A/N
Hello! This is Intata XVII. Many of my cloned predecessors have come and gone over the time since our last post. Finally! We have found stability! I might last a good bit longer than some of my previous clones! I hope to get more chapters out at a reasonable pace! Woo!
On a more serious note, I did start a pay tre on (search for Intata) Got an original story and such on there (the planning for which has taken up pretty much all my writing time until now). Also an early chapter of this. More on that at the end of the chapter though.
So, Marvel, pseudo-godhood, and a gremlin with an AI daughter, right? Let's see if I still got it.
Recap? This is copy/pasted from the previous chapter, but with the last section added to include the happenings of said chapter.
Nathan Quill, the twin brother to Peter Quill (Star Lord, GoTG), is a reincarnate artificial intelligence expert, and human-Celestial hybrid that learned how to use his father's powers. He gets abducted by space pirates at eight years-old, spends another eight years being a mechanic for said pirates, then another year alone after he steals a spaceship (named the USS M'Dick). During that year he goes to the planet Morag, where he finds the Infinity Stone of Power, and proceeds to jump-start his Celestial abilities.
The next few years after that start off with him fucking off back to Earth, where he joins the Masters of the Mystic Arts, and gets "~Lets do the Time Warp Again~'d" back into a five year-old via Time Stone shenanigans. Spending a lot of time there, he manages to become a recognized Master of the Mystic Arts himself, makes a few friends, and changes some world-views. Then he made like a tree and got the fuck out of there.
Now, Nathan is nearing adulthood for the third time, has spent about five-ish years at Wakanda - screwing with the royal family and learning everything he could about Vibranium and the human body. Nathan basically has an unofficial Ph.D in Biology right now, and could be considered one of the foremost medical professionals in the world - due to sheer knowledge on the subject, and his abilities to reproduce human anatomy via Celestial powers.
Nathan has also accomplished the feat of wolverine-ing himself with Vibranium, as well as creating a fully functioning AI, named 'Alice' with the help of Shuri.
But he still had a good bit of time to kill before the events of the first Iron Man movie, so he dabbled in Mesoamerican blood rituals and the sealing of dead gods.
Relatively par for the course, really.
So after Nathan sees Tony's "I am Iron Man" press conference, he hops over to Tony's place and has a bit of a forced chat. He then - totally consensually, shut up - rips the Arc Reactor out of Tony's chest, heals him up, and then fucks off.
The members of casa de Stark dealt with it.
This is the couple years following:
The first few months of 2010 were simultaneously the most boring and entertaining part of Nathan's life. He spent his time as an observer, only ever registering in the corner of everyone's vision. The guy who triggered a memory, or a stray thought as you walked down the street. A familiar face, with zero placement or recognition.
His monk robes tended to stick out in western society, but it wasn't particularly difficult for him to follow interesting characters around, then disappear into an alley and portal to the other side of town when they weren't looking.
Nathan made a game of it. He would seek out anyone he knew about with a prominent future, and just kept an eye on them in the background. Walk by them while they bought groceries. Stared at them, still as stone, from half a block away, only to disappear into the ether when their eyes combed back over his previous location.
Alexander Pierce, Phil Coulson, Natalia Romanoff, Clint Barton, Peter Parker, Stephen Strange, James Howlett, Charles Xavier (Yes, he found that the X-Men were actually a thing, here), Reed Richards (Specifically. Yes, F4 too, though nothing had given them powers yet), and everyone else he could remember from the MCU.
The most entertaining, however, was by far Nick Fury. The man was the epitome of paranoia. Nick's eyes would lock onto Nathan for minutes at a time, committing to staring contests that never quite allowed for a proper description to form in the man's mind. And thanks to Alice, security cameras would turn, glitch, or enter an update whenever he was near.
One particularly favorite memory of his was standing in line, immediately behind the director of Shield, to buy a coffee. It took an entire twenty minutes for Nick to order his brew, and the barista was utterly terrified. Poor girl. Nathan never did get to order his latte. He would have to go back at some point. He heard they had good beans.
