Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

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When Albedo awoke, it was to so much soreness that he wished he hadn’t. Aches wracked him from his annoyingly fur-covered head to his proportionally too-large feet, and it was only hard-won instinct disguising his waking hours from Plumber wardens that kept him from groaning or shifting in discomfort. 

A quick mental inventory of his body confirmed the worst: he was still human. But his horrific fate aside, he felt no sharp pains from skeletal fractures or dull, throbbing agonies from ruptured organs. Abrasion and contusions appeared to be the extent of his injuries, so overall he’d gotten off with minimal damage. But how had… yes, the ambush. 

A poorly planned affair, he had to admit, at least by his standards. Which was not to say it had been ineffective. A simple theft of Plumber technology had been sufficient to bait Tennyson into investigating the Undertown warehouse Albedo had laid out as a trap, rigging the doors to seal shut and concealing a small army of salvaged and rebuilt Techadon battle robots in the empty crates. And, of course, the stolen tech itself, a Null Void projector Albedo had stripped apart and rebuilt into something altogether more potent, the true trap past the robots that would distract Tennyson while it built up charge.

Albedo truly shouldn’t have bothered to be there himself. Gloating over a holoscreen, perhaps, but his presence in the warehouse itself had been pure self-indulgence, a mixture of spiteful desire to see Tennyson’s end with his own… with his current two eyes, and confidence that he’d be able to slip out in time to escape the blast zone of his dimensional bomb.

He should have had time, if not for a stray energy bolt from one of the robots striking the modified projector. The sudden change in pitch and ominous glow from the machine had been more than enough warning that something was going horribly wrong, but not nearly enough for him to escape. He’d barely reached his concealed escape hatch before a flash of light and then… here he was.

Wherever ‘here’ was. Even Albedo wasn’t sure where the projector would have sent Tennyson had it functioned correctly. He’d only meant for it to send that witless oaf far, far away. And instead he’d been caught up in the blast himself.

The thought was humiliating. Albedo, (second) smartest mind in three, possibly five galaxies, hoist by his own petard like some common crook. It rankled enough that he sat up quickly to escape the prickling anger and shame in his gut and across his disgustingly warm skin.

Taking stock of his situation. Yes, that was preferable to spending one more second laying on the ground examining his body for injury and taking stock of all the ways it was not his own, or dwelling on his feelings and failures.

Albedo opened his eyes expecting the barren nothingness of the Null Void, or some landscape yet more alien. Or perhaps the same warehouse in ruins, the damage to the projector reducing it to nothing but a glorified explosive. Instead he found… blue sky. Green trees. The smell of soil and plant matter in the air and the softness of dirt and fallen leaves beneath him. By all appearances, an ordinary forest.

And a forest on Earth, for that matter. Albedo had grown as familiar with the plant life and weather of this backwards mudball as he was with his own homeworld. Clearly the malfunctioning device had succeeded only in hurling him across the continent rather than through dimensions. 

He stuffed down the part of him that rankled at knowing his trap had failed so thoroughly and focused on his good fortune. It would be a simple matter then to return to Bellwood and pick up where he left off. New resources could be gathered, new traps arranged. This was but a momentary setback.

With a groan, Albedo pushed himself to his feet, leaning against a tree to support his aching back and legs as he looked around. He hoped to find a road or building, something to accelerate his return to civilization. Instead he found nothing but trees and undergrowth.

He groaned again, this time in frustration. This was… still a simple matter. Just an irritating one. He’d have to hail some lowlife to give him a ride back to Bellwood, and surely be swindled out of the last of his taydens in the process.

Fortunately his Ultimatrix still had its communication functions intact, even after being gutted of its stabilizer and genetic simulator. He dialed it up, scanning for communication signals using the encryption patterns favored by Earth’s extraterrestrial criminals.

Several seconds ticked by with no response. Irritating, but not abnormal. He was in the middle of nowhere after all. 

A minute passed, still with no response. Frustrating, and less easily dismissed. The Ultimatrix had interplanetary communication capabilities, it should have found something by now. He ran a diagnostic in case the blast had damaged it. The results came back seconds later: everything was perfectly functional.

When a second minute passed with nothing, Albedo grumbled in frustration and adjusted the settings, searching for any signals above the technological threshold of ordinary human communications.

Another minute, and still nothing. Albedo swallowed as he felt a growing pit in his abdomen, frustration beginning to give way to dread. Something was very wrong here. Earth had too many aliens for there to be nothing. Even at the height of the Forever Knight purges when extranet signals were shut down to avoid attention, it had never been this silent.

Technically there was still one recourse remaining. Albedo kept a block established on all Plumber signals to prevent them from picking up his Ultimatrix, having exploited Tennyson’s Omnitrix signature enough to be wary of having the same tactics used against him. But if everything else was gone…

Long and short term concerns warred in his mind, before he swallowed his pride and disabled the block. Immediately there was a ping as the Ultimatrix locked onto something.

The tension in his body bled away slightly. Clearly he had just been too hasty in his judgements. Perhaps this was a signal deadzone set up for training purposes, or a high security area under communication blackout. Neither were ideal, but there were something to work with.

He twisted the dial on the Ultimatrix, setting it to lead him to the source. It pinged immediately on the northern side of the face.

Perfect, at least he wouldn’t have to spend too long wandering to triangulate the signal. 

Then he looked at the distance readout and his short-lived relief vanished.

Ten meters.

Albedo looked to the north. Nothing. Just trees and shrubs and soil. No sign of anything but forest, and certainly not a Plumber installation.

The thought crossed his mind that, perhaps, the Ultimatrix was wrong, and was discarded as quickly as it was acknowledged. If he couldn’t trust the product of his own intellect… no, it had to be functional. It had to be.

He straightened up, doing his best to approximate the direction of the signal and began walking. Small point of favor to these human legs, they ate up the distance much faster than his natural galvan form would have been able to manage it. What would have been a minutes long hike became a matter of moments as he shoved his way through branches and undergrowth.

The distance readout shrank rapidly from ten meters to five to two. Right up until the moment he pushed through a shrub and his foot found a hidden incline where he’d been expecting flat ground.

Point of disfavor to these human legs: they put his center of gravity so high he had no chance to recover his balance.

He managed to spit a truly profane Galvan insult towards the geological processes that had created the drop off in the moment before too many branches and too much dirt was crashing against his face to vocalize anything as he tumbled down the slope.

Fresh aches and pains made themselves known alongside the existing injuries as Albedo came to a… less painful stop than he was expecting, against something soft. And warm. And groaning

He cracked an eye open to appraise his unwitting cushion, and the first thing that filled his vision was a garish white ‘10’ outlined in green.

This was truly just his luck.

Albedo pushed himself up off the thankfully still unconscious form of Tennyson himself. His first reaction was the one he voiced. 

“Of course you’re here too, Tennyson,” he spat, injecting as much venom into the words as he could manage.

Tennyson didn’t so much as stir, continuing to drool into the forest floor. How the human could sleep through having his own body weight, down to the kilogram, dropped onto him was a mystery.

His second reaction was to consider how easy it would be to simply dispose of the human, unconscious and helpless and alone in the forest. Most of his tools and equipment had been left behind in his Undertown hideout, but he had enough odds and ends in his pockets to assemble a simple laser projector in the time it would take the human to rouse himself.

But it was the third that stuck with him. Why hadn’t he been able to pick up any signals other than the Omnitrix? Because by now it was clear that was what the Ultimatrix had been leading him towards.

With some effort, Albedo forced himself to shelve spite and revenge in favor of seeking actual answers. He cancelled the seeking program on the Ultimatrix and grabbed Tennyson’s wrist. At least having the human’s wretched body was useful for bypassing the biometric security.

His hopes lasted just long enough to pull up the comms and find the same absence of any and all signals. 

One piece of level 20 technology, he could understand having a glitch after being improperly teleported. Two at the same time, in the same way? Inconceivable.

He dropped Tennyson’s arm without fanfare, an uncomfortable pressure and heat building in his body as his pulse and breathing began to accelerate. Wretched human body, couldn’t it even let him panic in peace?

No more subtlety. He set the Ultimatrix to scan for any and all communication signals, starting at most sophisticated and then working its way down.

The device beeped, showing a ‘20’ on its display and then rapidly counting down in a blur. Each number that flicked past made the pressure build and Albedo found himself pacing beside Tennyson. What if it found nothing? What if there were no signals, no hope of communication, and he was stuck on this miserable rock with only Tennyson for-

The Ultimatrix beeped again, now holding steady on ‘4.’ Albedo stopped his pacing, only very slightly reassured. At least the planet had something more sophisticated than cups on a string for its communication systems, though not by much. A quick ping of the network revealed a primarily satellite-based method of signal broadcast, not unlike the ones Earth’s humans used. Nearly identical, in fact.

So alien broadcasts were completely absent, but the human broadcasts remained. Albedo was reminded, suddenly and not at all pleasantly, of his time working with both Vilgax and several alternate Tennysons. If alternate realities and timelines existed, had the malfunctioning Null Void projector sent them into one? A reality where the Forever Knights had been successful in completely exterminating all alien life on Earth?

That would be… sub-optimal. He refused to let himself use any of the other words that occurred to him at the prospect of being stranded in a reality where those zealots turned an entire planet into a charnel house.

His fingers weren’t as steady as before when he flicked through the settings to isolate the most advanced signals currently active. If this was in fact a reality where the Forever Knights had won, those would be theirs. If not, it would be useful in any case to know exactly who was at the forefront of technology in this world.

And that would be… an orbital platform, according to telemetry data the Ultimatrix piggybacked off the communication signals before burrowing into its systems. Albedo wasn’t much of a programmer, but the Ultimatrix was a supercomputer more advanced than any human device, and without any of its usual functions to dedicate resources to it has processing power to spare.

His crude hack quickly splayed out reports on the platform to him. Too large and too energy inefficient to be a mere communication relay. A space station seemed more likely. And those communications were…

A spare moment was all it took to crack into those, and immediately he was assailed by shouting voices.

“-no sign here. Superman?”

“I can’t see a sixth bomb. He might be bluffing.”

“We can’t risk that, not this close to a faultline. I have Parasite subdued and ready for questioning. Flash?”

“On my way just need to- Whoa! Close one, anyone want to take my dance partner?”

“Roger, I’m-“

“Quiet.” A new voice cut through the din. Lower, gruffer, and not strained in exertion the way the others were. Albedo was almost thankful to whoever they were for bringing order to the mess of voices, if not for the fact that they seemed even more on edge than the people who sounded like they were literally fighting for their lives. “We have a leak.”

