Author's Note:
An old but still important piece of news: on SpaceBattles someone created a story inspired by mine, it's called Diplomatic Relations [MCU/Genshin Impact] - Fontaine vs SHIELD (and Hydra) written by Curiosity Relic.
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Story Arc: A New Nation and a New King for the Earth
Episode 2: The Mechanic, the Archer and the Spy
Chapter 4: Strategic Meeting
Plot: SHIELD prepares a team to go and explore a territory unknown to mankind.
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POV Narrator
Exactly one month has passed since what the news channels and international scientific committees have dubbed the Grand Blue. Thirty days have not been enough to erase the invisible, yet deep scar that this event has burned into the flesh and memory of human history.
The cataclysm manifested itself through three distinct and terrifying chain phenomena, redefining the boundaries of reality.
The First Phenomenon: The Global Impulse
The first sign came in the form of an anomalous seismic impulse, a low-intensity earthquake on a planetary scale that made the foundations of the world vibrate for sixty interminable seconds. Seismographic readings showed how the ideal epicenter coincided with the entire Eurasian tectonic plate, shaken by an unnatural shiver. From the perspective of Earth's geology, a simultaneous and global tremor is a scientific heresy, an impossible event. Yet, it happened. The shockwaves did not originate from the Earth's molten core; instead, they were the side effect of an external pressure, as if a titanic hand had distorted the very fabric of space-time to wedge something foreign onto the planet.
The immediate impact of this vibration shattered the communication channels of modern civilization, causing the instantaneous collapse of the Internet and global telecommunications. Beneath the dark surface of the oceans, in the silent abysses where the true pillars of the modern economy rest, submarine fiber-optic cables — digital arteries handling 99% of the world's data traffic — were stretched, severed, or buried. The weak but omnipresent tremor triggered a myriad of underwater micro-landslides; rivers of mud and high-pressure rocks poured into the ocean ridges, cleanly severing transatlantic and transpacific connections.
In major metropolises, the sudden digital silence triggered unprecedented mass panic. Left isolated, lacking a connection to verify news or reassure their loved ones, billions of people poured into the streets in a state of hysterical blindness. Some screamed of a biblical apocalypse, others scanned the sky convinced of the imminent impact of an asteroid invisible to radar, and others awaited a second planetary cataclysm that would swallow the cities.
The transport network evaporated within a few heartbeats. The sophisticated railway safety systems of the most industrialized nations registered the anomalous seismic wave, instantly activating automatic emergency braking protocols. Thousands of passenger trains and freight convoys ground to a sudden halt on the tracks, disrupting lines and trapping people inside the carriages. At international airports, air traffic controllers froze the runways, immediately suspending all takeoffs and ordering a state of maximum alert for aircraft in flight, fearing that the runways had suffered structural cracks or that radar systems had been permanently compromised.
Civilians' homes were turned upside down. In the houses of hundreds of millions of people, dishes, books, and paintings slipped from shelves in unison, shattering on the ground in a sinister domestic chorus. Beneath the asphalt of old European and American cities, historical gas pipelines and water networks, already worn down by time, suffered millions of invisible micro-fractures. The subsoil began to bubble with widespread and unseen leaks, an infrastructural crisis impossible to map or repair simultaneously. Even the simulacra of human history paid the price: ancient monuments, Gothic cathedrals, and millennial temples showed new fissures along their load-bearing pillars, with fragments of stone and marble covering the church squares in dust.
The Second Phenomenon: The Return Flood
If the tremor shook humanity's nerves, the second phenomenon dealt a devastating blow to the surface economy. The sudden insertion of Fontaine's landmass into the Atlantic Ocean generated an immense displacement of water. The sea was driven away with primordial violence, raising liquid walls hundreds of meters high. Tsunamis and rogue waves of mythological proportions crashed with blind fury upon the coasts of northern Spain, battering the cliffs of Galicia and the Basque Country. In France, the water gutted the ports of Brittany and invaded the vineyards of Bordeaux, while the south of England was hit by a destructive tide that chewed through piers and docks.
Once the first, fleeting wave of destruction had passed, the ocean found a new and unsettling equilibrium, stabilizing at a permanent global sea-level rise of 25 centimeters. This figure, seemingly small on paper, translated into an authentic chronic plague for every single coastal community on the planet, swelling routine maintenance costs out of proportion.