The events of Iron Man 2 occurred. Thankfully without much change, as far as Nathan could remember. Outside of the doom and gloom that Tony might have sunk into, of course. He was much more lively with his new Arc Reactor not killing him slowly. Nathan took it as a win, but otherwise didn't pay all that much attention to it all.
Sometime in June, Thor showed up as well. The Bifrost touching down sent a ripple through the fabric of the cosmos surrounding Earth. Thor saw him clearly as he stood next to Clint on his tower in the camp surrounding Mjolnir. Clint, of course, had no recollection of him.
Nathan managed to have an entire conversation with one of the Shield scientists as they studied the legendary thunder hammer, as well. He handed them various instruments as they talked his ear off. The enchantments on the hammer were fantastically profound, by the way. He could wrap his head around maybe a fifth of them - still, that experience alone expanded his understanding of thunder magics (Yes, thunder, not lightning) significantly.
When asked later, the scientist would wonder about his strangely competent, yet silent, assistant that seemed to appear out of nowhere within the camp. Fury was pissed.
Nathan did manage to wrap his head around the Allspeak enchantment on the hammer. That was by far the most lucrative find in his shenanigans. Many believed it was an inherent skill of the Asgardians, a magical language, or inherent magic. No, it was an enchantment. Simple in construction, strangely powerful in practice. Nathan thought that it might be woven into the normal equipment of the Asgardian garb - a helmet, or perhaps jewelry?
Unclear, but in the end, he managed to write a short essay on it and add it to the Kamar-Taj library. The spell wouldn't help the general learning process, as it didn't alter the being in question's ability to read different languages, just speak them. But good golly did it help with communication in general.
So Nathan made everyone paranoid. Fury was pissed and paranoid. And he learned something new. Overall, 2010 was a good year.
2010 was a weird year.
There was something just off about the air. Almost as if the world tilted a little bit to the left, and everyone was just rolling with it. It didn't help that London was like, totally depressing and the air was all muggy. That magic house with the shield-thingy was also reacting to her presence, so she had to be like, super sneaky. Like a ninja. That was fun.
It helped that more stuff was happening. Like there were at least four different viruses (that sprouted out of nowhere) that tried their darndest to become pandemics. She was feeling a bit less hungry because of those, but golly was that a pain to deal with. So much sneaking around. Hospitals were weirdly harder to sneak around than the shield-thingy. People had been getting suspicious until she faked symptoms and moved away to stay with 'family.'
She shook her head. Those few days of 'symptoms' had been torture. Sure, Mrs. Clarke dropped off a lasagna, but that didn't last more than a few minutes. Who gives sick people lasagna, anyway? Wasn't it supposed to be soup? Well, gift horses and all that. She'd been so hungry, but a new pair of biomass condensers made short work of the local cattle population to make up for it. She felt real bad for the moo-moos. They were so cute, but she was so hungry. Better them than the devastation hunger-induced insanity would bring to everyone around her.
There was also a resurgence of pirates, for whatever reason. In wooden boats. She didn't think the public ever found out about them - ships and all, disappearing down her gullet (the thought made her drool a bit). Pirates weren't people, after all. People were nice. Pirates were mean. She didn't eat people.
The ships though… Well, that made her think of all the wood that Europe had just sitting around. They wouldn't miss a few hundred trees, here and there, would they? That's too much biomass to give up on.
After that, a flat move, a new blouse and sunglasses, and she was a new woman. New neighbors, a scotland hillside, and a lady two doors down with some yummy cancer that she didn't know about. Well, she wasn't satisfied, she would never be that. But she was doing better than her daddy.
Overall, 2010 was weird, but good.
Whatever year it was, kind of sucked, but that was mostly par for the course. Space was an interesting place. You couldn't really get around the daily issues without stubbing a toe here and there. Or, you know, getting hit by a ball of superheated plasma that was aimed to roast your nuts off.
Peter lovingly stroked the shaft - Okay, no. Just, no.
He thrust forward gently, throttling his baby into a - what the fuck, brain? That's worse!?
The Milano, his spaceship, with him at the helm, slipped between glowing bolts of superheated plasma like a majestic dolphin in a storm, dodging thunderbolts. His grip was relaxed on the controls, a slight, smug grin on his face. It was like playing dodgeball with a bunch of children - if the dodgeballs were superheated balls of gas, flying directly at his ass.
