Avengers EMH: The Lost Seasons

“We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us.”

— Winston Churchill.

****

Crystal Chaos: Prologue

The Titan Thanos hated earth. He loathed it with a passion. Despite barely being in its atomic age with only a few trappings reminiscent of a civilization in a mid or high space age, trying to accomplish his goals on the planet had been difficult. Dare he say, EXTREMELY difficult, and he was no slouch when it came to strategic and tactical planning, unlike the unabashed ‘retards,’ to use the most derogatory term possible for their incompetence, that once lead the Skrull and the Kree.

For though his ego far out weighed that of even Queen Veranke and the Supremor, he had actually bothered to do his research, the most extensive homework he had ever had to do for anything ever. For despite its seeming primitiveness, within a span of time that was like the blink of an eye to even the youngest of the space-faring races, earth had produced champions great enough to crush the greatest of The Skrull remnant factions and managed to put an earth friendly puppet on the newly created Kree throne.

Even in his days as a wandering mercenary warlord, back when people trusted him enough to join up with him, back when the Skrull and Kree hired him and he played both sides, he had never dreamed of actually being capable of bringing either two civilizations to their knees with the small force the earthlings had sent.

For though neither of those two could out compete The Shi’ar or possessed a champion nearly as powerful, and meddling, as their ‘Gladiator,’ both were easily capable enough to kill Thanos if they only knew just what his Lady had planned for him to do.

And yet it was this planet that had done it where he thought he could not.

So, suffice to say when his probes and spies had discovered that the planet was an unstable nega-bomb of super genetics, super technology, and super magic atop the already intense political disputes endemic to an atomic age poly-cultural world, he had done his best to be subversive and play the sides already armed and willing to destroy each other. Unlike the Skrulls, though, he had actually proven to be successful and had no need to push quite nearly as hard as they had or that he had expected to.

Killing the human known as Reed Richards was almost child’s play, requiring only the prodding of his arch nemesis, one Dr. Viktor Von Doom, to finally focus on his desire to destroy Reed and that desire alone. Granted, the end result was that Dr. Doom was also dead and his country was taken over by a far less cooperative despot named Magneto and his brotherhood of mutants, but enough of Doom’s resources had been depleted that the global military coalition that surrounded Latveria insured that, if the shield surrounding the country ever went down, it would be a smoldering radioactive crater. Two Badroons, one laser shot, as the old universal saying went, though, he admitted Doom had died far too early.

Even easier than that was the finding and rebuilding of the one known as Ultron and the alliance with Mephisto’s son, Blackheart and this world’s first and most powerful mutant, Apocalypse.

But despite initial success, every step of the way, THEY just had to be there to try and trip him up. The Avengers, the ones that had caused his two former employers so much woe.

Many times did his Lady chastise him for a set-back she had thought was catastrophic, and many times did Thanos himself doubt he could accomplish his mission. But against all odds and his better judgment to just nuke the entire planet and sort out the ‘diamond he was searching for in the resulting rough, his patience and faith in the providing arms of his Lady were rewarded.

And now, all he had to do was sit back, recline, on his hover-throne with his hands resting behind his head and his feet pressed firmly upon his ship’s primary command womb. In five minutes, the improved hyperspace engine of his ship, Reaper-1, would finish the charge it was building up and he could finally leave the high-orbit of this annoying, little, mote of existence. In two minutes time, he would watch as one of his pawns started a nuclear war that would, if not destroy the entirety of humanity, would certainly send it back to the late iron age at the most optimistic outcome, and the sweet Schadenfreude he received as he pictured The Avengers, who he all thought were dead, looking on from the pits of Hela as their world crumbled made him feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

“Mi Lord, the ‘fire works,’ as you can them, are about to begin,” said Reaper, the AI that ran his ship.

“That time already?” Thanos asked, opening his eyelids and taking a more upright position on his hover-throne.

“Time flies when you’re having fun, as the saying in this world’s most popular language goes.”

“True enough, true enough,” Thanos chuckled. “How long does earth have precisely?”

“As soon as I’m done speaking? Twenty seconds.”

“Good. If you wouldn’t mind, would you please lower the blinds? I’d much rather see this with my own two eyes and not through a medium like a holographic projection.”

“At once, Mi Lord.”