At this new height, the ocean no longer needs the pretext of a perfect storm to cause damage. By now, the normal lunar cycle is enough to trigger disasters:
- In Venice, the high tide driven by the full moon has turned St. Mark's Square into a permanent mirror of water, forcing the authorities to keep the MOSE mobile barriers raised day and night, wearing out the hydraulic mechanisms in a desperate attempt to save the Basilica's mosaics.
- In Miami, the foundations of skyscrapers and luxury avenues have been systematically invaded by saltwater, which has corroded underground power grids and flooded coastal residential neighborhoods with a foul, unstoppable tide.
- In the Fiji Islands, entire Polynesian villages and tourist atolls have partially disappeared beneath the water's surface, sinking into the sea and triggering the desperate exodus of the local population toward the mountainous hinterland.
In the United States, the military heart of the superpower suffered a severe setback. The Norfolk Naval Station, the largest US Navy installation in the world, saw her strategic piers and dry docks invaded by saltwater. Critical infrastructures short-circuited, forcing the Pentagon to urgently redirect billions of dollars from defense funds in an attempt to raise the containment barriers.
An identical paralysis strangled the world's largest commercial ports. With the docks partially submerged and the seabed altered, the loading and unloading operations of massive container ships turned into high-risk maneuvers, slowing down almost to a standstill. International maritime trade suffered an immediate heart attack. The scarcity of raw materials, food shortages, and the blockade of oil tankers caused crude oil prices to skyrocket, accelerating a devastating inflation just as the global economy was already in the midst of a harsh recession.
Crowning this apocalyptic scenario was the definitive collapse of the financial system. The global real estate market, which was already staggering and imploding under the weight of toxic assets and subprime mortgages (the 2008 crisis), received its death blow. Millions of coastal properties, hotels, resorts, and industrial complexes suddenly became permanent high-water risk assets. Overnight, their market value plummeted, dropping to zero. Investment banks, whose vaults were already filled with securitized mortgages that citizens could no longer afford to pay, found themselves with their only real collateral — houses — literally submerged by saltwater or devalued by 90%. The collapse of the entire worldwide banking system was thus accelerated, becoming infinitely faster, deeper, and more ruthless than any Wall Street analyst had ever predicted.
The Third Phenomenon: The Shadow of the New Nation
In this tangle of rubble, financial crises, and humanitarian disasters gripping the Earth in a suffocating vice, no government has yet had the resources, the courage, or the political stability to launch a serious investigation into the third and most absurd phenomenon of the Grand Blue: the appearance out of nowhere of the Kingdom of Fontaine.
While the leaders of the old world scramble to plug the leaks of a system collapsing under the weight of its own negligence, the nation of the Hydro element has not wasted a single second. Amidst the mists of the Atlantic, protected by her towering Fog-Class battleships and the glass walls of her submerged metropolis, Fontaine is reorganizing herself.
Under the iron leadership of Francis Le Fay, the magitech forges are working at full capacity, greenhouse-skyscrapers are rising toward the sky, and the population is being trained. Fontaine is not merely surviving the cataclysm: she is growing stronger, sharpening her claws for when the new world inevitably knocks on her borders.
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[July 27, 2008]
The Atlantic Ocean was a leaden and menacing expanse. Not far from the jagged coast of France, SHIELD's colossal Helicarrier plowed through the dark waves, her massive gray hull partially submerged. Instead of soaring through the skies, her massive rotors were shut down; the flying fortress was navigating like an ordinary warship, maintaining an extremely low radar profile in a desperate attempt not to draw the attention of the mysterious enemy defenses.
After a month of grueling setbacks and planetary crises, SHIELD finally had the resources to investigate the so-called Atlantis Anomaly.
Director Nick Fury had planned this reconnaissance thirty days prior, immediately after the cataclysm of the Grand Blue. However, reality had gutted every schedule: Fury had not even managed to step on board the Helicarrier before an avalanche of global-level emergencies demanded his presence on land.
During the first two weeks following the disaster, SHIELD had been drained of all energy. Her agents had been deployed to support the United States government in protecting at-risk nuclear infrastructure, in a desperate attempt to reactivate the military satellite radar network — bypassing the silence of the severed submarine cables —, in securing flooded naval bases, and in containing terrorist groups ready to exploit the apocalyptic chaos to make their moves.
