The Beast renews his romance with Vera Cantor and invites her to Avengers Mansion, where she is seemingly killed by a poisoned cup of tea served by a Skrull disguised as Jarvis. The Skrull offers to restore Vera to life if the Avengers will retrieve a magical artifact, the Resurrection Stone, which has been split in two and hurled into Earth’s past. Using Reed Richards’s time-machine, the Vision, the Scarlet Witch, and Wonder Man accompany the Beast to the era of the Black Death, where they combat a mad child, Devlunn, who possesses one of the stone’s fragments, then to 1945 Dachau, Germany, where a death camp survivor has used the second fragment to reanimate his deceased family. Returning to the present with the stone, the Beast, realizing its corrupting power, crushes it to bits rather than turn it over to the Skrull, whom his teammates swiftly subdue. Later, Mr. Fantastic places the comatose Vera in suspended animation until another cure can be found