The ‘blinds, as Thanos called them, or rather, the opaque retractable metal shields that covered the windows of weaker, transparent metal of the control center, slid down and gave Thanos an unabashed view of the planet below, primarily the continents of North America, South America, Europe, and Africa. Anyone else, even a veteran space traveler may have found the sight to be breathtaking or at least mildly aesthetically pleasing, but to Thanos it was horrid, and the devastation that was soon to come was the TRULY beautiful thing.

“Take this as a small token of my devotion to you, my Lady,” Thanos said under his breath.

Reaper spoke up again, counting down until the thermonuclear rain was to commence. “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four three, two, one.”

Thanos took in a deep breath, preparing to waste all of the oxygen in his lungs on a laugh that would make the cosmos itself shudder. He waited for a second, and then another and another until a full minute had passed.

Something wasn’t right. He knew something wasn’t right when the first second passed and all was still right with the world, but he had hoped that it was a slight timing error on his pawn’s part. But beyond an entire minute? That was unacceptable.

“Reaper?”

“Yes, Mi Lord?”

“Why am I seeing a distinct lack of mushroom clouds?”

“It would appear that all of China’s ICBM’s have been successfully shutdown before they reached their targets.”

“And hat of the pocket nukes the Mandarin’s sleeper agents had in all of the world’s administrative and financial capitals?”

“I’m not sure, sir. I suppose that they were successfully shutdown as well.”

Thanos clenched his fists together. “And why, pray tell, is—”

Before he had the chance to finish that sentence, a portal opened up on the top of the steps leading down into the command womb, the answer to his question making itself known as the portal subsided. All ten answers, plus their canine mascot, one ‘Krypto the super dog,’ who from what Thanos had gathered, was from an alien world in another dimension where all life gained incredible powers under yellow sunlight.

Thanos growled. “The Avengers.” Of course. It just had to be them. It just HAD to be them.

The one known as Janet van Dyne, aka The Wasp, looked around like some sort of curious puppy. “Whoa. This place is spacey.”

“Well, we do appear to be in a spaceship of some sort,” the android, The Vision, said.

“And by the look of things, the big mastermind behind all the trouble since we got back is head ahead,” said the anachronistic archer of the group, Hawkeye. He whipped out an arrow from the quiver on his back and aimed at Thanos’s head. “Emphasis on the word, dead.”

“Hmph. This runt? He doesn’t look so tough,” Bruce Banner, aka The Incredibly Hulk, said before slamming his fists together. “Or smart.”

Thanos opened his mouth and gritted his teeth to together. “Do they not say, ‘appearances can be deceiving,’ on your planet?”

“If that’s true about you, they why’d you decide to mess with earth?” Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, said. He raised both of his armor’s palm based repulsor blasters at Thanos’s head as well. “And us?”

“Yeah. I’m certain it’s all over the subspace chatter about what he did to the last alien invaders that thought they could take on a dump on our planet get away with it,” said Carol Danvers, aka Ms. Marvel, as she decided to aim the energy projecting palms of her hat at, surprise surprise, Thanos’s head. “PS: it wasn’t pretty.”

“You know, kind of like how your face isn’t,” the mentally unstable size and bio-energy scientist of the group, Hank Pym, aka Yellow Jacket, said.

Under normal circumstances, this would have been the point where Thanos lashed out with an eyebeam of golden cosmic energy at Pym, disintegrated him, and started a fight that would at least go well in the beginning given his initiative and the shock the rest of The Avengers would have at one of their comrades’ death. As the battle wore on, though, which it was apt to do even if he could eliminate The Incredible Hulk next with the bulk of his power, he knew he risked certain death, or even worse, the parts of his ship critical to the extended hyper-drive jump he needed to make to fulfill his Lady’s desires.

Given this, and his intimate knowledge with just how much the universe seemed to favor them, Thanos instead decided to do the next best thing and stall for time. After all, it’d only be less than three minutes before the extraordinary jump was ready and he had told Reaper before hand to make the jump as soon as that happened. By then, it’d be far too late to stop him and who knows? Whether they did so or not, they might actually have wound up helping him.

First things first though, he needed to respond to Stark’s question before any of the others decided to jump the gun. “To answer your question, Anthony—”

“—Stow it!” Stark interrupted. “To scum like you, I’m Iron Man and nothing else.”

Ignoring that, Thanos continued. “—If there’s one thing I’ve learned ever since coming to your wretched little slice of the milky way, it’s that dealing with The Avengers is inevitably that cannot be stopped if one’s intentions were… less than amicable.”

