"Your lordship… The Omnitrix convoy will reach us within a few minutes. It's being escorted by a few mid-ranking plumbers but our fleet can handle them." A Bioid reported while kneeling on the throne room of the Chimeran Hammer.
The Bioid was a humanoid machine built like something that had never needed to be comfortable to look at… it had chrome plating over a lean skeletal frame and joints that clicked every time it moved with a head that was flat and featureless except for a single horizontal red sensor that swept slowly left to right.
Around it were several other ones exactly like it, manning different parts of the ship, and from some of the instruments came thin trails of steam that curled upward and disappeared into the dark of the ceiling.
The throne room of the Chimeran Hammer was not built for comfort either however the alien in front of the Bioid was far different.
It was an eleven feet tall humanoid creature with a face resembling that of an octopus.
The alien had tentacles dangling in the front of his face like a beard with pale green skin and yellowish spots on his face and tentacles as well as dull red eyes.
War-scarred armor sat heavy across his frame in shoulder plates, leg guards and even a respirator mask covering his mouth attached by a thick tube to the ship itself, hissing steadily with every breath he took.
It was Vilgax.
"Good work." Vilgax spoke and tried moving; however the mouth-piece connected to a tube on the ship prevented him from doing so. "Damn that Tennyson… We must ensure that the Omnitrix does not reach his hands."
It had been a long time since the One Hundred Year Galactic War… where Aliens and Humans alike had killed each other in a devastating conflict that had reshaped the political map of half the known galaxy.
However due to the efforts of the Plumbers and several alien patriarchs, this war had come to a stop… but the main reason, the real reason that everyone in a position to know anything knew, was because of Max Tennyson.
That damned bastard had not only put an end to a beneficial war and forced peace on people who hadn't finished with the war yet, but he had also wounded him greatly in their last encounter… which was why Vilgax was still recovering and which was why he was sitting at eleven feet instead of fifteen.
The Omnitrix was meant for Max Tennyson… a reward from Azmuth and a commemoration of his contribution to ending the galactic war which was precisely the reason Vilgax was intercepting it.
He was employing a human technique that Max Tennyson had once used on him… it was called "Spawn Camping."
"Yes, Sire!" The Bioid saluted and ran off and Vilgax waited, watching the holographic display. "Prep the cannons! Fire off when they come close! Paint the space between us with blood!"
The rest of the Bioids reacted immediately by moving faster across their stations.
Vilgax didn't say much however he tapped his foot down on the ground once, creating a small shockwave that rolled outward through the floor and made the nearest Bioid adjust its footing without looking up.
"Where are they?" He muttered under his breath then the sensors began beeping.
Coming from the horizon of the display was a squad of Plumber ships serving as guards in tight formation and among them, one ship that was different.
It was shaped in a very strange manner, being mostly horizontal but with a ring surrounding the back of the ship, seemingly acting both as thrusters and landing gear.
It was also navy blue with some components being green and it moved with confidence though Vilgax doubted that it would remain when it got attacked.
"That's the ship holding the Omnitrix… Deploy the beams!"
The clicks grew louder and the Chimeran Hammer began opening its weapon hatches though the convoy could not see it.
Vilgax's ship had one of the highest cloaking functions in the Universe as of now. As for how he had gotten it? He had destroyed the ship that originally had it and had the Bioids do the heavy lifting.
So as the convoy passed through the dark stretch of the Milky Way where the Chimeran Hammer sat waiting, all that followed were beams of crimson light that seemingly came out of nowhere and tore into the escort.
It had taken the Plumbers completely by surprise… partly because they hadn't expected to be attacked here and partly because you can't dodge what you can't see.
The escort ships were blown through and eviscerated with space metal and fire blooming silently in the vacuum while debris scattered outward in the slow graceful way that destruction moves in zero gravity.
Several beams collided with the ship holding the Omnitrix but its barriers held, though they had begun peeling off at the edges.
The Chimeran Hammer dropped its cloaking, revealing its completely bulky mass in space and the Omnitrix ship began firing green beams of energy back at it.
However the Chimeran Hammer's barrier was erected and the green beams dissolved the moment they touched it like they had never existed.
Another shot got through… one of the Chimeran Hammer's beams punched clean through the barrier and the explosion that followed knocked the Omnitrix ship off course and took out its weapon systems with it.
'The Omnitrix will soon be…'
There was a green glow that suddenly covered the hatch of the ship and out of it came the pod of the Omnitrix, it had been ejected from the Omnitrix ship and soared through the vacuum of space before cloaking itself completely.
Vilgax and the Bioids could no longer sense it… It was as if it had vanished.