Only now, with the world situation stabilized in a very broad sense of the word, had Fury managed to redirect his attention to that geographical scar that had been bothering his good eye for far too long.
Over the last seven days, the agency's technicians had finally managed to clean up the first clear satellite frames of the mysterious archipelago that had materialized in the ocean, deciding to send a flotilla of reconnaissance drones to study the area up close. A move that turned out to be a complete and frustrating wild goose chase: as soon as an unmanned aircraft crossed the invisible border of the archipelago, she was instantly pulverized by the pinpoint precision of heavy artillery fire or by an impenetrable and lethal air defense system.
Pushed into a corner by an unprecedented scenario, Nick Fury had been forced to resort to a desperate measure: dragging Tony Stark aboard the Helicarrier and forcing him to get his hands dirty with this business.
Involving the billionaire had been a bureaucratic and egocentric ordeal. Stark, too, had faced his considerable share of problems arising from the Grand Blue. The thing that had irritated him most deeply was the federal mandate that had forced him to evacuate his futuristic oceanfront villa in Malibu, judged unstable due to water levels, in favor of an old, austere, and dusty family property inland.
Furthermore, the Washington government had practically drafted Iron Man and Stark Industries to accelerate the country's reconstruction. At the moment, eight new state-of-the-art telecommunications satellites gleamed in Earth's orbit, designed in record time in the Stark laboratories to plug the gap in the global internet network. Half of Europe and the allied countries of the United States had lined up, signing billion-dollar contracts just to secure a share of the bandwidth from that emergency satellite assistance reserve.
The Iron Man armor had become the nation's lifeline. Stark had personally descended into the dark oceanic trenches to weld and repair the fiber-optic cables devastated by the underwater landslides. He had shored up with steel plates and plasma welding dozens of continental dams on the verge of giving way to the pressure, while coordinating countless minor interventions to save civilians trapped in flooded areas.
As if this were not enough to turn Tony Stark into the hero of the people — the most beloved face in America since the days of Steve Rogers —, on the pressing advice of Pepper Potts, the billionaire had founded the Stark Foundation: an immense charitable organization that was pumping rivers of money to fund relief efforts and provide shelter for those who had lost their homes to the tsunamis.
Tony, in truth, would have preferred to don his armor and streak at Mach 3 directly over the Bay of Biscay to take a look at the anomaly, but Pepper had begged him to desist. It was not just a matter of safety against the archipelago's unknown defenses; the people, in that moment of darkness, desperately needed Iron Man to remain visible, a symbol of hope and reconstruction.
Only now, with the ship's leaks temporarily patched, could the leadership of SHIELD finally move into action.
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Inside a secure briefing room deep within the heart of the Helicarrier — a room isolated by Faraday cages, soundproof walls, and shielding against any interception technology known to human beings — five elite figures sat around a metallic table:
- Nick Fury, the Director of SHIELD, dark-eyed and arms crossed.
- Phil Coulson, the Director's reflective and impeccable right-hand man.
- Natasha Romanoff, alias Black Widow, the most lethal and graceful spy and assassin on the international scene, motionless in her dark tactical suit.
- Clint Barton, alias Hawkeye, SHIELD's sharpshooter, whose eagle eyes and pinpoint precision with the bow had earned him a legendary reputation.
- Tony Stark, alias Iron Man, the billionaire genius who, at that moment, exuded the unmistakable scent of success and unbridled charisma.
"Finally, I've become important enough to sit at the Illuminati table," Tony began with a sardonic smile, dropping into the metal chair with studied carelessness and stretching his legs out on the polished floor.
"Mr. Stark, I ask for a minimum of seriousness," Coulson corrected him, keeping his voice polite but firm and interlocking his fingers on the table.
"Honestly, I imagined a round table. More glitz, more opulence, and definitely a higher number of women," Tony continued, completely ignoring the reprimand and tapping his fingers on the metal surface, looking around as if he were in a Michelin-starred restaurant with excellent reviews but mediocre decor.
"Stark!" Nick Fury's voice rose in tone, sharp and deep like a gunshot, filling the room and cutting short the echo of the billionaire's jokes.
