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The exhausted girl slept soundly.
She rarely stayed the night at Henry's place. But whenever she did, she slept especially well—as if she had found a safe harbor. The nightmares that once startled her awake had not visited in a long time.
Henry, however, was far from restful.
Holding someone soft and fragrant in his arms was one of life's pleasures—but the pile of research waiting for him had grown too large.
Most of the digital imaging development had already been handed over to Stark Pictures' technical teams. Henry functioned more as a guide—occasionally correcting their course to ensure they didn't veer off track.
His real workload lay elsewhere.
In projects no one else could assist with.
---
Research into Eternal blood related to future battlesuit development—but Henry wasn't in a hurry. Threats like exotic solar radiation or kryptonite weren't imminent.
Vibranium was the same. Without a clear purpose, crafting random gadgets would be a waste. Anything he made casually would likely end up as a paperweight—or a brick.
His true focus remained the Kree and Skrull storage crystals he had taken from the Kree cruiser months ago.
If he could extract usable alien technology—especially in the field of energy—it would change everything.
---
Recreating a device to read alien storage crystals wasn't difficult. He had seen the original hardware; duplicating the read-spectrum system on Earth posed little challenge.
The real difficulty lay elsewhere.
The data.
Mountains of alien-language documentation.
Without foundational knowledge or matching equipment, most of it was theoretical castles in the sky.
Worse—
Much of it was incomprehensible.
This was a Kryptonian with a super-brain.
And yet, without structured indexing or guided progression, mastering alien science from scratch left him without a clear starting point.
Mar-Vell, the original Kree scientist owner of these archives, had not thoughtfully labeled sections as:
"Primary School Level"
"Secondary Education"
"University Core Curriculum"
"Do Not Proceed Without Prerequisites"
So Henry resorted to brute-force absorption.
Read everything.
Memorize everything.
Search for threads.
Attempt to reconstruct the technological tree.
By comparison, learning Kree and Skrull languages through reading was child's play.
With some prior exposure to Kree, Henry quickly abandoned translating into English and began reading the original texts directly.
Skrull was manageable because the archives included comparative translations between Skrull and Kree.
Even so—
After several months, he could meaningfully understand less than ten percent of the material.
Partly due to limited daily time allocation.
But also because the knowledge truly reflected the level of a professional scientist. Very little was simple.
What he could understand most readily?
Mathematics.
Apparently, math really was universal.
Technical terminology, however, often left him staring blankly.
---
Still, there was progress.
Henry categorized the Kree data into:
1. Reference Literature — Established, verified knowledge.
2. Research Notes — Mar-Vell's hypotheses, experimental stages, and partial errors.
He chose to focus first on the reference material.
That didn't mean the research notes were trivial. In fact, Mar-Vell's work on the Pegasus Project, the light-speed engine, and Tesseract studies were all in that category.
Henry simply wasn't prioritizing them yet.
---
Skrull technology archives contained not only documents—but vast genetic libraries.
There was also something resembling a Skrull Imperial Encyclopedia.
Biology.
Minerals.
History.
Territorial expansion.
Technological evolution.
It even contained an entry on Krypton—classified as a defeated civilization.
Many extinct civilizations followed.
The common conclusion?
"Not worth preservation."
The sheer arrogance was chilling.
The Skrulls had clearly intended to rebuild elsewhere—why else carry a cultural archive during their escape?
And they did not record extermination as shame.
They recorded it as merit.
As achievement.
---
The version Henry possessed was incomplete—only directory structures and summaries were accessible. The deeper content was encrypted.
He didn't rush to break that encryption.
Even the accessible encyclopedia dramatically expanded his understanding of the galactic landscape.
Cross-referencing Skrull summaries allowed him to interpret Kree materials more effectively.
He was no longer just decoding equations.
But mastering two galactic empires' science overnight?
Impossible.
Materials science alone posed massive barriers.
Many raw elements used in alien technologies simply did not exist on Earth.
Without materials, you needed substitutes.
Substitutes weren't documented in alien manuals.
Henry felt like a butcher who had paid dearly to learn dragon-slaying techniques—only to discover dragons did not exist.
---
Still—
The small fraction of applicable technology was generations ahead of Earth's.
But even then—
Energy remained the bottleneck.
Henry would never risk building alien-tech prototypes inside old Gary's apartment building.
If the FBI ever raided again, he couldn't rely on self-destruct theatrics twice.
He needed a base.
A proper one.
The funds from Sony's settlement and Tony Stark's concessions made serious infrastructure viable.
An underwater laboratory?
A submarine?
Or—
The Watchtower space station?
He paused that thought immediately.
In DC lore, the Watchtower got invaded or crashed constantly. It was practically a mandatory tourist destination for alien conquerors.
Without Bruce Wayne-level finances, constructing something that fell from orbit every other year was… unwise.
Henry mentally crossed it off.
For now.
Energy first.
Then infrastructure.
Then—
The real leap forward
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