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# Flashback…
# Back in the main world..
- Underground Laboratory, beneath Rome -
- October, 1939 -
The sound of the machines never truly stopped down here.
Even in the silence between hums, there was a heartbeat — the quiet rhythm of electricity flowing through copper veins, of a mind that refused to give up.
Nicola Tesla sat alone at his desk, surrounded by towers of brass coils, glowing crystals, and half-finished prototypes of machines that seemed centuries ahead of their time. Blue sparks flickered around the room like tiny fireflies, dancing to an invisible tune. The air smelled faintly of ozone and metal — the scent of both progress and obsession.
He hadn't seen the sun In years.
The streets above belonged to another world now — one ruled by the shadows of the Brotherhood of the Shield.
And by Isaac Newton.
Tesla's lips curved slightly, though not in amusement. "You always believed the universe was a formula to be solved, Isaac," he muttered to himself. "But you forgot one thing… the equation does not exist without chaos."
For nearly a decade, Newton had been hunting him, certain that Tesla had fled to America. And that was the point. Tesla had left behind trails of false data, phantom signatures of energy that stretched across the Atlantic — misdirections meant to keep Newton chasing ghosts.
Meanwhile, Tesla had buried himself right beneath the Immortal City itself.
The irony was delicious. Newton's agents scoured the world for him, while he sat mere kilometers away from the Brotherhood's own archives, hidden by the very energy signatures they thought they understood.
He called his base The Human Machine — part laboratory, part living engine. It was an enormous, breathing system of circuits, wires, and bio-mechanical conduits that pulsed faintly with his own energy. Over time, it had become more than a shelter. It was his partner.
Panels of glowing data rotated in the air before him, showing fragments of overlapping timelines. They were fragile, trembling like candle flames in the wind. Some flickered and disappeared; others merged into new patterns that defied any conventional physics.
Tesla leaned forward, his eyes fixed on the holographic lattice — the intricate web of energy he had been mapping for years.
Each thread represented a universe. Each pulse, a moment in time.
And lately… the rhythm had changed.
The equations no longer followed any known pattern. Something else — something alive — seemed to be holding the fabric of reality together.
He rubbed his temples. "It's as if the universe is healing itself… by merging what was never meant to merge."
He had glimpsed the formulas — strange, divine patterns that hummed with logic beyond comprehension. He called them the Harmonies. They were not man-made, not even cosmic — they were self-born, rewriting existence from within.
He couldn't understand them fully. No one could. But he knew they were the reason this reality still held together despite the chaos that was ever-present.
And so he kept studying. Kept hoping.
Because somewhere out there, Da Vinci was trying to reach him.
For years, Tesla had sent message after message into the timestream — coded bursts of chronal energy that traveled like whispers through eternity. Every attempt had failed, blocked by the same invisible patterns. All except one.
That one message — the one that Da Vinci had received in Year 2077 of Earth-6316 — had only partially gone through before the universe corrected itself and sealed the breach.
Tesla had replayed it hundreds of times, each time catching the faint echo of his own voice lost in static.
"Leonardo… Newton… he's not what he seems. The Council has fallen…"
And then nothing.
It haunted him.
Tonight, though, something was different. His recalibration device — a sprawling sphere of layered rings humming softly with magnetic fields — had finally stabilized. The air shimmered as he adjusted the final controls.
Sparks traced symbols in the air, forming the temporal coordinates of this reality.
He exhaled deeply. "Finally…"
The machine pulsed in response, glowing brighter as he linked it to the Human Machine's central core. Streams of energy curved through the air like veins of light.
He knew this wouldn't break the Harmonies. But it might let him ride along their rhythm — not fight the flow, but move with it. If Leonardo was still alive, this signal might finally reach him.
He smiled faintly, exhaustion and hope tangled in his expression. "Let's see if the old artist still listens to ghosts."
He activated the transmitter. The sphere vibrated with a low hum, sending ripples through time itself — quiet but deliberate, like a heartbeat traveling through eternity.
For a few moments, everything was still. Then, the readings shifted.
Tesla's brow furrowed. "Wait… what is this?"
A new pattern was emerging — a disturbance not from now, but from before. He quickly scanned the data stream, and his heart skipped.
It was coming from 1936 — three years earlier.
New York.
The coordinates matched his old transmission marker.
For a brief instant, the machine showed something impossible — a tear, a temporal wormhole that had opened suddenly and collapsed just as fast. The Harmonies had fixed it almost instantly, sealing the breach.
But for that split second, something — someone — had crossed through.
Tesla froze, staring at the image. "Leonardo…? Did you make it through?"
