Chapter 8: A One Way Road to Preparation

Author's Note: Hello friends, so it has been about a week since I've even written anything, turns out that even though the school's on its last legs it still has more to throw at me. But rejoice! I have defeated the slew of end-of-year projects and have returned to this exercise in escapism called fan fiction. Enjoy the chapter, and don't forget to read and review.

"Hello fellow humans" - Speaking a foreign language(s)

"Hello fellow humans" - Speaking English

'Hello fellow humans' - Inner thoughts/thinking English

I had always been a lazy person…

To be perfectly fair it was an unavoidable side effect of growing up in the United States in the early 2000s. Apathy was a pervasive contagion that children in that society were almost preferred to contract. It was only shortly before I had been stolen from my original universe that young men and women from around the world were actually stepping up to the plate and doing things in the world. Like that twenty-something European millionaire that was pretty much single-handedly cleaning up the oceans' plastics with a viable idea, he developed in high school.

But in terms of moral fiber, motivation and any number of things really there was a huge gap between me and that guy. Something that I could no longer stand for. As much as it went against every ingrained instinct in me it was time to be…. Ugh… proactive.

I shuddered at the disgusting idea but shoulder through it. There are actual lives at stake here. Coulson may not be dead in this timeline, but he was lying in a med bay unconscious somewhere on this ship with a knife wound through his kidney. He shouldn't have gotten hurt at all. Really dropped the ball on that one didn't I. Well no more world, Never Fear, For I am Here!

I should really talk actual human beings instead of monologuing like a psycho, I think I may actually be losing brain cells by doing this. First order of business after this Chitauri business is to go out for a good burger with Bruce, maybe we even take the rest of the new gang, recreate that Shawarma scene, except instead of Shawarma it's a burger, because I don't know what Shawarma even is. I'm getting ahead of myself. The first order of business is this incoming Chitauri problem.

In the time taken up by slightly psychotic monologuing I had reached the runway deck of the Helicarrier. I turned to find Fury slightly behind me and the others approaching.

"So what exactly is the plan here Accelerator?" Steve asks while the others array themselves around me. This time around both the Hulk and Thor had managed to stay onboard the flying boat, even though Bruce had reverted back somewhen in the intervening time this was a big step up, I wanted all the help possible as close by as possible. All the better to keep the fighting concentrated and prevent collateral damages.

"Fury said there's guns on this ship, which means it'll be a help in the fight. But I also overheard an agent say even at full functionality the Helicarrier couldn't get to New York in time, let alone with an engine down."

"The plan was to take a quinjet," says Steve as he absentmindedly tightens the straps holding his shield to his forearm.

"Would probably work, but again..., this boat is an asset, so I'm going to push it to New York"

I'm getting pretty good at rendering people speechless. Must be an ingrained talent. I can't decide whose reaction is funnier, Steve stares straight on as if ignoring the statement that doesn't fit his world view will make it go away, Fury tries to glare answers out of me, Tony looks like he's trying to figure out how that would actually work, his intelligence definitely wasn't to be underestimated then, if he already had an inkling of my power after seeing me use it only a few times.

Banner draws focus onto himself, his previous knowledge of me allowing him to process the statement for what it means faster "Can you actually do that? We never tested with anything bigger than a car." Asking the questions seems to bring him out of shell a little bit, letting him forget if only for a moment the turbulent storm of emotions that a Hulk transformation must leave in its wake.

"Yes, I can Bruce, remember, there are no limits." Then I start laying out my plan.

I haven't had a 'huh... this is my life now isn't it?' moment in a while so it only makes sense the overdue feeling runs up my spine like a lightning bolt. Here I am, giving a superhero plan talk because my superpowers are badass as fuck so I have a plan. My life is pretty fucking great isn't it.

The plan was ironed out over an agonizing half hour when the more experienced combatants like Steve and Romanoff did not hesitate to rip into my half-baked idea and try to make something sensible out of it. Meanwhile, next to them Fury grilled Thor on any information the Aesir had on the Chitauri's martial capabilities while Hill stood and occasionally delivered status reports over his shoulder. We split off to our assigned positions.

