He set his sights on one name: The Guardians of the Galaxy. Or rather, the people who would become them. In his other life, Nate had played through every film, every comic adaptation. He knew their importance, knew the weight they'd carry in coming wars.
But they weren't legends yet. They were still scattered. Lost. Untested. And he needed to find them.
A Stark Solution to a Galactic Problem
To do that, Arden needed a ship. So he turned to the only men capable of building something insane enough for the journey Howard and Tony Stark.
Within days, the two of them had blueprints for a vessel that could withstand the depth and pressure of space. But there was a deeper issue. Even with arc-reactor-level propulsion, traveling far enough across the void to Xandar would take centuries.
That's when Howard had a breakthrough.
"You move through time with motion, right? What if we made the ship move like you do? What if we took your dilation and gave it to the vessel?"
It was madness. But it was possible.
The problem was power. Arden didn't have nearly enough energy to generate a ship-wide time dilation. Even the residual energy from the experiment that had brought him back to the present in 1972 the same energy that nearly killed him wasn't sufficient.
But Arden had been thinking of something else for years.
The Time Stone.
He'd wondered since day one: What would it mean for a Chronobit to wield one of the Infinity Stones? Especially the one tied to his very essence? He'd imagined it. He'd feared it. And now, he needed it.
Convincing the Ancient One was, in a word, exhausting. She wasn't about to hand over one of the universe's fundamental anchors to someone she still considered a temporal foreigner.
First came the lectures, three of them on the dangers of misuse, the fragility of the timeline, and the sacred duty of the Masters of the Mystic Arts.
Then came the test. A trial by combat not of brute strength, but of intent. She needed to see that he would protect the Stone, not corrupt it.
And in the end, she relented.
"One minute," she said. "No more."
Touching Eternity
The second Arden's fingers brushed the Time Stone, the world imploded into eternity.
He didn't see time. He became it.
Moments bled into centuries. Every possible past and every conceivable future cascaded through him. He didn't just feel old he felt infinite. He was standing in a supernova made of memories and possibilities, burning with endless versions of now.
And even though only a minute passed on the clock, to Arden it felt like years.
He emerged changed. Overflowing. Radiating.
Tony, Howard, and Arden used that energy to construct something new the Chrono Core, a compact but powerful battery able to fuel any machine with dilation-based time.
It revolutionized their plans. Space travel? Now possible in a day.
Training simulations? One year inside, a single day outside.
Time travel? Tony was already designing a prototype interface.
Of course, there were problems aging, psychological fatigue, entropy but they were manageable. Worth it.
This wasn't just a ship anymore. It was a chrononautic craft. And it was ready.
Arden boarded, his coat crackling with faint echoes of still-misfiring time. The Chrono Core thrummed beneath him like a second heart. His eyes locked on the nav screen Xandar.
"Let's find the Guardians before the galaxy even knows their name."
And just like that, space bent to his will, and the stars fell away behind him.
Let me know if you want to write the Xandar arrival scene, Arden's first contact with Rocket or Peter, or what's happening back on Earth while he's gone.
The stars bend around Arden's ship as the Chrono Core winds down, the space-time dilation field collapsing like a deflating lung. His vessel emerges just outside Xandar's atmosphere, sleek and alien, humming with invisible chronal residue.
Xandar is beautiful towering spires of gold and blue, oceans of light dancing across urban skylines, and a magnetic skyweb teeming with spacecraft. To a Chronobit, it's dazzling but more importantly, it's alive with threads of time. Each thread, a potential future.
Arden adjusts his coat and descends.
But the Nova Corps aren't as welcoming as he hoped.
His ship, which doesn't match any known technology, triggers security alerts. It doesn't help that his signature reads like a quantum hurricane and that he's carrying a Chrono Core running on something very close to Infinity energy.
Nova Officer: "You said you're here on a diplomatic observation mission?"
Arden (sighing): "From Earth or Terra. I'm investigating the fallout from a multiversal convergence"
Nova Officer: "Yeah, that's not on our alliance list. Step out of the craft."
They think he's a smuggler, a cosmic tech thief or worse, an agent of Thanos. He doesn't resist as they place cuffs on his wrists that shimmer with anti-kinetic pulses.
He could slow time and walk out of this easily.
But instead, he lets them take him.
"If fate wants me somewhere… maybe I need to see why first."
The Kyln is chaos wrapped in metal. A galactic prison for the worst the stars have to offer. Screams echo through the airlock as Arden is shoved inside.
He lands hard on the floor right in front of a tree.
And a raccoon holding a taser cannon.
Rocket: "You're not from around here, huh?"
Groot: "I am Groot."
Arden (getting up, brushing off): "Nope. But something tells me we're about to be very close friends."
Rocket squints at him. There's a flicker of awareness. Rocket's a genius. He sees the time residue clinging to Arden's frame like wet smoke.
Rocket: "You're some kinda science ghost or what?"
Arden: "Let's just say... I move differently."
They're locked up together for less than a day before chaos starts brewing. Quill and Gamora are dumped into the same block. Drax is already there, brooding like a blunt weapon waiting to be swung.
Scene: "Building the Escape"
Arden watches them all their timelines, their potential begin to weave. It's beautiful. It's right.
"This… this is how the Guardians are born."
He starts dropping hints to Rocket during lunch. A stolen code here. A weak magnetic field loop there. He knows the shift schedules. He can predict guard behavior. He's practically reading the future.
Rocket: "You some kinda chrono-sorcerer?"
Arden: "I'm worse. I'm from Earth."
Rocket: "…Yeesh."
Arden helps tweak Rocket's escape plan. With his time tricks and Rocket's tech, they hack the system in under a day. Groot handles muscle. Drax is thrilled at the promise of violence. Quill provides the distraction.
Alarms. Chaos. Lights flicker as the Chronobit alters temporal flow, making guards move in slow motion while the prisoners rush through like water through cracks.
When they burst onto the escape platform, Rocket's cackling.
Rocket: "Remind me never to pickpocket a time bender again!"
Quill: "You picked his pocket?"
Rocket: "Of course I did! …Also, I may have accidentally swallowed a chip from his ship."
They escape in a stolen Nova pod. Arden rides shotgun, eyes locked on the stars.
"The galaxy just changed. And they have no idea yet."
After the escape, the Guardians bicker, argue, and then slowly start being a team. Arden, however, has business. He returns to Xandar not as a prisoner, but as an envoy.
He confronts the Nova Prime herself, Irani Rael.
She threatens him with re-arrest. He calmly disables a chronal lock on her security council chamber and rewinds a cup of spilled tea back into the cup.
Arden: "I'm not your enemy. But if we don't work together, a hundred of them are coming. Worse than Ronan. Worse than Thanos. And you'll need people like me, and them—" (gestures to the Guardians on a hologram) "—to survive it."
He lays out what he knows about Thanos. About the Stones. About what's coming.
He asks for cooperation. Not allegiance awareness. Let him build connections. Let him travel.
Nova Prime thinks long and hard.
And agrees.