A sharp gasp left my lips as I jolted awake.
For a few seconds, I just lay there, staring at the ceiling. Everything looked normal, but something felt… off.
My body felt heavier. There was weight in my arms I'd never had. My shoulders felt broader. Yet at the same time, it felt like I was weightless.
Energy flowed through me, light and warm. Mana. I felt more energized than ever. It felt like a warm summer breeze—familiar, comforting, like a friend I didn't know I needed.
My whole body moved easier—like I'd just upgraded from Humanity 1.0 to Humanity 2.0. My senses were sharper. I could hear the faint hum of electricity in the walls, the distant sound of a car.
What in the hell happened to me?
Then boom.
My head started throbbing. Not from the usual headache, but from information overload. Memories crashed into me like a tidal wave.
Two separate sets of memories began mixing with my own. Experiences, emotions, battles I'd never seen—some I thought I had, but hadn't.
Then… it stopped.
I remembered everything. My own memories were clearer—not perfect, but easier to recall.
I remembered dying. I remembered the void.
I remembered being the Hero of Heroes.
I remembered mastering magic and my heritage.
I flexed my fingers, testing my body. My movements felt smoother, much more efficient. Stronger. Faster. Better.
And then I felt it.
Something cold and metallic against my arms.
Slowly, I raised them. Thick gauntlets clung to my forearms, one on each arm. Sleek and matte green, each carried the Galvan hourglass—black against green, set into bracers.
The Bio-Omnitrix. Grey matter, Brainstorm, Frankenstrike—even Juryrigg. I'd used them all to create my masterpiece. The idea had come from a time where I—as ben—had removed the faceplate of the original watch, glitching it to allow fusions.
Swinging my legs over the bed, I made my way to the mirror. Exactly where it had been in my house—is this my house? A duplicate? Questions for later— and good lord.
Yesterday. I'd been 5'10", lean—more of a swimmer than a soldier. Fit, but nothing special.
Now?
6'3". I had gone from lean to a bodybuilder build. I looked exactly like him—like me? —an adult Benjamin Kirby Tennyson.
The merger was flawless. I had two Bens' memories, but my thoughts still felt like mine. Their lives were background noise—context, not control.
They felt like added experiences to my own.
I felt powerful, heck I was probably the strongest person on this planet. I am Invi—Hungry. That's right. I am fucking hungry.
Think later. Eat now.
-X-X-X-X-X-
—A FEW HOURS LATER—
It had been a few hours since I woke up in this new-old body. I'd scoured the house top to bottom. It was a one-to-one replica of my home—same layout, same photos, same squeaky floorboards. Hell, even the attic light was still broken. But it wasn't my world. The calendar on the wall read January 12, 2005.
Currently, I was in the basement. Surrounded by all the mechanical junk I had. My old washing machine. A broken hairdryer. Christmas lights. A half-filled box with chilly fries. All the old stuff—minus the fries. Gotta love food delivery.
With all this old junk, there was also something I'd never seen. I had this good gaming rig and a gaming laptop. Now, in their place you could see an Oscorp Office Terminal Model 4.2 and a Stark series 3 laptop.
Guess I went from RGB overkill to corporate dystopia.
The weird part of this world? The tech level. Most of the stuff encroaches onto the 2015 territories. Some even in the 2020's.
The room flashed in a green light as I crossed my arm, blurring into motion. Uprigg—the form I had chosen for the task. Juryrigg's manic speed coupled with Upgrade's finesse.
Screws, bolts, and circuits flew apart, scattered mid-air like confetti. Washing machine, hair dryer—heck even my phone—was disassembled, rewired, reforged.
A few chaotic minutes later, and there it was: a sleek black laptop and a matching phone. Each bore the Omnitrix hourglass and tech this world hadn't even dreamed of. Battery power matching that of multiple cars. Processing speeds that outmatched supercomputers. Anything you could imagine—it had.
While the hardware was done and dusted, the software was far from over. I switched into XLR-Grey with nothing but a thought. The world shifted blue; time seeming to slow down to a mere crawl. Grey Matter's processing speed boosted by XLR-8's acceleration. My hands—claws? — sliding across the keyboard, lines of codes etching onto the monitor.
In what seemed like a single minute, my laptop—and by extension, my phone—were now armed with a new OS. A build eerily similar to the plumbers operating system.