"Krath'vel sorvaan! Xyn-thar grokuul veth'kai narroth, YOU CRAWLING PIECE OF WRECKAGE… FIRE IT DOWN!"
The Bioids obeyed.
Beam after beam connected with the ship, tearing through it completely and dragging it off course; however it soon disappeared around the edge of the display's range.
Vilgax did not give chase.
"Find it! We can not let Max Tennyson get his hands on the Omnitrix!"
…
"—Ben Tennyson!"
Ben Tennyson? The hell… who was talking about Ben Ten here?
"Wake up Mister Tennyson!"
Was it some sort of fan or what…? Why couldn't they let me sleep for five more minutes?
However there was suddenly a tap on my shoulder and I looked up to see a face looking down at me, I had never seen this person in my life.
I gradually blinked and looked around. I was in some kind of classroom which was new… It had been quite a while since I went to school last, hell I was even a college dropout.
After all, seeing the stuff these traders posted online was motivating until you were actually doing the real trading and realized motivation didn't pay the bills.
This classroom was unfamiliar and in front of a board that looked like a television and was currently showing some kind of timer that was slowly clicking to a stop was a middle aged man wearing glasses with the expression of someone who had made peace with his life choices.
"Mister Tennyson, I know you finished your exams forty minutes earlier than everyone else… but that doesn't give you the power to sleep in—"
I dropped my head back to the table and the teacher opened his mouth and then thought better of it.
I wasn't thinking about that though.
Where the hell was I? Mister Tennyson? What the actual hell was this…? I don't remember—
There was a rush of pain in my head, like a splitting headache that lasted exactly one second and then ended just as quickly as it started, and I now understood.
Technically, I was in the world of Ben 10… in the body of the world famous Hero of Heroes and wielder of the Omnitrix, Ben Tennyson.
However the world itself was what I couldn't recognize at all. I hadn't watched the full thing… I did watch only Season 1 as a kid and some of Alien Force years later on a sketchy site but even with that limited knowledge I was pretty confident that none of this was canon.
When did heroes start getting rampant on the planet? Last time I checked, Ben was the only real hero on Earth through the Omnitrix, with an organization called the Plumbers that I'd only gotten spoiled on through TikTok.
But in this world there was a whole Hero Organization that registered heroes like a government department.
A meteor had passed by Earth two hundred years ago and given a minority of humans powers… that sounded like something pulled straight out of a fantasy novel and there was something called the 100-Year Galactic War that the Plumbers had put a stop to roughly a century ago, plus the fact that some aliens now lived on Earth on an extra-terrestrial visa.
Nobody on Earth knew much about the Plumbers since they operated like some kind of space police, mostly off-world.
But everyone knew about the Hero Organization and the Call Of Justice… which was basically a knock-off of both the Justice League and the Avengers operating with a completely straight face.
They were Earth's mightiest heroes.
I sighed and pulled myself into a sitting position.
The timer was slowly clicking toward zero.
According to Ben's memories, humans in this world usually awakened some kind of power at eighteen.
Ben hadn't awakened anything and that had apparently made him pretty insecure about it for a while now.
I didn't care much about that personally… but where the hell was my Omnitrix? Ben was already eighteen in this world. Was it coming? Or was I going to spend however long stuck in a heroes world playing civilian?
That would be a problem. A real one.
What if I was just casually existing one day and some villain decided I was in the way? I'd get run through like Hughie's first girlfriend in The Boys and that would be that.
Over eighty percent of humans weren't heroes so being unpowered was statistically normal but being a Tennyson with nothing while villains existed was a different kind of uncomfortable.
The pay for heroes was apparently good though… so there was that. The timer on the board clicked to zero and a bell rang, signaling the end of school.
"Submit your papers. Your exams are done."
What followed was a collective exhale from across the room as a machine on the teacher's desk opened its compartment and inhaled every paper on every desk simultaneously… a quick mechanical breath that pulled them all neatly in without a single sheet going crooked.
People around me were staring at it like it was normal.
It was normal to them.
Damn that was neat though… Humanity had clearly learned some things from two centuries of confirmed alien contact, it was still behind overall but neat things like that were everywhere if you paid attention.
"You can all leave."
There were cheers and the guy next to me pumped his fist. I stood up with a bag over my shoulder and was halfway to the door when someone grabbed the strap and yanked me backward hard enough to make me stagger.
"Where do you think you're going?"
This guy was Kelly who was blond and confident because he had rich parents. He was grinning at me like this was obviously funny.
"Dude, I'm going home." I said while raising an eyebrow… then I caught myself.
Did I just say dude? I was twenty five before I ended up here, not fifteen. I hadn't said dude in years. Was Ben's vocabulary bleeding into mine already? That was going to be something to keep an eye on.