He pulled the stick to the left, barrel rolling away from a - was that a torpedo, or a missile? Didn't particularly matter, he surmised, as it flew straight into one of the other alien assholes chasing him.
"Oh my god." Whispered his passenger. "Was that Gildred? Please don't let that be Gildred."
His passenger, or more accurately, his client, was strapped into the copilot seat. Knees to chest, and hyperventilating at every little thing. Had she not been shot at before?
"Who's Gildred?" He asked, in way of pretending to care. "You mind flipping that switch on the consol? The blue one with the little orange dot on it."
She stared at the passing wreckage as they flew through the resulting fireball. "My ex."
Noticeably, she did not flip the switch.
"Why would your ex be in this mess?" He blinked, twisting away from another slew of plasma.
"He's in the guard." Her absent look turned into a glare, directed at him. "And you might have just killed him!"
Peter's whole face scrunched. "Excuse you, I haven't fired a single shot." Yet. He was trying to get away, but these guys were really on his ass.
"Whoever that was is definitely dead though!"
"Well whoever that was should have practiced a bit harder!" He shot back. "Also, please flip that switch." The ship rocked from the shields taking a hit. Can't avoid everything when you're getting shot by a whole planet's defense force.
"I can't believe you!" She huffed. "I hired you to kidnap me, not kill my whole family!"
"Since when were these schmucks your family?! I thought that was just the douche with the tentacle mustache!" The king of said planet, mind, but whatever. He was a douche.
"You were supposed to smuggle me out of this crap. Get me away from a forced marriage, not murder my betrothed!"
"Fucking who?"
"Gildred, you ass! He's dead now, because of you!"
"You don't even know if it was him!" He yelled back over a barrage of missiles - or torpedoes. Whatever they were, they exploded a lot.
He paused. "Does Gilded also have a tentacle mustache?" If so, he was completely befuddled how he managed to outshine that guy.
The night prior was very good for his ego.
"Gildred, you… you fuck. STOP KILLING MY FAMILY!" She screamed as another two ships collided with each other.
"If you haven't noticed, we're currently being shot at. A lot. Please, for the love of everything, flip that switch."
"Fine!" She slammed her whole hand on the consol, flipping like four different switches.
Thankfully, only the lights in the cockpit turned off, as a side effect. She was dangerously close to turning off the shields, he noted.
He would take the win.
"I hope you burn in heck, you murderer!"
Peter blinked, not even registering the next few hits on the shields. "You've been cursing me out this whole time, and can't bring yourself to say 'Hell?'"
"Oh fuck you!"
"There it is."
Whatever year it was back on earth, it sucked.
"That looks entirely too complicated for something so inherently simple." Alice's little holographic figure hovered over Nathan's wrist. Her head tilted to the side, and arms crossed.
"Well, it's definitely giving me a headache." Nathan wiped a bead of sweat from his brow, and repositioned his enchanted metal dye over the red-hot vibranium ingot in front of him. A light tap from a hammer saw the ingot marked with a new, Elder Futhark rune.
Enchanting was an extremely delicate process. Odin made it look easy in the first Thor movie, but the average magic user couldn't just whisper to a hunk of metal and make it disobey the laws of physics. And Nathan certainly couldn't expect to cast a bunch of melted metal into a fully realized, magical weapon without doing all the boring (and mind melting) legwork.
Stormbreaker was bullshit. The dwarves were bullshit.
No, the standard, normal person way of doing it involved a bunch of magical formulas hammered, or carved, into whatever medium the wizard was trying to make magical. Then they would imbue it with power, and submerge it in whatever raw spell they were trying to set into it for a stupid amount of time.
Nathan had, arguably, taken the masochistic route and was trying something new.
It was basically a hodge-podge mix of Japanese, Norse/Asgardian, and Greek methods that he hoped would allow him to layer a whole bunch of enchantments into one tool.
