Unsacred Responsibility Chapter 8 - I Can Do This All Day

In a frozen wasteland at the End of Time, I stood over the corpse of the Sexiest Man Alive.

“Is he the one?”

Nebula stood beside me, draped in a fashionable insulating skin-tight suit supported with a minor Prestidigitation spell to keep permanently warm. Mantis was on my back, as always, clad in something similar, her arms wrapped around my neck. Her antennae glowed, and her powers worked, currently, constantly, through her touch to soothe my mind. Mantis, whose powers worked even on the likes of Living Planets and Titans, felt what I felt, staring down at the corpse. 

The air was multiple degrees below zero, and nothing was living on this frozen, barren waste. My every breath came out rough and short, and created a cloud in front of my face, which almost threatened to freeze solid. Mantis’ breath tickled my ear as it came too, and I could feel it, every inhale, and every exhale.

“Is he sexy?”

Nebula lifted a brow at the question. “What?”

“Some part of me felt he was the Sexiest Man Alive,” I said, after a moment.

“He’s not bad,” Nebula said. “A seven, at least.”

“Petey is sexier.”

I crouched slowly, my feet crunching on the frozen snow, as I confirmed that he was indeed the one. Before me was the body of the man whose sole task was to oversee the Bifröst, Heimdall. The stray thought, the question as to why that appellation came to me on seeing the frozen face of the corpse, was something I did not understand. Ultimately, it was something that did not matter. Some things I did remember. Some things I did not. 

Dormammu had given me longevity, and the Heart-Shaped Herb had given me advanced speed, vitality, reflexes, and endurance. My blood flowed with a vibranium-enhanced plant, and my memory was hundreds of times better than any baseline human. The problem was time. 

Too many of my memories were just me, wandering the Void, encountering nothing, no one, for weeks, months, and years at a stretch. Sanity Plus Plus Plus in full drive, moving according to the whims of the Id; silencing the Ego, and desecrating the Superego. If my mind hadn’t already been lost before experiencing such things, it would be, after.

Mantis aided in suppressing a significant majority of those memories, those long stretches of aimless, solitary meandering and walking. There was a fifty-year stretch in my memory where I had seen no one, met nothing, as nothing that was ‘pruned’ that arrived in front of me landed alive. During that time, I found a broken, damaged, Eternal, and the things I did with her robotic body as I lugged her around for half a decade were outright sacrilegious. When I eventually met a non-broken Celestial Variant, Kingo, and he saw what had become of that Variant of his fellow Eternal…

No euphemism exists to downplay the wrath and fury he unleashed.

It was unfortunate for him; at that point, I was already the equivalent of a Tier Three Spellcaster. I could recreate magical effects corresponding to Sixth Level Spells, so long as I had a suitable Material Component.

Amongst the Eternals, Variants of Ikaris and Makkari were the ones who could give me trouble. The rest were not a concern, and if there was any amongst the rest that proved troubling to defeat, I would opt to Banish.

The Mirror Dimension was a Do Not Pass Go ability, and the Banishment spell, which sent people on a one-way ticket to it only required a piece of broken glass as the Material Component, of which there was never a shortage. 

To escape, or prevent Banishment, one needed outright absurd levels of power. Something comparable to the Power Stone, which Thanos used to shatter the entrance to the Mirror Dimension the first time and only time Stephen Strange tried to send him there. Failing that, one needed magical abilities and reality-altering powers like those the Scarlet Witch, who could use reflections and puddles of water to escape it. The final method required was to possess a dimensional teleportation ability or device, such as Cable’s Time Traveling Device, or America Chavez’s power. 

If one lacked power, magic, and interdimensional mobility, then the Banishment spell, the act of sending people to the Mirror Dimension, was a move that could not be countered. Even Strange, in Far From Home, had been stuck in the Mirror Dimension, unable to leave without his Sling Ring.

“Petey,” Mantis poked my cheek. “Your mind is wandering again.”

“It is?”

“It is,” Mantis nodded.

“You keep doing it,” Nebula added, nodding. “That thing where you just stand still and stare blankly for hours. Can you not do it here…? Before my nipples freeze off.”

On the ground, Heimdall’s frozen body almost seemed to beckon me. Staring at him, at it, there was a sense of… ludicrousness.

“I cannot remember how long I’ve been searching for him,” I said. “I thought of many methods, but most spells to track an Asgardian required an Asgardian. I felt it was up to luck.”