Albedo stiffened as the sounds of disbelief and confusion echoed from the Ultimatrix. That couldn’t be right. Surely these primitive humans, because they had to be humans, couldn’t detect the intrusion of a device as sophisticated as the-

“Watchtower reporting data breaches across multiple systems and an ongoing signal from an unknown source.” The voice continued, seemingly determined on proving him wrong. “They might be after our comms, or something more. I’ve disconnected the central data servers just in case, and I’m beginning a backtrace to-“

Albedo slammed the Ultimatrix dial like the device was threatening to bite him, severing the connection. Whoever that was, the individual or the organization, he didn’t want them tracking him down while he was still in such a vulnerable position. And if they could detect his intrusion into their systems, he shuddered to think whether properly tracking him was within their capabilities as well.

The incursion on their systems had yielded little he’d hoped for, but the overheard conversation had given him a few details he may be able to use. He selected an ongoing signal at a significantly lower level of sophistication and patched himself into the human internet. It was no extranet, but it was enough to make a few searches.

‘Watchtower’ got him nothing but sites about buildings. ‘Superman,’ on the other hand, provided a veritable flood of responses to sift through. 

Superman stops a bridge collapse. Superman diverts an avalanche. Superman stops an illegal whaling ship. Superman rescue a cat from a tree. Superman saves city hall from a hidden bomb. Superman stops Toy Man, stops Parasite, stops Atomic Skull, stops so many different titles and names that they all start to blend together.

Though not all associated names were foes. Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, the Flash- and the last he recalled being spoken over the intercepted communications. Not a code phrase or a random word at all, a code name . 

And collectively… the Justice League. Superheroes. 

Under different circumstances he might have laughed. The Galactic Enforcers seemed downright modest by comparison, at least they wore uniforms instead of gaudy personalized raiment. But the reality of the situation strangled any mirth out of him as he absorbed the implications.

This was a whole reality brimming with heroes, worse than Tennyson multiplied a dozen-fold. The kind of people that when Tennyson woke, he’d naturally seek out, ally with, and throw Albedo back in a cell to rot.

Albedo resumed his frantic pacing beside Tennyson’s obnoxiously still-sleeping form. He had to get out of here. Out of this reality, off this backwater rock, out of this revolting human form. But most of all out of this forest. He couldn’t be here when Tennyson woke, and through the cold weight in his gut he couldn’t feel the burning hate that had been enough to spur him towards more permanent solutions. If he was here when that happened, it would just make things easier for Tennyson to take him to… to…

Albedo slowed his pace as he mulled over the ending to that thought, then made one more search. ‘Ben 10.’

Absolutely nothing.

There was no Ben 10 in this world. There was no Tennyson in this world. Both he and Albedo were unknown quantities to this Justice League, and that gave him a chance. Tennyson didn’t keep mission files on him, any accusations would be purely his word against Albedo’s.

And surely Tennyson would want to go home as well. As much as Albedo loathed to even acknowledge the thought, Tennyson was a known quantity. Given the choice between struggling through this new reality trying to return home with Tennyson out there as an enemy, versus having Tennyson as an ally… well, he didn’t like the human by any definition of the word, but he could tolerate him for as long as it took to get home if it meant not having his efforts sabotaged like his genetic alteration field.

But if Tennyson disagreed… no, surely he could see reason. The human was dense, not stupid, and if Albedo was willing to put aside his loathing for the sake of getting home, then Tennyson must be able to as well. He must . 

But if he couldn’t... Albedo's gaze fell upon the Omnitrix sitting on the human's wrist. If he couldn't, then perhaps some insurance was in order.

When Ben woke up, he felt like he’d been run over by a bus, one that backed up after to finish the job. It wasn’t the first time he’d woken up sore and aching after a fight with a villain or a criminal but that didn’t exactly make it any more comfortable.

He groaned and grabbed his aching head to see if he could squeeze his skull back into a less-painful shape. At least his metallic fingers were… wait a minute.

He checked himself over in surprise. Two arms. Two legs. One tail. Two flexible tendrils extending from the back of his aching head. And… he opened his eyes, then corrected that count as he immediately clamped it shut again to ward off the bright light making his headache worse. One eye.

He was still Feedback.

That was weird. He’d been knocked out more times than he could count, and more times than Gwen would ever let him live down, but he always reverted to human when he did. Probably a good thing in this case though. The last thing he remembered was running for some device a techadon had shot a hole in to try and stop it from overloading.

Second to last thing, really, since the last thing was a boom, which meant staying Feedback had probably helped him absorb enough energy to just get knocked around instead of getting blown to smithereens. But hey, he’d count that as a win! Any explosion you could walk away from was a good explosion in his book.

He tried opening his eye again and the light hurt slightly less this time. “Anyone get the number on that truck?”

Too bad he’d been there alone. He could almost hear Rook’s ‘there was no truck involved, only an explosion’ or Gwen’s ‘Ben, you should really know better than to run towards the ominously glowing devices by now,’ or Kevin’s ‘nah, I was too busy watching you eating dirt.’

Except what he actually heard was, “Witticisms moments after waking? Your mind truly never rests.”

That was enough to knock the fog out of his head, and Ben was up on his feet before he could even fully register the voice. A voice that sounded like his own, but distorted like he was hearing it on a recording and spoken with an accent that wasn’t quite right, or even quite human.

“Albedo,” he growled, aiming both his hands and his plug-tipped tendrils towards the source of the voice.

The impostor was leaning against a pine tree, managing to look even worse than he had before. Same black and red clothing, same albino pale skin and hair with bright red eyes, but now he was covered in dirt like he’d been rolling on the ground with a few fresh bruises starting to show and a leaf stuck in his hair that he clearly hadn’t noticed.

And speaking of leaves and things that hadn’t been noticed…when had they gotten to a forest? They’d been in Undertown, and the tree Albedo was leaning against didn’t feel like home. Earth-home, yeah, but not Bellwood-home.

Movement from Albedo snapped Ben’s attention back to him, but he was just raising his hands. “No need for that. Let’s talk things out for a moment.”

“Yeah, I’m not really in the mood to ‘talk things out’ after you tried to kill me.” Ben growled, not lowering his hands.

Albedo sighed and rolled his eyes, as if Ben was being unreasonable for not wanting to have a conversation after his… fourth attempt to kill him? Fifth? They all kind of blurred together after a while.

“Alright, fine, let’s skip ahead.” Albedo said dryly, before switching to the worst attempt at copying Ben’s voice that he’d ever heard in his life. “‘Hey dude, I’m here to stop you! Hero time! Smoothies!’”

“Wha- I do not sound like that!” Ben objected. “I know you can sound like me better than that, you literally impersonated me, like, three times! Professionally even!”

Albedo ignored him to strike a melodramatic pose against the tree, switching to an exaggeration of his own voice. “‘Oh you have defeated me Tennyson! Curses, I will have my reveeeeeenge!’”

Then he dropped the act and held his hands out to Ben like he was asking to be cuffed. “Now, I believe this is the part where you capture me and then call the Plumbers to take me into custody?”

Ben narrowed his eye at Albedo. This was way too easy for someone who’d been ordering robots to shoot him a few minutes ago. “You’re being weird, man.” 

“Because you won’t listen to me otherwise,” Albedo complained. “Call the Plumbers now, if you please?”

Coming closer to Albedo still seemed too much like a trap, so instead Ben spared a hand to tap the Omnitrix dial to activate the comms. “Hey, Rook?”

Instead of the familiar chime and then his partner’s voice, he just got an unfamiliar beep. He frowned and tapped it again, only to get the same response.

“That would be the ‘no signal’ tone,” Albedo helpfully informed him. Ben almost wished he’d just try and attack instead, then he’d have an excuse to zap him.

“And how would you know, smart guy?” he snapped. Yeah, sarcasm, that felt better than trying to ask his doppelgänger a question for real, especially with him being weird like this.

“Because I already tried.” Albedo said, waggling the hand with the Ultimatrix. “Neither of us will be able to reach your partner, or the Plumbers, because they’re all gone.”

It had been a while since Ben had felt real fury, the kind that made his skin prickle and get hot as he imagined stomping someone into the dirt. It was almost a surprise to feel it again after breezing through so many fights on jaded amusement and/or annoyance, even if Feedback made it more of a staticky feeling as sparks crackled from his fingertips. “What did you do to them?”

Albedo’s eyes widened and he held up his hands in a more realistic surrender. “I didn’t do anything to them! Do you remember the time I worked with the alternate versions of you and we went to a different reality?”

The hurried excuse had only slightly dampened Ben’s desire to zap Albedo, but he couldn’t help but crack a grin at that. “I remember you being shorter.”

Albedo’s face twisted in annoyance. “Don’t remind me. It took far too long to revert the alterations to return to your marginally less odious adolescent form.”

“Hey, don’t knock it ‘til you try it.”

“I have tried it, and I hate it.” Albedo snapped, then took a deep breath. “Regardless. Being in an alternate universe?” 

He made a wide gesture towards everything around them.

It took a second for the meaning to sink in, and Ben’s hands sank from their aiming position as he understood. “We’re stranded in another timeline?”

“Timeline, universe, reality, dimension, whatever you like to call it.” Albedo said. “But yes. Wherever we are, we’re far from home. No Plumbers, no famous Ben 10, and as far as I can tell, no Azmuth.”

“That’s… wait, no Ben 10?” Ben perked up, latching onto the closest thing to good news he could get out of the bombshells Albedo was dropping. “So I can go to Mr. Smoothy without getting mobbed for autographs?”

“Will you focus!” Albedo snapped.

“I am focused!” Ben argued back. “Hokestar has that Mr. Smoothy store 23 that hops between dimensions, so we just need to find it when it comes through this dimension and boom! We’re on the fast track home.”

“That… is not entirely an awful idea.” Albedo said, ignoring Ben’s mock bow to acknowledge the praise. “But it still won’t work. Remember, a dimension where you never obtained the Omnitrix was a singularly rare occurrence in the entire omniverse. The reality we find ourselves in now is so far afield, the Omnitrix was never invented and you may never have been born.”

Ben winced and held up his hands in surrender, hunching in on himself slightly. He was used to having his ideas shot down, but by Gwen or Rook, people who at least liked him even if they didn’t like his plans. Getting the same from an enemy was a much sharper blow to his confidence. “Yeesh, alright, ease up a bit. So what, is Gwen the top superhero here? Kevin? …Cooper?”

