Author's Note: If you open an older issue of the Amazing Spider-Man or another comic written by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and look for that little box in the bottom of the page that tells you the author, you'll see something alone the lines of, "Written by Stan 'the Man' Lee and the fantastic Jack Kirby," or something else tinged with Tony Stark's ego and humor, penned by the legendary creators themselves. This is the reason for my dedication.
Dedication: For the marvelous Stan Lee and the incredible Jack Kirby. Thank you for gifting our world with another.
Prologue
There's always something scrawled in the margins of a notebook, of a story. Half-formed ideas, thoughts, inspirations. . .
But this margin isn't leftover paper and scrapped notions. No, this margin is something else: a parallel universe birthed by time travel, branching apart from the trunk of the world tree.
We saw the endgame. We watched fate pull strings cruelly. But there's an entire universe waiting to be explored. An entire universe where the Avengers didn't succeed - where the Decimation is yet to occur.
Think of the Endgame as the story and of this as the untold one unfurling, behind the scenes -
or rather, in the margins.
The year is 2023 in the story, Dimension Terra-1. Dimension Terra-2, the margins, haven't been created just yet.
A twenty-two-year-old Chinese woman is walking in the unusually quiet streets of New York City. It's early in the morning, perhaps six. The air is cool and crisp. The sun is peeking its glorious face up over the tower-speckled skyline. It's a beautiful spring day.
The woman's name is Anemone Song. She lost her twin brother to osteosarcoma when she was fourteen and her mother in the Black Order's attack five years before. Her classmates from her old Queens high school disintegrated when the Avengers failed then fell apart. She now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, struggling through each day like it's a battle.
She's brilliant in nanotechnology, earning her an internship at Stark Industries where she invents, doing things that have never been done before.
Presently, she's walking to the shuttle, which will take her within walking distance of the Avengers compound where she works. The day is ordinary and she returns home that evening. The next day is Sunday, so she takes the day off and goes for a walk in Central Park.
She sits on a bench facing a pond and watches the geese squawk and the water ripple. She's thinking about how it might be possible to emulate gills in an Iron Man suit or create a force field when the suit goes underwater so that the wearer can breathe and the water won't damage the technology.
It seems like a perfectly normal day.
The moment she thinks this, everything is gone, sucked into a whirlwind of darkness and mist and echoing voices.
...
A man jogging in Central Park passes a young Asian woman staring listlessly at a pond's gently undulating waters as if in a trance. He continues his run, before realizing who the woman was: Anemone Song, the nanotechnologist. He turns back, wanting to ask her about her inventions.
But when the bench appears in his vision again, the woman isn't alone. She's standing now before another Asian girl who's dressed in black and armed to the teeth. But the oddest thing is that he could have sworn the two were nearly identical.
The girl in black seizes the woman, pressing a handkerchief against her mouth. Probably chloroform, the jogger thinks as the woman goes limp.
"Hey!" he shouts against his better judgement, spotting the girl's sword after he blurts this. Crap, his mind screams as the girl advances, the woman slung over one shoulder, sword hilt seeming to glare at him from the other. She's gonna kill me! He tries to run, but his feet won't move. Glowing blue vines spiral around his ankles, trapping him as the girl draws closer.
"Hey," she whispers. She lifts a finger and taps his forehead. He vaguely feels her cool touch and the receding vines. His eyes roll back in his head. "This never happened," the girl tells him soothingly. "You were taking a run in the park. You stopped to watch the geese." Her voice is a calming mantra repeating in his head.
"I was taking a run in the park," he repeated. "I stopped to watch the geese."
"Good boy," the girl tells him as his head lolls to the side a bit. And then she's gone in a flash of blue.
The jogger stumbles on, his mind gradually clearing.
Any remnants of his encounter are gone when the dust begins to swirl around him. He stops, terrified. The dust is coming alive, taking shape-
Forming people.
Tears come to his eyes as he sees the form of his old girlfriend stumble toward him. She's confused, too, but they smile as they embrace and their lips crash together.
Earth has been avenged.
But in another universe, somewhere in the infinity of the multiverse, vengeance has not yet been claimed, the world has not yet been restored to its unbalanced, imperfect self.
In another universe, the fight is just beginning.
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