“Relying on your luck, you probably would never have found him.”

“Nebula,” Mantis chided.

“Don’t Nebula me. You must have noticed it too. Parker’s luck is atrocious,” Nebula said. “It is one of the worst I have ever seen, and I have seen men who have been struck by lightning four times on a clear day.”

Parker Luck, Nebula was starting to call it. For some reason, there was a feeling I should be familiar with the term.

“Remember the Kuiper Belt Series?” Nebula continued. “One hundred and eight asteroid belts in sixteen jumps. And when you took the pilot seat, we didn’t even encounter one. Then there was the accretion disk we entered, and the planets we nearly collided into, and the twelve suns we nearly flew into—”

The first few months after we set out, we found out, the hard way, that navigating space in the Void was millions of times significantly harder than navigating space outside of it. Random additions of spacetime created unspeakable gravitational ripples, waves, and fluctuations. We could, at one moment, be flying through nothing, and the next, an asteroid field would be in our path. We could, at one moment, be in an asteroid field, dodging asteroids, and the next, we would be fleeing from the gravitational pull of a gas giant.

Then, as we fled from a gas giant, we would find only ahead, space had rippled, and there was a dying star in our path.

Yet, these incidents were disproportionately correlated with me. 

When I was the one taking charge, piloting the Milano, we encountered far more dangers, all of life-threatening scale, than statistically expected. When Nebula took charge, they were significantly less, and notably far less threatening. Conversely, when Mantis took charge, when she piloted the Milano, we encountered almost zero problems whatsoever.

Despite the turmoil in the first few months of our journey, somehow, I handled it. 

The means to pilot a spacecraft was something I handled. The random calculations, the fluctuations, the oddities of spacetime, each came one after the other, and each time, I handled it, as though I had been expecting it, or as though I could see the tiny little signs and symptoms in the surroundings that indicated things were about to go to hell, and quickly find the nearest Jump Point, using gates to evade cataclysmic danger and death within a hair’s breadth.

In one case, I instinctively started preparing the Banishment spell before we exited the Jump Point, and had to unleash it, having no choice but to send away half of a Red Dwarf that had appeared in our way to the Mirror Dimension, before we collided directly into it.

It was as though I could sense danger approaching before it did. A preternatural ability to detect incoming catastrophe and evade it that was almost hardwired into my very being. It had always been present, in the earliest days I arrived at the Void, when I fled from Raiders, Flerken, and monsters, but it was far weaker, and I had been too insane to notice it.

Spidey Sense.

It was neither a spell, nor magic, nor a result of something I personally did. I had never been bitten by a radioactive spider, I had never been Spider-Man, so I should not have any form of Spidey Sense, any tingling sensation that seemed to take into account hundreds of potential variables and fluctuations and forewarn me of danger. The effect worked almost instantaneously, as if I could just passively detect the superposition of quantum particles in flux and react before changes and danger occurred.

Due to it, we’d survived those rough spells where I took the pilot seat, before we figured that it would be safer for us all if anyone but me was in the pilot seat. Due to it, Nebula praised my piloting skill and questioned where and how I learned to pilot so well. I told her that, before finding her, I had never piloted a spacecraft. She scoffed and told me that if I had no intention of telling her the truth, I should at least come up with something more believable.

Yet, it was the truth. I did not remember ever piloting a spacecraft.

I asked Mantis to search my memories, to see if I had. She came up negative. Yet, she’d only told me, vaguely, that I had ‘an overabundance of emotions.’ That I had felt certain strong and potent emotions that were ‘beyond’ even the already egregious number of years I had lived. Mantis, whose power could soothe the dreams of the likes of Ego, who had lived for millions of years, was capable of sifting through mere thousands of years and going further back still. Thus, she found emotions that, though the memories of what caused them were gone, the sentiments and feelings still left ‘scars.’

Emotional scars she could feel and see. Emotional scars that were so deep, they became etched in my ‘soul.’ Etched, such that they manifested in certain instincts, behaviors, and subconscious skills and habits.

I asked if the ‘scars’ were many. Mantis fell quiet for minutes before whispering, “You have a beautiful soul, Peter.”

I did not see it. I did not believe it. However, the existence of the Soul Stone proved that the Soul was a thing; it was as real as air, as fire, as wind, and as water. Dismissing the fact that in this Multiverse, the soul was real would not be wise. How my soul affected or connected to my mind, I did not know. That was a question better left for esoterics and mystics, as, given my atrocious luck, nothing good would come from messing with my soul.