“No, to all of those. As far as I can tell, there are no commonalities between the important individuals of this world and our own. No superheroes match-”

“So there are superheroes!” Ben grinned, straightening back up and regaining his ‘hero’ posture along with his confidence. “That’s perfect, we can just go to them and-”

“No!”

Ben froze mid-sentence. 

So did Albedo, who seemed to have been taken by surprise by his own panicked shout. He cleared his throat and tried to straighten his shirt in an attempt to regain his composure, which fell flat since he was trying to straighten a t-shirt.

“That would be unwise.” Albedo continued, doing his best to act like the shout hadn’t happened. Since Ben still wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, he let it slide too, but paid closer attention than he might have otherwise. “Devising a method to return to our home reality will be incredibly difficult. Considering the level of technology available on this Earth, it would have to be invented from scratch, and as the only person in this reality who’s properly observed ours, I am the one who is best suited to devise our return.”

“Riiiight.” Ben crossed his arms, unconvinced. “Why don’t I just turn into Grey Matter, or Brainstorm, or Frankenstrike, and do it myself? It can’t be that hard if you can do it.”

A distinctly unfriendly smile crossed Albedo’s face. “Be my guest. I’m sure the great Ben Tennyson would love to spend days upon days pouring over meticulous mathematical calculations to invent an entirely new field of technological development from scratch. Just you and a blackboard and tedious equations from the moment you get up to the moment you go to sleep, until you can recite the formulae for dimensional tunneling  in your sleep.”

Ben visibly shivered at the thought. Just because he could do it if he had to didn’t mean it sounded like fun, but pride demanded he stick it out. “Well… I mean…”

“A Null Void projector is level 10 technology.” Albedo said, and Ben had no idea how he’d managed to get a job as an actor because he faked innocence worse than Ben did when he was five. “A device to return us home? Level 20 at minimum.”

Pride warred with dread, and pride crumpled like a tin can. “Alright, fine! You win.”

“Good.” Albedo preened. “So you understand that our best chance for us to return home is for me to work on the technology for it, which demands that I not be incarcerated.”

Ben groaned at that. “Why do I get the feeling that you just don’t want me going to the superheroes because you don’t want to end up in jail?”

“Because it’s true.” Albedo said bluntly. “But what I said was also true. I was trying to be polite and appeal to your pathos, but if you need the logos as well, let me make it clear: I am our best hope of returning home. So if you don’t want to spend years figuring it out yourself, you need me.”

Ben stilled as he thought it over. He didn’t like it. He didn’t want it to be true. But as far as he could tell, Albedo was right. He was smarter than Ben, even if Ben would never admit it to avoid bloating his ego even more, and he was the better bet to figuring out a way home.

A more ruthless part of him whispered to ignore Albedo, to find whatever superheroes were around, throw Albedo in jail, and work with them to get home. It wouldn’t be the first time Ben outsourced the big technical problems to someone more qualified. Azmuth, Professor Paradox, even Blukic and Driba. Whoever the local heroes had as their head scientist had to be more trustworthy than the galvan who’d stolen his identity, tried to steal the Omnitrix, and nearly killed him, right?

But that felt uncomfortably like sweeping a problem under a rug. It was his fault Albedo was here in this world at all. Making him a problem for this world’s heroes to handle wouldn’t be fair, it was up to him to get Albedo back where he belonged. And if he could keep Albedo focused on making a dimensional portal instead of whatever supervillain stuff he’d get up to if left on his own or tossed in jail, well that was two birds with one stone.

“Fine. I need you.” Ben admitted, before sticking out his hand. “Truce?”

“Truce.” Albedo agreed, grabbing it and shaking to seal the deal with a triumphant grin. Though for a moment, Ben could have sworn he looked more relieved than smug. “You won’t throw me in jail. I won’t return home on my own and leave you stranded here.”

“...was that something you were planning to do?” Ben asked, twitching his tendrils uncomfortably. “I hadn’t even thought about that until you said that.”

Albedo shrugged. “Well it hardly matters now, I’m not going to do it. As long as-”

“As long as I hold up my end of the deal, yeah yeah. Not my first time getting vaguely threatened by a supervillain.” Ben muttered.

“Well, as long as we have an understanding.”

For a moment Ben was reminded of bickering with Gwen when they were kids. This was going to be a long, difficult partnership. And a long trek back to civilization, wherever that was. Might as well stretch his real legs before switching to Jetray to make the trip faster.

He tapped the Omnitrix face to return to normal, no longer needing Feedback to hold Albedo at tendril-point. The flash of green light and strange full-body shifting sensation were almost second nature now as his body reformed and remade itself… into a hulking, red-skinned giant with four arms.

Ben blinked his four eyes, taking in his body. Four Arms? No, that… he’d meant to turn back to normal. He hit the Omnitrix again, another green flash and shifting, before he settled into a new shape, red skin becoming red carapace as the world was subtly warped by eyes meant to see the world through water.

No, no no no no… He hit it again. Gutrot. Again. Wildvine. Again, again, again, shifting through Clockwork, Diamondhead, Articguana, more and more forms with increasing franticness, until the face turned red and chimed in denial when he tried hitting it again.

He staggered back as Chromastone and slammed into a pine tree, still tapping the Omnitrix as it chimed in protest under his crystalline fingers.

“Tennyson?”

Ben’s gaze snapped up, finally remembering he wasn’t alone. He couldn’t name the emotion on Albedo’s face, but he knew panic had to be plain across his own.

“I… I can’t change back.”

Chapter Text

| ?????

| May 31, 19:10 PDT

Albedo did his best to maintain a natural expression as Tennyson panicked. He wasn’t sure exactly what expression the human face was attempting to form, but at the moment he didn’t trust whatever it wanted to show.

It had worked.

Not that he’d doubted his own ability to manipulate a device as familiar as the Omnitrix, but he’d felt like someone was watching over his shoulder the whole time he was manipulating its settings, or that Tennyson would wake at any moment to demand to know what he was doing to it. He hadn’t dared to relax until he hit the final command and left an unconscious conductoid in place of an unconscious human on the forest floor, and he hadn’t dared to truly believe he’d succeeded until this very moment.

Tennyson’s struggles trying and failing to return to his natural form were proof that he had. Now the playing field was balanced, or perhaps even skewed in Albedo’s favor. Were all things equal, the stories of two identical humans would be weighed the same, but between a human and a being that very distinctly was not? Even the most benevolent and well meaning hero would be biased towards their own species.

And pragmatics aside… Albedo couldn’t deny how viscerally satisfying it was to get one over on Tennyson in this manner. After a veritable eternity trapped in the human’s disgusting mammalian form, now Tennyson himself could suffer under the burden of being confined to a body not his own. Even if it wasn’t enough to dissuade Tennyson from any foolish action, Albedo would endure incarceration happily knowing Tennyson would suffer alongside him.

He started slightly at the sound as Tennyson crashed back against a tree, as if he could somehow throw himself free of the body confining him. Which Albedo had to admit was understandable, if not sensible. When he’d first found himself as a human after the test transformation with his Omnitrix copy…

He shoved that memory of horror and panic into the back of his mind, refusing to dwell on it as he took a careful step towards Tennyson. Albedo wasn’t entirely opposed to watching Tennyson panic a bit more, but they needed to get a move on soon to get back to civilization. And establishing an alibi by trying to help fix the issue wouldn’t help either. As satisfying as gloating would be, outright admitting responsibility for this would ruin all chances of a working relationship.

No, gloating could wait until or unless it ever became necessary to extort Tennyson with the hope of genuinely undoing it.

“Here, let me take a look at-”

Albedo took one step too close and immediately found himself staring down a crystalsapien fist leveled at his head.

“Get back!” Tennyson yelled, the panic buried beneath anger.

Albedo immediately held up his hands and retreated the steps he’d just advanced before Tennyson could resort to getting his point across with lasers.  “Tennyson-”

“I’m not letting you near the Omnitrix.” Tennyson said, not lowering his hand. “I’ve got enough problems without you trying to steal it, or hack it, or whatever.”

His paranoia wasn’t misplaced, but it was too late to be useful. Albedo resisted the urge to laugh about the irony of it to give Tennyson his best annoyed glare. “Be reasonable, Tennyson. I was waiting with you for at least an hour before you awoke. If I wanted to steal, hack, or ‘whatever’ Azmuth’s precious creation, I would have done it then.”

Tennyson didn’t lower his hand, or stop glaring. The sneering tone probably hadn’t helped deescalate things, but Albedo was a scientist, not a diplomat, so sue him. “You could have been waiting-”

“For you to wake up so you can threaten me with lasers if I lay a finger on it?” Albedo scoffed. “Give me some credit, I have a sense of self preservation. But if you don’t want me near it, by all means. I’m not the one with a glitching Omnitrix, it makes no difference to me either way.”

A few tense seconds passed before Tennyson lowered his hand, and Albedo relaxed slightly, no longer needing to throw himself out of the way at the slightest glow. “Alright, fine. You can take a look at it. But I’m keeping an eye on you, and if you do anything funny…”

“You’ll blast me in the face, I understand.”

Albedo stepped warily closer. Even in a crystalsapien body, Tennyson’s tension was clear in the way he held himself like he was ready to dodge or attack in the blink of an eye, his body so tense Albedo half expected stress fractures to appear in the stone. But he didn’t follow through on either, so it seemed he was at least willing to allow the examination.

The only motion came when Albedo reached for the Omnitrix and Tennyson half-flinched away, which made Albedo flinch back a step in turn. A long second passed as they appraised each other. But Tennyson’s flinch didn’t continue into an attack, so Albedo supposed he was still allowed to continue.

Tennyson must have decided the same thing when Albedo’s reaching hand hadn’t become a desperate attempt to seize the Omnitrix, because he visibly forced himself to resume his previous position and nodded. “Do it.”

Albedo nodded back and reached for the Omnitrix again, slower this time. He’d learned his lesson the first time and had no desire to test how far Tennyson’s patience extended. 

A simple tap brought up the Omnitrix’s menu, and Albedo waited a few moments, giving Tennyson time to see it wasn’t going to explore or rip itself from his chest, before continuing. Which seemed to be the right move as Tennyson relaxed slightly while Albedo navigated the various settings and subsystems.

“Hmm. From the looks of things, you’re locked into a randomized transformation loop,” Albedo said. Not that he needed to examine the settings to know what he himself had done to the device, but he gave a good show of reading through the holographic display.

“Can’t you just, I don’t know, unlock it?” Tennyson asked. He still sounded tense, but no longer actively hostile, which Albedo took as progress.

