November 27th, 2024 – New York City, Earth 5554 Prime Universe
The door to Ben Stewart's apartment groaned open. He tossed his keys onto the cluttered table, where they skidded into his hard hat, and stood there for a moment just breathing.
Another day. Same colleagues. Same noise.
At eighteen, he felt ten years older than most of them — men in their thirties who still acted like they were killing time between high school and whatever came next. Ben didn't have that luxury. The real world hadn't waited for him to be ready, and he hadn't asked it to.
He pulled a water bottle from the fridge and drained it standing up, one hand braced on the counter. The apartment wasn't much — peeling wallpaper, mismatched furniture, a window that rattled when the wind came off the Hudson — but it was his. Eighteen months of splitting himself between construction and freelance graphic design had earned him that much. While most people his age were burning through their parents' money at university, he'd quietly built something. Small, fragile, but real.
Outside, the city was fraying. The financial crisis had been grinding on long enough that people had stopped calling it a crisis and started calling it Tuesday. An aging president whose speeches felt like museum exhibits. A vice president whose promises dissolved the moment they left her mouth. The streets below his window told the story plainly enough — spray-painted storefronts, protest crowds snarling traffic into knots, the whole machinery of the city running hot and loose.
Ben pressed two fingers to his temple. Eight years of boxing and karate had given him an outlet for this kind of frustration, had sharpened him into something that didn't rattle easily. But even that felt insufficient lately. You couldn't spar with inflation. You couldn't cross-counter a culture that had decided alienating its audience was somehow a bold creative choice.
He muttered toward the ceiling, half-joking, half-desperate: "If anyone's listening up there — save me from this. Otherwise I'm going to die of stress before I'm."
"Thirty?" said a voice behind him. "My sources had you worried about dying young. Let's not move the goalposts, Mr. Stewart."
Ben was already moving. The knife was in his hand before the sentence finished, his body dropping into stance — weight low, front foot angled, eyes sweeping the room. Eight years of training didn't make you brave. They made the response automatic.
Two men stood near his couch. He didn't know how. He hadn't heard the door. He hadn't heard anything.
The first was older — seventies, maybe — with kind eyes and a neatly trimmed mustache that tugged at something in Ben's memory he couldn't quite place. The second was harder to categorize: middle-aged, wearing what looked like a lab coat over a black turtleneck and brown vest, gold trim catching the low light, a white scarf draped over his shoulders. Pouches lined his coat. A sleek metallic gauntlet covered his right hand; his left wore a fingerless glove. Goggles hung loose around his neck.
He looked like someone who'd raided both a Renaissance fair and a robotics lab. And he looked completely unbothered by the knife.
"Who are you?" Ben kept his voice flat. He didn't rush — he was outnumbered, he didn't know if there were others, and he didn't know what the gauntlet did. Discipline meant not swinging until you understood the situation.
The older man raised both hands slowly, palms out. His smile was apologetic, genuinely so, but it didn't waver. "We've frightened you. I'm sorry for that." A small pause. "I'm afraid I also owe you an apology for what happens next."
"What hap—"
The word never finished. Something hit Ben's mind like a wave — not pain, just weight, the sudden gravity of unconsciousness pulling him down before he could decide whether to fight it. His grip loosened. The knife rang against the floor.
The old man's voice followed him down, quiet and unhurried.
"I'll leave you something. For the road ahead. Consider it a gesture of goodwill."
Then nothing.
---
Ben's eyes snapped open.
He was standing up. That was the first wrong thing. You don't wake up standing.
Times Square roared around him — cab horns, a vendor shouting over a cart, the smell of hot pretzels and exhaust baked into the November air. His body was already scanning before his mind caught up, the trained reflex of someone who'd learned that hesitation cost you. Two strangers. His apartment. Then nothing. Now this.
He looked down. Sneakers. Sleek, unfamiliar, definitely not his — he'd been barefoot.
Then he saw his wrist.
The Omnitrix.
He recognized it instantly, the way you recognize something from a dream that turns out to be real. Slimmer than the cartoon version, more refined — black and gray banding around a core that pulsed with quiet green light, warm against his skin like it had always been there. His fingers hovered over it without touching it.
This is not a prop.
He knew that the way you know when a bone is broken. Not from pain — from certainty.
He kept moving. Standing in the middle of Times Square staring at his wrist was how you ended up on someone's phone video, and he needed to think before he did anything else. He navigated the crowd on autopilot, sneakers slapping unfamiliar against the pavement, until the noise dropped away and the cool quiet of the New York Public Library closed around him.
