It was going to be a busy day, but the first step was the most important to me.

Finding the address of a certain Benjamin and May Parker hadn’t been all that difficult. They still used phone books here, after all, and there were some in the house. Big, thick things. x15 speed reflexes zipped through all the Parkers in Queens, and there they were.

Mr. Hill was only generally familiar with the area from doing some work back in the day, so we also had to pull out the local maps and find just where the house was. They didn’t have an internet like back on the Coast, and even Mr. Hill clucked about how behind the times Murica was.

Actually, they were right where they should be compared to other timelines, but without the benefit of super-geniuses. The last couple of decades since WW2 had been about playing catch-up while they wallowed in their lack of national unity and loss of their national dream, and unfortunately the benefits hadn’t trickled down due to the tight fists at the top holding onto the money...

Ah, well, so typical of those who despised low, broad power.

But, whatever.

I actually had one memory of visiting New York City, but that was right before it had been buried under a hundred-foot wall of water, and in a different reality, so eh.

Regardless, we took the Holland Tunnel across, took Canal Street and Broadway through Lower Manhattan while I coolly painted all the rising buildings around into my Visual File, noting that with the population pressure of being confined to half the country, New York was even more vertical than it had been back on Terra-Luna, although admittedly this was fifty years earlier.

Then it was up and across the Brooklyn Bridge into Brooklyn, and onto 278 and heading out to Queens.

We pulled up well down the street from where we needed to be, moving up into a service drive that probably wasn’t going to see much traffic so early.

Standing around without being obvious was very much a skill, and one Mr. Hill was actually pretty good at. Since he didn’t get tired like a normal person, sitting on the ground with his coat around him just made him look a bum catching some zzz’s, and he was big enough nobody was gonna harangue him lightly.

Me, I could just hop up to the top of a townhouse and go invisible as I wished.

It was late spring, heading for summer, so school was still in session. I watched as a teenager, a brown-haired boy, came out of the house, and rather awkwardly waited next to the steps of the house next door.

I lifted an eyebrow as I remembered something, and sure enough a minute or two later an attractive redheaded girl came out of the neighboring house to join him in waiting for the bus, which was visible down the street.

Mr. Hill was part of the scenery, getting a good look at the two of them and not much else. He headed back to the van, while I easily raced ahead of the bus on its morning run of delivering students into the arms of the system.

His high school, Midtown High, was only a couple miles away, unsurprising given the population density in the area. Still, there was significant lack of participation by broad swathes of the younger generation, who moved into trades, onto welfare, or into crime instead.

According to the comics, Peter Parker was a world-class genius, mostly unrecognized by those around him, who just thought him smart. He’d been picked on for his smarts, of course, and never really fought back until he gained his spider-powers and being bullied was simply no longer possible without him actually willing himself to take it.

Midtown High School was also vertical, mostly stories high instead of spread out like the Midwest had been, and the school grounds were naturally more restricted as well, land being at a premium. So, the baseball and football teams shared the same fields, the local homes and businesses could indeed be hit by balls going out of the park, and life went on.

He was also being watched by three other people outside the school, and who knew how many inside.

I’d seen the woman in the side alley street by his house, and by her posture and attire pegged her for SHIELD. Much as he might have tried, they had tracked him down and knew who he was.

The Tribal agent was a bit harder to spot... or maybe not, since he was Wildshaped into a raven, and perched on a building nearby. Magically speaking, he kind of stood out. An Urban Druid, tasked to keep watch on him, and doubtless clucking to himself over the mere human agent working routine surveillance below.

The whisper of a psychic presence ghosted past both of them, felt by neither. Charles Xavier had naturally taken interest in a new Powered coming out of nowhere and running around in tights nearby, and the most powerful natural telepath in the world didn’t have any problems locating him and keeping tabs, and doing it subtly enough that it didn’t set Peter off.

I imagine he knew about the SHIELD surveillance, but the Shaman likely had Div Wards up masking himself against Peter’s Spider-Sense, and Xavier likely routinely used the same, at least on a telepathic level.

I sat there and watched as all the buses pulled into the school’s lot and disgorged their parade of young bodies out to get a biased basic education or something, scanning the lot of them.

------

Mr. Hill came to a stop at the deli across from the school. I walked out of the alley there, got in, and we drove away.

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“Got what you needed?” he rumbled.

I nodded shortly. “Yes. He’s definitely being looked after.” I drummed my fingers on the dashboard. “There’s five other Powered in the school.”

He digested that as we drove away, heading back to Manhattan Island. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as numbers go, that’s way too high.”

I nodded agreement. “I can see one, maybe two others. Four means they’ve all been moved to one area to make it easier to keep track of them. All of them kids, all about the same age.”

“’The Murican Heroic Age igniting with the presence of a god’,” he remembered me saying. “Damn. Called it, short-stuff.” He paused again. “Are you thinking of enrolling there to watch after them or something?”

“If I’m the one who does that, it looks suspicious. If others make me do that, well, it’s just because it’s totally appropriate.”

“Hur-hur! Schmot Gurl like you don’t need that level of education, so you got plans or responsibilities or something. This got something to do with that Xavier person?”