“No,” Albedo said with a shake of his head. Which was true. Attempting to extort and manipulate Tennyson by exiling him from human form was risky enough, so out of his own paranoia he’d locked the ability to deactivate the transformation loop with a random sequence even he didn’t know. No one could force a code out of him that he didn’t know, and no one could make him undo it when it was beyond his power.

“At least not easily. The program must have been damaged during our transit to this reality. I can tweak the settings for the duration of individual transformations, but fully deactivating it would require either a full reset with a previous copy of the operating system, or I’d have to find a way to force an override.”

“Yeah, I’m fine with waiting until we get back to Azmuth to ask for a reset instead of letting you mess around with it even more.” Tennyson said.

Albedo shrugged, not bothering to look at him as he kept digging through the settings.

A few seconds ticked by before Tennyson spoke again. “Out of curiosity, how long would forcing an override take?”

“Weeks at minimum. Probably months,” Albedo said. “The Omnitrix is an extremely complicated piece of technology, and it’s…”

“Too complicated for you?”

“ Difficult .” Albedo snapped. “I could make a whole new Omnitrix to replace this one if I had the resources. Fixing a broken one without unravelling you on a genetic level is a much harder task.”

The jab had the desired effect as Tennyson winced. “Yeah, no unravelling please.”

“Good.” Albedo let them lapse back into silence again. There was really no need to keep fiddling with the Omnitrix now that he’d ‘discovered’ the problem, but he could admit to himself it was a guilty pleasure to get this much time to look at the final version of the thing after so long scrounging for scraps of prototype blueprints to build his own. For all Azmuth’s arrogance about his magnum opus, it was just a device like any other.

“You know,” said the annoyance attached to said device, “I wouldn’t judge you if it was too complicated.”

Albedo glared at him but didn’t reply. If he’d included the line of code nestled behind the sixteenth and seventeenth tertiary bioguards, he could have mitigated some of the feedback…

“I mean, I know you have some issues with stuff like this. The Ultimatrix-”

“The Ultimatrix,” Albedo snapped, abandoning the Omnitrix to look at Tennyson, “was an improvement on the Omnitrix in every way.”

“Sure, sure.” Tennyson nodded, as if Albedo couldn’t see the ‘except’ that was going to come after. “Except,” there it was, “for all the mistransformations. And the random time limit. And did you know the ultimates were sentient?”

“Don’t remind me,” Albedo groaned, “Azmuth visited me in prison to berate me for that. It was bad enough hearing from someone as smart as me, I don’t need to hear it again from some primate who uses the most sophisticated device in the universe to punch people harder.”

“You mostly used your transformations to fight too.” Tennyson said infuriatingly. And truthfully, which was what made it infuriating.

“At least I knew how to use my devices!” Albedo snapped rather than acknowledging the point. “I’ve heard Azmuth talk about how you used the original Omnitrix. A ten minute time limit on transformations before it had to recharge? Didn’t it ever occur to you to alter the default settings? This is a galvan device, it wouldn’t be at risk of genuinely running out of power until long after your star burns out!”

He was expecting another jab in reply, but Tennyson fell suddenly silent. He didn’t look angry, which was good, but Albedo had no idea what had just changed.

“So…” Tennyson finally said, his voice heavy. “I’m guessing that means waiting for it to just run down the battery isn’t an option?”

Oh. That was why. Albedo did not wince, he wouldn’t allow Tennyson to make him feel guilty. It was the right choice to make, and he’d make it again if he had to. But he did look away from Tennyson’s face to return to the Omnitrix and the actual menus he’d been pretending to work with.

“No, it isn’t,” Albedo said. “The Omnitrix’s power core is self-sustaining, capable of maintaining transformation indefinitely at the cost of a few other functions. In all likelihood, it won’t ever run out of power.”

Tennyson remained silent at that, which Albedo took as a cue to keep talking to fill the silence. “The DNA capture, DNA repair, and self-destruct functions are completely disabled to preserve power for future transformations. Re-enabling them would first require overriding the transformation loop, so they’ll sadly be inaccessible until that error is resolved.”

He hit a few commands to adjust a string of numbers on the readout. “Here, I’ve set the individual transformation time to last indefinitely. Now you won’t change from a given alien form until you choose to transform, which should make things easier to manage. Be careful about transforming too rapidly in too short a time frame though. If you strain the DNA processor too much, it’s more likely to make errors and eventually lock you out of further transformations while it recalibrates.”

“Well that’s… something at least.” Tennyson smiled. If Albedo hadn’t just watched him panicking, he might have believed it was genuine. Apparently all that time in the spotlight had given him at least a shred of talent at putting on an act.

Well, that was something he and Albedo were going to have to have in common, for Albedo to keep up the facade of innocence for however long it took them to return home. Or at least innocence in this matter, he had no interest in dulling his edges for Tennyson’s sake.

“Anything else I need to know?” Tennyson asked. “Is it gonna make me naked or have all my teeth fall out?”

“Hardly,” Albedo scoffed, flipping to the personalization settings, “the clothing resythecation systems are operating fine. Though if you wanted, I could get you an additional fraction of a percentage of processing power by disabling it, or a few other aesthetic systems, like the backlight for the Omnitrix dial, or the code string that tweaks your transformations’ eye color to match your own.”

“Wait, that’s why all my aliens’ eyes were green after it recalibrated?”

“...you truly do just run around without knowing half of what’s on your wrist, do you? Yes, it is. A frivolous expenditure of resources, honestly, I don’t know why Azmuth bothered to include it.”

Tennyson smiled at that, more genuine than the one before. “Pretty sure you did the same thing, Mr. Red Eyes.”

“Yes, well, I’m a supervillain.” Albedo said, waving a hand dismissively. “Doing impractical things to be dramatic is part of the territory.”

Tennyson almost laughed at that. Definitely an improvement over being morose or aggressive if they wanted to get back to civilization any time soon. How Albedo had ended up being the one making jokes was a mystery, but further evidence that this was an alien reality to their own

“If I had a tayden for every villain with a themed doomsday device...” Tennyson’s smile as he patted his thighs. “I guess I’d still have no taydens. Stupid Omnitrix, stealing my wallet…”

Albedo perked up at that. A simple, easily solved task to build rapport with his new partner. And one that didn’t involve interpersonal skills. “Now that, I can fix.”

He pulled up the resynthecation system and opened the log of stored materials. Most of Tennyson’s clothing and personal items had been broken down and repurposed into the clothing that adorned his crystalsapien form, with the less useful materials stored until he returned to his human shape. But it kept a log of where all the materials came from so it could return them to their original state when that time came, and with a few commands…

The Omnitrix flashed and Tennyson’s wallet appeared in the air in front of it.

“Woah!” He had better reflexes than Albedo, catching it out of the air before it could fall to the dirt. This time he gave a genuine smile as he rifled through it, which Albedo supposed was reasonable. This was after all the first good news since Tennyson had woken up. “Man, you got everything in here! My driver’s license, my Mr. Smoothy card, my Sumo Slammers, my money…”

“That last one may take priority.” Albedo interrupted. “Of the two of us, only you have any human currency, so if you want to eat we’ll either be using your money or we’ll be stealing it.”

“We’ve been in the woods for like five minutes!” Tennyson said, “Why are you already thinking about stealing food? I know you didn’t do that in our universe, because no one ever blamed me for stealing a bunch of chili fries.” 

Albedo’s stomach growled violently at the mention of the accursed foodstuff, and he had to swallow down the saliva that involuntarily flooded his mouth before he could reply. “Of course I didn’t! Do you think me such a common criminal that I’d resort to stealing my victuals? …I stole money, that I used to buy chili fries.”

Tennyson groaned and tried to pinch the bridge of his nose, only to be brought up short by the lack of one on his crystalsapien body. “No stealing food, Albedo. Or money. Just no stealing, period. If we’re going to be working together, we’re not going to be doing it as criminals.”

Albedo tactfully decided to leave the conversation for how to obtain the materials for him to invent a way home for a later date. “Very well. But we do still need to eat, so…”

“Fine,” Tennyson groaned, “I’ll buy you food.”

“Looking like that?” Albedo looked up and down at Tennyson’s two meter tall frame, cyclopean in both senses of the word and bristling with crystal protrusions.

“Then I’ll give you money to buy us food!” Tennyon said, “After we get back to somewhere we can, you know, actually buy food from .”

“Exactly what I was thinking.” Because now that he’d been reminded of his hunger, and of this wretched mammalian body’s downright addiction to Earth’s foodstuffs, it was frustratingly difficult to think of much else. He could plot later. For now, chili fries. “But seeing as we’re some distance from any sign of civilization, and you’re the one with an aereophibian form…”

“You’re worse than Kevin,” Tennyson grumbled, but he still tapped the Omnitrix to transform into the desired form. “We might as well figure out where we are anyways.”

Albedo didn’t get a chance to reply before he was being seized by a clawed foot and dragged into the sky with such speed that it felt like he’d left his stomach behind in the forest below. It was, he supposed, an effective means for Tennyson to get the last word.

So he settled in for however long the flight would take, pulling his limbs against himself to combat the chill of the wind and doing his best not to think of how easily Tennyson could drop him if he realized he’d been deceived.

Ben usually liked flying. It was one of his favorite parts of being a superhero, ever since he first turned into Stinkfly, and the rush of launching himself into the air had barely faded over the years.

Of course, usually he wasn’t carrying one of his arch enemies while being trapped in another universe and unable to turn human. So, you know, pros and cons.

Albedo didn’t seem to want to talk once his feet left the ground, which meant Ben had his first chance to really think. They couldn’t really be so far from home, right? Albedo said they were but he’d barely been able to make a working Omnitrix. Why should Ben trust him about dimensional travel? Just because he’d worked with Eon and Vilgax to go dimension hopping before and was probably smart enough to pick up a few things during it…

Okay so maybe Albedo was as smart as he liked to say he was and did actually know what he was talking about. That didn’t mean he was right.

Mr. Smoothie would settle it. Once they figured out where they were, they could head towards Bellwood and try to find Store 23, no matter what Albedo said. If they found it, problem solved. If they didn’t… this wasn’t the first time Ben had ended up stuck in some other universe. He’d managed then, and he’d manage now.

Though it wouldn’t hurt to have better company. Albedo reminded him too much of the worst parts of Azmuth, all smarter-than-you jerk but without the wise old mentor underneath. Which… actually made since when he remembered Albedo had been Azmuth’s assistant. One of them must have rubbed off on the other for the worse.

Maybe he could ask exactly who once they landed. If they were going to be working together, might as well break the ice. 

