If Jojani wanted to beat Rocket, she still had a mountain to learn.
Even in an interstellar society, knowledge monopolies were still the norm. Compared to the top engineers in this competition, her knowledge base was behind by the equivalent of well over a dozen PhDs.
After seeing the level of the other contestants firsthand, Tony knew just how hard Rocket Raccoon would be to deal with. The little monster was frighteningly smart, and his foundation was deep and solid. He looked like a self-taught wild card, but in truth every one of his creations was built from a design he understood inside and out.
Tony Stark had graduated from MIT. He had grown up steeped in scientific thinking, with a brilliant mind and extraordinary creativity. Yet even a top-tier human like him still flinched when faced with the engineering problems of the interstellar age. That was what it meant to be held back by the civilization level of your home planet.
Compared to the countless interstellar civilizations of the galaxy, Earth's scientific system lagged by more than a single generation. Tony openly admitted he was weaker than Rocket. It was not just that the little monster's brain worked better than his, the gap in basic theory was also a major objective factor.
For Jojani to defeat Rocket was almost an impossible mission.
Fortunately, Tony did the obvious thing, he cast Accio Skyl and called in the one wizard everyone could count on.
Ever since Skyl had obtained the Infinity Stones, he had developed all sorts of brand-new magic, and the Time Chamber was one of them.
The Space Stone alone had already been a tremendous help to him.
The move he had used earlier to seal away the Dark Elf warship had relied on curling space itself, making a three-dimensional object collapse into a two-dimensional plane. Using similar principles, he could also create things like Escher staircases and Klein bottles, topological forms that should not exist in normal three-dimensional space. In practice, one trapped people in an endless loop, and the other hid impossible amounts of space inside something tiny.
He could even treat smooth space like folded paper, pleating it into intricate structures that resembled DNA, proteins, or cell membranes. By letting photons flow through those structures as carriers of information, he could create a kind of "spatial life."
Skyl had experimented with it before. The longest such a spatial life-form had ever lived was five nanoseconds, but to it, that was a full and concrete lifetime.
When he placed one of these spatial life-forms inside a planetary test chamber, it developed a higher civilization in only twelve seconds. On the thirteenth second, that civilization became aware of Skyl's existence and launched an attack. Negotiations failed, and Skyl personally wiped them out.
The whole process was like unfolding a paper crane, but the creases left behind on the paper still left him amazed.
The Time Chamber mainly relied on the power of the Time Stone.
It was different from ordinary time acceleration. To solve the problem of the user's lifespan, Skyl compressed the time dimension itself and created an extradimensional space where the very concept of time did not exist, much like Dormammu's Dark Dimension.
The main reason Doctor Strange had been able to drive Dormammu nearly mad with a time loop was that the Dark Dimension had no time. Rewinding time there did not erase Dormammu's memory. He remembered killing Doctor Strange thousands upon thousands of times, remembered being trapped in an endless loop, and in the end he had no choice but to compromise.
Objects inside the Time Chamber were unaffected by the passage of time, but the results of studying and training remained. It was, in many ways, a nearly perfect spell.
One hour on Xandar equaled one year inside the Time Chamber. Everyone aboard the Planeswalker was anxious over the alien girl's path to the championship. Tony was busy trying to predict the likely challenges for the next day's final. Gali, Jormungand, and Stan discussed what kind of cheering signs to make for tomorrow. Lady Moonshadow gave careful guidance inside the Time Chamber.
Even Skyl had not expected that the Planeswalker's first group activity would turn into helping an alien girl win a contest. It was as if the whole crew had pinned some kind of hope on her. The whole thing gave him the strange feeling of looking after a kid cramming for the SATs. Jojani had buried herself in study for ten years just to face Rocket in a single showdown. At that point, the prize money barely mattered anymore.
When dawn came, Jojani and Lady Moonshadow stepped out of the Time Chamber together. Time had left no trace of hardship on her young face, but the impatience and rough edges had faded from her eyes. The lively tomboy from before had become a thoughtful, composed engineer.
Tony handed Jojani the packet of likely final-round problems he had spent the entire night putting together, letting her do one last round of cramming.
Gali and Stan had made some homemade cheering signs with their own hands, ugly as sin, with one simple message written across them:
Jojani Will Win!
Then the whole group headed into the arena in force. The stands were especially lively that day, packed with all sorts of alien species who had come to witness the championship match of Xandar's once-every-five-years engineers' competition.
In the waiting area, Varina kept talking without pause, telling Rocket to go all out. Jojani stood quietly off to one side. Groot walked over, nodded to her in a friendly way, and offered what was clearly meant to be comfort.
"I am Groot."
"All right, I'm Jojani."
Rocket climbed onto the table and sat across from her. "Hey, kid, Groot bet me you wouldn't show."
"You're amazing, Mr. Rocket." Jojani took a deep breath. The ten years she had spent inside the Time Chamber were for this one victory. "And you deserve to win too, because you're smart, and because you've been through a lot. But I still won't give up. I have to win this championship. This money matters to me."
"Not many people stick a 'Mr.' onto my name. Most people just call me a monster, or a hedgehog, or a squirrel, or whatever." Rocket muttered under his breath. He glanced back at the heavily made-up Varina and irritably slapped a hand against his head. "Now you're making me sound like the bad guy."
Jojani shook her head. "Mr. Rocket, you're only trying to survive. After this, win or lose, I'd like to introduce you to a few friends."
"I don't need that! You think a couple nice words are enough to make me grateful?" Rocket cursed under his breath and stalked off.
The final began. This time it was no longer about completing blueprints, it was an emergency spacecraft repair challenge. The organizers wheeled out ten single-pilot shuttles with identical levels of damage. The contestants had to restore each ship's core functions and make it fully flyable. Fastest time won.
As the police force of the cosmos, the Nova Corps was constantly involved in interstellar conflict, and the department most starved for manpower was ship damage control. Centurion Kori, the chief judge, announced that the winner of the competition would be offered an official Corps posting without having to take the entrance exam.
Jojani's eyes lit up at once. Varina let out an excited squeal too, grabbing Rocket's arm in a death grip and ordering him to win no matter what.
Up in the stands, Skyl was holding a cheering sign of his own. There were barely any supporters for Jojani on site. Almost everyone was cheering for Rocket Raccoon.
Sitting beside Gali was a fat alien with a head as smooth as an egg. He wore a white lab coat, and even his boots were spotless white. He stared at Rocket Raccoon without blinking, muttering excitedly under his breath. "Found him, 89P13. He's here. Notify the Master at once..."
Gali turned to him and asked, "Are you a Rocket fan?"
"Me?" The fat alien jumped. "Ah, no, no, miss, I'm not a fan of the raccoon."
"That's a shame. He's adorable, isn't he?"
The fat alien glanced at Gali's cheering sign, confused. "You're rooting for Jojani, so why are you speaking up for the raccoon?"
Stan chuckled. "Because people ought to be kind to animals. Son, maybe you don't know this, but where I come from, animal rights groups are no joke. You'd better learn to care about animals too, or sooner or later it'll come back to bite you."
The fat alien got up and left the arena. He reported to the High Evolutionary, who was on Counter-Earth, that the missing experiment had surfaced on Xandar. The mad scientist reacted immediately, mobilizing the Sovereign forces and ordering them to bring the escaped 89P13 back to his laboratory.
Standing atop his workbench, Rocket swept his gaze across the audience. His face was blown up on the giant screen overhead. He found the feeling of being watched by a whole crowd pretty exhilarating. Still, for some reason, a twitchy unease kept prickling at the back of his mind.
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