The Japanese made an art of setting their spells into each layer of a folded metal. Usually that would entail casting the same enchantment on each layer to cement it into place, making it many times more powerful than usual. The problem with the ancient custom was that the quality of metal they had access to was actual dogshit compared to others. Their swords needed that folding process to be pure enough to not fall apart in the first place, and their spells were mostly meant to increase that wonky sturdiness.
The Norse and Asgardian practice was more brute force than that. Strong words, strong letters, and a stronger medium combined together to bend reality into whatever pretzel the maker wanted. It was poetry, literally, that brought them power.
The Greek method could be reduced down to being loud, pretending you know what you're doing, and hoping for the best. Nathan identified with that, and threw it in for the hell of it.
So there he was, in his cordoned off little workshop, somewhere in the middle of Colorado. Probably. It was probably Colorado. He wasn't actually sure, since he just picked a mountain in the middle of the US, dug a hole, and started setting up.
Nathan had styled his underground lair as close to a Greek temple as he could. Columns lined the walls, reliefs of his life up until that point carved into the pediment, and a massive, chryselephantine statue of himself looking dispassionately down at the entrance. The statue also held a bowl that was completely filled with a mix of his blood and snake venom, and was lined with like, four hundred sticks of incense.
The actual workshop portion of the Temple of Nathan was what held the altar, which was just a large anvil lined with ancient Greek poetry (putting to words the same tales that were on the pediment), and inlaid with orichalcum filigree. Nathan was particularly proud of the 'hearth' that stood in the center of the room, which doubled as a furnace for the forge. It took up most of the room, was made entirely out of obsidian, and housed a blue, raging, magical flame.
Hephaestus better be jealous of this shit.
So yeah, the 'god' that Nathan was imbibing his craftsmanship's name with, was himself. Narcissistic? Probably. Did he think it would work? Eh. It was definitely obnoxious enough to make the ancient Greeks cry, though - which is what he was going for.
Future archeologists would be very confused.
Nathan studied the finished Allspeak enchantment as he let the ingot of vibranium cool. He was letting each enchantment time to take hold and really dig itself into the metal before he folded it in the fire and started with the next.
Alice's hologram made a show of walking on the metal, staring deeply into each groove, only to nod to herself and move on to the next in line. The enchantment itself was really just two, simple sentences written in runes: "If you speak, I hear. When I speak, you listen."
"Such a wonderfully concise, and disturbingly forceful bit of magic, this." Alice quipped.
"I know, right?" Nathan laughed. "I can't tell if it was on purpose, or if Asgardian ego is just that pervasive."
Alice glanced up at him, deadpan, then around at the Temple of Nathan without saying a word.
"Oi."
"What?" She asked with a small, cheshire smile. "I didn't say anything."
"Don't sass me, young lady." He pointed a finger at her.
She adopted a hurt expression, and covered her heart with her hand. "I would never!" She sassed.
Nathan chuckled. "Alright, alright. I get it." He looked around the room, himself. "This was probably a bit much." Something was happening because of the temple, though. He could feel that much, but he wasn't sure if it was actually helping the process, or doing something entirely separate. This was his tenth attempt, and the feeling seemed to reach a crescendo. It had started around attempt number three, picked up again on the sixth, then went absent until this latest one - and it came back with an audible hum in the air. Low, but tangible.
"How did we want to phrase the next one, again?" He asked, frowning back at the ingot.
"'Through space and star, through obstacle and foe, may thee find home in my hand.'" Alice recited.
Nathan hummed. "'Thee' seems a little indistinct."
"You said you were making an ax, right? Perhaps 'this blade,' or 'this ax' would work?"
"More of a tomahawk, I think. Something I can throw, but yeah. Let's go with 'blade.'"
It took the rest of the day to get all the enchantments hammered into the ingot, and went deep into the following morning to shape it into its final form. Nathan was caked in sweat, and exhausted as he stared down at his creation. It was still red-hot, so it would need to cool, a handle needed to be fitted onto it, and the edge would need to be sharpened before he could actually use it - but the enchantments were holding.