Wherever they were was in the mountains, that much was clear as they put on height. He has to shoot straight up farther than normal to get high enough to avoid smacking into a mountain peak, enough that he could feel Albedo start to shiver in his grasp as the air started to thin out.

Which shouldn’t be a problem for too long, Jetray was fast enough that they could get just about anywhere they wanted to be once they knew where they were headed. And it wasn’t a problem for Ben at all. He’d been Jetray high in the atmosphere, underwater, even in space once, and he’d never even thought to notice how he never really felt cold.

He noticed it now though, comparing Albedo’s reaction to his own. He wasn’t shivering, or getting goosebumps, and Ben wasn’t actually sure if he could in this body. Jetray didn’t feel like a mammal, and he definitely didn’t have hair. It was one of those things he’d never really bothered to think about before, but now that he had to consider what it would be like to stay alien for who knows how long…

Albedo shifted in his grip to rub his arms and Ben started guiltily. Right, passengers. He’d have time to get weird about his situation later. For now he turned to put his back to the sun and shot off.

The forest passed beneath them in the blink of an eye, then the mountains, and then they were flying over desert. That… honestly didn’t narrow things down at all. Forest on the west of some mountains, desert on the east, or maybe it was morning and it was forest on the east and desert on the west. That could be just about anywhere.

Probably America though. He wasn’t sure why, the forest had just had a… feeling to it, like it was familiar. Which again, didn’t help narrow things down much, most places in America were familiar after the country-crossing road trip with Grandpa Max. He’d always been more of a hands-on learner and more about that trip had stuck in his mind than all the other years of history classes, even with how often he ignored Gwen’s ‘fun facts’ in favor of messing around and doing hero stuff.

He kept an eye out for cities below, the actual act of flying practically on autopilot, but apart from the occasional road and small cluster of buildings, it was just dirt and some shrubs. None of which was any good for setting down and getting food, but at least the buildings confirmed Albedo hadn’t been lying about what kind of world they were in, humans were still around.

Just a shame there weren’t any other humans from his world here. As much as he’d called it annoying back when he was ten, he’d kill to have Gwen with him right now rattling off some fact about the desert below them. Instead he just had his own evil clone for company.

Actually, did Albedo still count as his clone when Ben couldn’t be human? Ben was the one to shiver this time. Not from the cold but he let his flight dip lower anyways so they were moving through the warmer air coming off the desert. Too existential for him, they needed to find something else to focus on and fast.

His eye caught on something green in the distance standing out against the orange-red, and he turned to bank towards it. Just what the doctor ordered.

As they closed in he realized he was looking at forest as the land started to creep back up into more mountains. Looked like they were through the desert then, which if he remembered right would put them somewhere in the west, and would make these either the Rockies or the Sierra Nevada since he still had no idea which direction they’d started from. Maybe if he could find a map he’d figure it out. Not that there were many of those in the sky.

He did see the next best thing though: bigger roads cutting through the foothills below, and these actually had cars on them. That meant people, and people meant…

He turned to follow the road and poured on the speed, outpacing the cars below in the blink of an eye, until a few seconds later he was bringing himself to a sharp stop to look down at the mountain town spread out below him.

Civilization, finally! Even if it had only been about fifteen minutes since they’d started flying, that was about fourteen minutes too long to be comfortable. He hadn’t realized how tense he was after waking up in a forest instead of Bellwood, alone with one of his enemies and finding out he was in another dimension. But now they could just get some food and relax for a bit while they got their bearings and-

“Th-there’s the c-city,” Albedo piped up as he rubbed his arms, interrupting Ben’s thoughts. “Tak-ke us down -n-now.”

“Don’t be so bossy,” Ben retorted, “I can always send you down the fast way.”

Albedo cringed hard at that, pulling his arms tighter against himself and pressing his lips in a thin line. Jeez, guy really couldn’t take a joke, Ben hadn’t even been annoyed when he said that.

He did start to descend though, opting for a spiral instead of a straight drop. He had a good view of the place as they got lower and he aimed to take them down behind some buildings in the center of town, speeding up for the last part so people below wouldn’t have time to see the big red alien mantaray coming out of the sky.

“Tennyson,” Albedo said as they sped closer to the ground, and then, “Tennyson, Tennyson, Tennyson! ”

“Relax,” Ben teased before snapped his wings out and swooped up at the last second, avoiding a sudden impact against the pavement and stopping in a hover before gently descending to dangle Albedo a foot above the ground. “You can let go now.”

Albedo looked down to the ground that wasn’t slamming into him at Mach 3 or a hundred feet below him, then up to where he was now clutching Ben’s ankle in a death grip. He cleared his throat and then uncurled from the fetal position he’d pulled himself into expecting a crash, setting his feet easily on the ground and straightening up until he was about at Ben’s eye level.

“You are a terrible flyer,” he said with as much gravity as he could muster. Unfortunately for him, it wasn’t much. Ben gave it a day, maybe two before he could take Albedo completely seriously again after hearing him panic like that. 

“‘Thanks Ben for flying me halfway across the country!’” Ben said, setting down beside him, “‘You’re welcome Albedo, I know how long it would have taken you to walk on stubby human legs.’”

“Don’t remind me what kind of legs I have, Tennyson. These are your legs.” Albedo hissed, jabbing a finger at him. “Their failures are yours .”

“Hey, I’m an athlete, my legs are fine,” Ben argued back. “Besides, you’re the one who got yourself stuck with them in the first place.”

“Because you and Azmuth were so arrogant in your-!”

Ben clamped a hand over Albedo’s mouth, muffling the rest of the sentence. Albedo’s eyebrows went up and he said something else that sounded a lot like some kind of galvan profanity.

“Dude, we’re in a city now,” Ben whispered, “try not to draw too much attention. We can have a shouting match later about what we can blame on who.”

Albedo glared at him, but didn’t keep shouting when Ben removed his hand. “Fine. To the matter at hand then.”

He gave a pointed look to the wallet Ben had been holding onto and held out his hand expectantly. On one hand, Ben really didn’t want to give Albedo his wallet. On the other…

His stomach growled, except it wasn’t from the place he was used to having his stomach. Ben shuddered and shoved the wallet at Albedo. Yeah, food seemed good.

Albedo took the wallet with a merciful lack of insults before practically running out of the alley with it. Seemed like he wanted to eat just as much as Ben did. Ben tapped the Omnitrix and his body changed from Jetray to Chamalien, his skin rippling into invisibility before he crawled to follow Albedo into the street.

“Let me guess,” he said quietly, following Albedo while carefully avoiding the other people on the street, “chili fries?”

“Your DNA, your body, your vile, disgusting cravings,” Albedo retorted as he beelined for the nearest burger joint.

Ben had to scramble a bit to make it through the door behind him. Not that he needed to hurry because Albedo only took a few seconds to look at the menu before turning on his heel and walking out, making Ben scramble all over again to follow.

The next fast food place didn’t have any better luck. Or the next, or the next, or the next, or any of the ones they could find.

“You know, I like chili fries too, but I do eat other things,” Ben said, perched on a wall that Albedo was leaning his forehead on, huddled in the shade to catch his breath from all the walking. There was a lot more of it now than when they’d gotten here, the sun already starting to sink out of sight. “I think you’re just going to have to settle for something else.”

Albedo looked up, then around, then settled for glaring into the air when he couldn’t find where Ben was. “Just because there’s no chili fries in this town doesn’t mean there are none to be found elsewhere.”

“...Are you asking me to fly us to a completely different city just so we can get chili fries?”

“You’d do it for Mr. Smoothy.” 

“Okay, yeah, I would,” Ben admitted, “but not every dimension has a Mr. Smoothy’s. Maybe they don’t even have chili fries in this one.”

Albedo’s expression shifted from ‘glare’ to ‘murderous.’

“So,” Ben said, trying to head off whatever Albedo was thinking about, “how about we just get some burgers and then find someplace where we can look some things up? I know you did your… whatever you did to figure out we’re in another dimension, but I wanna take a look at some stuff myself, and you look like you could use a break.”

“Fine,” Albedo snarled, “we can eat… normal fries. And burgers, or whatever other putrid substance serves as food on this planet. Perhaps a visit to an accaditor would help put things in order, or a relaxing walk through the halls of knowledge.”

“Yeah, we don’t have those things on Earth,” Ben said, feeling a little bit like he did whenever he talked to Gwen and she realized she was the only one in the conversation who really cared about whatever she was nerding out over. “We have, like, public libraries. Maybe a college if you pay to get into one.”

“...This truly is an abhorrent planet.”

Ben shadowed Albedo back to the first burger joint they’d visited and invisibly winced through the entire order. If Albedo normally acted this way when ordering food, it was a wonder he hadn’t gotten Ben banned from every restaurant in Bellwood. He’d have slipped the poor employee a tip if he wasn’t worried about how they’d pay for food later, so instead he settled for slapping Albedo upside the head once they were outside. Carefully, so he didn’t drop the food.

“What was that?!”

Albedo scoffed and straightened up, clearly wanting to rub the back of his head but without a free hand thanks to the bag of burgers in one hand and drinks in the other. “What are you so uptight about? We needed food, we got the food.”

“Food that the cook probably spit in,” Ben groaned. “If you’re the one ordering every time, we’re going to be in trouble.”

“Then by all means, starve.” Albedo deadpanned. “Just lead us to a library. Though what information your underdeveloped intellect hopes to glean is beyond me.”

“I don’t know, what kind of superheroes there are,” Ben said, taking the lead and occasionally tapping Albedo with his tail to nudge him in the right direction to follow as he wove around the other people on the sidewalk. “If they’ve ever dealt with some kind of inter-dimensional… stuff . Whether Bellwood exists here.”

“No ‘you are here’ map? Perhaps you’ve grown enough competence in the last quarter solar cycle to remember your own name?”

Ben whacked Albedo in the shin with his tail. Only lightly to annoy him, but he still nearly stumbled. Clearly he hadn’t gotten any of Ben’s coordination along with his body. “Ha ha. I know where we are. Kind of.”

The sun was already starting to set, which meant they’d gotten here in the afternoon rather than the morning. And that put west back the way they came, which meant they went east to cross the desert, which put them… “We’re somewhere in the Rockies.”

“Somewhere?”

“I said ‘kind of.’” Precise geography had never been his strong suit, but he knew enough to get four out of two and two, and he wasn’t going to let Albedo’s attitude about it get him down. 

Just like how Ben had never been in this town before and where things were, but he knew libraries were government buildings, which meant they’d be where people went instead of hidden off in some corner of the town somewhere. And more people meant more attention, which meant more complaints if there were problems, with one of the biggest reasons to complain right next to him to use as a guide.

