After the initial surge of excitement faded, I did something that has kept me alive through two lives and now several centuries of power.
I stopped.
I checked the numbers again. The data. The cycles. The alignments.
And then I realized something uncomfortable.
We were pushing it.
Not recklessly—but close. Close enough that a single miscalculation could turn a controlled operation into a disaster involving cosmic forces we were not yet ready to confront. After re‑running my models and comparing them with mythological convergence records, the conclusion was clear.
We had approximately a year and a half before the Nine Realms aligned strongly enough to allow stable access to the pocket dimension housing the Reality Stone, also known as the Aether.
Too early, and the barrier would reject us.Too late, and the opportunity would vanish.
That narrow window meant we had to act carefully—and decisively.
I immediately contacted Julius and The Watcher.
The system chat flickered to life, and within moments, the three of us were aligned. Julius handled force projection and containment logistics. The Watcher handled secrecy, misinformation, and the quiet removal of anyone who got too curious in the wrong direction.
Together, we committed a significant portion of Foundation resources.
Not enough to expose ourselves.
Enough to ensure success.
My advantage was simple—and irreplaceable.
I remembered the future.
In my past life, I had watched Thor: The Dark World. Not casually. Not once. I remembered the scenes. The environment. The strange way gravity twisted. The exact kind of place where Jane Foster would one day stumble into the Aether by accident.
So we went there.
The exact same location.
At this point in history, it was nothing special. Quiet land. Cold stone. No legends yet. No ruins worth noting. That made it perfect. We established a concealed forward base beneath the surface, reinforced with vibranium framework, telekill alloy bracing, and layered magical suppression fields.
Then we waited.
Weeks passed.
Then months.
My spatial‑distortion detectors hummed softly day and night, mapping fluctuations that were invisible to everyone else. The readings rose and fell like a breathing thing—close, but not close enough.
The realms brushed against each other but did not yet overlap.
Still, we tested.
We sent D‑Class personnel through the weak points as they appeared. One by one. Carefully monitored. Tethered to reality by every means we had available.
Most returned disoriented. Some injured. A few traumatized.
None reached the pocket dimension.
Until one did.
Hours after his insertion, alarms began screaming across the base. Reality twisted. The air thickened. Space folded in on itself like wet parchment.
Then the man reappeared.
He collapsed onto the stone floor, gasping, convulsing—and wrapped around him like living blood was a slow, pulsing red energy.
The Aether.
The Reality Stone had chosen a host.
Every system flagged maximum threat. The energy reacted violently to proximity, to intent, to observation. I could feel it resisting containment, warping probability around itself.
We immediately cleared the area.
No one touched him.
I already knew what the Aether did to its host. It did not grant power freely. It consumed life to express itself. Jane Foster had survived only because of circumstances we did not intend to replicate.
Heroism is inefficient.
Containment is not.
We transferred the host to a small, isolated temporary base—sealed, shielded, and removed from all critical infrastructure. The chamber was lined with vibranium, reinforced with telekill alloy, and inscribed with stabilizing runes to limit reality distortion.
The man was alive.
Barely.
And then we did something simple.
We forced the Aether to expend power.
Controlled stimuli. Spatial stressors. Reality fluctuations introduced in measured doses. Each time the Aether reacted—each time it rewrote physics to defend itself—it drained more from the host.
The man screamed less with each manifestation.
His life force thinned.
I felt no remorse.
This was not cruelty.
This was procedure.
Eventually, the inevitable happened.
The host died.
The moment his life ended, the Aether erupted outward in a violent surge of red energy—warping the chamber for a fraction of a second before collapsing inward, condensing into its true form.
Unbound.
Contained.
"Now," I said calmly.
The containment box was already prepared.
Forged entirely from pure vibranium, layered internally with telekill alloy filaments, reinforced with both magical and technological dampeners. The interior was designed to be dimensionally inert—denying the Reality Stone the ability to rewrite its own prison.
We sealed it.
The Aether struck the walls once.
Then fell silent.
For a long moment, no one spoke.
I stepped forward, careful not to touch the container directly, and looked at it with a measured sense of triumph.
One of the six fundamental forces of existence now belonged to the SCP Foundation.
I issued orders immediately.
Secure transport. Maximum secrecy. No records outside O5 clearance. Site‑01 containment protocols.
Julius acknowledged without hesitation.
The Watcher was already rewriting history.
As the base began dismantling itself, erasing its own existence, I allowed myself one private thought.
This wasn't just about power.
This was proof.
Proof that gods, heroes, and destiny itself could be outmaneuvered.
And this was only the first stone.
Five more awaited us.