I'd hate to spend however long I was here slowly becoming an eighteen year old.
"Kelly, didn't you say Ben's parents agreed to the camp night?" One guy nearby said… someone whose face Ben's memory had filed somewhere but whose name I genuinely couldn't be bothered to surface.
"Of course they agreed." Kelly pulled me closer by the shoulder like we were co-conspirators. "How many of us are actually coming?"
The teacher had left and most of the class with him, leaving maybe eight of us scattered around the room.
I scanned the remaining faces the way I'd been doing since I woke up here… matching what I saw against what Ben's memory had filed away.
Most of them I half recognized. They were present in his memory but not significant enough to land fully, Ben really didn't know their names however two of them landed completely.
The first was Julie. I recognized her immediately… I'd watched Alien Force after all, and she'd been in enough of it that her face was one I actually knew.
Julie Yamamoto was Japanese-American with black hair cut into a neat bob with straight blunt bangs sitting flat across her forehead and brown eyes that were currently looking at something on her phone.
She was wearing a black t-shirt under a pink hooded jacket, a white mini skirt, and white tennis shoes. She looked exactly the way she looked on screen except she was realer, which was still an adjustment.
She was Ben's girlfriend or had been and one of the only people in canon who'd genuinely liked him before the watch made him interesting.
I'd seen the TikToks about Omniverse and I'd seen the way they had broken up… I wasn't going to get into it but I had opinions and they were not complimentary to the choices of fictional Ben Tennyson.
Standing next to her was someone I didn't recognize from the show at all but Ben's memory had a full file on… She was Tara Shields.
A dark skinned girl and six foot two meaning she was quite taller than Ben if not all the guys in this class, she was really pretty and her body looked like she worked out regularly…
She was Julie's best friend and apparently a transfer student that had come earlier this term.
I may have looked for a half second longer than was strictly necessary.
"The school cancelled the organized trip this year so we're handling it ourselves," Kelly announced, phone out, showing us what looked like a reservation confirmation. "We'll be going to Whispering Pine reverse for three days and come back on Tuesday. My parents sorted the booking."
Rich parents… Of course…
The Tennysons were comfortable but spending money on a block reservation for eight people at a forest resort was a different tier of comfort entirely.
Ben's dad or rather my dad, technically would've rather had a philosophical crisis than spend money like that on a camping trip.
We all headed out and I drifted naturally to the back of the group, watching the others while we walked.
When we exited the school premises I had Ben's memories to prepare me but the outside still caught me a little off guard every time.
Bellwood looked like a regular American city that had been quietly evolving for two centuries with alien interior design input.
The buildings were familiar in their bones but different on the surface… there was smooth paneling that caught the light strangely and signage in English and two or three other languages I couldn't read, the streets were laid out normally but the air above them occupied.
Hover scooters moved in a loose upper lane about forty feet off the ground with riders in helmets navigating between each other with ease.
A delivery guy on one cut across the upper lane with several cartons of Mr. Pizza strapped to the back, the logo was bright red against the pale afternoon sky.
Mr. Smoothie existed down here too, except it had company now… Mr. Hamburger on one corner, Mr. Steak across from it and the whole franchise apparently having expanded its identity at some point.
On the sidewalk a woman in business clothes walked past a Galvan which was tiny, large-headed and moving quickly in the opposite direction but neither of them looked up from what they were doing.
It was just another Tuesday…
There was a long van waiting outside the school gates with a driver who gave Kelly a small bow when we approached.
"That's what we're using." Kelly pointed at it like he was presenting something. "Get in."
I sighed and got in.
…
It was 7pm by the time we'd settled into the Pine Cottage which was not a hut by any stretch of the word but a proper two-storey building with separate wings for the male and female sections, cozy individual rooms, and a wraparound porch that looked directly out into the forest.
The reserve was a whole dedicated woodland area available to us for the next three days, it was full of paths and clearings and the kind of clean air that reminded you cities weren't the default state of the planet.
There were four girls and four guys so the rooms sorted fairly and everything worked out.
I'd grown into Ben's life without much friction, honestly.
He was genuinely a more talkative person with Kelly and the others however there was nothing to talk about.
All eight of us were outside the cottage now in the cooling air, wearing the reserve's suggested exploration gear which was a light jacket with good shoes and reflective strip on the sleeve while Kelly was grinning as always.
"How about we all explore and meet back here? Should be move in groups… or alone?"
"Groups of two." Tara said and everyone knew that she just wanted to spend time with Julie.
"I'll go alone." I said.
Everyone looked at me.
I couldn't have my first real experience in an actual forest with someone hovering nearby asking questions.
