CH 70: Nexus
In the Land of Couldn't-Be-Shouldn't-Be, a cosmic entity was looking through the Multiverse.
She had been doing so for some time now, searching through realities that stretched far beyond the comprehension of most beings, looking for something she could not quite name. She knew what she was searching for, or at least she knew the effects it had left behind. Something had interfered with the natural order of things, something that should not have been able to interfere in the first place, and yet every time she thought she had found a trail, it slipped through her fingers.
The search should have been simple.
It wasn't.
The more she looked, the more there seemed to be nothing to find.
That was until she noticed something unusual.
A strange new wave of Domination had emerged from one of the universes she was observing. Under normal circumstances, she would have ignored it. Domination was hardly something that could threaten her, and countless strange powers and phenomena existed throughout the Multiverse without ever becoming relevant to her.
Yet this time, she stopped.
It was not the Domination itself that interested her. It was the feeling that accompanied it.
A clue.
Perhaps it was nothing more than coincidence, but she had been searching for too long to simply ignore even the smallest possibility. Her consciousness descended upon the universe, and as she looked deeper into it, the reason for her interest only grew.
There were far too many anomalies.
Not one or two isolated abnormalities, but an almost absurd concentration of them, all centered around the same small world.
Earth.
As usual, the source of the anomaly was on that little planet.
Earth was nothing particularly special on the surface. It was a small world mostly inhabited by humans, and humans were, by any reasonable measure, one of the weaker races to inhabit the Multiverse. Yet Earth had always possessed a strange tendency to produce things that it shouldn't have been capable of producing.
Of course, she knew why.
That was precisely why she had never bothered questioning it.
But this was different.
There were simply too many irregularities gathered here at once.
Her attention eventually settled upon a young man standing among the others, his existence beginning to resonate with some strange bloodline he had apparently just awakened. The change was subtle to most, but to her it was impossible to miss. The bloodline was producing one of the waves of abnormality she had sensed, though even that was not enough to explain everything surrounding him.
There were eight others around him.
Eight more anomalies.
She looked at them one by one, studying their existences with the detached curiosity of something that had long since grown accustomed to seeing impossible things. Each possessed their own abnormalities, their own strange histories and connections, and yet those histories seemed perfectly legitimate at first glance.
Fabricated.
At least, most of them were.
She paused when she reached one particular girl.
Her eyes narrowed slightly.
That one wasn't truly from this Multiverse either.
And yet...
She was so similar.
Similar enough that even she had initially accepted the history placed before her.
For the first time in quite a while, the Queen of Nevers found herself genuinely intrigued by what she was seeing.
They were all connected.
Not merely gathered in the same place, but connected to one particular existence at the center of it all.
The young man.
Lex Everhart.
She tried to look deeper into him.
Nothing.
There was no clear origin for him. No history she could trace beyond what he himself had allowed the universe to possess. Even his name was something she had learned only because he had spoken it to someone else.
That alone was strange.
She had encountered beings who could hide themselves before. Beings capable of deceiving perception, obscuring their origins, or even concealing themselves from the awareness of far greater entities.
But this was different.
There was nothing to conceal.
It was almost as though there was simply nothing for her to grasp.
She tried something else.
She attempted to teleport him to her domain.
The attempt failed.
The Queen of Nevers stared at the young man for a moment.
That was... inconvenient.
She could reach across realities. She could move through the Multiverse with a thought. Yet this particular mortal could not simply be taken from the place where he stood.
What a hassle.
Still, there was no reason for her to remain at a distance.
Her true self did not move. Instead, a manifestation of her consciousness appeared in the place where Lex and the others stood, taking form within the world as though she had always been there.
It was not her true existence, but it was more than sufficient for what she wanted.
The instant she appeared, however, her curiosity became certainty.
There was no longer any doubt.
This was him.
The one she had been searching for.
The one whose existence had interfered with the battle between herself and the Griever without her even realizing what had caused it.
A Nexus Being.
But not merely a Nexus Being in the ordinary sense.
The highest order of Nexus.
The Queen of Nevers looked at Lex with a growing interest as she finally understood why she had been unable to find him before. He wasn't merely difficult to perceive. His very existence sat outside the structures by which she normally understood existence.
Greater Science.
The Hidden Arts.
The Secret Alchemy.
The Quiet Math.
The Silent Truth.
All of them were simply nullified around him.
They could not properly define him, predict him, constrain him, or even establish the rules by which his existence should function.
And yet that wasn't even the strangest part.
Lex's existence created possibilities.
Endless possibilities.
No... even that description was insufficient.
Possibilities were still things that existed within a framework, branching from one point into another. Lex seemed to exist beyond that framework entirely, detached from any and all futures that could possibly lead toward him.
There was no future she could see.
And when she attempted to look into his past, she encountered something equally absurd.
Nothing.
Not an empty past, but an existence that could not be separated from its present.
She could rewind the world itself if she wished. She could return reality to an earlier state and observe everything that had happened within it.
But Lex would come with her.
His consciousness would remain present even within the past she entered, because there was no version of Lex that could be isolated from the Lex who existed now.
It was almost amusing.
Trying to create a paradox around him would be like trying to create a paradox around something that had already stepped outside the concept of paradox itself.
Fortunately, she had no desire to alter his past.
She only wanted to see it.
So instead of attempting to travel through his history directly, she turned her attention toward the universe itself.
A universe remembered its own history.
That was enough.
The information came to her almost immediately.
According to the universe, Lex Everhart had only appeared last year.
