Not far away, the Avengers Alliance's Quinjet hovered in midair. Tony's armor thrusters spouted blue-white exhaust, Steve held his shield across his body, violent arcs crackled around Thor's Mjolnir, and Banner stood at the edge of the aircraft's open hatch, his green muscles tensing slightly in the airflow.
The Justice League's Batwing circled higher above. Superman hovered roughly a hundred meters directly in front of the vortex, his blue-and-red cape pulled into a straight line by the airflow.
The Flash and Cyborg stood at the edge of a nearby skyscraper's rooftop, looking up at the ever-growing vortex.
The vortex continued to expand.
The outline of the blue-green Earth on the other side grew clearer and clearer. Its continental distribution was entirely different from this Earth's, with larger oceans and more scattered landmasses, like a planet that had been pieced back together.
As the vortex's edges continued to swell, the view on the other side unfolded layer by layer in visibly increasing detail: first blurry patches of color, then the outlines of continents, then the textures of clouds and oceans.
Finally, a group of people.
There was a bunch in outlandish outfits on the other side, too!
They stood on an enormous platform suspended in midair, their formation spread into a fan as they faced the superheroes on this side across the vortex.
Their leader sat in a silver wheelchair floating in midair. Bald, with a lean, gentle face, he wore a sharply tailored dark gray suit, his hands folded over his knees.
His pale blue eyes were as calm as an ancient well whose ripples had all been smoothed away by time. A faint smile rested on his lips as he looked across the vortex, his gaze sliding from Superman's face to Tony's, then from Thor's to Diana's, before finally