“I suppose your grasp of our location within the city is just as substantial?”

“Be patient, we’re almost there. Probably.”

“Probably?”

Ben poked his head around the next corner and wished he didn’t have to be invisible so Albedo could see his smug grin. Bingo. A public library, in the part of town with the best kept roads. Let’s see Albedo’s ‘genius brain’ pull that off without any street smarts.

“Nope, I meant definitely.”

Albedo looked at the building before scoffing in Ben’s general direction. “You found a building, congratulations. Now when will it be open?”

“What? No, it’s-” Ben looked back and took in the lack of cars in the parking lot, or lights in the window. “...okay yeah, it’s closed.”

“Wonderful.” Albedo said dryly before walking towards it. “Very well, I suppose breaking into a public building is far from my worst offense.”

“Hey, woah woah woah,” Ben said, hurriedly getting in front of Albedo to push him back, “we’re not breaking into a library!”

Ben had a sudden flash of sympathy for Grandpa Max and Gwen on the roadtrip back when he’d first gotten the Omnitrix. He really had broken into way more places than any normal ten-year-old should have, and listened even less than Albedo did, since he was stopping now.

“We can just come back later,” Ben said. “We’re not in that much of a rush.”

“Fine, then we may as well rest for the night,” Albedo said, turning on his heel and marching back the way they’d come. “Fortunately I already saw suitable lodgings while you were meandering us towards a useless building.”

He had? Ben had been more focused on the roads but he hadn’t noticed any hotels between the restaurant and here. He followed Albedo again, a little confused as he led them back down the street, turned to cut through an alley, and then stopped halfway. 

Ben kept being confused, up until Albedo sat down on the weed-cracked concrete of the alley and started pulling the food out of the bag, pushing half toward the other wall with his foot while taking the rest for himself.

“Here?” Ben let himself fade back into visibility, looking around the alley. Weeds, a dumpster, graffiti. The kind of place he usually stopped muggings, not slept for the night.

Albedo looked around too. He didn’t seem to pay attention to any of the things Ben was focused on, because he seemed almost confused.

“It’s perfectly serviceable. No mold or signs of large vermin, and it clearly hasn’t rained recently so it’s dry as well.”

“It’s an alley .” Ben emphasized. Was Albedo missing that part?

“I’ve read your personnel file, I know you’ve camped extensively. This should be no different.”

“Yeah, in a tent or a trailer. Not…” Ben gestured to their general surroundings.

Now Albedo just looked annoyed. “Tennyson, where do you think I slept when I was on the run from the Plumbers? Certainly not in hotels where the staff would be happy to turn me in for a few taydens. I slept in abandoned buildings and caves and yes, in alleys. If I can manage it, so can you.”

The retort made Ben wince. He couldn’t really argue with that, considering Albedo was using his body. And Albedo hadn’t mentioned it, but there wasn’t a ton of cash in his wallet anyways. Maybe enough for another meal or two, but definitely not enough for a hotel room, and he wasn’t nearly desperate enough to break into one for the night. 

This wouldn’t be so bad, right? He’d managed in the desert with Reiney. Here he didn’t even need to worry about giant worms or bugs eating his hands. An alley would be fine.

Albedo seemed to tell he’d won the argument because he settled back against the wall of the alley and unwrapped his burger. “That’s settled then. Eat, sleep, and we can check the library in the morning.”

Ben settled down across the alley from him and grabbed his own food. Reptilian claws weren’t exactly made for dealing with wrappers so he used his tail to hit the Omnitrix, dropping to about half his previous height as he shifted into Ditto and dug in.

It was almost nostalgic, digging into fast food as an alien. He’d done it at least once with almost every alien he’d had that first summer, and Ditto had always been one of his favorites. Bonuses of being a smaller alien: the same amount of food lasted even longer. 

Still felt like it was gone too soon after he scarfed down the burger and fries. It was no Burger Shack, but wasn’t bad. The meat had a taste of something different to it, though he couldn’t tell if that was because this universe used different seasonings with its meat, if it was just the brand, or if it was just a side effect of Ditto normally eating bugs and roots instead of the good stuff. But as long as he wasn’t upchucking it, he figured it was fine.

Almost as soon as he finished he regretted that he ate so fast, because now he had nothing else to do but think. Which meant thinking about home and everyone there and how far away it all was and how hard it would be to get back… Albedo had already crumpled up his trash and thrown it down the alley before curling up on the ground, but maybe talking to him would be better than letting himself dwell on all that.

“Albedo-”

“Good night , Tennyson,” Albedo said without opening his eyes, “whatever you have to say can wait until the morning. Let me sleep.”

“Alright, geez,” Ben snapped. Lesson learned, no talking to the villain after bedtime. “I’m gonna go fly around for a bit, try to-”

“Fine,” Albedo groaned, cracking open an eye, “what do you want?”

Well that was unexpected. Ben had figured Albedo would just wave him off with a ‘good riddance,’ but now that he had his clearly annoyed attention, he wasn’t about to admit that he didn’t actually know what he’d wanted to say.

“I just… wanted to let you know that earlier? I wouldn’t have lasered you in the face.”

Albedo opened his other eye too and pushed himself up a bit to look at Ben better. “Is that so?”

“Yeah.” Ben kept a straight face for a moment longer before he grinned. “I would never ruin those dashing good looks. I’d have lasered you in the chest.”

“Of course,” Albedo scoffed, closing his eyes and hunkering back down to sleep, “your egotism knows no bounds.”

“Hey, that face is one of a kind now. I gotta preserve it for the masses.”

“Go to sleep, Tennyson!”

Ben laughed, but he lay down across from Albedo. Maybe it was petty, but he actually felt a bit better after annoying Albedo. At least it took his mind off other things. Like how he was supposed to sleep as an alien.

Normally the Omnitrix just turned him human again if he fell unconscious in a fight, and he’d never wanted to waste alien time on something as boring as going to sleep, so he had no idea how or if his different aliens slept.

But the ground was hard and digging into his back, so he settled on being comfortable, transforming into Goop and setting the antigrav projector on the ground before letting himself ooze bonelessly into a puddle across the ground.

It was probably the most relaxed he’d ever felt. Weird considering everything else about being in another universe, stuck in alien form, and across an alley from his arch enemy. Maybe he needed to start a whole new type of spa.

He let his eyes drift to the surface and look up at the slice of sky he could see between the roofs bordering the alley. Looking at the quiet dark and faint stars, he couldn’t tell if it was any different from back home.

So he just lay there watching the sky and pretending everything was normal until his vision faded and he fell asleep.

Chapter Text

| Cedar City, Utah, USA

| June 01, 02:27 PDT

Ben was woken by a boot in his face.

He was pretty sure it was his face at least, since the slime of his body congealed back into a pair of eyes around the fresh bootprint as whoever it was stepped off him. Either way, rude.

“Ugh, what is this?” A gruff voice asked, and Ben felt the part of himself still stuck on the bottom of the boot get scraped against the ground.

“Nasty is what it is,” a second voice replied. “Maybe our friend here made a mess.”

Ben pushed his antigrav projector up, pulling his liquid body behind it to raise his ‘head’ off the ground just in time to see a scrawny guy in a jacket plant a foot on Albedo’s shoulder and roll him over.

Albedo started awake only for the guy’s partner, a burlier man in a nearly identical jacket, to step on his wrist. “You just stay down there. This is our turf you’re sleeping on, and that means there’s a fee.”

Even blinking groggily, Albedo was already awake enough to give the guys the most disdainful sneer Ben’s face could manage. “I’m sleeping in an alley. Surely there are more suitable targets for extortion, or are you delinquents of such shoddy stock that sleeping vagrants are all you can overpower?”

Ben’s first thought was ‘I was right, this is a mugging alley.’ His second thought as the guy drew back his foot to kick Albedo, was ‘oh absolutely not.’

Big Guy’s first mistake was choosing to be a mugger at all, and his second mistake was doing it anywhere Ben could see it, but his third mistake was trying to kick Albedo with the foot still coated with Goop slime.

With the ease of curling a finger, Ben snapped it out to stick to the ground like the world’s biggest, slimiest piece of gum, and Big Guy nearly fell on his face as he tried to swing his foot forward and found it didn’t move at all. If Ben wanted to, Goop was more than enough to handle two muggers. But he was tired and annoyed, and that was just from being woken up.

For a moment he didn’t see Albedo, the alien villain who’d nearly ruined his life more than once. He just saw a person on the ground getting picked on by people stronger than them, and that was enough to push him all the way into furious.

He surged upwards and slapped a tendril of slime against the Omnitrix. Big Guy stumbled forward as the slime restraining him suddenly vanished, while Ben felt his liquid body congeal and solidify, from liquid to something like flesh and then to something much more dense as he grew to a frame that stood head and shoulders above the bigger guy.

Skinny had been torn between following up on the kick that never came and looking back to see what was up with his partner when the green flash of the transformation behind them settled matters. He turned around just in time for Ben to grab him by the collar instead of the scruff of his neck and throw the lowlife bodily down the alley.

His trailing cry ended in a crash against the ground, by which point Ben was already grabbing the mugger’s partner by the arm and sending him after the first. The two were left in a tangled pile of limbs, trying to push themselves back to their feet and already yelling confused threats.

Ben put a stop to that by taking a heavy step closer to them, drawing their attention away from where Albedo was appraising them and towards the figure towering over them.

“Get lost. Now.”

It had been a while since Ben couldn’t count on the celebrity factor of his identity to shock common thugs like this into surrender. But even back when he’d been more of a cryptid than a superhero, seven feet of diamond and menace usually made guys like this think twice.

Usually. Not-So-Big-Anymore Guy was already up and hauling Skinny with him, bracing himself like he was getting ready to throw a punch instead of turn and run. “We don’t take orders from freaks!”

Okay maybe these guys were dumb enough to need more than two thoughts. But Ben was a generous guy, he could help them along.

Ben raised a fist, which didn’t stay a fist for long as it formed into a jagged collection of crystal before firing a shard into the ground between the mugger’s feet. It was closer than it would have been if he hadn’t made the freak comment, but Ben was careful enough to make sure the mugger wouldn’t lose any toes.

The guy’s face went pale, and only went paler as Ben’s arm continued the upward arc until those crystals were aimed straight at his chest.

“That’s fine. Make my day.”

Skinny broke first, turning and bolting down the alley as fast as his legs could carry him. Without his friend to back him up, Formerly-Big Guy didn’t last much longer before he made a run for it too.

Ben waited for them to get out of sight before he let the crystal cluster shift back into a hand and turned to Albedo. “You alright?”