For a lot of the team, their roles hadn't changed much, the four non-fliers cut across the busy runway during a lull to a quinjet whose engines were warming up, they were to meet the rest of us at ground zero in downtown Manhattan. Clint seemed to have bounced back impressively from his stint as a Loki Flunky because Fury hadn't hesitated to task their team assisting the recently begun civilian evacuation efforts and to take on any smaller troops that appeared. I suppose that was the nature of this field of work though, no rest for the wicked one could say.

I decided to leave the distraction part of the plan to Tony, he excelled at being an annoying shit, and to be honest, I was kinda jealous of it, definitely one of his better abilities. But perhaps, more importantly, it would give him a chance to get a new suit he said, an opportunity most were inclined to jump on given the fact that he'd been insistently whining about while staring plaintively at the ruined paint job and dented chassis around the glowing reactor in his chest.

Thor and Hulk would be crowd control, Bruce having been carried off by the demigod to transform into his angrier counterpart at the scene of the invasion. The two heavy hitters would take on larger troop emplacements and ensure none of the alien shits managed to dig themselves a foothold on this side of the portal for a further excursion.

My part was exceedingly simple, and yet a little complicated. Vague memories of the first Avengers movie told me that Romanoff had had to use the scepter to close the portal since nothing else could get through the Tesseract's force field. Since I had the Mind Stone now I volunteered to take over Thor's role in limiting entrants through the portal, conveniently putting me in a position to 'find' a way to close the hole in reality that the Space Stone would rip in the sky.

But before any of that, I had my original self assigned task to complete. I turned to Fury once the rest of the team had taken off in their own various ways and nodded once, signaling to him that I was about to begin. As he jogged away, back to the bridge no doubt to coordinate efforts I heard him yelling into his earpiece for agents to take their battle stations.

Pushing him and other extraneous thoughts from my mind I stared down at the tarmac. There were several ways I could do this really, I-

'Alright enough stalling, just do this.'

I crouched and laid a palm flat on the warm ground, letting the mid-morning heat soak into my hand via the asphalt. Taking a last breath to steady myself I dived head first into the numbers.

I'd never pushed my powers to work on something this big but that wasn't really an issue. Unlike other superpowers from fiction which were often scaled for some semblance of balance the character whose abilities I'd inherited worked a little differently. What limited me was the number of calculations required for whatever it was I was trying to pull off, so it didn't matter whether I was trying to move a golf ball or a boulder, their masses were just different numbers to compute the actual math didn't change very much.

So although it took a second to adjust to the flood of information within my grasp it was almost criminally easy to push aside the current wind bearing and surrounding high altitude thermals and seize the overall vectors governing the Helicarrier and everything on it.

A little tweak is all it takes, the massive vessel's acceleration shifting from zero meters per second squared to a decent five meters per second squared at my meddling. Within minutes the airborne destroyer was moving about as fast as most commercial jets, several times the top speed it might but on a good day without my hero. Several minutes after that I brought the acceleration back down to zero, leveling off our airspeed and ensuring that we would reach New York only several minutes after the others.

Criminally easy…

While the ship zooms along, rattling sightly at being stressed so far from its usual operating tolerances, I stand up and dust my hands off. I was able to find time before this to get my hands on a few new toys from the SHIELD armory. One of the few weaknesses my power possessed was the inability to manipulate matter that wasn't there, hence the soda can-sized oxygen canister strapped to the small of my back. Suffocation was one of the sure fire ways to take me down so there was no sense in leaving the loophole open.

I also snagged a multi-user contact taser, I could generate lighting myself but it was a bit off an iffy process since even slight atmospheric disturbances were enough to domino the math into requiring exponentially more processing power. Much simpler to use premade electricity and just push on it to take the size and shape I want.

My jumpsuit remained the same, standard SHIELD-wear winter edition. Still flawlessly clean even though I'd been in several fights, reflection field for the win.

Done checking myself over I forced myself to sit down on the edge of the ship. Trying to put my sudden nerves out of mind. Wouldn't be long now.

PS, Accelerator moving the Helicarrier so easily is well within the scope of his abilities. In the source material in stealing his power from he throws an entire skyscraper with a single hand.