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Knowhere [Just after the Chitauri Invasion was foiled]
–Taneleer Tivan–
Ah, as he had suspected. Tea made from the tears of those very elusive light bunnies was as refreshing as the rumours made them out to be. He might go even one step further and compare them with the tea made from the leaf from the Yggdrasil that Odin had traded to him in exchange for some information.
And yet, as sad as it was, he could only have this tea twice every cycle, even after making sure that the bunny was provided with hydration and pain every single day.
Well, it wouldn't be worthy of being in his collection if it wasn't so…rare.
Ah, he did so love rare things. Especially living beings, he loved to collect the last people of their species.
That was why, even at the risk of angering the Bor and his son, Odin All-Father, he had kept a specimen of the Dark Elves species, however low quality it might have been. It was a shame that he could not get his hands on one of the Light Elves, despite his best attempts.
Would have really brought the set together but oh well, the universe doesn't always work the way he wants it to.
He did always love collecting rare species and The Mad Titan, in particular, was making it very easy for him to expand his collection. He scoffed in foolishness when he had heard about the Mad Titan and his supposed goal.
Sure, the Mad Titan was powerful, so powerful that it beggared belief, but apparently, his mind was not at the same advanced stage as his strength.
His doctrine of defeating, usually by killing, the most powerful people of a species before proceeding to kill half of the remaining population, which mostly comprised the young, elderly, and non-combatants, more often than not resulted in complete societal collapse.
That same societal discord made the very species easy pickings for slavers, human traffickers, mercenaries, and more. He hadn't bothered to calculate it but he had a standing contract with the seedier parts of the Ravagers to bring him anybody who they thought was the last remaining of their species, as he was best suited to "protect" them.
So far, he had received over 20 different last of their kind specimens and while he detested the stupidity with which the Mad Titan wasted the vast resources he had at his hand, he could not really argue with the results. Not the results that the mad Titan was looking for, though.
The fool refused to see reason about the truth of life in the universe. He had been around in the universe for a long time and despite his lack of extraordinary powers, he was an immortal.
Where beings like Odin shone like a bright star but for a very short time, he was a dull light but it went on for forever, without stopping, ever. He had all the time in the world and while his collection had come later, he had been obsessed with the universe and its composition for a long time.
Ever since he came into existence, by the hands of those pesky Celestials no less, he had been travelling as far as he could. He had observed life for millions of years and while life was wonderful with its facet of being different every time he shifted his attention away from it, it had something in common.
Life, sentient life, in particular, could never stay still. It was at the very core of their essence, movement. There was a reason that most life forms could be safely declared dead if they were to stop moving for an extended period of time.
That same movement led to a struggle, which led to ambitions, which led to strife, which led to wars, which eventually led to something that every sentient species had in common.
Murder.
Yes, every single sentient life form in the universe would eventually go on to gain capacity for violence, so much so that they would either murder other species, turning expansionists or try and kill their brethren, turning into genocidal monsters.
These tendencies were very hard to suppress yet suppressing them, either temporarily or just aiming the instincts at something else was very necessary, for progress. Any tangible progress made by any species was made only if the species was in a period of peace between violence or rather, preparing for extreme violence with another race.
What the Mad Titan did was extremely counterproductive, at least to someone like him who knew the ins and outs of the observable universe. He went around, culling populations and then leaving immediately after, on to the next unfortunate species that catches his attention, leaving the survivors of the current species to flounder about, setting them back considerably in the small amount of progress they had made.
Because the Mad Titan never went after the established players. No, he never once went after the Kree, Skrulls, Sovereign, or Xandarians, the less said about the species of the Nine Realms, the better. He only went after the species that he could defeat with ease.
That was hypocrisy right there and yet…
What did he care? He shrugged and went about enjoying his tea. After all, he would not get this for another cycle since he had to send the rest of it to his fellow Elder, the Grandmaster who, for some reason, had chosen to live on Sakaar of all places.
The cosmic garbage dump was his choice of residence and while he did not care one bit about what happened to that opportunistic bastard, they, as fellow Immortals, had some image to maintain and the Grandmaster was bringing his image down!
"Calm. CALM," He muttered to himself, gulping down the rest of the tea.
