Chapter Summaries

Lynn rejected military action and forcibly extracting energy in response to the TVA's proposed sanctions, instead ordering his departments to stall, protect supplies, and investigate Ravonna's communications. He confronted Ravonna in the isolation zone, where she showed him TVA surveillance footage of Sokovia with a top-secret emblem and timestamp.

• Hela urged the committee to destroy Proctor's fleet, while Wanda proposed extracting energy from nearby dimensions.
• Lynn rejected both proposals, assigned Gwen Stacy to stall Proctor, ordered Hela to secure the jurisdiction, and tasked Wanda with rationing energy and mining Ravonna's devices.
• Lynn went to the isolation zone to question Ravonna about the sanctions.
• Ravonna showed Lynn a recording of Sokovia depicting a figure shielding a witch before dissolving into streams of data.
• Lynn noticed a ticking timestamp and a TVA top-secret surveillance emblem on the footage.

Lynn turned Ravonna’s supposedly decisive footage into evidence that the TVA wanted her eliminated, breaking her faith in the system. Desperate for a way out, Ravonna named the person behind her danger: B-15, commander of the Minutemen Legion.

• Ravonna presented Lynn with top-secret footage and used it to pressure him into a private deal.
• Lynn stayed calm and argued that Ravonna’s superiors had sent her into his custody so she and the footage could disappear together.
• Lynn explained that the TVA’s fleet and sanctions proposal were meant to provoke him into killing Ravonna and give the TVA an excuse to attack.
• Ravonna’s faith in He Who Remains and the TVA collapsed as she realized she had been treated as an expendable pawn.
• Lynn asked who wanted her and the footage gone, and Ravonna identified B-15, commander of the Minutemen Legion.

Lynn persuaded Ravonna to write a confession that blamed her for the unauthorized probe and offered her a new role in the Negative Zone’s Cross-Dimension Coordination Office. As he returned to the command center to use the report to ease the border crisis, he discovered that Hela and Wanda had blocked Proctor’s ship by force.

• Lynn offered Ravonna a choice between being handed over to the TVA and writing a confession that cast her actions as a personal workplace error.
• Lynn promised to protect Ravonna and recommend retaining her as a special consultant responsible for preparing the Cross-Dimension Coordination Office.
• Ravonna accepted the deal and began writing her confession on a data pad.
• Lynn left the isolation room intending to use Ravonna’s report to defuse the border crisis.
• Lynn found Hela and Wanda’s forces blocking Proctor’s ship, the Justicia, with an Undead Warship and gathering scarlet energy.

Lynn intervened in the standoff between the TVA envoy and the Negative Zone’s forces, publicly suspending Hela and Wanda for acting without authorization. After they withdrew, Lynn used their defiance to underscore the danger of sanctions and opened negotiations with Proctor over an alternative.

• Lynn ordered a ship and headed to the border buffer zone after learning that Hela and Wanda’s forces had confronted the TVA fleet.
• Lynn entered the standoff and publicly reprimanded Hela and Wanda for crossing the buffer zone and acting without the Management Committee’s approval.
• Lynn suspended Hela and Wanda and ordered them to return to headquarters, submit written self-criticisms, and await disciplinary action.
• Hela and Wanda obeyed Lynn’s order and withdrew, while Proctor realized Lynn’s public punishment was meant to demonstrate the danger of provoking the Negative Zone.
• Lynn privately apologized to Proctor and proposed discussing an alternative to the TVA’s sanctions.

Lynn negotiated an end to the TVA’s proposed sanctions by offering a face-saving settlement that secured compensation and energy extraction rights for the Negative Zone. After the agreement took effect and energy rationing ended, a new audit report raised suspicions about the Technology Integration Department.

• Lynn apologized for his personnel’s reckless actions and presented a report blaming Ravonna Renslayer, allowing Proctor to drop the proposed sanctions.
• Lynn demanded compensation and new energy channels, citing the costs and risks the Negative Zone had incurred during the joint operation.
• Lynn presented a memorandum granting the Negative Zone extraction rights to three timelines for one hundred years in exchange for waiving claims and accepting partial responsibility.
• Proctor reported to He Who Remains, then told Lynn that the TVA’s senior leadership had approved the memorandum.
• The signed agreement took effect, the TVA fleet withdrew, and Gwen Stacy informed Lynn that energy rationing had ended and the restrictive measures had been withdrawn.
• Gwen Stacy gave Lynn an audit report about irregularities in the Technology Integration Department’s special-purpose accounts, which Lynn read with concern.