And more practically… what if something fell out of the sky? The Omnitrix had to be out there somewhere.
"Sure, don't get lost." Kelly said easily, and a few others said the same.
Tara gave me an amused look and then the group split off in their pairs. Kelly somehow ended up walking with both Julie and Tara, which he looked extremely pleased about while I went the other way.
The forest at night, away from city light, was the kind of quiet that wasn't actually quiet.
Wind came through the tops of the pines and something small was constantly moving in the undergrowth and stopping as well, there was also the creak of branches.
I walked without direction for a while, genuinely just looking around… There were flowers that had closed for the night and a shallow stream catching what little light came through the canopy.
I could also hear the sounds of an animal though we were told by the guide that animals here were much calmer and didn't attack you as long as you didn't attack them.
"I feel nice…" I muttered.
So what if I don't get the Omnitrix?
Being a hero was stressful… It was genuinely stressful.
The pay at the higher ranks was good but getting to the higher ranks meant surviving the lower ones first, and this world had real villains doing real damage on a regular basis.
Eighty percent of humanity lived completely normal lives and I could do that so It was fine. I was almost believing it when the sky lit up.
It was not lightning but a singular streak of light from high up, moving fast across the dark above the treeline, trailing something bright behind it.
It was a shooting star… A very fast, very purposeful looking shooting star.
Every thought I'd just been having dissolved immediately and I waved my hands at it like a complete idiot.
"Omnitrix! Here! To me!"
I was fully aware of how I looked.
I did it anyway… This was the Omnitrix and Ben was my guy growing up, incomplete watch history or not though it was a shame I never got to see the Absolute series but that was a separate grief.
The streak kept moving.
Of course it did.
I lowered my hands and watched it arc toward the treeline and start to disappear and told myself this was fine however—
It curved.
It was like a course correction made by something that had found what it was looking for.
It came down fast… it was fast enough that I had about one second of seeing it coming before every instinct I had fired at once and I threw myself backward.
The impact hit the ground twenty feet ahead of me and the shockwave from it picked me up and held me briefly in the air before the forest floor came back up to meet me.
Dirt and pine needles rained down and I lay there for a second, coughed through the smoke, and then got up because lying there wasn't going to tell me anything.
The smoke cleared to reveal a crater, maybe eight feet across. It was empty at first glance and suddenly, it was not empty because something materialized at the bottom of it.
It was a pod.
The pod was round and smooth with a surface that had wave-like ridges running across it and I slid down into the crater with my heart doing somersaults in my chest… and the pod responded to me being close.
It clicked and then opened… and inside it was a watch. It was not the same as the one I remembered from Saturday mornings.
This one was completely black and the hourglass symbol at the center was different… The edges were slightly rounded and the lines felt more geometric than the original like circuits but the core of it glowed green and the shape of it was unmistakable.
It was the Omnitrix… the real one and it was right in front of me.
"Cool." I said.
The watch unlatched from its pod and jumped onto my right wrist.
There was brief pain and then the watch clamped completely around my hand… not only that but the pod shrank into a smooth ball the size of a marble.
I picked it up and turned it over… surprisingly it was not hot at all so I put it in my jacket pocket.
This could come in handy soon.
The Omnitrix let out its signature ping that I could recognize and I raised my wrist and looked at it.
When I pressed the two buttons on either side, the dial extended and a hologram bloomed upward from the surface, cycling through alien silhouettes one by one.
I turned the dial.
There was Ripjaws… Ghostfreak... Upgrade… XLR8… Diamondhead… Stinkfly… Wildvine... Four Arms… Grey Matter… and Heatblast.
I stopped.
The hologram was small but I'd have known that silhouette anywhere… It was a living creature made entirely of fire and black volcanic rock with flames rolling off its shoulders.
Heatblast was the first alien Ben ever used in canon. After I did some additional research, it was a Pyronite which was a species from a star called Pyros, and just looking at the silhouette I could already feel why this one was the one.
It was my favorite alien and I could feel our connection… My finger was on the dial and I was ready to push it in however there were suddenly footsteps and several sets of them moving fast through the undergrowth above the crater.
Tara's face appeared at the rim first then Julie's and then Kelly's however by the time that they faced me, I was laid on the ground as if I had been caught in the blast. The Omnitrix had vanished, I could still feel it on my hand though but I couldn't see it.
It had cloaked itself.
"Ben!" Julie yelled out and someone came sliding down into the crater fast as I closed my eyes.
When I opened them Tara was crouched over me... Up close she was genuinely as tall as she'd seemed across the classroom which was considerable and beautiful too.
"What the hell… happened?" I asked, putting my acting skills to work.