Marvel's The Exiles of the Panoptichron
He Who Remains ensured his universe was the sole survivor of a Multiversal War. He weaponized Alioth to do so. He then created the Time Variance Authority to ensure no other versions of himself could be born by pruning all alternate universes before they could be fully realized, the red line. He grew old and tired, he looked for years to find someone to replace him. Someone turned out to be two variants of Loki Laufeyson, Loki Laufeyson Variant L1130 and Sylvie Laufeydottir Variant L1190. Sylvie killed He Who Remains and recreated the multiverse. The Time Variance Authority overworked and overstressed collapses under the pressure.
At some point in time, a variant of He Who Remains who was mutated into an insectoid being came to be known as the Timebroker discovered the Panoptichron, a massive crystalline fortress existing outside of space and time from which alternate realities could be viewed or visited. During his exploration he caused an accident that destabilized the multiverse, threatening to destroy all existence. A pacifist by nature, the Timebroker chose to seek out champions to correct changes to various realities. Finding that mutants in general (and those associated with the X-Men in particular) were highly versatile, the Timebroker chose various X-Men from different realities.
A genius psychopath discovered the existence of the multiverse. Blink of Earth-295 discovered this psychopath and his girlfriend/bodyguard, she was equally as crazy as him. She sacrificed her life to get information back to her team. Her dying act was to give her team a video of them.
Unknown Male: Every decision we make is meaningless. Because somewhere, on a parallel Earth, we have already made the opposite choice. We're nothing. Less than nothing.
Unknown Female: How can you say that? We're rich! We're conquerors!
Unknown Male: (pointing at alternate Earths) And here we're poor. We're slaves. And here, our parents never met, so we were never born. Here, the world ended in a nuclear war. Here, no fish was brave enough to crawl upon land and humans never evolved. And so on, ad infinitum.
Unknown Female: So even if you destroy the world, there are a billion others, right? What difference would it make?
Unknown Male: Somewhere in the multiverse, there is a world I call "Earth-Prime". Every Earth is a variation of this one, the original. And once I destroy it, all reality will follow.
The Exiles tracked them down to the original Earth. They followed him and his team of equally psychotic villains backward in time to before the original nexus point that birthed the multiverse. They fought but none of the Exiles could get close enough to stop his bomb. They were barely made out of there in time but they were exposed to lethal doses of unknown quantum radiation. They lived long enough to witness the birth of a new universe, then another, and another. When they questioned how it was possible. The Timebroker said, "As Dr. Ian Malcolm said, Life will not be contained. Life breaks free. It expands to new territories, crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously." The Timebroker stayed with the Exiles until they each died from radiation exposure. The Timebroker then began selecting members for a new team.