Lynn received Natasha Romanoff’s audit report showing that Wanda had secretly used the Technology Integration Department’s computing power to reconstruct legacy energy code from the Sokovia Ruins. Before Lynn could decide how to handle the report, Wanda attacked the Internal Affairs Inspection Office, pushing his Sokovia secret to the brink of exposure.

• Lynn read Natasha Romanoff’s audit report, which traced an unauthorized requisition of ninety-seven percent of the department’s peak computing power to efforts to reconstruct energy code from the Sokovia Ruins.
• Gwen Stacy warned Lynn that Wanda’s suspension would end in twelve hours, leaving him little time to address the audit before Wanda returned to her duties.
• An emergency alert reported that an unknown source was stripping away the Internal Affairs Inspection Office’s defensive barrier.
• Lynn watched surveillance footage as Wanda used chaos energy to blast open the Inspection Office’s door and surrounding wall.
• Lynn realized Wanda’s attack had put his secret concerning Sokovia at risk of exposure.

Lynn arrived at the confrontation between Wanda Maximoff and Natasha Romanoff and used the Management Committee’s emergency procedures to contain the incident. After Wanda submitted to restraint, she asked Lynn where the Audit Report’s working papers were.

• Lynn left his office and walked through the chaotic White Bone Hall toward the Internal Affairs Inspection Office.
• Lynn declared the confrontation a Class A major safety accident and activated the level-one emergency plan.
• Lynn ordered the Stability Maintenance Office to cordon off the scene and escort Wanda Maximoff and Natasha Romanoff to separate Isolation Review Rooms.
• Natasha dropped her pistol and accepted the Energy Suppression Rings, while Wanda initially kept the Enforcement Team at bay with her scarlet energy.
• Wanda withdrew her energy, allowed the Enforcement Team to restrain her, and asked Lynn where the working papers for the Audit Report were.

Lynn reprimanded Natasha for provoking Wanda’s unstable energy during an audit and deferred her permanent appointment as Internal Affairs Director. Natasha accepted the decision, then revealed that the audit report had already been sent to the Stability Maintenance Office.

• Lynn summoned Natasha to his office after reviewing the audit report.
• Lynn accused Natasha of using the audit to provoke Wanda and advance her bid for a permanent appointment.
• Lynn deferred consideration of Natasha’s permanent appointment and ordered her to submit a written self-criticism.
• Natasha accepted the reprimand and kept her position as acting Director.
• Before leaving, Natasha told Lynn that a copy of the Department of Technology audit report had already been sent to the Stability Maintenance Office.

Lynn questioned Wanda in the isolation room and used a fabricated TVA conspiracy to explain the matching energy residues from Sokovia and the Asgard Ruins. Wanda tentatively accepted his explanation before Hela arrived with Natasha’s Audit Report to join the inquiry.

• Lynn warned Wanda that their discussion was classified and claimed the matching energy residues were TVA-made false memory anchors linked to Ravonna.
• Lynn told Wanda that the TVA had used mimetic shells and genuine protective feelings to implant memories and monitor her and Hela.
• Wanda’s anger subsided as she considered Lynn’s explanation, though he recognized that he had covered the rift with another lie.
• Hela entered the isolation room with Natasha’s Audit Report and asserted the Stability Maintenance Office’s right to participate in the questioning.

Lynn halted Hela and Wanda’s departmental power struggle by sealing the disputed evidence and forming a joint task force to take over three abandoned timelines. As the meeting ended, an urgent report revealed that standard probes could not penetrate the first timeline’s intense, unknown rule-based shielding.

• Hela argued that the Department of Technology posed security risks and proposed transferring some of its functions to joint supervision.
• Natasha affirmed that her Audit Report was thorough and accurate, while Wanda asked whether it should be linked to the Asgard energy sample and her TVA analysis.
• Lynn classified the report and related evidence at the highest secrecy level, suspended the investigations, and proposed an interdepartmental takeover task force.
• Lynn assigned security work to Hela’s office, technical work to Wanda’s department, coordination to Gwen Stacy’s Liaison Office, and audits to Natasha’s office; Hela and Wanda agreed.
• Gwen Stacy received an urgent report that probes could not penetrate the first abandoned timeline because of an unknown, highly intense rule-based shielding effect.

