CH 72: Queen of Nevers
After informing everyone of what had happened, Lex decided that the best way to clear his head was to take a walk. The woman in green accompanied him as they stepped out of the mansion and into the garden, where the noise and activity of the others gradually faded behind them. The mansion was still filled with people moving about, but outside, beneath the open sky and the quiet greenery surrounding the estate, the atmosphere felt considerably calmer. Lex glanced sideways at the strange woman walking beside him, still unable to shake the feeling that there was something fundamentally unusual about her, even though she looked like nothing more than a pale woman dressed in green.
“So, what do you want to talk about?” Lex finally asked, breaking the silence.
“How is Outside?” the woman asked, her voice carrying genuine curiosity. “Outside of Marvel?”
Lex thought about the question for a moment before shrugging. “It's just like here, but still quite different. As far as I know, Earth is pretty common everywhere.”
“Of course,” she replied, almost thoughtfully. “Earth is, in one way or another, an anchor of reality.”
“Really?” Lex muttered, glancing around as he considered that information. “Didn't know Earth was so important.”
The idea actually made a strange amount of sense when he thought about it. Earth certainly seemed disproportionately important compared to the rest of the universe, at least in the worlds he had encountered so far. Even in the Boys universe, conquering Earth had effectively meant conquering the world, which suggested that Earth might literally be the only significant inhabited planet there. Perhaps the pattern existed elsewhere too, although Lex had no idea whether that was some universal rule or simply another strange coincidence.
“How about we go somewhere else?” the woman suggested.
Before Lex could ask what she meant, he felt that familiar sensation of reality shifting around him as she attempted to teleport them. This time, however, he didn't resist. There was little point in refusing when he was already curious about what she wanted to show him, and besides, if she truly wanted to harm him, she had already demonstrated that she possessed abilities far beyond what most people around him could comprehend.
The world disappeared.
For an instant, Lex felt as though he had been pulled through an invisible gap between locations, and then everything returned at once. He found himself floating in space, surrounded by an endless ocean of darkness scattered with distant stars. The woman in green was nowhere to be seen, and for a moment Lex wondered if she had simply abandoned him.
Then he looked ahead.
A cosmic figure occupied the darkness before him.
She possessed the recognizable shape of a woman, but the comparison ended there. Her body seemed almost impossibly vast, not because she simply had a physical size that could be measured in kilometers or even light-years, but because the space surrounding her seemed to arrange itself around her existence. Pale features emerged from an ethereal green radiance, her form appearing almost translucent in places as though she had been sculpted from moonlight and possibility rather than flesh. Long strands of luminous green energy drifted around her like hair caught in a nonexistent breeze, while faint patterns resembling branching paths, stars, and countless alternate possibilities appeared and disappeared across her body.
The sight was beautiful rather than monstrous, but there was something deeply unnatural about it. Looking at her felt less like looking at a person and more like looking at the idea of a person given temporary shape. The stars behind her seemed strangely insignificant, while the space around her carried an almost dreamlike quality, as if reality itself had become softer simply because she was present within it.
Raphael's voice came quietly into Lex's mind.
<It is hypothesized that she is indeed the woman in green, possibly her true form.>
“Hello again, Lex,” the cosmic woman said, her voice somehow reaching him despite there being no atmosphere for sound to travel through. “I suppose it's time I introduce myself as well.”
Her enormous form shifted slightly, and the green radiance surrounding her seemed to ripple outward like the surface of an endless ocean.
“I am the Queen of Nevers, the True Possibility, the Nothing and Always Queen. All possibilities are from me, and all changes stem from me. You may call me the Never Queen.”
Lex stared at her for several seconds.
“Impressive, I guess,” he eventually replied.
Despite the sheer scale of what stood before him, Lex's response remained almost frustratingly casual. Internally, however, he wasn't nearly as unconcerned as he sounded. Every instinct he possessed was telling him that this woman was operating on a level that made most of the beings he had encountered look insignificant, and even Raphael's attempts to analyze her were producing very little useful information.
“So why have you brought me here?”
Even while he spoke, Lex continued trying to understand her. He attempted to analyze her nature, her abilities, the strange energy surrounding her, and even considered using Mocking Truth if he could find something that it could actually copy.
Nothing happened.
For perhaps the first time since obtaining the ability, there was simply nothing for him to grasp.
The Queen of Nevers noticed his attempts but didn't seem offended. If anything, there was a faint amusement in her expression.
“You see, while your existence as a Nexus Being has helped me tremendously, the more I observe you, the more I realize that you are an anomaly unlike any other. Because of that, there is a chance that you might know what happened to the Outside.”
“As for why I brought you here, it's simply so that our conversation cannot be spied upon.”
Lex frowned slightly.
“What do you mean? The Outside you're referring to... what exactly is it?”
“The Void? The Source? The Fourth Wall? The way to other Omniverses?” Her expression became faintly curious. “Whatever you call it.”
Lex shook his head.
“Never heard of any of that. I just travel using my powers.”
For perhaps the first time since their conversation began, genuine confusion crossed the Queen's face.
“Strange,” she murmured. “What sort of power can ignore the Outside and directly reach other Omniverses? Such a thing shouldn't exist.”