Albedo shot him a glare as he pushed himself up to sitting. “I didn’t need your assistance, Tennyson. I had it under control.”

Ben bristled at that. Okay maybe he hadn’t been expecting a ‘thank you,’ but… no, he actually had been expecting that. It was pretty much the bare minimum people usually gave him after he rescued them from muggers or robbers or the rampaging robot of the week.

He’d done the same thing with the ride to the city too, was Albedo just allergic to manners?

“Oh yeah? What part were you controlling? The mugging? The guy about to kick you in the ribs?”

“It was two human thugs!” Albedo snapped. “I’ve dealt with worse without needing you to run to my rescue.”

“So you’d rather get robbed than have me help you?” Ben asked in disbelief. The brief moment seeing Albedo as just another person in need of help was long gone, now it was just his annoying, arrogant doppelganger.

“The only money I have on me is yours,” Albedo said, his expression finally twisting out of annoyance and anger into a smirk. Somehow, Ben was not pleased with this development. “I’d survive the loss.”

“You… gah!” Ben spun on his heel so he didn’t have to look at the world’s most ungrateful albino mirror. Kicking the crystal in the ground to tear it free of the concrete and send it skittering down the alley was petty too, but he was willing to cut himself some slack. Who was gonna judge him for it, the super villain? “I can’t wait until I don’t have to deal with you anymore.”

“Yes, that makes two of us,” Albedo retorted. “How much longer until we can go to your miserable human library without offending your conscious?””

“The sign said they open at 9 AM.” Because of course the super genius couldn’t be bothered to putting some of those IQ points to work remembering business hours for himself.

“And currently it is…”

Ben looked at his watchless wrist. “Night.”

Albedo sighed. “Fine, be that way. You said we’re in the Rockies, which are in the northern hemisphere, correct? A simple observation of the stars should tell me the time.”

A few seconds of silence passed while Ben waited for the inevitable smug reply, tapping his finger on his arm with a clink-clink-clink of crystal against crystal, before Ben finally got curious enough to look back and see Albedo craning his head back to look up at the sky. “So? What time is it?”

“Polluted.”

“Fan-tastic,” Ben drawled, rolling his eyes before hitting the Omnitrix to switch to XLR8. It was a weird feeling going from being that big and heavy to something so much lighter and faster, it almost felt like he’d become weightless. “I’m gonna go grab those guys and drop them at the nearest police station. You stay here and sulk or whatever.”

He let his visor snap down and seal his helmet, but paused before he could tear off after the thieves. Right now his eyes and brain were meant to take in and process details to the tune of miles per second, and they couldn’t help but latch onto the glimmer of the crystal he’d kicked down the alley.

“And when I get back, I’m going to solve our money problem.”

| Cedar City

| June 01, 09:04 PDT

The pawn broker adjusted her eyepiece, leaning closer to her subject as Albedo tapped his foot impatiently.

“Relax,” Ben whispered, leaning in behind him. “This is normal for selling stuff like this.”

Without a visible target to glare at, Albedo just glared at the pawn broker. 

“And try smiling instead of glaring,” Ben added, “You’re just a normal guy, here to pawn off some old jewelry.”

“This isn’t jewelry, this is loose gems. I look like I robbed a jeweller and I’m selling the goods.” Albedo hissed under his breath. 

He did try to follow Ben’s advice though. Or maybe he was just trying to spite him, because Ben had seen him smile before and normally it didn’t look nearly that much like a death grimace.

“Okay, fine, drop the smile,” Ben hastily corrected. “And you’re the one who wanted to do this first thing in the morning.”

“We don’t have time to waste, Tennyson!”

The pawn broker looked up at the noise and Albedo shut up, while Ben tucked his wings closer around him and double checked he was still invisible. Maybe in West Virginia he could get away with being seen as a giant moth man, but he didn’t want to deal with the panic that would cause in Utah.

“Apologies,” Albedo said, “just a… cough.”

She seemed to buy that at least and went back to turning over the green-blue gem in her hands. It had taken Ben a while to chip and scrape Diamondhead’s crystal shard into something passable as a gemstone, especially since all he had to work with was more of the same while hunched under a back alley light. But Albedo hadn’t gotten thrown out as soon as he put it on the counter, so he’d count it as a solid B+.

“If this doesn’t work, or she gets suspicious-”

“Then we’ll move towns and try again,” Ben cut him off before he could work himself back up. “Sooner or later we’ll find someone willing to take a mysterious gem without asking questions. And it’s not like we stole it in the first place. Honestly I’m surprised you never did this back on our Earth.”

“On our Earth, petrosapien crystals are too well known to extraterrestrial merchants to be valuable, except to anthropological collectors during the period where Vilgax had exterminated the majority of their population. And I had assumed humans would be able to recognize they weren’t a traditional gem and would refuse to purchase them.”

“Half right, but you got the second part wrong.” Ben said, jumping on the chance to be the one correcting Albedo for a change. “Maybe she’ll be able to tell it’s not a diamond, but as long as she knows it isn’t glass, it being a mystery is just gonna make her want to buy it more.”

“I find it unlikely that’s-”

“Okay,” the pawn broker said, returning to the counter. Albedo hastily stopped talking again, though Ben could tell he was getting increasingly annoyed about being interrupted so many times. “It’s not diamond, I can tell you that much. And you were right about it being some kind of gem. Where did you say you found it?”

“The woods,” Albedo said stiffly. At least he wasn’t glaring at her anymore.

“Right…” she said, giving him an odd look before almost visibly choosing not to press harder. “Anyways, it’s pretty but it’s not worth much, especially since it’s just loose.”

She didn’t say anything else, just gave Albedo a pointed look.

Oh, Ben knew this one. Kevin had taught him during one of his stories from his… shadier business deals, letting the other person make assumptions about price and lead them into naming a higher or lower amount than the thing was actually worth.

“Ask for one thousand,” he hissed at Albedo.

Albedo got halfway through an annoyed glance into thin air before correcting himself. “Then I think one thousand dollars would be a fair price.”

From the way she grimaced, she’d been hoping for him to guess lower. One point to Team Tennyson! 

“You’d be lucky to get one hundred for this,” she said, “but I’ll go two hundred to be generous.”

“Don’t accept, she’s haggling.”

“Why would she-”

“Stop talking to me! Ask for eight hundred.”

“Eight hundred.” Albedo repeated mechanically.

“Look, kid, this thing’s barely cut,” she said, gesturing with the crystal.

“Rude,” whispered Ben.

“I can break the bank and do three hundred.”

“It’s big enough for her to get recut,” Ben urged, which Albedo repeated for him, “seven hundred’s more than fair.”

“Four.”

“Six.”

“Four-fifty, and you can pick out something for free,” she said, gesturing to the shelves full of stuff.

“...Well?” Albedo whispered.

“Decent enough,” Ben admitted, “take it.”

He let Albedo handle the last details of the sale as he wandered around the store to take a peek at what they had. There was a lot of themed stuff, way more than he’d ever seen before. Lunchboxes and blankets and decorations, plastered in bright colors and bold fonts proclaiming names like Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Captain Atom.

So these would be the superheroes Albedo had mentioned. He picked up a bright orange mug with a fishscale pattern, turning it over to show off a cartoonish depiction of a blonde bearded man in a similarly orange top leaping out of what had very clearly been waves that were then recolored as coffee.

He hadn’t had much time to really sit and dwell on it before, but he wasn’t really sure how to feel about there being other heroes. Sure, home had Lucky Girl and Captain Nemesis and Kangaroo Commando, and sort of the Galactic Enforcers, but they focused too small on a single town, or too big with Earth as nothing but a name on a list of dozens of planets, or just flat-out turned evil. 

He’d been Earth’s only real superhero. He was the one saving people and getting on the news and having terrible themed mugs made about him. And now he was… what, one of a dozen? More?

And he couldn’t even team up with them. Instead he was stuck partnered with/babysitting his supervillain doppelganger working on a science project to get them home. Which hopefully he’d be able to do, because if not…

Ben shivered and put the mug back before he could accidentally freeze and shatter it into pieces. Time for the classic trick of distracting himself from things he didn’t want to think about by focusing on literally anything else.

And a perfect distraction was leaving the counter now, tucking away the money along with an old cellphone.

Ben stepped straight through a shelf to get behind Albedo, doing his best to take his annoyance at the villain and his insistence on avoiding other superheroes and put it in with all the other thoughts he was trying not to think about.

“Why a cellphone?”

Albedo waited until they got out the door and didn’t have to whisper before replying. “It’s a simplistic device, but its components should be useful enough to repurpose. I’m surprised you didn’t micromanage my purchase like you did the sale. Have your fill of bossing me around?”

“Hey, if there’d been a Sumo Slammers card pack there, I’d have made you get that instead.”

“Of course you would have,” Albedo sighed. “Should I be concerned about the proprietor calling the police on me now that I’m not in the store?”

“Nah, not after she paid for it.” Ben waved off the concern, even knowing Albedo couldn’t see it. “If she did that, the cops would take the gem as evidence, and then she’d be out four hundred bucks and change for nothing. She’ll probably stay quiet and sell it off to someone else for ten times as much.”

“If your planet finds gems like that so valuable, why did you settle for such a low price!?”

“Chill, man,” Ben said, trying and mostly failing to grin at his own joke with Big Chill’s inflexible mouth. “We can always make more and sell them off somewhere else. But you have got to get way better at talking with people, she probably would have thrown you out if you had to haggle with her much longer.”

“All the more reason to get a bigger payout in one fell swoop instead of making me go through this more than we need to,” Albedo grumbled as he marched into the library.

“You were about ready,” Ben said normally, before hastily correcting to a whisper at the distant ‘shh!’ of some unseen librarian, “to take her first deal without haggling for it at all!”

“How was I supposed to know such a common material was worth any more to you primates? Her first figure already seemed exceedingly generous.”

“Yeah, see, that’s why I’m in charge of the haggling.”

“Your wallet contained a grand total of seventeen dollars, fifty four cents, and two taydens before our purchase yesterday and the payment for the gem five minutes ago,” Albedo retorted, “barely enough to purchase anything worth having. I doubt you qualify for a financial expert by any stretch of the definition.”

“Yeah? And how much did you have?”

“...So this is a human library.” Albedo blatantly changed the topic, prodding a book perched on top of a display.  It was some cheap fantasy thing whose cover showed a guy with a sword facing off against some burbling slime thing that was clutching a damsel who was probably supposed to look terrified, but mostly just looked bored and kind of disgusted. From the way he was looking at it, Albedo empathized with her the most. “It’s… quaint.”