Lynn divided the new abandoned-timeline task force among remote sites, sending Wanda, Hela, and Natasha away from headquarters while Gwen Stacy coordinated their work. The plan was quickly put into motion, but a signal detected at XN-734 revealed an ancient distress call trapped behind its dimensional barrier.

• Lynn assigned Wanda and the Technology Integration Department to breach and survey XN-734 from the Delta-1 Observatory, while Hela and the Stability Maintenance Office prepared armed clearance at Erebus-2.
• Lynn ordered Natasha to conduct on-site audits at both remote locations and made Gwen Stacy responsible for coordinating reports and blocking unauthorized interdepartmental contact.
• Gwen Stacy issued the formal plan, and Wanda, Hela, and Natasha departed for their assigned locations within minutes.
• Two hours later, a Department of Technology supervisor contacted Lynn directly from Delta-1 and reported that scans of XN-734 had intercepted an unfamiliar psychic signal.
• The supervisor said the signal appeared to be an ancient distress call trapped behind the dimensional barrier.

Hela’s takeover fleet was stopped by a golden shield protecting the abandoned timeline XN-734, and she refused to attack without lawful grounds. Natasha discovered that the shield was anchored to a living organism, revealing a sleeping red-haired woman as its core.

• Hela ordered the First and Third Assault Fleets to enter XN-734 and establish landing zones.
• The fleet’s ships halted at an invisible barrier, and their propulsion and weapons systems stopped working.
• Hela used conceptual vision to reveal a resilient golden shield and found that her death authority could not overcome it.
• Hela rejected a proposal to bombard the shield because it had shown no aggression and the attack would lack lawful grounds.
• Natasha traced the shield’s power to a living core and sent Hela a secret model of a sleeping red-haired woman.

Gwen Stacy uncovered evidence that the TVA had handed the Negative Zone a timeline containing a dormant Phoenix as a trap to exhaust its strongest forces. Before she could report the discovery to Lynn, an unauthorized attack on the timeline's shield triggered a supercritical reaction and awakened the Phoenix.

• Lynn denied Hela's request for higher authorization and ordered Gwen Stacy to lead a review of every original TVA file about the XN-734 timeline.
• Gwen Stacy's review team found a hidden, damaged folder whose encryption signature was linked to a sealed TVA memorandum about an X-Men timeline.
• Gwen Stacy and her team decrypted the folder and discovered that the TVA had pruned XN-734 because an out-of-control Phoenix host posed a multiverse-class threat.
• The folder revealed that the TVA had deliberately transferred the dangerous timeline to the Negative Zone as an expendable weapon intended to wear down its forces.
• Before Gwen Stacy could alert Lynn, Delta-1 Forward Observation Station reported that the Minister of the Department of Technology had attacked the timeline's shield with the Chaos Matrix, triggering a supercritical reaction and awakening Phoenix.

Wanda’s unauthorized use of chaos magic shattered the psychic shield around timeline XN-734 and unleashed the Phoenix Force’s storm, while Natasha’s inspection bulletin and Hela’s takeover order deepened the command crisis. As the storm overwhelmed Hela’s forces and the frontline descended into chaos, Lynn decided to go there himself.

• Wanda’s unauthorized intervention collapsed the shield around XN-734 and triggered a supercritical energy storm.
• Natasha issued an inspection bulletin calling for Wanda’s technical command authority to be revoked and for her to be isolated pending investigation.
• Hela assumed frontline command, ordered fleets to withdraw, and prepared the Night Owl-class main cannons while Wanda rejected the directive and ordered her forces to hold position.
• The conflicting orders paralyzed the frontline as the Phoenix Force’s psychic storm contaminated Hela’s Undead Warriors and threw her fleet into disarray.
• Lynn recognized that remote orders could worsen the crisis, ordered Gwen Stacy to draft a Special Director’s Order, and set out for the frontline himself.

Lynn took personal control of the XN-734 operation and entered the Phoenix Force storm to contact Jean Grey. Their Mind Link awakened a memory in Jean, and she recognized Lynn as someone she had lost.

• Lynn ordered the Shuttlecraft to land on the Nibelung despite the psychic storm surrounding it.
• Hela, Wanda, and Natasha learned that Lynn had arrived after their conflict had crippled or contaminated more than thirty percent of the Undead Fleet.
• Lynn issued a Special Director's Order suspending the three department heads' authority and placing frontline units on silent standby under his supervision.
• Lynn entered the Phoenix Force storm, protected by the Conceptual Bastion (Fragment), and found Jean Grey at its center.
• Lynn initiated a formal mental contact with Jean, whose awakened memory sent a surge of grief and recognition through their Mind Link.