The Mid-Manhattan branch. He'd spent hours here as a kid, then as a teenager teaching himself code between shifts, turning a borrowed library card and free WiFi into something resembling a skill set. The smell of it — old paper, polished wood, recycled air — steadied him slightly.
He found an open terminal and sat down.
The monitor was a CRT. Bulky, curved screen, the kind that belonged in a storage unit. He moved the mouse and looked at the clock in the corner of the screen.
Sunday, June 1st, 2009.
Ben sat very still.
He opened the browser — Internet Explorer, ancient, grinding slowly to life — and went to Google. The homepage looked like a fossil. He searched for current news and read until he was certain.
2009. Fifteen years before the morning he'd woken up in his apartment.
"Excuse me," he said to the girl at the next terminal, keeping his voice even. Red hair, flip phone, the particular expression of someone who'd rather not be spoken to. "What's today's date?"
She glanced at him. "June 1st. Sunday." A beat. "It's on your screen."
"Thanks."
He turned back. His hands were steady — he made them be steady — but his thoughts were moving fast. Fifteen years back. Different city, same city. And if the headlines loading slowly across the browser were real—
He turned back. His hands were steady — he made them be steady — but his thoughts were moving fast. Fifteen years back. Different city, same city. And if the headlines loading across the browser were real—
'Tony Stark Rescued from Afghan Desert. Tony Stark Is Iron Man.'
Ben stared at the photos for a long moment.
He knew that name. Tony Stark — Iron Man — was as old as his father's comic collection, a founding Avenger, one of the pillars of Marvel's universe. He'd grown up with the 80s cartoon, had read enough back issues to know the broad strokes. Genius billionaire, powered armor, massive ego with occasional moments of genuine heroism.
But the man in the photo didn't look like any comic panel he'd ever seen. He looked like an actor — handsome in a specific, Hollywood way that felt oddly familiar, though Ben couldn't place it. The colonel beside him was the same. Real people wearing faces that seemed almost cast for the role.
He scrolled further. More names. More faces that didn't quite match the illustrations he remembered but fit the characters perfectly.
Ben sat back slowly.
If Tony Stark was real — if Iron Man was real — then this wasn't just 2009. This was a world where the comics were history. Where the Avengers weren't a franchise but a fact. Where the things he'd read about in four-color ink — HYDRA, gamma radiation, super soldiers, alien technology — existed in the same physical reality he was currently sitting in.
His gaze dropped to his wrist.
The Omnitrix pulsed once, slow and steady, like a second heartbeat.
Okay. Not nobody. Not anymore.
But he had no idea what was coming. No roadmap, no timeline, no script. Just a world full of forces that could level cities — and a device on his wrist that might let him meet them on something approaching equal footing.
That would have to be enough.
---
Ben slipped out of the library and kept walking until the foot traffic thinned. He needed somewhere he wouldn't be seen, somewhere he could think without a dozen witnesses.
The alley behind a shuttered bodega on 42nd was narrow enough, wedged between a dumpster and a fire escape dripping with rust. The smell was foul. He barely noticed.
He turned the Omnitrix over on his wrist, studying it in the low light filtering between buildings. The dial rose smoothly when he pressed it — a holographic column of silhouettes blooming upward, each one rotating slowly like it was waiting to be chosen. He recognized them immediately. Jetray. Swampfire. Rath. Brainstorm. Ten forms total, each one pulled from alien species he'd read about in comics that apparently weren't fiction anymore.
He scrolled through them with his thumb, unhurried now, thinking.
Rath for raw power. Jetray for aerial mobility. Swampfire if he needed to hold ground. But right now, in this moment, with no money, no identity, and fifteen years of history he only half-remembered from old comic panels?
He stopped on Brainstorm.
Yeah. You first. Ben thought.
He waited until the sun dropped behind the skyline and the alley went properly dark. Then he took a breath and slammed the dial down.
The transformation hit like a current through every nerve at once. His skeleton stretched and hardened, skin giving way to orange exoskeleton, skull expanding outward as his brain rewired itself in real time. It wasn't painful — it was the opposite of painful, which was almost worse. His thoughts went from a single lane to a twelve-lane highway in under a second, every problem he'd been carrying suddenly reduced to a set of variables with clear solutions.
He caught his reflection in a shard of broken mirror propped against the dumpster. Crab-like, imposing, green eyes glowing in the dark with an unsettling intelligence. The Omnitrix emblem sat squarely on his forehead like a brand.