The energy reading didn't match Da Vinci's frequency. It was close… but more unstable. More human.
"Whoever it was," Tesla whispered, "they came through by mistake."
His fingers danced across the console, pulling up old chronal records and harmonics. The signature was unique — chronal, but infused with a self-generating energy pattern he had never seen before.
"This… this is not Leonardo," he murmured. "But he's connected. Somehow."
He didn't know it yet, but the man who had fallen through that unstable wormhole was Nathaniel Richards.
Tesla sat back, thinking quickly. The disturbance had already been sealed by the universe's own self-correcting equations, but a faint echo remained — a residue he might be able to trace.
His mind raced with possibilities. If Da Vinci had tried to reach him, and someone else had slipped through instead, maybe the link between their worlds was not entirely gone. Maybe, just maybe, there was still a path open.
He turned toward the far end of the room, where a tall mechanical figure stood against the wall — his cyborg duplicate, a perfect replica of himself built for fieldwork.
It looked human In every way, down to the fine lines on its face, but its eyes glowed faintly blue, powered by the Tesla Core embedded in its chest — a miniature fusion heart of electromagnetic and temporal energy.
Tesla approached it slowly, his hand brushing over the cold metal surface of its arm. "You'll do better up there than I ever could."
He activated the link. The cyborg's eyes opened, pulsing with soft light.
"Mission directive," Tesla said softly. "Temporal anomaly detected — New York, 1936. Investigate. Record everything. Find out who fell through that rift."
The cyborg tilted Its head slightly, acknowledging. "Understood."
Tesla stepped back, watching as the machine prepared for departure. Through a concealed elevator shaft, it would rise to the surface, blending seamlessly into the human world above.
He took one last look at his monitors. The signal to Da Vinci had gone out. Whether it reached or not, he couldn't know. But for the first time in years, he felt that faint stirring of belief again — that the web of time wasn't broken beyond repair.
As the cyborg ascended toward the surface, Tesla turned back to his desk. The glow from the recalibration core reflected in his tired eyes.
Quietly, he whispered to himself, "If the universe truly wants to heal… then perhaps, Leonardo, we are its instruments."
And somewhere far away — across timelines and centuries — the faintest echo of Da Vinci's newest Chrono Nexus stirred in response.
The threads of past, present, and future were aligning again.
Slowly. Painfully. But surely.
—
# Present Time...
- New York City, January 15, 1940 -
The city outside was buried under snow.
Grey skies pressed low over the skyline, and the wind howled between the tall, cold buildings like a ghost that never stopped wandering. People hurried along the streets, faces half-hidden behind scarves, unaware that beneath the steady rhythm of winter, something far stranger was unfolding.
In a dimly lit workshop near the Hudson docks, the cyborg version of Nikola Tesla stood alone, surrounded by machines that hummed softly like a heartbeat. Sparks of blue energy flickered through the air, reflecting in his metallic eyes. His movements were precise, deliberate — every gesture measured, every thought running through a thousand lines of code and memory that were once human.
He had been here for months, searching for traces of the breach that had torn open reality three years earlier.
The readings were faint, nearly erased by the natural corrections of the universe itself, but he had been patient — tirelessly analyzing electromagnetic remnants, subatomic distortions, and the faint echoes of chronal residue left behind.
And now, finally, he had something.
The cyborg adjusted the controls on his handheld scanner — a sleek, palm-sized device that emitted faint pulses of blue light. It picked up invisible ripples in the air, mapping them into holographic threads before his eyes.
"There," he murmured in a voice that still carried the calm tone of the real Nikola Tesla. "That's where it opened."
He marked the location — an abandoned subway tunnel under the city, sealed decades ago. The breach had happened right there, a tear in reality that had lasted mere seconds before the universe stitched it closed again.
But no matter how many times he ran the calculations, one thing remained missing — the traveler.
The one who came through.
He had scanned every trace of energy, every possible quantum imprint. But there was no consistent reading. Whoever — or whatever — had fallen through that tear had disappeared completely, as if time itself had swallowed them.
"Not Leonardo," he said softly. "Then who?"
The cyborg stood still for a moment, his artificial eyes dimming as he processed the possibilities. His science had reached its limit. Even his Tesla Core — the quantum heart that powered him — could only stabilize the data for so long before it degraded.
He nee'ed a different kind of insight now. Something beyond numbers.
Something human.
Or perhaps… something magical.
He looked out the frosted window toward the skyline, his decision made.
—
Later that evening, in a quiet townhouse in Greenwich Village, a faint shimmer of energy lit up the drawing room. Candles flickered, and the scent of burning sage filled the air.
