The Reality Stone never slept.
Even sealed inside a vibranium containment box, layered with anti-reality anchors, thaumic dampeners, and Scranton Reality Anchors running at maximum output, I could feel it—like a pressure behind the eyes. The Aether didn't rage. It waited.
That should have been my first warning.
Three days after containment was confirmed stable, alarms screamed across Site Command.
Not Foundation alarms.
Alien intrusion alarms.
"Unknown spatial signatures detected," the AI announced, its tone flat and merciless. "Multiple incoming vessels. Non-terrestrial. Technology classification: hostile."
I already knew what this was.
We hadn't just taken the Aether.
We had rung the dinner bell.
The Dark Elves had awakened—just like they did in Thor: The Dark World. Ancient, patient, and very, very angry.
Their ships tore through local space like knives through paper, bypassing conventional defenses with terrifying ease. Black-hole grenades, gravitic lances, reality-shearing cannons—technology so advanced it barely registered as physics anymore.
They weren't here to negotiate.
They were here to reclaim their god.
The Foundation mobilized immediately.
MTF squads deployed in full force, anomalous weapons glowing with unstable energies—products of SCP-914's finest outputs under Doctor Bright's supervision. Reality-disrupting rifles. Causality-inverting mines. Weapons that shouldn't exist, and now did.
It still wasn't enough.
Personnel died by the dozens in the first engagement.
Entire strike teams vanished when localized singularities collapsed inward. Aircraft were torn apart by gravity wells that ignored inertia. I watched feeds cut to static one after another, jaw clenched, hands steady only because panic wouldn't help anyone.
Then the anomalous weapons started to turn the tide.
A Bright-designed rail weapon punched clean through a Dark Elf cruiser, rewriting its internal structure into something that couldn't sustain existence. A squad armed with Fine-Tuned gear erased a boarding party from causality entirely—no bodies, no traces, just absence.
It was brutal.
It was expensive.
And it worked.
By the time the last Dark Elf fell, their ancient warlord reduced to dust beneath overlapping reality collapses, the battlefield was silent. Smoldering. Red with loss.
We had won.
Barely.
We secured everything.
Their ships. Their weapons. Their black hole containment systems—miniaturized singularity generators far beyond anything humanity had dreamed of. All of it was transported under maximum security to Foundation black sites for analysis.
And that was when the next problem became obvious.
Doctor Bright was already buried under his own mountain of projects.
Anomalous weapon production. SCP-914 optimization. Ethics Committee breathing down his neck. Giving him alien hypertechnology on top of that would have been irresponsible.
So I did what I'd been doing since the beginning.
I recruited.
The system responded eagerly, points draining as the acquisition finalized.
Doctor Charles Gears.
One of the Foundation's best minds.
Emotionless. Tireless. Terrifyingly competent.
When he appeared, there was no confusion, no panic—just a brief pause as his memories integrated seamlessly into this reality. To him, chakra anomalies, Infinity Stones, and alien gods were simply… data points.
I granted him Level 4 clearance and placed the entire Dark Elf technology division under his command.
He nodded once.
"I will require unrestricted access to all recovered materials," he said calmly. "Casualty tolerance parameters?"
"As low as possible," I replied.
He considered that.
"Understood. Progress will be slower."
That was Doctor Gears for you.
As the site settled into uneasy calm, I stood alone in containment, watching the vibranium box housing the Reality Stone.
We had power.
Too much power.
And we were running out of time.
One and a half years until the realms aligned again.
One and a half years until the universe noticed us properly.
And judging by how violently it had already responded…
It wasn't going to stop.