"Carina. Clean this," He snapped his finger after setting the cup down on the table and going back to his office, where he could check upon the future deliveries of multiple fine specimens he was going to receive. Unfortunately, they found one with his family and he had to choose between having a young specimen, which could grow up in the collection and would be more compliant, or having a fully grown specimen that had grown in its natural habitat.
In the end, he had chosen the young one to be added to his collection and as a result, the mercenaries had to gas the other two.
Well, they did demand more compensation for the apparent mental trauma but for someone as long-lived as him, money was not an object so he had approved the request. It was better to maintain the relationship with this faction of the Ravagers since they were the only ones who took his retrieval requests, the others being far too uptight to accept his money.
He whistled a jaunty tune that he had picked up from accessing the Earthen Midgard as he made his way to his office. The path he had taken overlooked most of his collection in all its glory, from the subterranean lava world to the freezing cold ice world to the sea world to the tropic world, he saw it all on his way to his grand office.
It was by design, obviously. After all, he prided himself on his collection and while only a select few would ever get the chance to feast their eyes on his collection, he loved to look over his collection every single day.
After all, he had built every single bit of it himself, bit by bit, until finally, it reached the level it has now, surpassing all other collections in the known universe. He was now firmly known as the Collector and he prided himself on getting that title.
He may have had a hand in making sure that nobody had a collection that came close to his. In the early times, he had to quietly dispose of multiple aristocrats of superpowers of the galaxy but that was then and this was now.
After admiring his collection and himself for going to great lengths to maintain the collection, he finally arrived at his office, situated at the center of the floating celestial head that was known as Knowhere.
Honestly, he did not know who or what was strong enough to sever a Celestial's head from its body but he had checked to see if any other Celestial could lay claim to the head but after thousands of cycles of nobody even coming close, he had claimed it as his base of operations, even going so far as to install his precious museum in it.
It helped that the celestial organic matter was so powerful, even after it had been dead for so long, it generated more than enough power to power his museum as well as his other defense measures. The leftover organic matter was an added bonus as well.
He had thought that it was just biological waste since he knew that nobody in the universe could come close to understanding Celestials and their biology so he was just going to mine it for all its worth and sell it to some rich races.
He knew that the Sovereign and the Kree held delusions of grandeur when it came to advancing their respective races biologically and if he had dangled the juicy meat that was Celestial bio matter in front of them, they would have sold half their soul to get that from him.
But that was before he found the miraculous properties of the fluids. That was a mistake that one of his earlier attendants had made. She was someone from a race of natural telekinetics.
She was the strongest of them all and had been blatantly sold off by the rulers of their race to the highest bidder as experimental material. He had snatched her off them because he had a need of an attendant and also entertainment that only a soul recently thrown into despair could provide.
She was already injured from the ordeal when she was captured, losing one of her limbs, not that it reduced her capacity to work for him in any way. She actually considered him her savior at the time and worked wholeheartedly for him, being responsible for a significant portion of the museum being installed properly.
He might be immortal but that did come with its own pros and cons. Con being that time just blended together, after a while. He had periods where he had gone into brainstorming sessions and once he came back to his senses, he had found that multiple cycles had passed without him being aware of it.
So he had hired her, someone whose race was known for having exceptional mental as well as physical characteristics, making them a rare commodity in the black market, owing to their excellent strength as well as their non-interference policy when it came to other warring civilisations.
Their race was of the opinion that the universe was big enough for all of them and they had no need to fight for something as inane as a territory when the universe was ever expanding. So, no other superpower of that time bothered them as well, putting the topic on the back burner until their enemies were defeated.
She was doing some work on one of the early iterations of the pods that housed most of his collection these days when she slipped and instead of saving herself, she prioritised the pod, ending up falling into a vat of celestial biofluid.
It was not as if he had not tested that fluid. It was just that any species it came into contact with, it grew like a cancer, absorbing matter and energy, sucking anybody dry which forced him to torch everything down to ash and even then, keep the ash in a tightly locked container. He still had some of those containers.
But what happened that day was completely out of his expectations. He had written that woman off when the vat of liquid began bubbling outwards. He had already initiated the quarantine protocols and was sitting out of the area, safely looking at the vat, curious to see what was happening when the woman, naked as the day she must have been born, slowly floated out of the vat of celestial fluid.