“Petey…” Mantis poked my cheek once more. “Your mind’s gone off on a tangent again.”

I nodded. Slowly. “...How long?”

“Almost five minutes.”

When I was alone, I could stand in front of a man’s corpse and watch it completely rot and putrefy to the bone without care in the world. Even now, it still took effort to be reminded that not everyone could do the same.

“What were we talking about?”

“Luck,” Mantis chirped.

“Right.” I nodded. “...Luck.”

Within a meager six months of traveling with Mantis, I met Nebula. 

Within a meager eleven months of encountering Nebula and relying on her Neural Network, I had found a workable ship, the Milano, and an Asgardian, Heimdall.

I had made more progress within two years with these two women at my side than I had in the thousands wandering by myself.

“...Luck.”

Heimdall was just as he was in the memory of Nebula’s Variant that arrived on this frozen wasteland, one that managed to avoid going insane, only to freeze to death instead. Within a frigid cave littered with icicles and stalactites, having come here to take shelter from the cold, his eyes closed, and broken pieces of the hilt of a hammer, Mjölnir, clutched in his hands.

His frozen, near-perfectly preserved corpse almost whispered an invitation. Gently, and carefully, I began the process of heating up the face of the corpse with my hand, applying Heat Metal over a solid steel rod and going slowly, and going steadily, to ensure I did not lose what it was we came for.

His eyes.

Heimdall’s Eyes allowed him to see the three trillion souls across the Nine Realms, and the power was enough that even his son inherited it, and was capable of contacting others entire galaxies away with only his gaze. They were a potent Material Component. With Heimdall’s Eyes, I could perform a Divination Spell that would let me scry everywhere in the Void.

With Heimdall’s eyes, I could finally find Cassandra Nova.

Within two years of having these two, I would be able to do something I had consistently failed to achieve in millennia. 

Luck… huh…?

“Petey? Are you okay?”

“I will be.”

Slowly, as the heat removed bits of frost from his eyelids, I opened them and saw them. The twinkling, still potently powerful eyes of a dead Asgardian.

Should I laugh with glee? Or cry with gladness?

There was a part of me waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting for the inevitable “but.”

I was waiting for another ‘screw you’ by whatever powers that be, that would once again sour this moment. Thus, I could not, or did not feel excited, or even glad, or even optimistic, at finally managing to have gotten a hold on Heimdall’s eyes.

There was certain to be a wall to come. A barrier. An obstacle. It was almost guaranteed.

Parker Luck would strike.

“Pete…”

As always, it was outright impossible to hide one’s emotions from an empath, especially one who was always in proximity with you. Slowly, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

So what if it comes? So what if Parker Luck strikes?

I pried Heimdall’s eyes out slowly, carefully, cautiously, to avoid any incidents. Even with my distorted sense of time, it felt like it took hours, so I could not imagine how long it actually was. Having the man’s orbs in my hand, they were fleshy, but in perfect, pristine condition, preserved well due to the cold. 

Only here, in this frozen waste of a world, was there a quarry that met those requirements.

“About time,” Nebula said.

“Petey?”

“I’m going to perform the spell now.”

Mantis nodded, getting off my back and taking a few steps back. Nebula also, as a caution, took several steps back. I steadied my breathing and held out Heimdall’s Eyes in the palm of my right hand. Slowly, both eyes floated into the air in front of me, hovering directly within my line of sight. My left hand moved, and my right hand followed by performing the Somatic part of the spell. 

The Dhyana Mudra came first, the hand symbol often seen on Buddhist statues, one used for meditation. These, I learned, from that same Variant of Kingo, the Eternal, before I killed him, after he tried to kill me for turning one of his broken companions into a seed receptacle. We’d conversed before that incident, and I learned he was a Variant that had not been as successful as repeatedly passing himself off as his son, grandson, and great-grandson. He ended up drawing the attention of Hydra during World War II, preemptively revealing the Eternals to the world.

Next, I made the Uttarabodhi mudra, a yogic hand gesture known as the “Gesture of Enlightenment.”

Both hand signs, performed back and forth, made up the needed Somatic gestures.

Heimdall’s eyes, floating, started to glow with a thick, bright, purple sheen. Ancient Nordic Runes floated about the eyes, rotating counterclockwise, both caught ablaze with a golden fire. 