She fell silent, her gaze lingering upon him as though she were attempting to find some hidden explanation beneath his words. Yet Lex wasn't hiding anything. He genuinely didn't know what she was talking about, and that seemed to make the situation even more confusing for her.
If Lex truly didn't know what had happened to the Outside, then there was nothing she could gain from questioning him about it.
“Anything else you want to ask?”
“Not really,” the Queen admitted after a moment. “I don't think you yourself actually understand your powers well enough to explain anything to me, or you're simply too good at lying. Either way, it's useless to talk about your powers, which was actually what I was most interested in.”
There was a faint note of disappointment in her voice, although curiosity remained far stronger.
“Considering how few things exist that I cannot understand, I still find myself wondering how you managed to acquire abilities that even I cannot properly perceive.”
Her thoughts wandered briefly to another anomaly.
Wade Wilson.
Deadpool possessed a strange power that could be interpreted as simultaneously weak and powerful depending on how one looked at it, an existence that occasionally refused to behave according to the rules around him. Of course he wasn't alone, Jennifer Walters, Doreen Green were also examples of similar anomalies.
Of course, the most interesting of them was Gwen Poole.
Could Lex be another such entity?
Perhaps.
The possibility amused her.
“I guess then I'll be leaving,” Lex said.
Before the Queen could answer, Lex teleported away.
He reappeared in his garden, expecting to be alone, only to find the woman in green standing exactly where he had left her.
Lex stared at her.
She stared back.
“You know, it's quite rude to teleport away when we're still talking, right?” she asked.
“I thought we were finished talking.”
“Yes...” She hesitated for a moment, almost awkwardly, before adding, “but I still wanted a little help from you.”
Lex raised an eyebrow.
“Sure. Ask away.”
There was no real reason for him to refuse. Whatever else the Queen was, she had already helped him when Arishem attacked, and Lex wasn't the sort of person who would simply ignore a reasonable request after receiving that kind of favor.
“Can you take any Nexus out of this Omniverse?”
Lex blinked.
“Out of the Omniverse?”
“Yes. Any one of them is fine.”
“Maybe,” Lex answered slowly. “Can you give me a list of Nexus Beings?”
“There's no need for a list,” she replied. “At any given time, a universe can only have a single Nexus Being, and only after their death is another born. Of course, if someone comes from outside that universe, they can still remain a Nexus Being.”
She paused briefly before continuing.
“Currently, in this universe, there is only one.”
“Who?”
“Wanda Maximoff.”
“Ohhh.”
Lex thought about it for a moment. He had only met Wanda once, barely a day ago, and his impression of her had been fairly ordinary as far as his rapidly expanding definition of ordinary went. She had seemed decent enough, and the fact that she happened to be a Nexus Being didn't particularly change his opinion of her.
“Well, she seemed like an alright person, I guess. I'll see what I can do.”
Lex glanced upward.
“Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to figure out why my most powerful Summon yet isn't moving at all.”
His gaze settled on the distant black-and-white figure floating above them.
Alien X.
The Never Queen followed his gaze.
“Oh, that,” she said. “Let me help.”
Before Lex could ask what she intended to do, reality folded around them again.
This time, however, the teleportation didn't take them somewhere in the physical universe.
It took them inside Alien X.
The transition was unlike anything Lex had experienced before. One moment there was the familiar world around him, and the next he was standing within an endless black expanse filled with distant points of light. Stars seemed to hang impossibly close, yet there was no sense of distance between them, while the darkness beneath his feet stretched endlessly in every direction without any visible ground.
In the middle of that impossible space stood Ben.
Two enormous green faces floated nearby, both clearly involved in an argument with him.
“Who are you?” they demanded simultaneously, their voices echoing through the strange subspace.
The Never Queen looked around at them with mild curiosity.
“Hello to you too.”
Before either of the two faces could say anything else, the Queen simply reached out.
Her hand passed through the strange cosmic environment and physically grabbed Ben.
For a moment, Lex simply stared.
“I'll be borrowing this guy for a bit,” she said.
The two green faces looked utterly baffled.
Then the Queen pulled.
Reality twisted.
The three of them vanished from the subspace together.
A moment later, Lex, the Queen, and Ben reappeared in the garden.
Ben immediately returned to his normal form, the cosmic blackness disappearing from his body as he became the teenage boy Lex had summoned only moments earlier.
“Hi, Lex,” Ben whispered, glancing suspiciously at the woman standing beside them. “Who's this lady?”
“I don't know,” Lex whispered back. “Some cosmic being calling herself the Queen of Nevers.”
“You two know that whispering won't be enough to stop her from listening, right?”
Gwen's voice came from behind them.
Both Lex and Ben turned.
Gwen was watching them with her arms folded, her expression far less welcoming than it had been earlier. Her eyes remained fixed on Ben for a moment before shifting toward the woman in green, clearly trying to determine exactly what had just happened.
The Queen smiled faintly.
“She is correct.”
Lex looked around.
“Wait, you guys can see her now?”
“Ah...” The Queen glanced down at herself, as though only just considering the matter. “I didn't think there was any reason for me to hide anymore, I suppose.”
She turned and began walking away.
Lex watched her for a few seconds before she simply vanished, disappearing without even bothering to say goodbye.
He stared at the empty space she had left behind.
“Wasn't it her who said that teleporting in the middle of a conversation is rude?”
No answer came.
Lex sighed.
“Hypocrite.”