Shuri enlarges the stone on the model's forehead and millions of swirling lines connect the stone to the rest of the body. She stares at it for a moment, then starts delicately manipulating the lines.
Banner asks something technical and she responds with something else wording and scientific that Sans doesn't understand. Peter seems to have given up watching altogether and is trying to figure out the technology in the cases next to where they're sitting.
"What do you think?" Peter asks Sans, who shrugs.
"depends on what you want my opinion on. i'd say that human-shaped model is probably supposed to be a thing to make stuff human shaped, but who can say, really?"
Peter grumbles, "you know what I meant."
"do i?"
"Do you?"
Sans grins at Peter. "maybe i do, maybe i don't. maybe my don'ts do and my do's don't."
Peter takes a long look at Sans, considering. "...No idea what you just said there."
"shame. hey, look, there's a fireball in the sky heading in our direction."
"There's a WHAT?" Peter yelps, rushing to the window to squint at the sky. ("Can you keep it down over there?" Shuri hisses at them without taking her eyes off of the holograms.")
Sans follows him at a considerably slower pace and points upwards, where there's a tiny flaming ball steadily growing bigger. "see?"
"...No? Wait—kinda?" Peter gapes at the sky as the fireball gets closer. "I see it! Wow, it's coming really—really quickly—is it going to hit Wakanda?!"
The laboratory door slams open as one of the king's guards rush in, almost yelling, "Shields, my princess. Shields—a meteor—!"
"hey, there's like three more over there."
"What!?" Peter and the guard—Okoye, Sans thinks her name is—nearly shout in unison.
Shuri taps on a hologram with a worried expression. "There, it's up." And, nearly as fast as Sans' shortcut, a giant, transparent blue-white dome blinks into existence.
A dome that reminds Sans a lot of the Barrier. Though this one seems to keep things out instead of in.
And it was not placed a moment too soon: the meteor slams into the ground with a thunder-like thud, shaking the lab and everywhere else all at once.
After the shockwave had cleared and Sans had started to wonder how a meteor that size (taking another look, it looks more like a giant pointy ship) hadn't completely shattered the ground they're standing on and more, another slams down, followed by another, another, and another until finally, it stops.
Ships had landed all around the perimeter of the shield, completely surrounding the country with smoke, flame and destruction. Banner gapes at the smoking objects. "What the…?"
Okoye runs out, yelling to her guards to form a perimeter around the castle while T'Challa pokes his head in the lab.
"How close are you to done?" He asks his sister, who shakes her head.
"Not even close." She tells him, too busy to even form a snarky remark to his very obvious question.
Sans looks back at the ships to see thousands upon thousands of weird alien things pouring from them, charging at the shield with little to no progress. The shield holds strong, but the aliens are still single mindedly bashing it with their weapons anyway.
"hey, look."
Peter groans. "What now—OH, WHAT THE HELL?" He exclaims upon seeing the army bashing the wall. T'Challa comes over to take a look, then immediately rushes back out the door.
"that doesn't look too good." Sans observes without much interest. "hey, if the big alien dude has these shiny rocks that can destroy the universe or something, why isn't he here to take the other shiny rocks himself?"
Banner frowns thoughtfully. "That's a really good question. What if he's trying to wear the defenses down so that he could come in and get the stones without much more of a fight?"
"Go bother my brother with this information, would you?" Shuri grumbles without looking up. "I have enough to deal with as it is." She says offhandedly, but Sans can see how scared she actually is with the shaking of her hands and furrowed eyebrows.
That's the expression of someone who's stressed, but trying to hide it as best as they can because they're supposed to be the responsible one.
An expression Sans is very familiar with.
Anyways, inform the king about information that he probably already knows because he's been talking to Strange and the rest of the random people that were here before they even came here? Sounds like a lot of effort to him, really.
"How are we supposed to get to him?" Peter asks, squinting out the window at the tiny figure of T'Challa, down in the fields right outside the shield.
Sans takes that question as an opportunity. And, with a blink of an eye (or lack thereof, in his case,) he and Peter stand before T'Challa.
The king startles, and with lightning fast reflexes, nearly take their heads off with a swipe with a clawed glove. Fortunately for all, Sans is faster, taking another shortcut just out of reach.
"What—?" T'Challa asks them after a moment of realization. He raises his hand and somehow, the claws retract back into the glove. "How did you just do that?"
"Wow," Peter says, somewhat humorously. "That was the closest I had ever been to dying. Ignoring that other time," he adds when Sans gives him a look.