Tony did not flinch. He shifted his winking gaze to Natasha Romanoff, studying the spy's red hair and lethal silhouette. "I have a soft spot for redheads, but I'm not sure about the skin-tight jumpsuit. I'm not the type for certain costume games."
Natasha did not tense a single muscle. Her gaze remained ice-cold, a promise of silent death that reminded Stark that this woman could end his life in two well-placed moves, or simply by using a pencil if she were annoyed enough. Turning her head toward the head of the secret service, the agent asked: "Director Fury, was it truly necessary to involve an external, unstable, and unpredictable element in this mission?"
"Unfortunately, Stark and Iron Man are necessary," Fury cut across, clenching his teeth. He needed the billionaire's brain and, above all, the cutting-edge technology that only Stark Industries could deploy at that moment.
"What can I do? I'm the most loved hero on the planet," Tony declared, spreading his arms with a smile of pure, crystalline arrogance.
'Fantastic. His ego has doubled since he confessed to the world that he is Iron Man,' Natasha thought, her eyes narrowing into two slits. The press had fallen in love with the image of the modern knight saving villages from the waters, and Stark was basking in it. The armor was a formidable weapon, but the man inside it risked being a loose cannon on the field.
"Stark, stop flaunting or I swear I will remove you from the assault team, nail you behind a screen, and leave you to manage tech support for the rest of the year," Fury threatened him, leaning forward. The Director was fully intent on exploiting Tony's mind, but he would not tolerate him turning a potential national security crisis into a personal show.
"James Bond was allowed to do things his way," Tony retorted, crossing his arms over his chest and shooting a glance of mock defiance.
"You are not Bond," growled Clint Barton from the end of the table, tampering with one of his training arrows. The billionaire's racket and attitude were starting to get on his nerves.
"But I will become him by the end of this story, believe me," Stark replied, his expression filled with an unshakeable confidence in his own abilities.
"Can we please begin this briefing?" Coulson intervened, breaking the tension accumulated in the room and calling those present to order with a controlled cough. He had spent entire nights preparing a detailed presentation on the subject.
"Coulson, show our agents and the consultant present here what we have discovered so far," Fury ordered, leaning his back against the backrest and leaving the floor to his deputy.
Coulson touched the console integrated into the table. A low hum filled the air as the central holoprojector turned on, outlining a three-dimensional geographical map of Europe. In the heart of the Atlantic Ocean, geometrically wedged between the waters washing France, Spain, and the United Kingdom, a new, immense territory shaped into concentric islands stood out.
"As you all know, a month ago the planet was shaken by the Grand Blue. Due to the collapse of telecommunications and the isolation of the media, most of the world's population still believes it was a natural catastrophe or a bizarre seismic tide," Coulson began, pointing out the details of the map.
Until that moment, only the heads of global governments, spy satellites, and European coastal communities had a vague and frightening idea of what had actually emerged from the ocean. The truth was destined to become public domain, but with the internet reduced to a heap of isolated servers and the military blockade of information, the news traveled at a snail's pace. And those who heard it mentioned in inland cities dismissed it as an apocalyptic hoax.
"In reality, the explanation is much more exotic than a tide," Tony interrupted, pulling his modified smartphone from his jacket and placing it on the metal table with a sharp click.
The device intercepted the signal of SHIELD's holoprojector, overwriting Coulson's data with a stream of very high-resolution satellite images, whose contours were defined by a perfect chromatic spectrum. "What you see is not a volcanic island emerged from the seabed. It is the geodetic consequence of an immense continental plateau, dominated by a suspended inland sea, which literally materialized out of nowhere and wedged itself onto the Earth's crust."
The images showed extremely high coastlines, elegant architectural structures, and a dense network of suspension bridges joining the landmasses.
"The sudden appearance of such a landmass displaced millions of tons of water, generating the tsunamis that devastated Galicia and Brittany, permanently raising the ocean and triggering a climatic destabilization that will forever change the winters of England, Ireland, France, and Spain," Stark explained. The billionaire had not limited himself to looking at the immediate damage, as the politicians in Washington were doing; he had calculated the energy vectors of the anomaly.
Coulson stared at the detailed three-dimensional holographic renderings provided by Stark's phone, his gaze surprised and his features tense. "Stark... how did you get these frames? SHIELD's satellites took weeks just to pierce the anomaly's blanket of ionic fog."