Except for the Web spell, which was a signature spell, all spells I recreated consumed the Material Component. That is, the Material Component would be gone after use. For things that were easily replaced, like a shard of broken glass for Banishment, it was not a concern. For things like Heimdall’s Eyes, if used for a powerful spell, as the one I was preparing, it was a one-time use.

I did not know when next, or if at all, I would find another corpse of Heimdall with eyes to pilfer. Thus, I went all out, deciding to use the most powerful version of the spell I could feasibly cast.

The more powerful the spell that needed to be performed, the longer the Verbal Component was needed.

“Beyond Nine Realms, I Wish To See,

The Mutant that Holds the Ring of Thee.

Sorcerer, and Doctor, Strange It Be,

In Thy Hand, She-Mutant,

Lies Freedom; It’s Key.”

The flames surrounding the eyes grew hotter.

“Ninth Level…”

I took a deep breath.

“Scrying.”

My eyeballs burst.

“Parker!”

“Peter!”

The voices came faint. Something exploded. A boom rattled my ears and assaulted my body, and my vision, which had seen nothing but darkness, instantly saw light. My spirit, no, my Astral Form, ejected from my body and was hurtling faster and faster through space and time, faster and faster, and faster, and faster—

Planets zoomed by, then stars, then solar systems, then galaxies.

Universes, the likes of which contained all of creation, whizzed by…

Yet, my Astral form was still going, into the eternal void.

Going, and going—

Going and going and going—

No.

No. No. No. No.

“DISPEL MAGIC!”

I sought to cancel the spell immediately, but I could not. 

There were no Material Components on my Astral Form.

I could not cast spells without Material Components.

NO!

I had no knowledge of how far and how long my Astral Form would keep traveling, in the goal of attempting to scry Cassandra Nova. 

A month? A day? A year? Ten years?

I did not know.

There was a catch.

There was always a catch.

Fucking Parker Luck.

=====)+(=====

“Parker!”

“Pete!”

Nebula cursed. Nebula swore. Expletives came from her lips multiple times as Parker’s eyes started to heal at an accelerated rate, but his body still remained completely comatose and unconscious. Mantis, beside her, rushed to his side, her antennae glowing.

A pitch black sword formed in the air and cut her off, preventing her from touching him.

“I’d suggest you refrain from doing that.”

Nebula grabbed her sword, turning it immediately on the voice of the newcomer. At first glance, she could tell that the woman, the tall, black-haired woman, clad in black, with a thick fur coat draped across her shoulder, and having only one arm, was dangerous. Her senses, not just the ones honed in the Void, but honed for battle, told her that much.

An Asgardian.

The Asgardians were feared by many, and though often seen by many as a race of mere enhanced aliens, Parker had been the one to let her know that they were gods. They were all gods. That meant they were on the list of the top five most dangerous entities one could potentially encounter whilst traversing the Void.

She snuck up on us…? On me? On Mantis?

Nebula shot a glance at Mantis, asking the unasked question. Mantis was not looking at her, but instead, at the Asgardian.

“...You are not our enemy.”

“I’d not waste my breath on you if I were.”

Not our enemy? She just attacked you!

Nebula held her tongue. She chose to believe in Mantis. The ditzy woman’s powers, those empathic powers of hers, had not failed them yet. The black clad Asgardian woman stepped forward into the frigid cave and glanced down at Parker’s unresponsive form before she turned to both of them.

“Performing that sort of spell with Heimdall’s eyes was nothing short of madness,” She muttered. “Did his teachers in the magic arts not give him any lessons on restraint?”

“Do you know what’s wrong with Petey?!”

“Hubris,” the Asgardian said.

Nebula glared. “What?”

“He attempted to scry the entirety of the Void. There is nothing else to call it but hubris,” the Asgardian said. “Any other Sorcerer would already be dead. To have gotten away with only damage to his eyes and to still be alive means his protective spells are sickeningly potent. He is surprisingly powerful.”

She paused.

“Unwise, but powerful.”

The Asgardian woman knelt beside him, and her hand scanned up and down across Parker’s forehead, without making contact with his skin.

“Potent, yet primitive, complex yet unpolished… these enchantments are hallmark of a self-taught Sorcerer… He might be able to…” She paused. “We’ll have to return to my fortress. Carry him, but take heed not to touch his skin directly.”

She got up to her feet.

“Your head will likely explode the moment you do.”

