The Blackwood Estate, Outskirts of London
The portal jump ended not with a bang, but with a soft, vacuum-sealed pop of displaced air.
The violent, tropical humidity of the Pacific vanished instantly, severed as if by a guillotine.
It was replaced by the smell of beeswax, old paper, and the damp, cloying chill of an English autumn.
They arrived in the center of the drawing room of a sprawling manor.
The room was a testament to Victorian excess.
Dark mahogany paneling lined the walls, absorbing the gloom.
Heavy velvet drapes were pulled tight against the windows, but through the gap, the thick, yellow soup of the London fog could be seen rolling over manicured gardens.
It was a supreme irony. A joke that only Ernst was privy to.
Here he was, a Major General of the Third Reich, a man whose signature authorized the movement of Panzer divisions and the allocation of concentration camp labor, standing in a multi-million pound estate in the heart of enemy territory.
He was less than thirty miles from Churchill's bunker.
He had purchased the property three years ago, before the war truly ignited, through a labyrinth of shell companies, Swiss trusts, and Cayman Island holding firms.
To the British land registry and the prying eyes of the neighbors, this was the ancestral home of a reclusive, eccentric philanthropist named Lord Blackwood, who was currently "abroad for his health."
To Ernst, it was Safe House Alpha.
"Money," Ernst murmured, walking to a crystal decanter sitting on a silver tray.
He poured himself a generous measure of brandy.
The amber liquid swirled, catching the dim light of the fireplace that had been lit in anticipation of his arrival.
"It opens doors that armies cannot. Panzers can take territory, but gold? Gold buys the silence of the land itself."
He took a sip. It was a 1920 vintage. Smooth, burning pleasantly on the way down.
The estate wasn't just luxury; it was a fortress masked as a manor.
Beneath the Persian rugs lay reinforced steel plating.
Behind the oil paintings were surveillance cams.
The staff were hand-picked mercenaries and intelligence operatives, unaware of Ernst's true identity as a Nazi scientist but fiercely loyal to the exorbitant paycheck that appeared in their accounts every month.
Ernst glanced toward the hallway.
He could hear the faint, muffled sounds of the researchers Kerry had evacuated from the island being ushered down the servants' stairs.
They were being "settled" into the hidden sub-basements.
Ernst felt a flicker of cold pragmatism.
Those men had seen the Tesseract technology.
They had seen Azazel transform.
They knew too much.
"They will be comfortable?" Ernst asked, though the question was rhetorical.
"They will be... secure," a voice answered from the shadows.
"They will never leave this estate alive, Master Ernst."
Ernst nodded, satisfied. He turned his attention to Azazel.
The demon was standing by the fireplace, looking out of place among the chintz armchairs and porcelain vases.
He was still glowing.
A faint, rhythmic blue bioluminescence pulsed beneath his red skin, tracing the intricate, tribal lines of the runes that had been burned into his flesh.
It looked like he had a galaxy trapped beneath his epidermis.
"We have a problem," Ernst noted, circling him slowly, glass in hand.
"Schmidt isn't blind. He is paranoid. If you go back to the Alps looking like a neon sign, he will know. He will know we accessed the Tesseract's full potential."
Azazel looked at his hands.
He flexed his fingers, watching the blue light flare and dim with his heartbeat.
"I cannot turn it off," Azazel rumbled.
"It is not a switch. It is part of my biology now. The energy... it flows through the blood. It is the blood."
"Then we lie," Ernst said, a wicked, calculating glint entering his eyes.
He took another sip of brandy, the plan forming instantly in his mind.
"We tell him an experiment failed. We tell him the 'blue glow' is cellular decay. Radiation sickness. A byproduct of your unstable physiology rejecting the environment."
Ernst stepped closer, poking Azazel in the chest.
"You act weak. You cough. You move slowly. You make him believe you are dying, rotting from the inside out."
Azazel blinked, his yellow eyes narrowing. His tail flicked with irritation.
"I am a warlord of the Neyaphem," Azazel growled.
"And you want me to play the dying dog?"
"Exactly," Ernst said, his voice dropping to a whisper.
"A dying dog is ignored. A dying dog is not a threat to a man like Schmidt. It lowers his guard. It makes him arrogant."
Ernst smiled, and it was a look that matched the demon's own cruelty.
"And when the time comes... when he turns his back on the cripple..."
Ernst mimed a knife slash across the throat, a quick, brutal motion.
Azazel stared at him for a moment, and then a low, dark chuckle bubbled up from his chest.
"Deception," Azazel mused.
"I like it. Understood. I shall cough until he offers me a lozenge."
The Study
An hour later, the heavy oak doors of the study opened.
Kerry entered.
The transformation was seamless.
He had traded his butler's tuxedo for the tweed three-piece suit of a respectable British gentleman.
He looked like a banker, or a lawyer, the kind of man who belonged in a high-backed leather chair at a private club.
"The researchers are secured in Sector 4, Master Ernst," Kerry reported, closing the door softly behind him.
"Good," Ernst said.
He was sitting behind the massive oak desk, surrounded by walls of books—first editions, scientific journals, and occult grimoires.
"Now, regarding the primary objectives. Report."
Ernst leaned forward, the light from the desk lamp reflecting off his glasses.
"Give me the numbers on Project: LUCY."
Kerry walked over and opened a thick, leather-bound ledger.
He placed it in front of Ernst.
"We have established twelve new maternity hospitals across Europe and South America under the 'Foundation' initiative," Kerry explained, his finger tracing the columns of data.