“Less than amicable!?” yelled out T’Challa, aka The Black Panther. “You destroyed my country and almost did the same to what little family I have left!”

“You almost plunged the planet into World War III several times!” yelled out Steven Rodgers, aka Captain America.

“And you killed some of our friends, some of which were set to be fathers!” Stark said, tears undoubtedly falling down from his face beneath his armored head.

Thor Odinson, the literal norse god of thunder started walking down the steps and into the control womb proper “If I were thee, monster, I would pray to whatever heathen gods you worship, for only they may save you from our wrath.”

“Hmph, I doubt it,” The Hulk said as he followed his comrade. “If they try, Hulk’ll smash puny gods, just like he does to blondie whenever we spar.”

“Precisely,” Thor said, beginning to spin his enchanted hammer, mjolnir. “Which is why you’d best yield cretin, and follow us into your new prison.”

Thor and The Hulk were two meters from Thanos and his hover-throne when Thanos said, “Take another step, and we all die.”

As expected, the two largest powerhouses of the group stopped in their tracks, looking at each other with confused looks on their faces.

“What? Did you truly not think I had no contingency set up specifically if you managed to get aboard my ship?” In truth, Thanos had no ‘specific’ contingency set up for this particular scenario, which was a plan he had developed long ago, but knowledge was power and The Avengers were ignorant of this. “If any of you so much as make a movement I find to be insulting, my ship’s AI will induce a critical reaction in all of my ship’s power plants that will create a blast wave none of us are capable of surviving.

“Wanna bet, Skrull chin?” The Hulk said, flexing his forearm muscles.

“The better question would be: would you bet on the lives of your teammates that aren’t as durable as you?”

The Hulk snorted and then scowled. He and Thanos engaged in a long and tense staring contest, The Hulk snarling all the while. Neither was willing to blink. It was even more intense for those of the group that were not pagan gods, accidental Human-Kree hybrids, density shifting androids, clad from the neck down in power armor made out of proprietary metal just shy of being as durable as secondary-adamantium and capable of defensive force-field projection, the last dog of Krypton given to them by it’s Last Son, or a gamma irradiated rage monster.

“Hulk…” The Wasp said. “Don’t do anything rash now, honey.”

“Listen to the lady, Hulk. I know this creep needs a good haymaker or a thousand to the face, but he’s outflanked us this time. Don’t do what I know you’re thinking of doing,” Captain America pleaded.

For a few more seconds, The Hulk and Thanos continued staring down. Though The Hulk never blinked or looked away, he did stop snarling and scowling. “What do you want,” he said, almost in a sigh. “You space-cases always hate earth and everything on it, and your plans in particular make you out to be more a destroyer than a conqueror, yet you didn’t just try to take the planet out with a nega-bomb or something. So what is it you’re really after?”

Thanos huffed. The Hulk truly was far more intelligent than his demeanor suggested. Not his size, his demeanor. Thanos himself was bulky and was the last to judge an opponent’s intellect based on their body mass.

In that way, he supposed that The Hulk and him were kindred spirits of a sort. Perhaps that was why he was about to answer with a hint, when all of a sudden, Krypto started barking from his spot next to The Wasp’s leg.

Thanos groaned, looking at the kryptonian dog with disdain. “Don’t any of you have a vibranium muzzle for that beast?”

The Wasp knelt down to the team’s pet, massaging his head. “What is it, boy?”

At her question, Krypto hovered in the air for a bit and pointed his nose and his head like an arrow at something behind Thanos. The windows. The followed Krypto’s gaze and gasped. The other Avengers followed suite, their reactions much the same.

Thanos was puzzled at first, until he turned his hover-throne around. The sight that greeted him beyond the windows was not of earth, at least, not the earth he knew. Instead, a world with far more alien landmasses and far clearer skies, greener foliage, and bluer oceans glittered before him like a painted, monolithic marble suspended by gravity’s invisible strings.

He was only in high-orbit, and already he could tell that by the standards of most beings aside from himself, this planet would win any beauty pageant against earth by a wide margin.

Which meant that, once Thanos was done making it over, it would be all the more TRULY beautiful.

Despite himself, he chuckled. “My great, green friend. To answer your query: I’m afraid none of it matters anymore. For Equis, is now mine to play with.”