=====)+(=====

The longer my Astral Form sped through space, the more I could feel the efforts Mantis had made to heal my mind unwind.

“To be able to navigate space in the Void, Houdini, you need an understanding of differing fields of science; without that, you might as well call it quits.”

The first sign was that the Ghost of Tony Stark returned.

Yet, there was something odd, this time, about his arrival, compared to all his previous appearances.

He was talking to a different me. It was as though I were watching a memory I could not, or rather, did not remember. The surroundings were pitch black, and nothing of location or time could be seen, and the Ghost of Tony Stark explained things with a stick in his hand, to a ‘me’ listening to him.

“First is Astrophysics,” said Ghost Tony. “To measure cosmic expansion, study galaxy clustering or cosmic microwave background curvature, and observe gravitational lensing and black hole shadows. You absolutely need this if you want to traverse space in the void, Houdini.”

“Next, General Relativity and Gravitation, as well as Quantum Cosmology and Quantum Gravity. Due to the nature of ever-adding space, you need to understand what happens to spacetime at the Planck scale and— wait, wait, I know, it’s getting dull and boring, but this won’t be boring to you once you encounter interwoven portions of spacetime that come from the Quantum Realm. Trust me. Your life will depend on it.”

“Also, don’t forget Mathematical Cosmology. You’re going to need to recognize the pure geometry of a universe if you’re going to be flying through many universes. As well as Relativistic Cosmology. You’ll probably figure out that many universes don’t function as a dynamic, expanding entity governed by the Einstein field equations. So, it’s up to you to account for factors like dark matter and dark energy—”

The words went in one ear and out the other. The Ghost of Tony Stark was saying things that I did not understand. Yet, somehow, I did understand. 

Everything Ghost Tony was saying was things I had taken into account when traveling the void in the Milano, things I just ‘grasped’ intuitively, innately, to avoid danger, to avoid chaos and accidents, and keep myself, Nebula, and Mantis alive.

What I did not understand was why Ghost Tony was explaining it.

“Where do you expect me to learn any of this?” said the ‘Other-Me.’

“I recall someone telling me something about how they can’t die.”

“I said I can regress through time,” Other Me countered. “That doesn’t mean I can’t die.”

“Po-tay-to, Po-tah-to,” he’d waved his hand. “Can’t die, always regress, what’s the difference? It only took me one night to get Astrophysics down—”

“I’m not you.”

“Well, I would hope not. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’d make a very poor me. I think it's the eyes? It might be something regarding the eyes—”

Other-Me was reining in the temptation to beat him. Tony Stark was a man whose presence was best enjoyed in small doses. He had his moments and he had his charms, but watching him, there was not a single second where he did not attempt to remind a person that he was the smartest man in the room.

Is this a memory? Or is it a dream?

Dreams are windows into the lives of our Multiversal Selves—

I could not tell if it was memory, dream, or mere hallucination.

Or if it was all of the above.

I always buried Tony Stark whenever I found Variants of him. I myself did not know why. Unlike T’Challa, I could remember why I did that for him, but for Tony, something in me felt grateful to him, and the core reason was something I could not explain.

Slowly, the memory, the scene vanished. I continued hurtling through space. Longer, and longer, and longer. Then, the Ghost of Tony Stark came back, with the ‘Other-Me’, and both of them started talking, again, about odd things. 

“Her name is Cassandra Nova,” Other-Me said. 

Other-Me asked the Ghost for Advice. Asked why it was that I could not find Cassandra Nova.

Ghost Tony laughed.

Laughed. 

Other-Me had attacked, predictably.

Ghost Tony had lost, predictably.

Wheezing and extending his hand, Ghost Tony quickly sought an apology.

“Wait, wait, Houdini, you can’t blame me. How was I supposed to know you were serious?”

“What possibly made you believe I was joking?”

“Well, where's your faster-than-light ship, Han Solo?”

“My… what?”

“Your spaceship? Hello? Am I not speaking English? Where is thine ship, from which ye travel?”

“I don’t have one?”

“See, when you say things like that, you can’t expect me to believe you’re serious about finding this woman.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Let me break this down as simply as I possibly can—”

“Make it even simpler.” 

“You’re asking the impossible.”

“Try.”

Ghost Tony sighed. “Picture God as a Tailor, and the universe as an elastic red hanky—”

“Why red?”

“One, it’s rude to interrupt. Two, I like red. Why not red?”

“...Go on.”

