POV Tony Stark
"Sigh. Can't use the door for once?" I complain as I see Nick Fury sitting in my living room.
"Mr Stark, I have a job for you," Fury says, ignoring my jab.
"I'm busy, so get in line," I reply.
"Are you sure? It has to do with alien technology," Fury says.
I pause.
"What kind of tech? And what do you want?" I ask.
"A spaceship, or what remains of it. My people have gone through the wreckage, but they haven't been able to find anything of use. I was hoping you could succeed where they failed," Fury replies.
"Where is the wreckage?" I ask.
Snap
Fury snaps his fingers, and several goons walk into my house holding case after case of items I might want.
'I need to update Jarvis as soon as I can. This cannot keep happening. Especially not with their issues.'
I let the matter go for now and made sure to memorize the faces of all the agents that entered my house, as well as where they were, so I could check for bugs.
"This is it?" I ask while looking at the 8 crates before me.
"Every last bit we could find," Fury replies.
I take out the pieces and start organising them while I try to get an idea of what this ship once looked like. Before I could even ask, Fury had already sent the data they had from their research. As I looked over the data, I had to admit it seemed fairly close to what I started to assemble. Except one key detail.
"You missed a spot," I comment.
"Oh, and what did we miss?" Fury asks.
I grab several chunks of metal that they had labeled as melted from reentry.
"These pieces weren't melted by reentry. They were melted by some form of casutic material," I reply.
"How can you be certain?" Fury asks.
"I know metals, and I know how they react to heat. Entering the atmosphere gets hot, really hot, but this metal shows no signs of warping consistent with extreme temperature changes. The metal shows a completely different type of melting consistent with acid, a really strong kind, the sort you would usually only see in laboratories. Further, this is Silver. There is no way it could survive entry into the atmosphere and then the following impact without any signs of change," I explain.
"Anything else?" Fury asks.
"This was a box. Which means either someone had access to insanely powerful acids and used them to melt this box that had somehow managed to crash land with no signs of taking such an impact. Or something inside the box melted its way out. Now, either you didn't show me everything that was retrieved, or whatever was in this box broke out and walked away from that crash," I explain.
"How big was the box?" Fury asks sternly.
"4 cubic feet at most and at minimum 2 cubic feet," I reply.
"Thank you, Mr Stark, if you find anything else, please let me know," Fury says while getting up and leaving my house.
I look at all the junk he left in my house and sigh.
'Might well see if there was anything of even slight value I can learn from it.'
I wasn't worried about whatever Fury had to go capture, as I felt Shield was capable enough to deal with some small creature or robot escaping a crashed starship. But how wrong I was. It at least made me feel better that there was nothing I could have done to stop the horrors that would come, as Fury hadn't come to me until over a month after the crash, which meant that creature had already matured and created a hive.
POV Shift Ancient One
I look at the bleeding and broken corpse of Xu Wenwu. Killing him by myself would have been troublesome, but that was why I had sent Dracula to deal with him in my stead. However, what he never considered was that I knew he couldn't defeat the Mandarin. Dracula thus perished, and I moved in to finish off the weakened and battered Mandarin. I usually wouldn't use such tactics, but I was on a time limit, and I needed the Ten Rings for my plan. Which meant it was time to collect the next piece of the puzzle.
I open a portal to an abandoned warehouse where my target lives.
"What the? What you want, baldy?" says Cain Marko.
I ignore him and send us into the Mirror Dimension.
"Haha, you've come to challenge me! Don't you know who I am?" Cain Marko asks.
"You are Cain Marko. Now surrender, and I shall spare your life. I only want what is inside you," I request.
"I'm the Juggernaut B*tch!" Cain Marko says while running at me.
I roll my eyes and invert gravity, thus removing his momentum, and then stop him mid-air before removing the oxygen around him. He struggles fiercely to gain a foothold but fails to do anything but waste oxygen. I watch as he slowly suffocates to death, then right as he loses consciousness, I cast a spell and rip out the gem that was inside his body.
'The Crimson Gem of Cyttorak. A shame he no longer exists, or else I would have been able to steal more power from him.'
The gem was limited in power now that Cyttorak was erased from existence, but it would do fine for my needs. I cast another spell, and Cain Marko's body is disintegrated, then I leave the Mirror Dimension.
