Returning from their recent time travel mission to the 1940s, the Avengers are shocked to discover their meeting room occupied by their team’s long-ago founding roster, none of whom recognize the current Avengers. The “old” Avengers attack the “new” Avengers, who flee. Realizing history has been altered, the new Avengers access this reality’s version of the Herodotron, a special history-imparting computer, which explains how the Scarlet Centurion duped this reality’s original Avengers into imprisoning all of their world’s super heroes and super-villains, promising he would transform Earth into a paradise in exchange. The Scarlet Centurion now orders his Avengers pawns to destroy the new Avengers, who are seeking out the components of Dr. Doom’s disassembled time machine. Despite the overwhelmingly superior raw power of the original team, the new Avengers defeat their foes using a combination of skill, knowledge and luck, recovering and reassembling the time machine’s components. The Scarlet Centurion appears, boasting that he mesmerized the original Avengers into eliminating most of this reality’s defenders and manipulated the new Avengers into neutralizing the more powerful original team. He now intends to destroy the weaker new Avengers himself, and he defeats most of them one by one with his far-future technology, but not before Hawkeye fires an arrow carrying a shrunken Goliath into the time machine, which Goliath uses to hurl the Scarlet Centurion out of this time period and send himself and the other new Avengers back to their proper timeline. As they fade away, cosmic observer Uatu the Watcher comments on how the Avengers and their foe will lose all memory of this adventure, which will lead to the Scarlet Centurion returning in a new guise as their enemy Kang the Conqueror. FLASHBACKS: Rama-Tut encounters Dr. Doom (FF Ann #2/2, ’64). Rama-Tut becomes the Scarlet Centurion, and causes the Wasp to fall asleep during the Avengers’ recent time travel mission, triggering the timestream disruption that will enable him to diverge the alternate reality of Earth-689 (p). The Wasp falls asleep at the time machine’s controls during the mission, causing the other Avengers to materialize in front of Baron Zemo in the 1940s (Av #56, ’68). The Scarlet Centurion prevents Hulk from quitting the Avengers on Earth-689, then convinces that reality’s Avengers to aid him by neutralizing all of their world’s super heroes and super villains, supposedly to rectify a “cosmic imbalance” that prevents the Centurion from making their world a paradise. Once all super-beings and other potential opponents are imprisoned, the Avengers outlaw atomic tests and other forms of scientific experimentation, so as to prevent the creation of new superhumans (p).