Chapter 200: Welcome Back

9th March 2012, New York City

(Jasmine Sayre POV)

Frigga stayed silent for a second before bursting into laughter, “It seems that you do not only offer your wisdom for the young.”

I chuckled, “Perhaps I don’t. I turned around. I believe it’s time for me to leave. I have a family to get back to as well.”

She nodded and brought out her hand, and the Tesseract appeared. I touched the cube for a second, and opened a portal to my mansion in New York, where Selene and I lived.

“Farewell, Morrigan.”

“Farewell, Frigga.”

I stepped into the portal and arrived back to Earth.

Before the portal could close, I threw the Tesseract to the other side of the portal. I could see Frigga, on the other side, catching it carefully. She gave me a smile, turned and left. She was probably returning the Infinity Stone to Odin’s vault or something. They were going to need it to rebuild the Bifrost after all.

Seconds after I stepped foot in the mansion, I could feel several people teleporting towards me. I was immediately enveloped by hugs from both Wanda and Rose. Without the distraction of an alien invasion, it seems that their inhibitions were lowered somewhat.

I hugged them back and took a look at the both of them. They looked older, more mature, like adults, “You grew up so fast. Look at how beautiful you two have become.”

They blushed slightly and Selene snorted in the background. I broke my hug with my sister and my daughter, walked towards her and kissed her passionately. It wasn’t the longest period of time we spent apart. Over the centuries, I sometimes needed to spend a few decades in a place to preserve the timeline, or sometimes at Death’s request. Selene would go her way and play with her little machinations and politics games that she likes so much. We spent decades apart without any problems.

But this was the first time we couldn’t see each other at a moment’s notice. Normally, if I needed to see Selene urgently, I could just find her in seconds and teleport to her. This time, we were in different universes entirely, while this one was on lockdown, meaning that we had practically no way of contacting each other, let alone seeing each other. The absence of the possibility of seeing each other was what made this different, and very hard for the both of us. I might have pulled some shit out of my ass to find a way to get back to this universe, but it was a very close thing.

After a minute or so of passionate kissing, we separated, and I looked at the other people in the room. Jean Grey was there, standing close next to Wanda and Rose had sat down on the sofa. I followed my sister’s lead and sat down as well, and we all just stayed there, in an awkward silence.

Selene decided to break it, “So, how did things go in Asgard?”

I shrugged, “Well enough. I explained the situation to Odin, and I got Asgard’s support during the upcoming crisis in exchange for freeing them and letting them have a say in Earth’s affairs after the crisis”

Rose looked confused, “What upcoming crisis?”

I looked at Selene and she nodded at me, “They’re old enough to make their own decisions. I kept an eye on them while you were gone.”

I smiled gratefully, “Thank you. I suppose that it's time for you to sit in the big table. You know, with you being famous superheroes or something. Apparently, SHIELD has an entire file on you.”

They all blushed in embarrassment, and I continued, “Well, for you to understand the crisis, you’ll need to understand why I disappeared in the first place. A few decades ago, right after World War two, something shifted the fate of the world drastically. It wasn’t anything too dangerous, but those with strong awareness to the flows of time could feel it. The Sorcerer Supreme and I are such individuals, so we decided to use the Eye of Agamotto to see what happened. For some reason, in every iteration of every possible future we explored, there was a gap, a blank space, for the events that happen from 2018 to 2023. These were five years about the future that couldn’t be accessed. It seemed like someone had put a great deal of effort to blind any precognitive from seeing anything that happened during these five years. We’re not sure how they were able to do this, but there are many theories in using tachyons, but that’s theoretical at best. What we were able to see, were the results of these five years. What we missed, however is that half of the possible futures had nothing but darkness in them. In the rest, there were a few pyrrhic victories, sometimes the planet was just destroyed, but the universe itself survived. We called the events between 2018 and 2023, the crisis. The issue was that something was doing its best to get the maximum number of dark futures as an outcome. To combat this, we have been taking steps to balance back the number of futures that at least has life in them. Not all of them are good ones, but they are far more preferable than complete annihilation.”

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Rose had a thoughtful look on her face, “Do you have any idea who’s responsible for this mess?”

“We didn’t. That was until the day of my disappearance. Previously, an alternate version of Wanda went back in time using the Darkhold trying to save me from the crisis. She ended up destabilizing the whole timeline and got herself erased from existence. It seemed like a clear-cut issue that fixed itself, except that something hitched a ride and got back to this timeline without suffering any consequences. It attacked me during the Asteroid M issue and called itself Entropy and his goal was the destruction of the entire multiverse. He claimed to be a cosmic entity, something that I confirmed to be true, and we fought. He was a lot more powerful than I was, but I was able to trick him into a stalemate. I froze him in time, and got accidentally launched into a multiversal portal, with this universe locking down because of future Wanda’s mess. I was only able to come back after a lot of effort on my part, which brings us to now.”