“Stretch it until there are four corners. That stretched handkerchief is the fabric of space-time. Place a coin in the center. That coin is you and me. Place an eraser right at the edge of one of the corners. The eraser is the person you're searching for.”

“The Big Man Upstairs decides to cut some fabric from somewhere else and add it to the handkerchief. He perfectly sews on another identical handkerchief without removing the coin or the eraser. Then, he stretches the handkerchief that has been doubled in size. Now, here’s the million-dollar question: What happens to the coin and the eraser?”

“If it’s stretched the exact same way, they’ll be shifted from where they once were—” Other-Me paused. “They’ll get further… apart?”

“There you go. Because the overall surface area of the fabric is bigger, the distance between things on that fabric increases. Add more fabric, and the distance increases even more. Keep adding, and, well, you get the picture.”

Listening to Other-Me and Ghost Tony, something clicked in my brain. I could see where he was going.  I did not like where he was going.

“If what you told me is correct, then these Time Terminators—”

“The TVA.”

“Every time they cut and paste a universe, they are adding more and more ‘fabric’ to that hanky. The ‘coin’, which is you and me, is drifting. Shifting farther, and farther, and farther away from where we once started, and from everything around us.”

“I can’t feel it.”

“Do you grab on to your hat as the Milky Way Galaxy hurtles through space?”

I almost refused to believe it. Other-Me also looked like he did not want to believe it.

“What you’re saying… because they keep adding universes, the Void keeps expanding, and because the Void expands at the speed of an entire universe at a time, then the speed of the expansion of the Void is hundreds of multitudes faster than light.” 

“Look at you, Houdini. You know a thing or two.”

“Doesn’t that violate Einstein’s speed limit?”

“Einstein's speed limit only affects objects moving through space, not the expansion of space. If we crunch the math a bit, then the current rate of expansion of the Void would be a few hundred multiples faster than the expansion of the universe itself, which is already clocking in at around 70 kilometers per second per megaparsec. And, just for reference, Houdini, one megaparsec is 3.26 million light-years.” 

Something in my throat felt dry.

“That means, even if I spat in Einstein's eye and invented light-speed travel,” Other-Me asked, going quieter and quieter. “There are regions of spacetime within the Void that I physically cannot get to.”

“Correct. Hate to break it to you, Houdini, but this place isn’t Kansas. It’s not the size of Asia, it’s not the size of Earth. You’ve been attempting to find one person in a place larger than the observable universe.”

Ghost Tony laughed.

“And for the longest time… you were searching on foot.”

Ghost Tony laughed even louder.

“Unless you landed directly next to her, you’re out of luck. Even if you had a device that could track her… she could be somewhere that’s the equivalent of being beyond the cosmological horizon. Do you know what that is?”

Ghost Tony’s laughing grew louder and louder.

“Here’s the cliff note: It is the distance beyond which objects are receding faster than light due to cosmic expansion, and light emitted now from beyond it will never reach us, no matter how long we wait, or how fast we move. Do you really think you can do it, Peter? Find a person beyond the reaches of the observable universe?”

Ghost Tony pointed.

“Do you really think you can do it?”

Ghost Tony kept pointing.

Not to Other-Me.

But to Me.

To Me-Me.

Ghost Tony looked at Me.

“Answer me.”

Ghost Tony stopped laughing.

“Can you do it, Peter?”

Ghost Tony vanished. The scenes, dreams, or hallucinations vanished. All that was left was my Astral Self, hurtling through space, in the silence and the quiet.

The drowning, suffocating quiet.

Heimdall could see the three trillion souls across the Nine Realms, and his gaze could even pry further, towards any location in the known universe.

But beyond it?

Not even Heimdall’s gaze could see what lay beyond the Observable Universe. 

My spell could.

Cassandra Nova was somewhere, comparable to that vast distance, here in the Void. My soul was attempting to scry her, thus going somewhere to that vast distance. Even moving several times faster than light as an Astral Spirit—

That place was still drifting away from me faster than I was approaching it.

I would never reach it.

My Astral Form would keep going, and going—

Chasing a thing it could never reach.

The countless Jump Points, scattered across the Void, were random at best, and uncontrollable at worst. Even if I were on the Milano, there was no guarantee there was any connected to the other end of that vast cosmos. No guarantee it could reach there. 

Accepting this, comprehending this, knowing this, all I could say was…

“There’s a way.”