I nodded. “None of those Powered were mutants. Three are Spider-Totems, like me, however.” Of the other three, one was Awakened by a car crash that killed her whole family and exposed her to nuclear materials; one was endowed with powers by an alien lawman who died here hunting Skrulls or something; and the last one was probably involved in a random Awakening experiment, like the ones the Crux used, except this time it wasn’t in prison.

Changes in the timeline. Richard Ryder (Nova), Gwen Stacey (Spider-Girl), and Luke Cage had stepped off the buses to join Jessica Jones (Jewel), Cindy Moon (Silk), and Peter Parker (Spider-Man) at Midtown High. Luke really stood out, tall as he was and in a sea of white kids.

I suppose their power sets made it easy to clump them together. They were all basically physically enhanced, with two nigh-Paramounts there with Jones and Ryder. No energy projectors, telepaths, or other weird combinations to worry about.

But that hadn’t been the real kicker. The biggest spoiler had been when a middle-aged man with his hair going grey had come out of the house just after Peter had gotten on his bus, backed his rusting car out of the garage, and driven away to work.

Peter’s Uncle Ben was still alive, and yet Peter was out there fighting crime. Someone had gotten to him and saved his life, not all that hard in a world with psions and Shamans around who could heal. If one ‘just happened’ to be in the right place at the right time, sure, Uncle Ben could be saved, even if he was shot and would normally die quickly.

Certain timeline events were going to happen. A Peter Parker was born, even though this United States of America was vastly different than what normally happened. Briggs and Sama were aware they were in the Marvel Universe in some version or another, and had taken steps to ensure that certain events went one way or another.

Outsider knowledge, insider power. How long had they been working on whatever they were planning?

Well over a century now...

Well, I wasn’t going to argue against a Source that powerful or a Null who terrified all the superhumans on the planet, especially since I’d been here barely any time at all. Sure, I could make some guesses on the things they were trying to do, but it was all high-end planning I couldn’t comprehend too much about yet, and they’d definitely recruited some very big guns to carry things through to completion.

Had they gone out and grabbed the Infinity Stones?

I looked up at the sky, frowning.

In the original stories, it was Thanos who made the mental leap about the combined powers of the Stones, and their potentially infinite power. While subsequent writers had downplayed the Stones with their own universal Disasters of the Week, the fact remained they were indeed unbelievably powerful, and they had been able to wipe out half the living things in existence with a finger snap.

Pre-empting Thanos wouldn’t be hard. Obviously, aliens had been coming here for years, and the tech of the Kree and Skrull in particular hadn’t advanced much in centuries, or even millennia. Go out into the stars, find out where the Stones were, and steal/take them from others. If the possessors didn’t realize their power, all the better.

The Infinity Stones definitely trumped the power of a Beyonder, which meant they trumped the power of a Cosmic Cube, too, and thus could neutralize the power of a Molecule Man.

They were necessary, because Sama and Briggs were Forsaken, which meant they wouldn’t survive a Continuity Reboot.

I didn’t remember how many times Marvel had rebooted things to stay current in their ‘main’ timeline, but Forsaken couldn’t do that. They enforced the current timeline. Literally speaking, the universe could not reset any point that was anchored down by Nulls and Sources; that section of the timeline was unalterable. The only way to reboot the universe would be to sever off this branch, and replace it with a new Earth that didn’t have Nulls or Sources, a literally new Reality, instead of a redone old one.

So, if one of any series of cosmic events occurred that enforced a rebooting of Eternity and Infinity, well, both of them were utterly hosed. They’d either be wiped out of existence, or thrown outside existence without a home dimension anymore as it was wiped away around them.

They were both very smart, and would have glommed onto the fact very quickly. Their very existence also shut down a considerable number of time-travel shenanigans. Going back and changing the past with them around wouldn’t work if said events ever interacted with them... and they would. Time-travel thus just became more alternate realities travel, and if you returned to the present inside that reality, things would naturally be very different, as Sama and Briggs would never have existed in it... and likely neither would you, meaning you were an alien in an alternate timeline, no more, no less.

Using the Time Stone to render such things ephemeral nonsense would make sense, meaning that even with all the powerful magic and entities flying around, this Earth probably had the cleanest timeline imaginable, as any alternate realities spinning off it were just shadows, or straight-up ventures into alternate timelines with no Briggs or Sama.

The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Someone going into the future was either going to be going to an alternate future that had neither of them, or was going to lose all knowledge of said future when they returned, anything they did or learned wiped away by Creation itself reinforcing a Forsaken’s power to strengthen reality around themselves.

You literally couldn’t access the future in front a Source, as it didn’t exist until the Source got there! Or, in other words, you could go there... but then you couldn’t go back successfully with what you learned!

If there was a Cosmic Restart, they could use the Stones to move the entire planet out of it, then insert it back in. Potential options including recreating a whole new solar system, replacing the ‘new’ Earth, or forming a Counter-Earth, whatever they wanted to do. They could even exist in their own reality bubble, although that was probably not the best solution.

Or maybe it was. I didn’t have the Stones, so I didn’t know.

Whatever it was, Thanos wasn’t going to spill the beans about the Stones to the galaxy if he never got his hands on them. Adam Warlock’s split soul wasn’t going to create the Universal Church of Truth... which wouldn’t mean something else wouldn’t, of course.

Of course...

I sighed as I tossed all the long-term cosmic stuff to the back of my head. I could potentially get there, and, barring getting curb-stomped, I would do so. In time, in time...