His eyes had gained interest in them as he saw that her body was healed of all the damage that had been inflicted on her during the experimentation and the fight where she was defeated and given to the mercenaries before that.
She too looked at her hand in curiosity and then looked straight at him and after seeing the quarantine protocol around her, that she knew the existence of, simply….walked out of it.
Yeah, the woman simply walked out of the quarantine protocol by walking into the walls as if they simply didn't exist.
Somehow, the celestial fluid not only healed the damage done to her body, it also enhanced her powers, so much so that she had become the strongest specimen he had on hand. The urge to just store her in one of the pods had been strong but he knew that her place was more in managing her burgeoning collection and not being a part of it.
His decision was proven correct when the girl helped him gather many, many other unique specimens, with seeming ease, all until she died. He had tried to clone her but apparently, she was a unique existence that was made even more unique by the vat of celestial biofluid.
He had tried the fluid with thousands of other specimens of different species, willingly and unwillingly. The result had been somewhat disheartening.
The celestial fluid didn't work on everyone. No, one had to be exceptionally strong, both of mind and body, before he could be exposed to the biofluid. Ordinary members simply had their bodies eaten from inside out from the cells. Only the exceptionally strong members of their respective species had any chance of successfully assimilating the lifeblood of the strongest members of the universe to ever exist.
He had the idea of using it on himself but he liked himself the way he was and who knows if there was a chance of it ruining his handsome face. He would have no place to redress his grievances.
So, he kept the fluid stored and only gave it out occasionally, at exorbitant prices, only to exceptionally influential figures of the galaxy, like Odin AllFather after he had banished his eldest daughter and recently, the Supreme Intelligence of Kree.
He shook his head to clear his thoughts as he sat on his comfortable chair, also one of a kind, built by the Dwarves of Nidavellir in exchange for rescuing one of their kidnapped members. It was made from a metal that was only used in the strongest of weapons that the Dwarves ever built, Uru.
He had just never expected to find something very interesting on his computer the moment he sat on his chair in the office.
Red alarms began blaring as a feed opened up in front of him, showing an energy storm of untold proportions brewing right outside Knowhere. While it was a bustling trade front at the moment, he controlled every single aspect of Knowhere and as such, it was his prerogative to send someone to check that out.
Anybody else wouldn't have the guts to check it out anyway, considering the sheer energy of that storm. The only reason he was sending something to check it out was because of the energy signature of that energy storm. It somehow had energy from the Space Stone and Mind Stone in it.
Energies from two Infinity Stones arriving right outside his doorstep? Well, this was going to be a very interesting day.
He leaned ahead as he watched the feed from the unmanned drone he had sent ahead, no way he would risk his image for something as dangerous as this. He was immortal in every way that mattered but Infinity Stones rarely if ever followed tradition. They were known for bending and breaking every law of the universe, after all.
The drone came as close as it could before it was at risk of being damaged beyond repair. No amount of shielding would save it from an infinity Stone, after all.
He could see that the energy storm was only temporary and it had arrived from somewhere else, most likely the influence of the Space Stone, in a wormhole that had long since closed.
The drone went closer as the storm was subsiding, taking any and all readings it could. The closer it went, the clearer the picture became.
His eyes widened as he realised that in the middle of that energy storm, was a…human?
Yeah, that looked like a human, alright. A dying, bleeding human but still a human.
A human that somehow arrived cocooned in an energy storm composed of the energies from not one but TWO Infinity Stones? And he survived, albeit barely.
Well, things just got very interesting, something of a rarity in his long life, he thought to himself as the drone carefully took the human, or what was left of him, into the storage bay and scurried back to his personal hangar.
"Carina, prepare the Primed C-fluid for healing. We have a very special guest visiting us," He pressed a button and ordered his personal attendant.
"Yes, sir," She squeaked as he leaned back into his chair, feeling excited for some reason, after a very long time.
Ah, he missed this feeling. The last time he felt this thrill was when he negotiated with the All-Father, unheeding of the risk of being smote on the spot using the Space Stone that he had in his possession, and was willing to use it on his enemies, as was evident by his previous war conquests.
Word Count - 3019
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