you solve as many crimes during the shortest amount of time."
"Not only was it all fairly minor, I was responding only barely before other heroes. It wasn't enough to strain any relations but it was arguably a waste of time."
She just shrugged. "Then we figure out better questions to ask. Things like how far you want to go, what's the minimum danger you're looking for, precautions against any other heroes already handling the situation. It was exactly what you asked for which is the downside to my thinker powers. I'm not in tune with my alien side enough to simply use them at full blast all the time and evaluate everything."
"Is there anything we could do to help you with that?" As much as it galled her to admit it, Jessica was probably their strongest member. Anything that could make her even better would probably be in the team's best interests. Fortunately she took every request fairly seriously.
"I can try and meditate more, but so far that hasn't seemed to actually speed up anything. If there's a big enough emergency I can try to unleash more power, but that mostly improves my ability to act simultaneously, not raw output. It's also very painful mentally."
"The Celestial Destructor wasn't a big enough threat?" What did she need to try and release her full power?
"Actually that was too big of a threat. All I would achieve by letting loose would be hurting myself. I had to rely on someone else having a solution to the problem, my best couldn't even scratch its armour."
"And Thanos?" He was an immensely powerful adversary and Jessica hadn't had any sudden power-up that she could notice. She'd just played with him the whole time.
"My strongest offensive power is very much a yes or no solution to a problem. Either it works perfectly and I can cleave through them like butter, or it does nothing. I guess there could be some people partially resistant to it. Thanos actually resisted it a little, but nowhere near enough to be a problem. He was also vulnerable enough to the strategy of simply hitting him harder. If he'd started throwing around magic I might have needed to actually use my temporal clones, to give him more targets if nothing else. They're one of the abilities I don't like having too many of in any given multiverse."
"So your clones don't put pressure on your mind unless they're in the same multiverse?"
"Not quite, there's still a little extra pressure, but it lessens the more metaphorical distance there is between them. I've only got three of me in total right now, all in separate multiverses."
"I'd there any way to tell if you're pushing your power to its limits?" It was important to understand what her team could and couldn't do.
"My skin will go metallic purple. I can actually do that intentionally without pushing it, but I stop being able to control what I look like. Like this." Her face rippled and suddenly it was like she was looking at a purple feminine version of Colossus. Her face went back to normal and she continued talking.
"I vastly prefer this look over that one. I like to feel human still, you know?" Carol wasn't sure she could relate too much, for all that she was half Kree she never felt like she was losing herself. But she assumed feeling like your humanity was fading would be pretty distressing.
Steve Rogers, Captain America, had a problem, two problems actually. Anima and Ulysses. Both were threats to his goal of creating a world where Hydra reigned supreme. He had come from said perfect world, and only the power of the sacred pool in Ashomia had allowed him to pass from that world to this one without losing himself. With two precogs scanning for threats to their way of life he would have to wait until he could remove them.
"You have two supers who can predict, or see, the future. This is very, very bad."
"I understand your concern, Doctor Selvig. The question is, what do we do about it? I've already ordered a full cessation of Hydra operations-"
"But for how long? You don't know how far either of them can see into the future. Unless Hydra is disbanding entirely and permanently, that could be a futile gesture." The doctor was pacing back and forth.
"And besides, there are things you need to be doing. Places you must go that cannot wait. You know that better than anyone."
"I do. So what if I wore a disguise?
"Then they could see you putting on that disguise. Or they could see you talking to me right now, discussing the possibility of putting on a disguise!" The doctor put his head in his hands.
"I need to know more about the extent of their powers and how they function. Are they triggered by their own self preservation instincts? What are their error rates? Are they glimpsing alternate realities?"
"I know more about what she can see. It's like a web of possibilities, every event bouncing off of every other. Each person alone is a web of maybes and could be's. Then each of their futures interact and it becomes infinitely more complex. She can even make herself match a particular future she wants to come true to make it so."
"And what about the boy?"
"She said he's simulating the future, not truly seeing it. She also believes he can get things wrong."
"We could kill the boy, tie up another loose end, but she might see that coming. He might only see personal threats, maybe global ones too. He might as well see this too but he's far less able to do anything about it. Is there anything she fears?"
"Magic. She said she has no real knowledge of it, but she's already learning. Something tells me she's a quick study."
"So our solution needs to involve magic. Unless we could get our hands on Kobik, a living cosmic cube, she would likely be powerful enough to beat her. Perhaps even turn Anima to our side."
"So far my attempts at establishing contact with Kobik have been… less than successful. But I do know where she is."
"But until we can get to her it's useless. What else do we have? We need something to protect our efforts now."
"I have an idea." Steve was even proud of this one. It had come from her conversation asking Doctor Strange to mentor her. She was interested in dark magics.
"I'm all ears."
"You said that you think his powers could be tied to his own survival instincts, or focused only on potentially global level danger scenarios. Is that right?"
"Yes, that seems to fit the extremely limited data. It's impossible to say for certain, but the bigger the threat the more likely he'll pick up on it."
"So we give them a threat bigger than Hydra. Tell me Doctor. How much do you know of dark magic? Could we find the Darkhold?"
"Well there are rumors of it hidden underneath America, in the ancient kingdom of Abysmia. But I'm not quite sure where that actually would be located in the modern day. I'll get back to you on that."
He could likely gauge her progress in magic by just asking Doctor Strange, they were 'friends' after all. But her near single handedly defeating even a weaker than usual Thanos meant she would need another foe of a similar level to beat her. Maybe he could stage a jailbreak and let Thanos loose on her to seek revenge? He was a powerful mage among many other things.
Any way Steve could think of to beat her personally would require him to have already won, a cosmic cube or the like would have to already be in his hand. He wasn't skilled in sorcery, and the loss of most of his Hydra allies in the changing of worlds meant he was short on those who could hope to beat her. The other fear was that if someone else powerful enough to beat her came along the rest of them may not be able to push them back. It would be a lose lose scenario.
The Darkhold ploy was one such endeavor that might backfire, but it seemed like it would be the best they could offer. She could likely see his attempt to release Thanos, which would point back to him. Magic she had said she was less able to predict, so she might be unable to see the history of the Darkhold. It would also let him turn the so-called heroes against one another. Utilizing their inherent weakness to sow division. The natural state of humanity, all peoples, was war after all. It would just need a spark.