1 Never buy strange things from strange people.

Note: This is set at the beginning of 2015, before the events of Ultron.

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In a cheap and dull apartment room, a person was in the center covered in black robes. The room was littered with anime and pop star posters and ordinary furniture. In the center, where the person was, was a circle with a strange and meaningless design, with several lit candles connected to the circle.

"Ahlloigehye mggoka'ai ya uln! Y' ymg' uln! Ahlloigehye mggoka'ai ya uln! Y' ymg' uln! Ahlloigehye mggoka'ai ya uln! Y' ymg' uln!" The hooded figure repeated over and over with fervor, his words completely unfamiliar and meaningless to humans.

"Mgep mgr'luhah ya!" She exclaimed with conviction as she raised her arms, ending the incantation.

Ten seconds...

Twenty seconds...

One minute...

Ten minutes...

After a long wait, the hooded person sighs with apparent disappointment. "I did everything right, and nothing happened. As I imagined, this book I bought from that strange old lady is nothing more than a farce."

Taking off her hood, the mysterious person revealed herself to be a young girl, no older than sixteen. Her slightly wavy brown hair, honey-colored eyes, and small, cute face were a strange contrast to the mysterious and macabre atmosphere of her room.

The girl's name is Annabeth, a high school student at Midtown High School in Queens, New York. She is a normal girl who came alone from the countryside to study in the big city. As a country bumpkin, she soon found herself in awe - New York seemed like another world when she first saw the city, and she explored everything she could.

That's how Annabeth had her first contact with the world of occultism, mysteries, and the supernatural - obviously in a fictional way, like in books and movies.

Falling in love with this universe of mysteries, like a true enthusiast, Annabeth was tempted to test everything and anything that could prove that the supernatural was real, after all, if there are real gods, aliens, a green monster, and a genius man that can build a super technological combat armor, why can't there be magic? But sadly, in her six months of research, nothing worked.

That was, until that day.

Turning on the lights, Annabeth grabbed a wet cloth and got ready to clean the floor, but suddenly, the light began to flicker wildly, the candle's fire seemed to come to life as it began to dance unnaturally, and as a final cue, the apartment began to shake violently.

"K-Kyah! What the hell is happening? An earthquake?!" Annabeth screamed in fright as she held on to the wall to keep her balance.

In her confusion, Annabeth noticed that the summoning circle she'd drawn began to glow slowly, and then it exploded in a show of red, white, and yellow light.

Annabeth closes her eyes to protect them from the blinding light, and when the light seems to have disappeared, she opens her eyes again, and to her disbelief, she is no longer in her room, but in an empty, weird place.

The place had a lot of resemblance to outer space, but it was full of beams of light, ripples, and strange objects with completely confusing geometric shapes.

She was scared, she was confused, she wanted to scream, she wanted to get out of there, but she couldn't do anything. It was as if only her conscience was there.

In that completely strange and meaningless place, something caught Annabeth's attention. In the middle of all that, there was a huge cloud composed of countless bubbles that resembled soap bubbles. The bubbles retracted and contracted and emitted hundreds of different colors, most of which Annabeth couldn't even tell if they were really colors.

Strangely, she found that cloud very beautiful, which helped her to calm down.

But in the next moment, another strange thing happened. From the gigantic cloud of bubbles, one of them broke free and began to squirm as if it were made of Play-Doh. The bubble began to shrink and curl; Annabeth watched the strange action of that single bubble, but then her surprise turned to amazement as the bubble seemed to be taking the shape of a humanoid.

After a few more seconds, the blob had transformed into a humanoid creature, but one that could hardly be called human. It looked like a human girl, it had a very young stature with long white hair and golden yellow eyes. But the resemblance to humans ended there.

On the sides of the creature's head, two long thin red drill-like horns extended horizontally, and on top were two more black-colored horns. Its eyes seemed to contain no feelings or life, and on its forehead was a black and yellow third eye. On its back, there were three pairs of small white wings, and each of them had two pairs of small eyes. On the creature's chest, instead of breasts, there was a huge black mouth that salivated a strange yellowish goo, and its arms and hands looked like those of some beast with sharp claws, and on its back, it has a red tail. (Look at the cover image)

Annabeth looked at the creature that formed from the bubble and was startled and amazed. The creature was frightening, yet strangely beautiful at the same time. That strange being made Annabeth feel things she didn't know how to describe.

The creature then moved, looked directly at Annabeth, and smiled. Then, in the blink of an eye, Annabeth's consciousness returned to her room, as if this had all been a dream. She looked scared from side to side, but everything looked normal. The candle fire burned quietly, the light in the room was not flickering, the room looked in order, and the circle did not emit any light.

Seeing that everything was completely normal, Annabeth heaved a long sigh of relief, but she was still confused. Was this some hallucination? As far as she knows, she doesn't have any mental health issues and neither uses drugs, and it couldn't have been a dream since she was standing in the same spot before all of this happened.

Still, with complicated feelings, Annabeth rubs her eyes and decided to forget about what happened and go to sleep. She would clean the room the next day, and think more about it later. Turning around and taking a step to go to her bed, suddenly she feels something tugging at her shirt from behind, and she freezes.

Beads of sweat began to fall from Annabeth's forehead. She lived alone, and she was in the middle of the room, there was nothing there that could snag her shirt like a doorknob usually do. Telling herself inwardly that it was nothing, Annabeth plucked up courage and she turned around.

In the middle of the circle she had drawn, the strange humanoid creature resembling a little girl she saw in that strange place was standing there, her bestial arm outstretched holding the edge of Annabeth's shirt and staring at her with lifeless eyes.

Looking at the creature, a myriad of feelings engulfed Annabeth, and amid the chaos that was in her mind, she could only think of one thing.

'It was real...'

Unable to stand the whole situation, Annabeth's fourteen-year-old mind shuts down and she passes out.

The creature on the other hand, seeing the child in front of her fainting, sighs and whispers, "What a mess..."

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Elsewhere, far away from New York, in a temple hidden in a mountain, a bald woman dressed as a monk abruptly rises from her chair, her pupils dilated and head drenched in sweat.

"What was that....?" she murmured. She was just having tea, and suddenly a chaotic, evil and extremely powerful presence appeared on earth, and a second later disappeared without a trace.

The woman felt extremely alarmed, whatever it was, it made her, the Sorcerer Supreme, feel dread. Not even Dormammu aroused such primal terror as she felt in that small but slow second.

Not only her, but several sensitive beings noticed the arrival of something unimaginably dangerous.