Agatha Harkness — her silver hair tied loosely behind her head, eyes sharp with ageless wisdom — turned from her armchair as the shimmer condensed into a figure of light.
When the glow faded, the cyborg Tesla stood there. His mechanical form was sleek yet strangely elegant, faint arcs of blue energy humming gently through his chest where the Tesla Core pulsed.
Agatha raised an eyebrow, half amused, half astonished. "Well," she said, setting down her cup of tea. "You certainly know how to make an entrance. I didn't expect to see you again — at least, not made of wires and starlight."
The cyborg Inclined his head politely. "You still have a sharp tongue, Agatha."
She chuckled. "And you, Nikola, still find new ways to defy both science and reason. You built yourself into a machine?"
"Not exactly," the cyborg said softly. "I am a fragment — a copy, sustained by his energy. The real Tesla remains… elsewhere."
Agatha studied him for a moment. Even now, centuries after their last meeting, she could still sense that spark — that mix of logic and wonder that had made Tesla so rare. He had always walked the line between the magical and the mechanical, though he had stubbornly refused to cross fully into her world.
"You know," she said thoughtfully, "you would've made a fine sorcerer if you'd ever agreed to train under me."
The cyborg almost smiled. "And you would've made a fine engineer, had you agreed to stop bending the laws of physics."
Agatha laughed softly. "Touché."
But the brief warmth between them faded quickly as the cyborg's expression turned serious.
"I didn't come for nostalgia," he said. "I need your help."
Agatha straightened in her chair. "Tell me."
He projected a hologram between them — a swirling image of New York City overlaid with glowing strands of light. At its center was a single, flickering point — the remains of the 1936 breach.
"A temporal rift appeared here three years ago," the cyborg explained. "Its energy matches the work of Leonardo da Vinci's Chrono Nexus. But… the readings are incomplete. There is no sign of him. Only a trace of someone else — someone the universe doesn't seem to want me to find."
Agatha studied the projection, her sharp eyes narrowing. "A breach like that shouldn't have lasted at all. The fact that it did, even for a second, means something — or someone — interfered."
"Exactly," said Tesla's echo. "But my instruments can't go further. The irregularities are not just quantum — they're woven into the structure of the timeline itself. I need… perspective beyond science."
Agatha was quiet for a moment, her gaze softening. "You're asking for magic."
He nodded. "Yes."
For a heartbeat, she looked at him with something almost like pride. "I never thought I'd live to hear you say those words."
"I don't have the luxury of pride anymore," he said simply.
She sighed and stood, walking to her shelves filled with grimoires, artifacts, and vials that shimmered faintly with energy. "You do realize," she said, "that I haven't exactly had time for private favors. The world's changing. The Brotherhood is moving again. And I've been busy guiding a few… talented women who want to make sure men like Newton don't burn the world down."
"The Daughters of Liberty," Tesla replied. "I've heard of them. Patriots, mystics, visionaries. You're building something good."
Agatha smiled faintly. "And dangerous."
She turned back to him. "You do know I refused to work with Newton last year, don't you? He came to me with one of his grand schemes — wanted me to help him 'contain' an Emperor in the East. Some kind of mutant, powerful beyond measure. I told him no. I don't serve tyrants."
The cyborg tilted his head slightly. "Then we stand on the same side, still."
Agatha nodded slowly. "That's why I'll help you, Tesla. Not for science, not for your machines — but because you've always sought understanding, not control."
The cyborg's eyes dimmed slightly, a quiet gratitude flickering in his voice. "Thank you, Agatha."
She smiled, stepping closer to him. "Now," she said, raising a hand that glowed softly with violet light, "let's see what the universe has been hiding from you."
As her spell took shape, the lights in the room flickered. The hologram shimmered, the faint image of the breach pulsing in time with her heartbeat. And slowly, through the noise of space and time, a new pattern began to emerge — faint, fractured, but real.
Agatha's eyes widened. "This isn't Da Vinci," she whispered. "Whoever came through… their energy feels different. Human, yes — but touched by something far different."
The cyborg's gaze tightened. "Then it wasn't Leonardo."
"No," Agatha said softly, watching the light twist into an unfamiliar shape. "It was someone else entirely. And whatever they brought with them… it's changing this timeline more than either of us realize."
The Tesla Core Inside his chest pulsed once — bright, alive, almost anxious.
Outside, the storm over New York intensified, lightning flashing over the frozen skyline.
And deep beneath the city, in the shadows of the old subway tunnels, the faint hum of chronal energy stirred again — waiting to be found.
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