POV Shift Selene
"Ms Selene, as I've said multiple times, there is no way to track where your friend has gone. I've gone to Limbo and spoken with people as high up as Belasco, and they all say they cannot detect any such summoning, nor can they see any way past the recently created barrier," Professor Blood says.
"I cannot just give up on him," I refute.
"I'm not saying you should give up, I'm saying that you should be patient and have faith in your friend. Look, I truly empathize with your situation, I do, but I have exhausted all the possibilities; there is nothing more to be done," Professor Blood replies.
"I-I understand, Professor, thank you for your help," I say with clear disappointment.
"Sigh. I'm sorry I couldn't be of more help. The best I can do is what I have already done. If he reappears or if he connects with this world again, that amulet will react. Keep it on you at all times, and it should help you," Professor Blood says while gesturing to the gold amulet I wore around my neck.
I leave the library that Professor Blood lives in and make my way out of Monstropolis. Once I leave, I let everyone know that I have hit another dead end. As much as I wanted to keep looking, it was abundantly clear that it wasn't possible. There was another option, but I was warned not to attempt to contact her, the Ancient One. Even Rio had mentioned that he couldn't predict what kind of person he or she was. And from what I had been told by Professor Blood and several other sources, it was clear she was no friend of vampires.
'Perhaps she could make an exception since I was Alexander's heir.'
I was tempted, but in the end, I decided against it as it was too risky, and even if she didn't destroy me, she likely wouldn't help me either. Or at least not for free.
'Sigh. I guess I shall be patient. I just hope you're doing okay, Rio.'
POV Shift Rio
BOOM
"Sigh. Another failure," I say while lowering the shield I had cast.
I had made numerous attempts at recreating the interdimensional portal that my Gruncle Stanford had made, but despite my confidence, nothing had worked so far. Though I had learned a lot from this experience. For one, I was now confident that it wasn't my designs that were the issue; it was the world I was in. Thanks to what I could only guess was Brimir's actions, the dimensional barrier and stability of this universe were constantly in flux. That instability made it impossible for the portal to lock onto a point where I am now, let alone make a stable tunnel between those two points.
I had only started messing with this idea thanks to the newest template I got. It was of a woman named Eirtama Ballory, apparently she was the Handmaiden to Queen Amidala from Star Wars. Her knowledge was the only standout thing I got from her. Her gear was basic stuff like a blaster and some fancy clothes. She was also quite the artist, which was neat, I guess. But the reason her knowledge was so useful was that she was an engineer. So I got a pretty great grasp on how the advanced mechanics of a Galaxy Far, Far Away did things. Not that it necessarily helped at this point.
It was a bit frustrating to see that she was taking so long to assimilate, but that was mostly my fault as I had been especially busy lately. Lots of experiments and training of the army and the elimination of spies. Germania was doing very poorly as the Demon Lord's army was crushing them time and time again. This even led to the Emperor's death in battle, leading to a succession crisis which only made things worse. For them that is. We were doing fine. And in fact, we were just about ready to begin the continental conquest.
To make things a bit easier for me and my plans, Romalia started another conflict with the Elves of the Sahara. From what little I gathered, it seems the Pope has been desperate to gain more guns and other tech, or as they call it, Holy Weapons. The elves, on the other hand, had been relatively quiet, just attacking the Romalian invasion and not much else. Even though they bordered the Demon Lord's territory. Though that brought up another good point.
The Demon Lord was acting quite intelligently. They haven't attacked anyone other than Germania, and they even seem to understand that Tristain either has strong ties to the Grand Duchy of Anhalt-Zerbst or that having a large army so close to their border might invite us into the war. They hadn't even attacked either the distracted Romalia or the weakened elves. Despite the fact that it seems like the Demon Lord's army was extremely brutal and savage in its attacks. Often leaving no survivors in their conquests.
'What is their goal, though?'
That was the question that troubled me the most. They were conquering Germania, that was true, but they were losing massive portions of their army. It made no strategic sense, but the actions of the Demon Lord led me to believe he can think strategically. Then again, it could be that the Demon Lord was using his fodder army first, as it was true that the army was mostly made up of monsters and other lesser intellect creatures. But it just didn't sit right with me. Something was off, and I wasn't sure what it was.