Quill nudged Rocket Raccoon, who still stared at Bucky's mechanical arm without batting an eye.
Bucky was somewhat baffled, but Steve recognized Rocket's interest in his prosthetic limb. As a result, he gently patted Bucky's shoulder, signaling him with his eyes.
Bucky looked closely at Rocket Raccoon again, revealed a look of sudden realization, glanced around, saw no children paying attention, and pressed a button on his arm lightly. Click, his mechanical arm was taken off.
Bucky placed the mechanical arm in front of Rocket Raccoon, who instantly jumped out of Quill's arms onto the table. He stared at the beautiful mechanical arm with wide eyes, and then lifted it with his small claws.
"It's beautiful," Rocket Raccoon said.
Bucky was slightly surprised that a raccoon could talk but showed no signs of it. He smiled and said, "Yes, both Howard and I feel the same way. It's an industrial miracle of mankind."
Rocket Raccoon lightly stroked the surface of the mechanical arm with his claws. Gamora came forward, put a hand on Peter's shoulder, and said, "Rocket seemed interested in all kinds of prosthetics. When we visited the teleportation gate of the Shi'ar empire last time, he had his eyes glued on the security captain's fake leg for a long time."
Quill wanted to say something, but after a long moment, he looked at Shiller and said, "Okay, get him one just like it. We'll do you a favor."
"If you don't mind that it's been used, you can have this one," Bucky gently shook his head and said, "Howard plans to upgrade me. He intends to replace the core parts with molten steel. Vibranium isn't quite strong enough."
Steve frowned slightly and said to Bucky, "Why wouldn't it be strong enough? Isn't vibranium the best for defence, just like my shield?"
Bucky hesitated a bit and said, "I asked Howard about that, but he told me that your shield isn't just vibranium; it's made of an accidentally produced vibranium alloy."
Steve slightly widened his eyes but knew it wasn't the time for this. He looked at Shiller, who nodded at him, showing that he already knew about this.
Steve let out a small sigh of relief. After all, his shield is an indispensable weapon. If anything were to happen to it, his combat power would be reduced by at least half.
"How can we help Rocket to get this mechanical arm?" Gamora asked.
"It's simple. You only need to..."
The plan was still proceeding as Shiller originally intended, only turning into the Guardians of the Galaxy and others giving misleading information to Yondu. Most importantly, they told Yondu that Thanos entered the Interstellar Security Committee and tried to use the security system of the Star Area to seize power, only because he wanted to explore the origin of life.
Loki told Shiller about this, and Thanos didn't try to hide it. However, to Thanos, its importance was not that high; at best, it could be described as curiosity.
Thanos was very keen to know what constituted the current cosmos and what really created life. But since he has already chosen the path of civilization's development, he must investigate it in a civilized way.
This gave Yondu some leverage, at least letting him know, Thanos had selfish intentions and could be persuaded; it just depended on whether Yondu really had the talent.
Shiller had some understanding of the so-called origin of life mentioned by Thanos. In the comics, there exists a magical race called the Celestials. Who they are and what they did is not important. It's just that due to the transmigrator's information gap, Shiller learned of a fatal weakness of the Celestials.
For those familiar with Marvel Comics, there's a Celestial corpse on Earth. The fact that it can become a corpse shows that they are not completely invincible. This type of powerful being with weaknesses is just the kind of ally Shiller hopes for.
"Ally" is not quite accurate. Mainly, Shiller needed a bunch of tools. As the scale of Battleworld kept growing, it was clear that there weren't enough programmers.
The entire system of Battleworld was manually coded by Lucifer and Owen, where Lucifer was a bona fide world administrator, and Owen was a bit like a senior programmer and a novice one.
Shiller was the planner, who put together the operating methods, certain rules, and elements of the game.
Which to say, right now, the entire Battleworld only had one planner and one and a half coders. During the internal testing period, there were just over a hundred players, Shiller even had time to participate in the game himself.
But what if they moved into the public testing version, where the number of players would grow exponentially with people constantly coming and going. A few people couldn't manage that, even if Lucifer had fantastic coding skills, they would definitely need a group of ordinary coders to maintain the servers.
Take the Marvel big event as an example, only referring to the settings in Marvel, the OAA is like the company boss, Life Court Adam is like the company manager, the union of the five gods is like the department head, while the branches of the five gods in each individual universe are like ordinary employees.
The OAA is indeed omniscient and omnipotent, but if he could do everything on his own, he wouldn't need these employees. The same goes for Lucifer, Shiller, and Owen.
This world belongs to the boss as well as the worker, but in the end, it belongs to the worker. Without them, even if the capitalist had three heads and six arms, he couldn't produce a single brick.
In order to properly set up Battleworld, it's inevitable to start by recruiting employees and building the company's basic framework. Once some results are shown, the company can go public, attract shareholders, raise more funds, and grow stronger.