To the world outside, I didn't even exist online.
In a flash of green, I was hovering over the box fries. Whatever the world, those things were the goat.
Now, the research—boring—part.
Sitting up straighter, I let my fingers glide across the new keyboard as I began my deep dive.
Tony Stark—still just a spoiled genius, burning money faster than alcohol. No armor, no hero.
Steve Rogers—Dead. Well, he is probably still in the ice.
Reed Richards—Scientist, 30, poking into cosmic radiation and space ventures. About a year before space flight.
Victor Von Doom—Newly crowned ruler of Latveria.
Charles Xavier—A 42-year-old geneticist focused on human mutations. Founder of Xavier's School of gifted youngsters.
Peter Parker—Nothing. Just a file on Richard Parker. Geneticist focused on splicing human and animal DNA. Died 10 years ago in a car crash. There was also a small section on his son who was about 4 at the time of the accident.
After all that, something clicked.
I wasn't just in the Marvel Universe.
I was before the age of Heroes.
And looking at everything, I seem to be in a timeline that's a mix of movies and comics. Some of the backstories were strikingly similar to their cinematic counterparts.
I stared at the screen, hands stuck under my chin.
This wasn't just a head start.
This was a chance to become something bigger.
Well… we will see how this goes.
-X-X-X-X-X-
Mr. Smoothy.
Of all the things I thought wouldn't exist here, that was near the top of the list. But nope—same big billboard, huge parking space, and the same exact flavors as I remembered from before the anilargh. Mr. Smoothy was just built different.
I walked home, sipping a strawberry split with extra ice. It had been a few days since I started rebuilding some of my tech. XLR-Grey made it easy—coding a surveillance program with speed that looked impossible. I'd kept the program slow on purpose. Not because I couldn't make it faster, but because I didn't want anyone noticing. Sure, I might have the most advanced tech on the planet—but mutants and mages existed.
A technopathic mutant might be out there. Fury's paranoia. Or the fact that Doom existed. This was a comic universe—I wasn't taking any chances.
The goal was simple: poke around SHIELD systems without alerting someone I'd rather not. Quietly mirror their drives. Map internal pathways. Pull whatever looked interesting. Most of it was boring protocol or some random mission report. Then I got a ping.
Hydra.
Embedded. Still alive. Operating in the shadows inside SHIELD, just like in The Winter Soldier movie. The timeline followed a movie-verse—if marvel owned all of its IPs.
Of course, I couldn't get everything (yet). Some files were locked behind local-only servers with no external access.
Did it really matter? Hell no. I had speed. I had stealth. If I needed to physically break into a building to copy files? Fine. I'd XLR8 my way in and out before the cameras finished buffering.
My phone buzzed again. Background crawl on the broader mutant situation. I scrolled through while crossing the street.
The government had known about mutants since World War II. Some Hydra project—and Logan's fight with Sabretooth—had exposed them… but that never made it to the public. It was just a creepypasta—until Erik Lehnsherr, a.k.a. Magneto decided to assassinate Kennedy. He turned a national event into a national tragedy, all on live television, and suddenly the world couldn't ignore the word mutant anymore.
Xavier's School of Gifted Youngsters was a thing. In the eyes of the public, it was a private institute. To those in the know? It was a school teeming with mutants. Apparently, Xavier and Peggy Carter—Director or SHIELD—had struck some kind deal. The full file was gone, but I did find a name: "X-Men," signed by both Charles Xavier and Peggy Carter.
Then there was the Hellfire Club.
Sebastian Shaw ran the show—for now, But Emma Frost was in the ranks, biding her time. No real movement yet, just power games and influence building. But if I remembered correctly, it wouldn't stay that way for long.
I stepped through my front door and locked it behind me.
The house looked the same. Same photos. Same layout. But I'd done some remodeling. Using my reality warping powers—courtesy of Anodite Ben—I had made some alterations. I hadn't done a full-blown transformation—just minor stuff that made the interior look as good as new. A few appliances that didn't exist yet sat comfortably like they belonged—Air fryer. Voice lights, and all that jazz, comfort stuff, really.
The big change however, was the basement. The door? Gone.
Erased. No knob. No latch. No visible entrance. If you didn't know what to look for, you'd never find it. The only way in now was teleportation—or phasing.