12 July 2013, as the Earthlings would record it.
And then she saw everything.
From the moment he had appeared in this world, every event connected to him unfolded before her awareness in an instant.
Her curiosity steadily grew.
How had he arrived without anyone noticing?
Where was Oblivion?
That should have been something Oblivion noticed. It was, in a sense, his purpose. Yet somehow Lex had simply appeared within the universe without drawing the attention that should have accompanied such an intrusion.
Was it because Lex himself could not be perceived?
No.
That didn't seem quite right.
She continued observing.
The young man had accumulated wealth almost immediately, yet even that was strange. There was an organization called the MU Bank associated with him, apparently capable of existing outside the universe while allowing him to access it from wherever he happened to be.
The Queen of Nevers accepted this information without question.
Why wouldn't she?
The universe itself told her that it existed.
There was no reason for her to suspect that the information was false.
What she did not realize was that the MU Bank was not some mysterious organization operating beyond the Multiverse at all.
It did not exist.
At least, not in the way she believed it did.
Even she was being fooled by the Essences.
That realization would have been amusing to someone who could see it, but there was no one watching her closely enough to notice.
She continued.
This young man certainly loved sex quite a lot, it seemed.
That thought earned perhaps the smallest shift in her expression as she continued watching his history unfold. There were an absurd number of women involved with him, and yet what was more interesting was how many of them seemed to have appeared in his life through the strange phenomenon he called the Gacha.
Gacha.
She still did not understand what that was.
It was clearly connected to something beyond this Multiverse, however.
Cards appeared from worlds and realities that should have had no connection to one another. People were summoned from places that should have remained separate. Powers, objects, bloodlines and even entire worlds could apparently be reached through it.
What exactly was this thing?
And why could it connect to the Outside?
Her attention shifted again as she watched one of the more peculiar aspects of Lex's existence unfold.
He could bring back people he had Summoned from death.
That was... unexpected.
She watched carefully, trying to determine exactly what happened to those people when they died.
Did they truly die?
Or did they merely return to him?
The distinction was difficult to make, especially when Lex himself seemed to treat their return as something entirely natural.
Even his pet was extraordinary.
It was only a creature, at least in appearance, yet reality itself seemed to bend around it in subtle ways, almost as though Lex's influence had extended into the creature simply through their connection.
Then something happened that made her stop.
Lex traveled to the Outside.
Just like that.
The Queen of Nevers watched the transition carefully, following him as far as she could.
She knew the Outside.
She lived at its edge, after all.
But this wasn't merely Lex moving somewhere within the Marvel Omniverse. He had crossed beyond it entirely, entering somewhere she could no longer determine with certainty.
Where?
She couldn't tell.
That alone was interesting.
And apparently, even when he was gone, the people he had Summoned continued living their lives as though nothing had happened. They worked, fought, traveled, built things and interacted with one another, completely unaffected by his absence.
The Queen of Nevers remained silent for a moment as she looked at the young man again.
There was something almost amusing about him.
She had spent so long searching for an existence that had somehow slipped through the notice of the Multiverse itself, only to discover that the being responsible was a young man who spent his time collecting strange powers, building an empire, travelling to the Outside and sleeping with beautiful women. None of that should have been possible in the way he was doing it, and yet here he was, existing as though the impossible were simply another part of his daily life.
She thought about approaching him.
After all, she wanted some answers.
Not because she was uncomfortable with the uncertainty surrounding him. Quite the opposite. She was the Queen of Nevers; uncertainty was closer to her nature than certainty could ever hope to be. The unknown, the impossible, the things that refused to settle into a predictable pattern... those were the things she found most fascinating.
She loved uncertainty.
Perhaps that was why Lex intrigued her so much.
There was simply no way for her to determine what he would become, where he had come from, or even what he truly was. Every attempt to understand him only revealed another question waiting behind the previous one.
Still, curiosity was curiosity.
She wanted to speak to him.
The moment she made that decision, the space around her seemed to respond.
A figure began to materialize within the world.
There was no grand flash of light, no explosion of cosmic energy, nor any disturbance that would alert the people surrounding Lex. Reality simply accepted that someone was now standing there, as though she had always possessed the right to occupy that particular space.
The woman who appeared was pale, almost unnaturally so, with features that possessed an ethereal beauty that was difficult to properly describe. Her long hair fell naturally around her, framing a face that appeared calm and almost serene, though there was something in her eyes that hinted at depths far beyond anything her appearance suggested.
She wore a flowing green dress that moved gently despite there being no wind, its fabric seeming less like ordinary cloth and more like something woven from the concept of a distant night sky. A delicate tiara rested upon her head, simple in appearance but carrying an inexplicable sense of importance.
She looked like a woman.
Just a woman.
There was nothing about her appearance that suggested the scale of the existence standing behind that manifestation. No overwhelming aura, no pressure that crushed the surroundings, no visible distortion of reality.
The Queen of Nevers did not need such things.
She could have manifested as something incomprehensible, something that reflected even a fraction of her true existence, and the world itself would have struggled to accommodate her presence. But there was no reason to do that.
She wanted to talk.
So she appeared in a form that could simply talk.
And yet, despite the simplicity of the manifestation, Lex immediately turned around to look at her.
His reaction was instant.
The Queen of Nevers noticed.
Of course he could perceive her.
She had deliberately allowed it.
The others, however, continued what they were doing. None of them noticed the pale woman standing among them, none turned their heads toward her, and none seemed even remotely aware that another existence had entered their midst.
She had allowed only Lex to perceive her.
After all, this meeting was between the two of them.