Other-Me and I spoke at the same time. We looked at each other. Other-Me smiled at me, then faded away. 

“An Einstein-Rosen Bridge. A wormhole… a portal. One that goes directly to a location by folding space, so it doesn’t matter how far it is… I can still get there. Still reach her.”

Ghost Tony reappeared. “Do you have one of those just lying around in your pocket?”

“No.”

“Do you know where you can find one of those? Create one of those?” 

“Cassandra Nova has something that can make one.”

“So, to get to her, you need a device that can create a portal,”  Ghost Tony said. “But to get that device, you need to get to her? You see the problem, here, Houdini?”

“There’s another object that makes wormholes.”

“Another?”

There were only two objects that could create controlled wormholes that I knew of:

A Sling Ring.

And Stormbreaker.

Stormbreaker, which could channel the raw power of the Bifröst. 

I could use it as a Material Component.

And cast Gate.

“Do you think you can find one axe—”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m not searching alone. I have Nebula. I have Mantis. I’ll get more people to help me search.”

Ghost Tony shook his head and sighed.

“Just look at the mess you’re in! Despite all this? You won’t give up?”

“Give up?” I chuckled. “What does that look like? Giving up? The Void does not cut off access to the afterlife. I’ve seen that already, after T’Challa gave me the Heart-Shaped Herb. Giving up means postponing the problem. Go to Valhalla, only for the God Butcher to arrive? Encounter Anubis and the Field of Reeds, only to find it is embroiled in a war, because Khonsu had a spat with Zeus over Hathor’s tits?”

I snarled at Ghost Tony.

“There is no giving up. You either claw to the pinnacle of existence or condemn your soul to eternal torture or eternal servitude at the whims of capricious, uncaring and narcissistic gods.”

It was a reason, a strong reason, that no matter how much shit this Multiverse sent my way in the Void, I never considered ‘giving up.’

Death was no escape, not in a Multiverse where death could be undone with six stones and the snap of a finger.

Not in a Multiverse with gods that had already been portrayed to be anything but benevolent. 

Not in this Multiverse.

Never in this Multiverse.

“I can’t give up.”

No matter how much Parker Luck sought to screw me over, as long as I had my senses, my body, my very burning soul, then I would never give up. No matter how many times this Multiverse knocked me down, I would get back up again, and again, and again. 

I would look it straight in the eyes, and tell it, with all the flair of a weak, scrawny Steve Rogers with a busted lip in a filthy alley…

“I can do this all day.”

Ghost Tony faded away. I paid no heed to it or him, as my mind racked itself for answers for this current dilemma. Finding Stormbreaker would have to wait until I stopped hurling through infinite space. Thus, only one solution came to me.

“When you feel there’s nothing you can do—” 

I extended my hands out. 

“Mantis says… ask for a bit of help from others.”

To perform spells, I needed a Material Component. However, the Material Component for one particular spell was everywhere, every thing, every inch and iota an atom of spacetime, which meant it could be cast even if I had ‘nothing’ in my hands, or if I was just an astral body floating through space, because space itself was the Material Component.

This spell was one I never cast, because what it should do in my memory of that game was different from what it would do, here, in this Multiverse. The risks were the reason why I never sought to cast it.

Yet, if I did not, I would likely continue hurtling through space endlessly.

For all I knew, Mantis and Nebula were panicking near my body, not knowing what had happened or why. 

I needed to return. 

No matter what.

I channeled all the energy of the Dark Dimension I could muster through my Astral Form, causing it to light up with a thick, purplish dark energy.

“Mehsira, Mehsira, Mehsira.”

I called out.

“Mehsira. Mehsira. Mehsira.

Six Times, Do I Invoke,

The Name of Thee,

That came before Six,

At the Dawn, Thy Was,

At the Dusk, Thee Shall Be.

Space I Rend,

Judgment I Call—

The Origin of Beginning—

Arrive at Time’s End.”

My Astral Form trembled.

“Ninth Level…”

“Summon Celestial.”

Something stopped me.

My Astral Form froze in the Void, within the hands of a gargantuan creature. There was no mistaking the creature, or what it was. There was no mistaking who it was. Massive as it stood, it would effortlessly dwarf planets. 

“Peter Parker of Earth, Servant of Dormammu.”

The voice boomed into my head, transmitted, raw and potent, into my skull.

“Great Arishem, the Judge!”

I called out, smiling from ear to ear.

“May I interest you in a bargain?”