The CEO of Stark Industries raised a finger, pointing it with a cheeky smile toward the ceiling of the secure room. "Simple, Phil. At this very moment, there are ten state-of-the-art scientific satellites in geostationary orbit. And my name is stamped on them."
"Anyway, we have chosen to temporarily codename this landmass Atlantis," Coulson intervened, crossing his arms over his chest and claiming the paternity of that mythological choice with a hint of composed pride.
"All right, but can anyone explain to me how the hell such an amount of land can materialize out of nowhere? Were we hit by an invisible meteorite or what?" Clint Barton asked, tormenting his bowstring with his gloved fingers and demanding a linear explanation that would not strain his sanity.
"Legolas, if a meteorite as big as the whole of France had impacted the planet, you wouldn't be here asking questions right now. Such an impact would have instantly wiped out Earth's habitability, sterilizing every complex life form within minutes and liquefying her crust into an ocean of magma," Tony Stark declared, shaking his head and dismissing the seismic-ballistic scenario with the cold certainty of nuclear physics.
"Are we talking about teleportation?" Clint proposed, narrowing his eyes and falling back on an explanation that, however sci-fi, appeared decidedly more sensible than the end of the world.
"Don't be ridiculous, Clint. Nothing and no one on this planet possesses an energy reserve capable of teleporting a continental mass of those proportions," commented Natasha Romanoff, her voice cutting through the air like a scalpel. As an elite SHIELD agent, the Black Widow had viewed the darkest files in the global database, including those classified on mutants, and she was aware of the existence of extraordinary individuals like Kurt Wagner, alias Nightcrawler.
According to the confidential Level 7 files, under optimal physical conditions Kurt Wagner could cover a maximum distance of about three kilometers; even the number of passengers she (referring to the agency's records) noted he was able to drag with him through his support dimension was limited to one or two people, as the molecular effort caused him an imminent cardiac collapse. And Nightcrawler was officially considered one of the most powerful and skilled teleportation users registered on Earth.
'He talks as if molecular teleportation were a consolidated reality and not a simple theoretical construct from a scientific magazine. This agency hides more skeletons than I imagined,' Tony thought. Despite his permanently objectionable attitude and eccentric billionaire facade, Stark remained the sharpest and most dangerous mind in the room. It was a detail that many of those present tended to forget, blinded by his media reputation and his scandals, incapable of discerning a genius who expressed himself in ways infinitely more subtle and layered than military logic could comprehend.
"Well, gentlemen and lady. Let's hear your brilliant theories on the matter. What has the mind of SHIELD's best analysts given birth to?" Tony asked, leaning his elbows on the table and scanning those present with vibrant curiosity.
"What if Atlantis simply... re-emerged?" Coulson ventured, his mind all too nourished by non-academic historical essays, ancestral myths, and lost legends of the ocean.
"That mass is too vast to be the seabed of a volcanic island, and it is structurally impossible to be the work of human engineering. Aliens?" Natasha ventured, curling her lips slightly with a tinge of professional annoyance, almost ashamed of having to resort to the green little men rhetoric for lack of rational alternatives.
"Top Secret," Nick Fury cut across, his good eye fixed on those present. The Director had no intention of opening the Pandora's box of classified information accessible only to SHIELD's supreme leadership, files containing far more disturbing scenarios related to mutant proliferation or unknown relics.
"For once, I agree with the archer. The mass teleportation theory is the only computable one. Before the tsunamis gutted the fiber-optic nodes, isolating half the world's servers, a handful of Stark Industries oceanographic sensors registered a terrifying energy spike, an electromagnetic impulse localized exactly where this so-called Atlantis now stands," Tony revealed, sliding a finger across the screen of his handheld device to show the thermal tracks he had privately isolated.
"How it happened is a secondary detail that we will leave to the laboratories. The true priority for a security agency is to discover the why and, above all, the who," Natasha decreed, striking the operational core of the discussion.
"Does that mean that heap of rock in the middle of the sea is inhabited?" Clint asked, straightening his back. Over the last thirty days, he had been tossed from one global hot zone to another to quell outbreaks of looting, and he had not had the time to read the preliminary reports.
"It hosts an actual civilization," Coulson and Stark replied in unison.
The two men exchanged a knowing look and, with a synchronized movement of their fingers, expanded their respective holographic screens, flooding the secure room with images captured along the borders of the nameless plateau.