"Extraordinary," he said — and immediately noted, with some amusement, that Brainstorm's voice came with a plummy British accent that he absolutely had not chosen.
He didn't linger. Brainstorm's mind didn't linger on anything that wasn't the next problem.
---
Breaking back into the library's staff office took roughly four seconds. The lock was a basic pin tumbler — he could have opened it with a bent paperclip as a human. As Brainstorm, he simply understood it.
The computer was old by any standard, but the network it connected to wasn't the machine's limitation — it was the administrators'. He moved through it efficiently, leaving the minimum footprint, until he reached what he needed.
The new identity took shape in careful strokes. Something plausible. Something that wouldn't collapse under casual scrutiny.
' Benjamin Stewart Alexander Tennyson. Born July 23rd, 1991. Austin, Texas.'
He paused on the surname for exactly one second, then kept typing. It was a small private joke — or maybe a tribute. Either way, it felt right. If he was going to be reborn in a world where the comics were real, he might as well lean into it.
Height, weight, eye color — all accurate. Social security number generated from a valid Texas sequence, backdated through the right federal indexes. A digital birth certificate seeded into the appropriate county records. A driver's license entry flagged as non-driver ID. Enough to open a bank account, rent a room, pass a background check.
Not perfect. Physical documents would need separate work. But for tonight, it would hold.
"A legal person," he announced to the empty office, in Brainstorm's insufferable accent. "Digitally speaking."
---
He reverted in the alley, the green flash brief and the crash immediate.
Coming back to his human brain after Brainstorm was like stepping out of a cathedral into a broom closet. His thoughts, which had been arranging themselves into elegant branching structures moments ago, were now just... thoughts. Sequential. Slow. Limited to one thing at a time.
He stood still for a moment, letting it settle.
The strange part was the residue. A faint clarity that hadn't been there before — not Brainstorm's full processing power, nothing close, but a slightly better understanding of what he'd done in that office. The logic of it. Like someone had briefly held a lantern over a map and then taken it away, but he'd memorized a few landmarks before the dark came back.
He filed that away. Something to think about later.
---
He found a motel in Hell's Kitchen — the flickering sign, the peeling facade, the front desk clerk who asked no questions in exchange for cash. Three nights, $180. He paid and didn't argue.
The room was exactly what he'd paid for. Questionable mattress, water-stained ceiling, a television bolted to the dresser like someone expected it to escape. He dropped onto the bed without taking his jacket off and was asleep before he could think of a single reason to stay awake.
---
Morning came through the grimy blinds in thin slats of gray light.
For one merciful second he didn't know where he was. Then he looked at his wrist.
Right.
He sat up, took stock. No toiletries, no change of clothes, no phone. He was wearing the same jeans and jacket he'd been knocked out in — back in his apartment, back in 2024 — which felt like a different person's life now. The bathroom mirror showed him a face that looked about ten years older than eighteen, shadows carved under his eyes. He splashed cold water on it until he felt marginally human, then went to find food.
The diner a block over was small and warm and smelled like coffee and butter. He slid into a corner booth, tugged his sleeve over the Omnitrix, and ordered pancakes. Then ordered more pancakes. The waitress raised an eyebrow at the second plate but didn't comment. He left her a decent tip — 2009 prices were almost offensive in the best possible way.
$25,000 in a freshly created account wouldn't last forever. He'd justified it to himself as reclaiming what was already his — the equivalent of his real savings, moved across time rather than stolen outright. The logic held up better when he didn't examine it too closely, so he didn't. What mattered now was that it bought him time to find something sustainable. He'd grown up reading Spider-Man; he knew exactly where the "broke hero" road ended. He wasn't taking it.
That didn't mean he'd walk past someone getting hurt. He wasn't built for that. But there was a wide stretch of territory between vigilante and bystander, and he intended to find his footing in it.
He checked the clock above the diner counter. 9:15 AM. He paid — $7.50, almost funny — and stepped outside with a mental list: clothes, toothbrush, cheap prepaid phone, somewhere quieter to sit and actually think through what he knew about this world and what came next in it.
Then the ground moved.
The boom came a half-second later — deep, resonant, the kind of sound that doesn't just hit your ears but presses against your sternum. A column of black smoke climbed above the rooftops three blocks east. Car alarms cascaded in both directions. The pedestrians around him stopped, turned, stared.
Ben stood on the sidewalk and looked at the smoke and thought, with great calm: of course.
"First full day," he muttered, already moving toward the alley. "Couldn't even finish the shopping list."
---