I whispered a spell under my breath—and poof.
I vanished from the living room and appeared in the basement.
I turned the whole thing into a base. A workshop, to be precise. Using junkyard salvage and Uprigg, I had upgraded it until it looked like an old plumber base.
I'd even magick'd the place—expanded the space, layering it with anti-scrying wards, and just reinforced the hell out of it.
On the main central console, you could see three main programs running.
The long-term SHIELD-Hydra crawl Surveillance trackers on key individuals (Stark, Richards, just to name a few) A proximity alert tuned for power surges or alien signals.
I hadn't spied on Xavier or Doom—too risky. The first could have a technopathic mutant I don't know of. The second had magical barriers surrounding Latveria.
I set the smoothy down in a cupholder and got back to work.
-X-X-X-X-X-
-3RD POV-
The screen glowed pale green in the dark.
Rows of decrypted SHIELD files scrolled across Ben's monitor, flickering with logs, reports, and bureaucratic nonsense. Most of it was just static. But buried beneath layers of encryption was something huge.
The Kree invasion nearly happened.
The entire Captain Marvel movie was real. Fury had scrubbed most of it from every public record, but some servers held bits and pieces. Alien tech. A dead body. Energy signatures. Interrogation transcripts. SHIELD knew. Just… not all of it.
Ben leaned back, a half-finished six-pack of smoothies and a bag of chili fries beside him. "So Earth already got a wake-up call," he muttered. "And went right back to sleep."
He tapped a few keys. The decryption process on the Hydra cluster was still ongoing.
Aliens weren't all he got. Inhumans too.
SHIELD had files on this mutagen—the Terrigen mist and related tech.
They knew a little about them, it wasn't much. But it was a start.
Filing that for research, he switched focus. Pulling up a design schematic, he started a parallel thread. Not surveillance. Not infiltration. Defense.
SCRANTON REALITY ANCHOR—THEORETICAL BUILD DESIGN
The idea had come from the SCP Wiki. While he used to consider it fiction, his current reality proved him otherwise.
A Scranton Reality Anchor—or a SRA—was a device that could stabilize the reality around a person. Preventing it from warping, being overwritten, or distorted by stronger influences.
He hadn't cracked the design yet. Not even close.
Even with all the processing power of BrainMatter, he hadn't come close to cracking it. The SRAs didn't just suppress reality-warping. They used it. Matched force with force.
While he wasn't close to cracking it, he had time.
He decided to switch tracks. He could protect his reality later; what he could do right now was protect his time. His mind flashed back to Azmuth. Professor Paradox. The Chrono-Sapien time war.
PARADOX SHIELD—BLUEPRINT DATA
Ha blueprint. A bubble of stabilized causality. A temporal protection that would shield him from any attempt to erase him by going back in time.
While he couldn't protect his reality yet, he could protect his time.
Just as he was about to add more to the data, he got a ping.
Because Hydra's files finally finished decrypting. And one of them hit him like a punch.
SUBJECTS: 7A-12B
AGE RANGE: 9-17
STATUS: ALIVE
Ben went still.
Something in him snapped.
Mutant children Hydra was experimenting on kids. Right now. In a location he knew.
His chair scraped against the floor as he stood, pacing the room. Every part of him wanted to run—XLR8 in, smash heads, get them out. But logistics slammed into his instincts. He had no shelter. No system. No fallback.
He could free them. But then what?
His eyes drifted back to his files. Scranton. Paradox. Now this.
"The world doesn't need another solo hero," he muttered. It needs a network—an organization. It needs the Plumbers."
It was the second time the thought crossed his mind. This time, it stuck.
Still, he needed to act. He couldn't do nothing.
So, he crafted a message—untraceable, encrypted, clean—and passed it onto Xavier.
Ben sat back, shoulders tense.
He'd give Xavier a day. Twenty-four hours.
If nothing happened, he'd tear Hydra apart himself.
Screw hiding. He was gonna save those kids—one way or another.
-X-X-X-X-X-
Author's Note:Thanks to everyone who voted—looks like we're going with the 5k words every 5–6 day's schedule.
This chapter doesn't reach the full word count yet since it's a two-parter. Together with the next part, it'll total around 5k words. Part two will be available tomorrow.
The next full chapter will be uploaded by June 9th or 10th. Stay tuned.