SHIELD Headquarters.
"What happens to the waste?" Barton asked the question nobody wanted to answer. "When you prune a branch... where does it go?"
"It doesn't go anywhere," Fury said, his voice cold. "It stops existing. The people, the planets, the history. Gone."
"Like emptying the Recycle Bin on a computer," Hill added. "Data deletion."
The room was silent. The existential dread was palpable. They were fighting Hydra, aliens, and gods... but they were doing it on a stage that could be dismantled at any moment by an unseen stagehand.
"We need to know the rules," Fury stated. "What triggers a Pruning? Is it a person? An event? A choice?"
"If we know the rules," Natasha said, "we can survive. We can stay on the 'Sacred Timeline' until we're strong enough to break it."
Queens. The Bedroom.
Gwen Stacy sat on her bed, hugging a pillow.
"Zombies," she whispered. "My dad... my mom... me. Eating each other."
The image was too much. She closed the diary, her hands trembling.
"Lucas is right," she thought. "The world is fragile. One virus from the Quantum Realm... and it's over."
She looked at her reflection in the mirror. A normal girl. A student. A daughter.
"I can't just be Gwen Stacy anymore," she decided, a new resolve hardening in her eyes. "If I'm supposed to be Spider-Woman... I need to find out how. I need to be ready."
The Apartment.
Lucas Chen stretched, feeling his spine pop. The solar energy was humming in his veins, but it wasn't enough.
"Still can't fly," he grumbled. "Just really aggressive jumping."
He checked the news. Still no Stark kidnapping.
"Is Tony already in Afghanistan?" Lucas wondered. "Maybe Obadiah Stane is better at cover-ups than I thought."
He sat down to write, his mind drifting to the complexities of the Multiverse.
June 16
Speaking of Timelines... the whole "Kang the Conqueror" thing is a mess.
He Who Remains had so much swagger. He controlled the TVA. He wrote the script for all of time. A true boss.
But then Sylvie kills him, the timelines branch, and we get the Council of Kangs.
And let's be honest... the Kang in 'Ant-Man 3' was a disappointment. He's supposed to be a Time God who has killed Avengers? And he gets beaten by... ants? Large, intelligent ants?
It was embarrassing. High diff? No. It was just plot armor.
But the concept of the TVA is terrifying. They prune timelines by sending them to "The Void"—a trash heap at the end of time where a giant smoke monster called Alioth eats everything.
Imagine being pruned. You don't just die. You get sent to a cosmic landfill to be digested by a cloud. Brutal.
Stark Mansion.
"Sir," Jarvis alerted. "Update."
Tony read the entry.
"Kang... Ant-Man 3... Council of Kangs."
"Beaten by ants."
Tony snorted. "Okay, that's funny. A Time Lord defeated by Pym's ants. Hank is going to be insufferable if he ever finds out."
But the next part wiped the smile off his face.
"The Void... A trash heap at the end of time."
"Alioth... A giant smoke monster that eats everything."
"So that's where the waste goes," Tony whispered. "The Void."
"It's not deletion," Jarvis analyzed. "It is displacement. The Pruned Timelines are transported to an entropy zone. A 'cosmic landfill.'"
"And Alioth is the incinerator," Tony realized. "A biological weapon used to clean up the mess."
"If this 'He Who Remains' controls Alioth," Tony said, "then he controls the ultimate delete button."
"We need to find the TVA," Tony decided. "If they exist outside of time... they must have a door. And if there's a door, I can pick the lock."
"Or blow it open," he added, looking at the Mark 1 blueprints. "Depending on the mood."
SHIELD Headquarters.
"Alioth," Fury read the name. "A smoke monster."
"Sounds like something from Lost," Barton quipped nervously.
"The Void," Natasha murmured. "The end of time. That's where the Pruned go."
"So we don't just disappear," Hill noted. "We get fed to a pet."
"Kang," Fury focused on the name. "He Who Remains. He's the one at the top. The guy writing the script."
"And he gets killed by 'Sylvie,'" Fury noted. "Who is Sylvie? A Loki variant? Or someone else?"
"Doesn't matter," Fury said. "What matters is that the system breaks. The timelines branch. And then we get the Council of Kangs. A war of conquerors."
"Lucas calls the Ant-Man 3 Kang a disappointment," Coulson noted. "But he also says he's killed Avengers. Plural."
"Which means," Fury said gravely, "in other timelines, we lost. We died fighting him."
"We need to prepare for a war we haven't even started yet," Fury said. "Against an enemy who has already beaten us a thousand times."
"Get Pym," Fury ordered again. "If his ants are the key to beating this guy... I need to buy stock in ant farms."