Shiller wanted to get in touch with Mickey or Walt Disney because they are characters beyond the fourth wall, possess tremendous authority, and are perfectly suited to be company shareholders.
At the same time, he also had his eyes on the Heavenly Gods Group, mainly because he believed they had enough strength and didn't carry any particularly critical responsibilities in the cosmos. They were essentially cosmic vagrants, which made them ideal for employment.
The final point is especially important. If you're looking for handy tools and programmers, of course, Shiller's old friend, Eternity, comes to mind. Eternity has years of work experience, is diligent and uncomplaining.
However, while recruiting the Heavenly Gods Group would be considered hiring, employing Eternity would be more like job poaching. Eternity has a job already, and if Shiller were to poach the five major Gods from the Marvel Universe, what then?
To be more specific, the five major Gods are the universe itself. It's one thing to recruit employees, but isn't it a bit much to take the whole corporate building, foundation and all?
Therefore, Gods intricately connected to the Marvel Universe's structure like the various aspects of the five major Gods, Adam, are out of the picture.
And Gods, who derive their power from cosmic concepts, also don't make the cut. Battleworld is basically a new universe and the encoding of concepts isn't universally applicable. These Concept Gods, although strong, can't express their strength there.
Looking at it this way, Gods with powerful physical strength like the Asgard God Clan become suitable choices. Sadly, the Aesir are not strong enough. Although they stand out in interstellar civilization, in the multiverse of two big worlds, they still fall short.
If all of them possessed Skyfather-level strength like Odin, that would work. But as it stands, there's only one Odin.
This brings us to Odin's duel with a member of the Heavenly Gods Group. Back then, Odin, piloting the Destroyer Mecha, stood against a group of Celestials. Despite not achieving a decisive victory, he did manage to hold them off.
This implication suggests there is a race with an average Skyfather-level power. That coincidentally satisfies the power requirements for Battleworld's programmers.
Though such a race is rare in the cosmos, it does exist. The main reason Shiller chose the Heavenly Gods Group however, is because they have a fatal flaw.
As mentioned before, one of the Celestials' bodies was left on Earth. How did it die?
Unbelievable as it may sound, that member of the Celestials died of illness.
That's right, even though almost each one of them possessed Skyfather-level power, they can get sick, contract incurable diseases, and woefully die on Earth.
This terrifying disease, which scares the daylights out of the Celestials, is in fact a type of virus infection. It's much like the human's flu, and this virus is called Cosmic Locust.
Please distinguish between various Insect Races in the cosmos. The Destroying Worms originated from the Antimatter Universe, with their biggest need being to invade Positive Matter Universe for survival. The Hive Parasite Clan of origin that Hydra once stemmed from, thrive by infesting other races, and are natural enemies to the Cosmic Agent Symbiote.
The Cosmic Locusts, on the other hand, really enjoy chowing down on other planets. To them, planets are nothing but jumbo-sized chocolate beans that they can easily burrow into for a good munching session.
Then one day, a clever Cosmic Locust realized that there's a race known as the Celestials in the cosmos. Their flavor is somehow like mixed stuffing dumplings, not only tastier than chocolate beans but also more nutritious and easier to chew on.
The news spread wildly amongst the Cosmic Locusts, and the Celestials became their prey, persistently hunted down for their hearty crunchiness.
Unfortunately, this powerful race couldn't counter these little pests. It's much like how an advanced human society can't deal with a simple flu virus. The so-called treatment just suppresses the uncomfortable symptoms while waiting for the immune system to kill the virus, prey to fate.
But a Celestial being infected by Cosmic Locusts is much severe than a human getting the flu. About 4 billion years ago, a miserable Celestial member known as the Original Celestial God, contracted the Cosmic Locust. Being feverish and dazed, he slammed into Earth.
After arriving on Earth, they started vomiting and suffering from diarrhea. Already critically ill, the collision only made matters worse. At that time, Earth was still in a primitive era and obviously couldn't handle such a virus, hence this poor Celestial perished on Earth.
His vomit, blood, and parts of his corpse became the foundations for life on Earth. The diverse species on Earth all emerged from his body, which inspired the solar chasing myth of Kuafu in the East of the Marvel Earth.
Of course, when a member of their kind went missing, the Celestials came looking for them. They ended up finding Earth, but Earth was Odin's turf, so they ended up in a fight with Odin.
During the fight, a Celestial known as "The First Firmament" realized just how magical Earth was. The magnetic field of the planet had a marvelously suppressive effect on Cosmic Locusts. The Cosmic Locusts in the original Celestial God's body were trapped in the center of Earth and couldn't escape.
So, the arriving Celestials left without doing anything. After all, smashing open Earth to recover the ill-fated Celestial's corpse would have meant the Cosmic Locusts would escape too, and that would spell disaster for them all.
Shiller, however, was not as compassionate. He knew exactly where the Cosmic Locusts were in the center of Earth.