Wanda asked, “Is he still trapped?”

I shook my head, “Sadly, no. He was able to escape months ago. But we did end up delaying his plans. Unfortunately, we have no idea what his plans are, and for the next decade or so, until the timeline stabilizes, we cannot use any type of precognition. In fact, time travel to the past or to the future is now impossible until everything is straightened out.”

Rose gasped, “Is that what happened? The time turners just stopped working a few years ago. We had no idea why. The Unspeakables were completely gob smacked and they didn’t even know why that happened. The magic was sound, and it was working, but it was like time itself had become rigid.”

I nodded, “That’s a consequence of someone messing with reality that much. Now, we’re flying blind. Before future Wanda’s foolish gambit, we were only planning on telling a few people and dealing with it discreetly. It was like a giant game of chess that we were playing with Entropy. Unfortunately, now that Entropy destroyed our little game of chess, we need a new plan. From now on, we’re recruiting people who could have a chance in helping us deal with him. For example, we have Odin who will help us fight him directly, while others like the Avengers would handle his distractions.”

Jean looked confused, “What criteria do we use to pick people?”

“Like I said there are two main teams. One will handle entropy and will only include very heavy hitters, like myself, Odin, Selene and probably Jean. The rest of you are candidates, and so are many more, but we don’t know if any of you could handle a fight like the one that's coming. The second team will deal with Thanos. He’s a very dangerous alien war lord, one of, if not the most feared man in the galaxy. He seeks artifacts called the Infinity Stones, which are objects of immense power. He wants to use them to kill half of all life in the universe, so that the other half flourishes properly.”

“That makes no sense…” Rose protested.

I shrugged, “It does in a very complicated way. It’s all because of the mess with Asgard to begin with. The nine realms exist outside the known universe, but are still connected to it. Every few thousand years, an event occurs that causes the destruction of the nine realms. They call it Ragnarök. The energy released from the destruction is funneled to the boundaries of the universe itself, allowing it to grow even further. With a bigger universe, we get more species, but that doesn’t mean that there is more life. The number of souls funneled to the universe is regulated with that energy as well. A bigger universe just means that it’s better spread out. The problem is that the universe is expected to be a certain size, yet it’s not. Which means that the new souls are sent to the already existing planets, which are slowly starting to get overpopulated, leading to war, famine and death. Thanos was able to see this and thinks that killing half of the people in the universe will solve this problem, or at least delay it. Don’t get me wrong, the guy is horrible, a cruel mad man who conquers any planet that takes his fancy, but he genuinely believes that he’s saving the universe like this. If he gets the Infinity Stones and uses them, the boundaries of the universe fade for a fraction of a second. Entropy wants to use that moment to spread his essence across the multiverse making sure that every single universe suffers from heat death forever.”

The three girls looked flabbergasted at this, and Wanda asked me weakly, “Is this all because of me?”

I walked towards her and gave her a hug, “Of course not, sweetie, this was going to happen regardless and even if Future Wanda was responsible, she’s just a possibility of what you might become, not a certainty. It’s proved by the fact that she erased herself. If you were always going to become her, she would have survived, after all. Now, it’s your responsibility to not follow her footsteps, to become better than she ever was.”

The girl nodded, eyes watering slightly. Jean smiled at the scene, but Rose looked at me sympathetically, “Is this what it’s like, being you? Facing impossible odds and trying to solve one disaster after another for thousands of years.”

I chuckled, “Yes. It’s intimidating, isn’t it. It’s why I’m retiring after the Entropy mess. I’m tired after all this time. It’s also why I decided to not have a single successor but several, each one taking responsibility over a part of my directive. I’m having you, Rose, watch over the wizarding world, Wanda will deal with dimensional threats that go past the Order of Sorcerers, I’m having Nicholas Flamel make sure that none of the immortals step too much out of line. The Avengers, on the other hand, will deal with technology based threats, and the aliens who manage to come to Earth somehow, not that it would be easy, now that I made sure that the planet was back under Odin’s protection, meaning that attacking Earth would be like declaring a war on Asgard. I have made sure that whatever happens, if we defeat Entropy, we’ll have a future.”

Rose gasped for a second, “This was your plan, wasn’t it? You’ve always wanted this. It’s why you disappeared from the wizarding world and faked your death. You want to disappear.”

“It’s time for the world to lose its babysitter, Rose. It’s time for you to become self sufficient. You don’t need me anymore. You’re starting to catch up to the rest of the universe. You’re ready.”

Before she could respond, Selene’s phone bleeped and she read a message, “Morrigan, someone is trying to hack our company servers.”

I groaned inwardly. Will this day ever end?