The Shaw Farm - Smallville, Kansas
Clark settled into the farmhouse seamlessly.
Tina took to mothering the alien infant instantly.
She had ample experience, and she excelled at it.
But Ernst wasn't going to live like a normal person, isolated in the American Midwest.
He excavated a massive, subterranean bunker beneath the cornfields.
At its core, he installed a permanent spatial door.
It was a direct, unbreakable tether back to Skull Island.
At any moment, they could step through it and interact with their old mutant allies and the island's magical ecosystem.
Security, however, was Ernst's primary concern.
Standard alarms were useless. Kyle and Clark would eventually go to school, play outside, and make friends.
They couldn't live in a vault.
Ernst brought in the heavy hitters.
Ghost and Simba.
Ghost was a one-man army.
His hive mind now controlled over twenty thousand soul clones.
Five thousand of those were capable of manifesting as intangible, lethal specters.
Ernst assigned Ghost the ultimate task: babysitting Clark.
The spectral clones acted as a shadow guard. During peaceful moments, invisible hands would straighten the infant's blankets.
In times of danger, a legion of ghosts could manifest instantly, tearing an assassin apart in a microsecond.
For his eldest son, Kyle, Ernst deployed Simba.
The dog had spent years gorging on the magical ley lines beneath the ancient castle.
Simba's raw physical prowess now rivaled Ernst's own baseline strength.
Combined with the beast's spatial devouring abilities, Simba was an apex predator.
Ernst quietly doubted he could easily retreat if the dog ever turned hostile.
But there was a logistical problem.
Excessive energy absorption had caused Simba to mutate.
The dog was now seven feet tall at the shoulder.
A monstrous hound of that size would trigger a military response in Kansas.
Ernst spent days in the lab.
He forged a complex, continuous shrinking rune matrix into the beast's collar.
It compressed Simba's mass, locking his height at a manageable two feet.
He was still massive for a dog, but he no longer looked like a kaiju.
Ernst wanted to shrink him further, but the beast's magical resistance made it nearly impossible.
Then, there was Tina.
Ernst had briefly considered assigning a mutant bodyguard to protect her.
He abandoned the idea entirely. It was insulting to her capabilities.
On the surface, Tina appeared to be a delicate, stunningly beautiful mortal woman.
She was submissive to Ernst and soft-spoken.
Underestimating her based on that facade was a fatal error.
Tina possessed a magical physique and a terrifyingly pure soul.
Ernst had tested her magical affinity. The results were staggering.
He taught her the arcane arts. Within a few short years, her raw magical output rivaled the likes of Albus Dumbledore and Voldemort.
She was a walking nuclear deterrent.
But Ernst didn't stop at spellcraft.
He put her through physical conditioning.
Her physiology reached its peak, rivaling Captain America's sheer durability and strength.
She was a flawless, lethal magic-warrior, proficient in both catastrophic long-range spells and devastating close-quarters combat.
Beyond her combat prowess, her pure physique held a unique allure.
It allowed for ancient, dual cultivation.
Ernst practiced this secret technique with her.
During their intimacy, Ernst could feel his own vast reserves of magic being actively purified by her.
It was a perfect loop of pleasure and ascending strength.
Ernst embraced the aesthetic of an ordinary farmer, but his methods were anything but ordinary.
He refused to grow standard crops for pennies.
After mapping the topography and deep subterranean aquifers, Ernst deployed cutting-edge technology.
He constructed a massive, climate-controlled ecological park hidden on the farm's acreage.
He dedicated the space to a genetically modified, highly specialized grape.
To ensure absolute perfection, he drilled ten thousand meters into the Earth's crust.
He tapped a primordial vein, altering the pressure and magnetic fields to generate "active water."
Inspired by the sacred springs of Kunlun Mountain, this deep-earth water carried immense, life-giving properties.
He used it exclusively to irrigate the vines.
The result was staggering.
He synthesized a wine of unparalleled nutritional and magical density.
The only drawback was the yield. The active water was scarce, limiting production to a maximum of five hundred bottles a year.
For a shrewd businessman like Ernst, five hundred was too many.
He adhered to the absolute law of artificial scarcity. He locked away the bulk of the vintage for personal use.
He released exactly fifty bottles a year onto the global shadow market.
He branded it the "Elixir of Life."
It wasn't marketing hyperbole.
The wine genuinely rolled back cellular aging, purging toxins and extending human lifespans.
Kerry handled the distribution through exclusive, highly vetted channels.
The global elite engaged in a bloodbath of bidding.
At a private auction in Monaco, a single bottle hammered at ten million dollars.
When Tina heard the price, she accidentally dropped a bottle on the kitchen floor.
She stared at the shattered glass in horror.
She had casually drunk seven or eight bottles over the past month.
She wept at the $80 million she had gulped down.
Ernst just laughed.
To the ultra-wealthy, it wasn't a beverage.
It represented ultimate status and the conquest of death itself.
Ernst had arrived in Kansas with limited funds, intending to live simply.
The first vintage instantly turned him back into a mega-millionaire, restoring his absolute financial freedom.
But Ernst's priority was his eldest son.
Kyle was enrolled in the local school.
His CPH4-enhanced brain didn't need the academics, but he needed the social camouflage.
He needed to understand normal humans.
Clark, however, was too young and too dangerous for the public.
He stayed home under his mother's watchful eye.
The Kryptonian's terrifying biology began to manifest early.
Before his first birthday, Clark exhibited monstrous strength.
He casually lifted a solid oak dining table with one hand while searching for a dropped toy.
His senses were a nightmare.
His hyper-sensitive hearing picked up a heartbeat a mile away.
The ambient, chaotic noise of the planet kept him awake, screaming in agony.
Ernst went to work.
He constructed a bespoke, lead-lined, vibranium-baffled sleep chamber in the basement.
It offered absolute, dead silence, allowing the infant to finally rest.
During the day, Ernst carefully exposed Clark to controlled levels of noise and environmental stress, forcing the alien physiology to adapt to Earth without breaking the boy's mind.
One afternoon, Ernst was relaxing on the porch, sipping a ten-million-dollar glass of the Elixir of Life.
Suddenly, his left wrist vibrated violently.
"Logan," Ernst murmured, his eyes snapping open.
He checked the heavy, tactical watch.
"Report," Ernst commanded.
A holographic light screen projected upward from the watch face, linking directly to the Red Queen's localized subroutine inside Logan's watch.
The screen displayed a live, first-person feed.
Logan was sleeping peacefully on a retro waterbed. A young woman lay next to him.
But as Logan's eyes opened, Ernst saw the shift.
The feral, carefree glint of the 1970s Wolverine vanished.
It was replaced by the exhausted, traumatized stare of a man who had lived through an apocalyptic war.
The consciousness from the decimated future had successfully bridged the timeline.
Logan stumbled out of bed, staring at his un-grayed hands in absolute disbelief.
The bedroom door was suddenly kicked open.
Three mob enforcers stormed in. They were the woman's bodyguards, demanding answers from the mutant who had compromised their boss's daughter.
"It wasn't me," Logan grunted, his voice thick with future-shock.
"It was the guy who was just here."
Predictably, the thugs didn't buy the excuse. They drew weapons.
A fierce, brutal brawl erupted.
Logan moved with a terrifying, seasoned precision.
He dismantled the enforcers in seconds, leaving them bleeding on the shag carpet.
He grabbed his clothes, stole a set of car keys, and walked out with absolute confidence.
Watching the hologram fade, Ernst swirled the red wine in his glass.
A cold, calculating smile spread across his face.
The temporal fracture had occurred.
The plot of Days of Future Past had officially begun.
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