"The screening process is underway. We are targeting high-risk pregnancies in war-torn areas where documentation is... loose."
"And the synthesis?"
"We are administering the synthetic hormonal triggers to selected candidates," Kerry continued.
"Simulating the distress signals that cause the biological production of CPH4."
"And the yield?" Ernst asked, his voice tight.
"Low," Kerry admitted, a frown creasing his forehead.
"We have extracted less than twenty grams of pure CPH4 in two years. The extraction process is incredibly delicate. We have to ensure the mothers produce enough for the fetus first, skimming only the excess. If we take too much, the infant dies, and the mother goes into septic shock."
Ernst frowned, drumming his fingers on the desk.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
"Twenty grams," he muttered.
"It's not enough. I need at least a hundred to reach the threshold. I need a sustained dose."
CPH4.
It was a substance he remembered vividly from a movie in his past life—Lucy.
A synthetic version of a growth hormone released in minuscule amounts at the sixth week of pregnancy.
It was the atomic bomb of biology.
In the movie, it unlocked the brain's full processing power.
It allowed the user to control their own metabolism, then matter, then time itself.
In this reality, it was a theoretical substance, unnamed by science.
But Ernst knew the chemical formula. He knew what it could do.
In a world of mutants, gods, and super-soldiers, he was still just a man.
A smart man, yes, but a mortal one.
He needed an edge.
He needed his mind to be a supercomputer.
He needed to process the Tesseract's equations, the serum's variables, and the magical theorems of the East simultaneously.
"Expand the program," Ernst ordered, closing the ledger with a snap.
"Open more clinics. War zones. Impoverished areas. Places where people don't ask questions about free healthcare. Go to the favelas in Brazil. Go to the slums of Calcutta."
He looked up at Kerry, his eyes cold and devoid of empathy.
"I want that hundred grams before the war ends."
"Yes, sir," Kerry noted it down, his face impassive.
He had served the Hellfire Club long enough to leave his conscience at the door.
"And the second matter?" Kerry asked, turning the page.
"The 'London Anomaly'?"
Kerry looked up, visible frustration in his eyes.
"Master, I have had teams scanning London for months. We've swept every inch of the city with the gravitational sensors you designed. We have bribed sewer workers, subway engineers, and historians."
He sighed.
"We found nothing. No energy spikes. No radiation. Are you sure...?"
"I am sure," Ernst cut him off sharply.
He stood up and walked to a large, antique globe standing in the corner of the room.
It was a masterpiece of cartography, mapping a world that was currently burning.
"Kerry, imagine the universe as a series of plates spinning on poles," Ernst said, giving the globe a violent spin.
"They drift. They wobble. But every few millennia, the poles align. The Nine plates stack on top of each other like beads on a string."
He reached onto the desk and picked up a silver letter opener.
He pierced the air near the United Kingdom on the spinning globe.
"It's called the Convergence. The alignment of the Nine Realms."
Ernst's eyes were distant, recalling the plot of Thor: The Dark World.
"The next full alignment isn't for ninety years," he murmured.
"But the fault lines are already there. The scar tissue in reality. The walls between dimensions are thinnest here, in London. Specifically, Greenwich."
Kerry looked bewildered. He adjusted his glasses.
"Ninety years? Master, why are we looking for something that won't happen for a century? By the time this 'Convergence' happens, we will be dust."
"Because," Ernst said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper.
'The Aether is hidden in the cracks,' he thought. 'The Reality Stone. Malekith's weapon. Bor hid it deep, but he hid it where the walls were weak.'
"If we can find the frequency of the fault line now," Ernst said aloud, "we don't have to wait for the alignment. We can break in."
He turned to Kerry.
"Azazel can pick the lock."
Ernst didn't tell Kerry the truth—that he knew this because he had watched a movie in a previous life.
To Kerry, Ernst was simply a genius, a savant who calculated celestial mechanics in his sleep.
"Focus your scans on Greenwich," Ernst commanded, pointing the letter opener at the map.
"Specifically the Old Royal Naval College. Ignore the radiation sensors. They are useless here."
"Then what are we looking for?"
"Gravitational anomalies," Ernst said.
"Look for physics misbehaving. Birds flying in circles. Rain falling upwards. Objects floating for seconds before dropping. Trucks that seem lighter than they should be."
He drove the point home.
"Find me the crack in the world, Kerry. Before the Asgardians do."
Kerry nodded slowly, suppressing his doubts. The boy had never been wrong before.
"As you wish, Master. I will redeploy the teams to Greenwich immediately."
Kerry bowed and exited the room, leaving Ernst alone with the silence of the manor.
Ernst walked to the window.
He pulled back the heavy velvet drape just an inch.
Below him, the fog swirled.
In the distance, the London skyline was a jagged silhouette of black against a dark grey sky.
The city was blacked out, hiding from the Luftwaffe bombers that his own countrymen were flying.
He was playing a dangerous game.
He was hunting for Infinity Stones under the nose of the Ancient One in Kamar-Taj and Odin in Asgard.
He was collecting neuro-enhancers harvested from the desperate.
He was playing Hydra against itself, stealing their resources to build his own empire.
He smiled, and his reflection in the dark glass smiled back.
"Let them play checkers," he whispered to the sleeping city.
"I'm building the board."
——
Authors Note:
I have analyzed the physics of 'Writer Motivation.'
It turns out, my typing speed is directly correlated to the number of shiny blue rocks (Power Stones) in my inventory.
200 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter
10 reviews = 1 bonus Chapter