The Tesseract Awakens

Close your eyes for just a moment. Can you picture it? Deep underground, buried beneath miles of earth and stone, there is a room. It has no windows. It has no sunlight. The only light in that room comes from a tiny glowing cube, no bigger than a grapefruit, sitting on a metal stand in the very center of everything.

That cube is called the Tesseract.

It glows blue — a deep, humming, electric blue, like the heart of a lightning bolt caught in crystal. And it holds inside it one of the most powerful things in the whole universe: the Space Stone. With it, you could open a door between any two places in the entire cosmos. Any star. Any world. Any time.

For years and years, two very serious people watched over it. Their names were Doctor Erik Selvig — a scientist with wild white hair and kind eyes who loved mysteries — and Director Nick Fury, a man in a long black coat with one sharp eye that missed absolutely nothing. They kept the Tesseract safe underground, in a secret base belonging to an organization called S.H.I.E.L.D.

Then one night, without any warning at all, the Tesseract began to pulse.

THRUMM. THRUMM. THRUMM.

The lights in the base flickered. The floor shook. Doctor Selvig grabbed the edge of a control table. Nick Fury looked up from his desk and went very, very still.

The glowing blue cube — which had been quiet for decades — was opening something. It was tearing a hole in the air itself, like someone ripping a piece of paper, except the paper was the fabric of space and time.

CRACK! A blazing portal of light split open right in the middle of the room.

And through it stepped a man.

He was tall — very tall — dressed in green and gold armor that shimmered like a jewel. His eyes were sharp and cold and hungry. He carried a scepter that glowed with an eerie golden light, and he smiled the kind of smile that meant he had a very, very bad plan.

His name was Loki. The prince of mischief. The god of lies.

"I am Loki," he announced, in a voice like thunder wrapped in silk, "of Asgard. And I am burdened with glorious purpose."

Loki swept his scepter through the room. Each time the golden light touched someone — ZAP — their eyes would go glassy and strange, and they would no longer be themselves. Hawkeye, a brave archer named Clint Barton who had been standing guard, felt the scepter touch his chest. His sharp blue eyes went blank. He turned and stood at Loki's side, completely under the spell.

Doctor Selvig was next. ZAP. His kind eyes went dim.

Loki plucked the Tesseract from its stand — it pulsed in his grip like a captured heartbeat — and he walked calmly out through a collapsing ceiling, his mind-controlled agents following behind him.

Nick Fury crawled out of the rubble, coughing dust, his black coat torn.

He looked at the empty stand where the Tesseract had been.

He looked at the ruined base around him.

And then Nick Fury did something no one had done in a very long time. He reached into his coat and pulled out an old, battered phone. He pressed a button. Then another. Then another.

Somewhere in Russia, a black-haired woman named Natasha Romanoff — the best spy in the world — felt her phone buzz.

Somewhere in the mountains, a man in a plain grey T-shirt doing sit-ups at four in the morning — Steve Rogers, the soldier once known as Captain America — felt his phone buzz.

And somewhere in Malibu, California, a man in a very expensive suit sipping coffee while three holograms of rocket blueprints floated around his head — Tony Stark, the genius behind the Iron Man armor — felt his phone buzz too.

Loki had come. He had the Tesseract. He had an army waiting somewhere in the dark between the stars. And he intended to conquer the whole world.

But Nick Fury had a different idea.

He had been building something. Something he'd hoped he would never need. He called it the Avengers Initiative.

Tonight, it was time to make that call.

Can you imagine the whole universe holding its breath? That is exactly what it did — right there, in the dust and darkness of a broken underground base — waiting to see if the mightiest heroes on Earth could find each other in time.

The adventure was just beginning.