"that banner guy said something about thanos using this army to weaken your defenses so that he could just scoop the rest of these glorified rocks out of your hand easily." Sans tells T'Challa, completely ignoring the question. "so, i dunno, just don't drop the shield for whatever reason. if you can even do that from here. why would you do that anyway? seems a little counterproductive."
T'Challa looks at him a bit strangely, but thanks Sans and sends the two on their way. And instead of taking a shortcut back to the lab—where Banner and whoever else are probably confused as hell right now—Sans just decides to take a stroll around the Barrier—the, uh…shield.
Aliens smash the thing with their weird looking weapons and each time they do, the shield emits a bright pulse of blue energy and blasts all of them back. But then they just run up and try again.
The shield shows no sign of damage, either.
"Hey, it's a couple of kids." Someone observes from a couple of feet away.
"I know those 'couple of kids,' unfortunately." Someone else grumps. Sans recognizes that voice, which is confirmed to be Strange as he and Peter turn around.
"Rude." Peter says. Strange and his companion, that one mage that Sans had met quite a while ago, walk up towards the two.
"It's you." The mage? Witch? Some person? breathes as she gets closer. "I didn't expect to see you here."
"heya." Sans greets with a wave and a grin. "i didn't expect to be here either."
Peter huffs a laugh. "Does anyone really expect to be in a country with a giant barrier that a bunch of aliens are hammering?"
"Doubt it." Strange agrees. "What are you even doing here? Just taking a stroll around this place?"
"Isn't that what you're doing as well?" Peter fires back. Sans inspects the shield as they start up a conversation. He pokes it experimentally, and surprisingly, his finger goes right through.
He immediately draws it back in as a hammer tries to smash it. The shield shudders, then lets off a shockwave that blasts all the aliens, all around the perimeter, back several meters.
"So what's the plan here?" Peter asks Strange, who shrugs.
"I was just leaving it for the king to decide." He replies noncommittally. "We have two stones in a small area; I'm surprised Thanos hasn't come to collect them himself. None of us are sure that we could hold him off at this rate."
It does seem strange. Either the big bad guy is after something else, or he's just really bad at his villainy. It reminds Sans a bit of some of the books that had washed up in the river, these plastic children's books that survived the water damage. Sans had found them and taken them to read to Papyrus.
The villains in some of these books were hilariously incompetent. Maybe this guy is the same way. Hopefully.
In the distance, Sans suddenly sees someone he recognizes on the other side of the shield.
One of the aliens that had tried to take the green rock back from the other side of the world, the telekinetic one, is barraging—is that even the correct term?—slamming rocks and various other things into the shield. It's floating a distance away in the sky, out of range of the random pulses of energy the shield is emitting.
With one wave of a hand, the alien tears up the landscape, and, several of its own army, and hurls them at the shield with little to no effect.
Three seconds later, a shining ebony spear flies into the shield and for a second, it actually sticks into the thing before it gets blasted back. A more humanoid alien, a woman with black hair, catches the spear as it flies towards her.
Seeing the tiny bit of progress seems to give the alien army more strength and they pummel the shield with vigor.
"Not good." The witch, Wanda, Sans had heard Strange call her, says, with a lot less emotion than what would've been expected. "They made a dent."
"not any other damage so far. they're still taking a crack at it despite the lack of change." Sans jokes while watching the alien with the spear attempt to charge at the shield. She gets caught in the blast before she even reaches it and slams into a tree.
He winces: that looked painful.
Strange watches the telekinetic one with a critical eye. Wanda does the same, but with a much more concerned expression.
She sighs. "It's only a matter of time before they start trying other things."
"Don't jinx it." Peter warns. "Some random thing will probably happen now that you say that."
"Is that really how it works?" Strange looks back at Peter, who shrugs.
"I mean—"
The ground shakes. Peter gives Strange a 'see what I mean?' look before looking elsewhere in a panic as the ground shakes again. Even the shield fizzes out for a split second, but fortunately the alien army seems to have also stopped to look around to take advantage of it before it reappears.
Suddenly, with a sound like a jet flying across the sky, a massive arc of light streaks across the sky and heads straight towards where they're standing.
Each one of them frantically hurry away as it gets closer. Wanda soars away with her strange, red magic, Strange and Sans both teleport out of the way, and Peter is just left to dive to the side as the beam of light slams into the ground, missing him by an inch.