Lynn negotiated with Jean Grey over the transfer of timeline XN-734, agreeing in principle to her demand for an autonomous region and a place at his side while postponing the details for committee review. Jean accepted the arrangement and approached him, leaving Wanda and Hela bristling with suspicion when they saw her on the Nibelung’s bridge.

• Lynn established mental contact with Jean Grey and framed the takeover of timeline XN-734 as a lawful asset transfer and offer of asylum.
• Jean agreed to the transfer but demanded an independent region under her full authority and a position beside Lynn at all times.
• Lynn agreed to her proposal in principle and asked her to submit a formal report for an internal joint review.
• Jean accepted and left the mental storm, appearing in a flaming battle suit as she approached Lynn.
• Wanda and Hela saw Jean’s possessiveness toward Lynn and gathered their magic and weapons, while Natasha watched the situation unfold.

Lynn avoided a confrontation between Wanda, Hela, and Jean Grey by ordering Jean quarantined under the Management Committee’s regulations. Jean accepted isolation, while a secret assessment flagged her psychic fixation on Lynn as a severe risk.

• Jean Grey approached Lynn and reached for his hand, prompting Wanda and Hela to prepare for a fight.
• Lynn stepped away and ordered the adjutant to display the cross-dimensional quarantine regulations.
• Lynn classified Jean Grey as a pending high-risk asset and ordered her held in Forward Isolation Cell One for forty-eight hours without outside contact.
• Jean Grey accepted the order and was escorted from the bridge, while Lynn ordered reports on the incident and an accountability review of operational errors.
• A monitoring report assessed Jean as extremely dangerous and noted her extraordinary psychic orientation toward Lynn before sending the report to his private terminal.

Lynn chaired a Standing Committee review of Jean Grey’s proposal to establish a Special Zone in timeline XN-734, where Hela and Wanda joined forces to oppose it. He returned the draft for substantial revisions, leaving Jean Grey to face a formal rejection pending a more complete submission.

• Gwen Stacy presented the draft proposal to the Standing Committee for initial review.
• Hela vetoed the proposal on jurisdiction and security grounds, while Wanda objected that it lacked staffing, budget, and technical assessments.
• Lynn accepted their concerns and ordered the draft returned, requiring a detailed budget, a division of functions and jurisdiction, and a risk assessment of the timeline’s assets.
• Gwen Stacy prepared the formal review letter, and the Standing Committee sent it to Jean Grey in Forward Isolation Cell One.
• Jean Grey read the letter returning her proposal and slowly lost her smile.

Natasha used the Internal Affairs Inspection Office’s authority to screen Jean Grey and tried to trade a favorable political report for permission to monitor the Phoenix Force. Jean Grey rejected the pressure and warned that Lynn would handle her affairs, leaving Natasha to send Lynn a top-secret preliminary report.

• Natasha equipped a Body Camera and went to Forward Isolation Cell One to conduct a background security and political screening of Jean Grey.
• Natasha confirmed Jean Grey’s name, origin timeline, Phoenix Force signature, and former X-Men role, then raised the rejected Special Zone Establishment Draft.
• Natasha offered Jean Grey a favorable Political Screening Report in exchange for monitoring her energy signature.
• Jean Grey called Natasha’s tactics meaningless and said Lynn would handle her affairs, briefly causing Natasha pain and disrupting the Body Camera.
• Natasha ended the screening, found no trace of the mental encounter in the recording, and sent Lynn an encrypted top-secret preliminary report.

Lynn confronted Jean Grey over her unauthorized use of the Phoenix Force and explained why her proposed Special Zone conflicted with the Management Committee’s rules. After Jean apologized, Gwen delivered an urgent, highest-priority communication from the TVA Commission for Discipline Inspection.

• Lynn summoned Jean Grey to his office after reading Natasha’s report and waiting for her quarantine to end.
• Jean Grey tried to use the Phoenix Force to isolate the office, but Lynn called her unauthorized energy use an attack on the Command Center.
• Lynn explained that Jean’s Special Zone proposal lacked proper jurisdiction, staffing, funding, and oversight, and warned that she would be cut off from institutional support.
• Jean Grey apologized, and Lynn told her to submit a written self-criticism to the Internal Affairs Inspection Office.
• Gwen Stacy entered with a highest-priority communication from the TVA Commission for Discipline Inspection.