Coulson's projection showed a grainy but unsettling video of just a few seconds: a close-up aerial reconnaissance revealing massive warships with a sharp, dark design deployed to defend territorial waters, while enormous armored airships cruised lazily among the low clouds, patrolling the airspace.
The video cut off abruptly with a blinding flash, but analysts had managed to isolate several frames of the coast: monumental bridges, profiles of white spires, and complex urban settlements stood out in the background. In the subsequent zoom, figures in impeccable military uniforms appeared; most were humans, but a percentage showed beastly grafts — feral ears, fur, mutated features — and, mixed among them, small bipedal amphibious creatures stood out, less than a meter tall, singularly graceful and harmless in their appearance.
Stark's modified phone, instead, projected a very high-resolution three-dimensional model of the territory's topography. The map highlighted the geometric structure of the surface cities and bridges, even though vast areas of the central core appeared obscured by a thick blanket of artificial ionic fog that short-circuited sensors.
"As you can see, Atlantis possesses an impressive population density, defensive installations shielded even against Stark's orbital toys, and a combined barrier of battleships and aerial fleets sealing her borders twenty-four hours a day," Nick Fury summarized, his voice turning dark and heavy.
"Can anyone tell me why some of those natives look like they stepped out of a bioengineering lab, and others look like adorable little aliens?" Clint muttered, studying the silhouettes of the Melusines with evident perplexity.
"I understand your paranoia, Fury. Out of nowhere appears an advanced civilization whose language, technology, and origin we know nothing about, equipped with a formidable military apparatus. Yet, so far, they have shown no hostile intention: her fleet has not strayed a single nautical mile from her coasts, limiting itself to acting as a shield for her own borders," Tony pointed out, locking eyes with the Director and tapping the table to emphasize the absence of offensive movements.
"Her mere arrival triggered tsunamis and geological alterations that caused more material, economic, and environmental damage than both World Wars combined, Stark," Nick Fury retorted, pinning the billionaire with the intensity of his single eye. "I cannot afford the luxury of hoping they are peaceful."
"Whether or not these visitors represent an existential threat to the planet is exactly what we are going to verify," Coulson intervened, pouring oil on troubled waters to ease the geopolitical tension.
"Which brings us to the nature of our operation: a ghost infiltration. We must breach the perimeter, gather data on their technological apparatus, and determine if they intend to declare war on us or if we can contain them," Natasha concluded, translating the discussion into field orders.
"We've handled infiltrations halfway across the world, Nat, but how do you plan to get past that steel wall? The entire nation is locked down by a naval military cordon that shoots down anything that flies or swims, and we have no diplomatic channels or burnable false identities with a civilization that doesn't even know what an American passport is," Clint observed, shaking his head at what appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be a tactical suicide.
"And that is exactly why Stark is sitting at this table," Nick Fury replied, shifting his gaze to the billionaire genius.
"I've spent the last seventy-two hours modifying a small magnetohydrodynamic reconnaissance submarine and a handful of technological toys of my own invention. They should allow us to slip under their sonar, zero out our thermal signature, and bypass the naval blockade without anyone noticing a thing. It'll be like playing James Bond, but with an unlimited budget," Tony announced, offering the room a cocky smile, clearly flattered to have the eyes of SHIELD's entire elite pinned on him.
'I have this absurd, persistent feeling that this will be the most hellish mission of my entire career,' Clint Barton thought, exchanging a serious look with Natasha. Walking onto that unknown continent together with the Black Widow and a billionaire in armor risked making their old disasters in Budapest look like a pleasant Sunday outing.
To be continued...
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Author's Note:
I hope you enjoyed this chapter! I admit it's a bit short, but I wanted to get this scene out of my head; I've been very busy over the last few days with bureaucracy and train trips to settle paperwork and deliver documents.
I thought about making Fontaine's arrival into the MCU less smooth, so I could explain potential tensions in future chapters and make things more interesting.
PS. I finally got the fifth Dune book (Heretics of Dune). I'm on page 108 and I have 498 pages left to finish it; I read them all in one day, the wonders of spending many hours on a train and at the station waiting for the convoy to arrive!
Once I finish this volume I can order the last book (Chapterhouse: Dune) and move on to reading other works.