“I mean, it’s a library,” Ben shrugged, not feeling any particular need to defend a place he never wanted to visit anyways. “As long as they’ve got good internet the rest doesn’t matter.”

“Such low standards for a repository of knowledge,” Albedo sighed, giving the book one last disdainful glare before walking past to the computer corner. “I lament for the quality of your species’ scholars.”

Ben followed and claimed a computer for himself. While Albedo started fumbling his way through turning his on, Ben looked around to make sure they were alone, then hit the Omnitrix.

The bright green flash felt as conspicuous as letting the microwave go off at night, even more so when he wasn’t able to hide behind invisibility as his body expanded and liquified into a metallic slime. But if he was going to be surfing the web, better to do it as a living computer than a ghost moth.

“Tennyson!” Albedo hissed, looking around the same way Ben had a few seconds ago.

“Relax,” he said as he enveloped the computer, pulling himself into it and oozing through its circuits so the rest of his sentence came from its tinny speakers, “I already checked to make sure no one would see.”

“As if I would trust your attention to detail,” Albedo sneered, then flinched at a distant ‘shhh!’ But when a few seconds went by and no one jumped out to yell about aliens, he reluctantly went back to his own computer.

Ben was almost certain Albedo was disappointed that no one had come to investigate, if only because it meant he didn’t get to gloat about ‘I told you so.’ The guy really needed to learn to relax, but right now Ben had more important things to pay attention to. Namely the internet connection unfolding in his awareness as he finished integrating the computer’s internals.

It was only a second more before those internals dissolved and reformed better than before in a wave of Upgrade’s nanites, and then Ben was practically swimming in better internet speeds than even money could buy. Oh internet, how Ben had missed you and your endless entertainment.

But first things first, seeing if Albedo had lied to him. He pulled up the first search engine the library computer browser had available, nearly gagged when he realized this thing hadn’t been updated probably since before he was born, and then spent a few seconds upgrading that too.

Working with software rather than hardware was a weirder feeling, more like static electricity than moving his body, but it wasn’t actually that hard. But once he was finished, he pulled up the shiny new browser and did a search for ‘Ben 10.’

Absolutely nothing.

‘Ben Ten,’ ‘Ben Tennyson,’ and ‘Ben savior of the universe’ got, respectively, zero, zilch, and nada. So maybe Albedo had been telling the truth on that one. ‘Lucky Girl,’ ‘plumbers,’ ‘plumbers space cops,’ ‘Omnitrix,’ and then for good measure, ‘Providence,’ ‘EVO,’ and ‘nanite event’ also got nothing. 

So not home, any of the alternate versions of home, or even the other dimension he got stranded in for a while. Man, why couldn’t anything ever be easy?

‘Bellwood’ at least got him something, though apparently in Pennsylvania, and he set that tab aside to commit the map to memory so he could track the town down later. ‘Sumo Slammers’ only got him a correction to something called ‘Samurai Slicers.’ But ‘Mr. Smoothy’ did get him a proper Wikipedia page for a fast food chain that looked almost identical to the one back home… until he read further down and found out it had gone out of business in 1996 because of a sanitation scandal it had never fully recovered from.

Okay, maybe he’d been too hasty in taking Albedo’s word that this ‘alternate reality’ thing was scientific. Maybe it was magic instead and this world was some kind of shadow realm designed to feed on his misery.

Then he tried ‘aliens’ and that was when he hit the jackpot. So many results flooded in that he oozed back from the computer’s processor to avoid taking the sheer number of webpages directly to his brain, letting the poor public machine handle it before he moved back in to look it over.

This was… a lot. Almost as much as he’d expect from back home. ‘Alien invasion’ narrowed it down only slightly, also like back home. So, who was talked about the most? That would be either the most important or the most recent, which looked like… something about a kryptonian invasion force.

He opened up the first article and read the first few paragraphs before distorting his circular eye that had taken over the computer screen into a harsh V, the closest he could get to pulling a face as Upgrade, and he hastily closed it. Right, he’d forgotten the other reason people would talk about something a lot: sheer petty spite.

Ben didn’t know who Superman was besides a name on some pawn shop lunchboxes, but the general tone of the article felt too Harangue-y to believe even half of what it was saying. At least whoever wrote that was only getting an article column instead of a full show.

‘First alien invasion’ then. That got better results, and a full Wikipedia page about something called apellaxians. He skimmed through that and a few of the articles, enough to get a gist about energy beings making bodies out of whatever materials they found laying around until they got stopped by the formation of the Justice League.

Which led him to the Wikipedia page about the Justice League, which quickly branched out into individual pages about its founding members. Superman (he knew that first article couldn’t be trusted), Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, Flash, Aquaman… oh hey, he recognized that last one from the mug.

His first takeaway was that this Earth really did have more heroes than his. His second was that this Earth had way more problems too. Seriously, back home he could handle most of the planet’s big problems as one guy, but skimming through the pages for the various heroes he kept finding more and more links for different villains and disasters.

Within a few minutes he had fifty different tabs open, skimming and flipping between them as new details caught his attention. From heroes to villains to cities… Gotham City in particular kept coming up a lot, why did anyone still live there?

But otherwise it was pretty impressive. Lots of stories and videos of cities being rescued from natural disasters, villains being thwarted, people being saved. If he grew up here, Ben could totally see himself wearing a Superman shirt every day as a kid or arguing about which hero was the strongest on the playground.

“You sure we can’t just talk to the superheroes?” Ben asked, morphing his head back out of the computer screen to look at Albedo. “One of ‘em has to have some kind of secret lab or magic spell that can help us.”

“Absolutely,” Albedo retorted, not even looking away from his own computer as he typed. “Ability to help does not guarantee willingness to do so. Especially in my case, and I will remind you that I am your best chance of finding a way home. We will handle this on our own without exposing ourselves to this world’s heroes.”

“You’re being paranoid,” Ben complained.

“No, you’re being careless,” Albedo hissed. “How many times have you had to break the law or defy the Plumbers because doing good wasn’t the same as doing what authority wanted? Can you genuinely not imagine any circumstance in which we would be imprisoned or exploited by this authority just because some of them wear capes and bright costumes? Two individuals adrift from another dimension, carrying incredibly advanced technology and repositories of alien DNA, and in one case possessed of vast intellect, with no one to advocate for or rescue them?”

Ben wavered as he considered it. Albedo made some good points, but on the other hand, it didn’t hold as much weight now that he had names and faces (or logos in some cases) to put to the idea of this world’s heroes. “Well…”

“Or,” Albedo fully turned away from his computer to fix Ben with a glare, “would you like to have a discussion about Area 51?”

That got a full wince out of Ben, even as a one-eyed metallic blob. There was really no good argument against that, not after he’d seen what that prison was like himself. If there was even the possibility that this Earth had something like that, he couldn’t hold it against Albedo for wanting to take every possible precaution to avoid it.

Actually, Albedo looked human, so really it was Ben who was more at risk of ending up in some test tube under a government blacksite while he walked free. Had Albedo even realized that yet?

Probably not, otherwise the guy wouldn’t be shutting up about going to the heroes for help.

“That’s what I thought,” Albedo said when Ben didn’t reply, turning back to his computer. Ben would have expected him to seem smug after winning an argument, but instead he just looked… tired.

Okay, lesson learned, don’t keep prodding him with that plan. In fact, better to avoid talking about superheroes altogether and find something else to discuss, which ruled out everything Ben had been looking at. Villain’s browsing history it is.

“So what are you doing?” Ben stretched his head to twist it around and look at Albedo’s screen.

He’d been expecting news articles or scientific blueprints. Instead he just saw a document filled with more words than Ben could have typed in twice the time they’d been there.

Albedo sighed, but at least he didn’t shove Ben’s head away, so he was technically more relaxed about the invasion of his workspace than most people Ben hung out with. “I am working to secure gainful and productive employment for myself.”

“Gainful and… you’re job hunting?!” Ben squawked. 

Albedo and the distant librarian shushed him in unison.

The screen of the computer Ben was inhabiting lit up with a volume bar that dropped to the bottom as he cranked the speakers down, then repeated with much less volume and just as much shock, “You’re job hunting?!”

He looked Albedo up and down. ‘His evil doppelganger submitting resumes’ was something he’d never, ever have imagined seeing. He’d smack himself to see if he was dreaming if not for the fact that he was worried about breaking the computer he was in.

“Of course not,” Albedo scoffed, “I’ve already found a job. I’m simply working to make it mine.”

It took a second for Ben to fully process the words. Okay that sounded way more suspicious than just getting a gig at the local pizza joint. And much more like Albedo.

“Albedo,” he said warningly, “tell me that somebody doesn’t already have that job and you’re stealing it from them.”

The villain cocked his head in thought. “I’m not, but now that you’ve suggested it-”

“Albedo!”

“Fine, fine.” Albedo grumbled. “No, I merely located an employment position that should meet our needs and is requesting applicants, with a high enough salary to obviate the need for further pawn shop visits and replete with resources with which to work on our main task of returning home.”

Now that he knew Albedo wasn’t actively committing crimes to get the job, it honestly sounded pretty good. Not having to make any more gems to sell would save him a lot of time, save Albedo the trouble of having to make the sale, and save any more employees from having to interact with him. Win-win-win.

And anything that got them home faster was good. Especially if it meant they just gave Albedo the tech he needed to work on it instead of them having to scrounge and barter for it.

“Of course, the application process would be a waste of my time and talents,” Albedo continued, his tone starting to lapse from informational into bragging, “so I bypassed the electronic portion of the hiring process to add myself to the list of finalists. With a few filed patents with falsified backdates and some records to establish my identity, I will easily surpass whatever pitiful human competition there is for the position.”

“No worries about your glowing personality, I see.” Ben deadpanned.

Albedo scoffed. “As if any competent business would turn down an intellect like mine because of my personality.”

It was hard with only a single eye to work with, but Ben did his best to fix Albedo with an unimpressed look.

“And I made certain to find a position with an organization known for prioritizing results over people,” Albedo admitted. “The benefits are less robust than many of its competitors, but it should allow me significantly more freedom to operate. As long as I produce satisfactory work, which would be exemplary work by your species’ pitiful standards, then they will turn a blind eye to-”

“To you being a jerk?” Ben finished for him.

“To any abrasive personality traits,” Albedo spoke over him with a glare. “I understand that you’ve never actually had to bother seeking employment for yourself, but rest assured, I know what I’m doing. By this time next week I’ll be lucratively employed at Lexcorp.”