It was a tomahawk. About half an inch thick, and only about the length of his elbow to his fingertips. Barely more than an ax blade with a handle sticking out of it, and the handle was just a suggestion at the moment, as it was only represented by the full tang of the piece. There was no mark on its surface either, no visible runes or evidence of its enchantment, as each one had been folded into the metal during its making. He would be fixing that now.
"Time to christen this bitch." He declared.
Alice huffed.
"Any names in mind?" He turned to his digital daughter.
She hummed. "What language are you planning to use? All the enchantments were done in Elder Futhark and runes, except the paper seals that burned away on it in the furnace."
That was the Japanese method of increasing purity and strength. Purity wasn't really a problem, as he had conjured the brick of vibranium from nothing, but slapping a paper tag on the ingot while it heated up between folds wasn't a particularly difficult thing to do, and it definitely didn't hurt.
Nathan twisted the tomahawk in the air with a pair of tongs, looking for any imperfections. "I'm thinking Greek." He glanced at the temple. "So far, all the enchantment process included from that is the general ambiance of the location. The identity should fit the theme."
She looked up to him blankly. "It's a tomahawk. Made with Japanese and Norse processes, in the center of a fake Greek temple. Father, there is no theme."
He nodded smugly back at her. "So it has to be ridiculous, and egotistical."
She giggled at him. "So something like, 'Αστέρσχίζτέρ,' then?
Nathan blinked, and laughed out loud. "That's so stupid, it's perfect!"
"I was joking!" She hastily interjected.
"Too late! Already stamped!" It was true, he had already formed the dye with the name embossed on it in full, and hammered it into the butt of the ax.
Immediately, Nathan could feel the previous crescendo of whatever-it-was in the temple snap. The hearth's blue, magical fire shifted tones to deeper shade, and the torches that lined the colonnade burst with the same hue. Then the statue of himself's eyes gleamed in an unnatural, and powerful gaze as it fucking moved under its own power, and lowered the bowl of blood and snake venom to the ground.
"Uh… what the fuck?"
Alice didn't bother repeating the sentiment, but Nathan could tell she wanted to. "I… Father, I think it wants you to quench the ax in there."
Nathan couldn't blink even if he wanted to. Eyes glued to the statue. "Huh."
He did as his daughter bade, and cautiously moved forward. As the weapon submerged into the viscous liquid, he heard a hiss and a whirlpool formed. All of it, over the course of three seconds, every last drop was sucked into the vibranium tomahawk as if a black hole had opened in the center of the bowl.
Around its unfinished handle, the blood and venom solidified. Crystallized, and hardened into what looked like a dark, red wood with slight green highlights.
Nathan stared numbly at it for another second before lifting it out.
Then the goddamn statue returned to its previous position, and spoke.
"Starsplitter is born. May He rend the Sea and Sky. May He fell the Light and Dark. May He reign and tear the Fabric asunder."
The… blueness of the room died down as the torches and hearth returned to their normal colors. The weird feeling that entombed the temple dispersed, and the fucking statue went back to being a fucking statue.
"What the fuck?!" Alice whispered in a sort of broken incredulity.
What the fuck, indeed.
A/N
Started a pay tre on, like I said earlier. Search for Intata, and my page will show up. I've got an original work going on over there (which is what it's for), but I will also be offering early chapters for all my on-going stories there, as well. This one included. Meaning, yes, there's another new chapter of Godhood: for Dummies up on that page.
The original work is called "Fogwalker" and is set in a very colorful fantasy world with magical powers and stuff. It's got a sassy narrator too, who is very fun to write. I've written like… 40 drafts of this thing before finally settling on a path. Now that the planning is basically done, I can spread my mind around again. Expect more chapters of G:fD. I'm trying to stick to one chapter a week from now on, but work is currently kicking my ass. This whole thing is an attempt to quit my job and do this full time, if you haven't figured it out. In which case, I'll probably be able to to a bit better than one a week. Here's to hoping that I'm good enough to warrant that.
Check it out, and see if you're interested.
Also, if you're interested in a discord server with like, a billion writers and readers, take a gander at this:
discord . gg / elibrary
Anyway, hope you enjoyed the chapter. I've still got way too much planned for this thing to let it drop forever.
Review. Now. Do it.
Please?