Chapter 35: Tinkering with Ti
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The Omnitrix beeped its familiar warning, red light pulsing as my crystalline form dissolved. The transformation always felt like stepping out of armor, leaving vulnerable, exposed, especially with the X-n limping toward us like wounded predators who hadn't quite given up the hunt.
Scott Sumrs looked like he'd gone ten rounds with a at grinder and lost. His precious visor sat crooked on his face, one lens spider-webbed with cracks. Blood trickled from a split lip, and he held his ribs like they were the only things keeping his organs in place. But his jaw was set with that special brand of righteous fury that only the truly self-important could manage.
"You," he spat, pointing a shaking finger at . "This is your fault."
I raised an eyebrow, crossing my arms. "My fault? Did I throw you through a building? Because from where I'm standing, that was all Rogue."
"You could have helped!" His voice cracked with pain and anger. "The mont she appeared, you should have—"
"What? Jumped in to save your ass?" I let out a harsh laugh. "After you told your girlfriend to mind-rape ? After you threatened my cousin? After you asked us to step away? Nah, watching you get your teeth kicked in was way more satisfying."
“We’re not dating,” Jean quickly clarified.
Her words sohow offended Scott more than mine did, although he turned to to hide that fact. His face went red, impressive considering how much blood he'd already lost. "You arrogant little—"
"Weak." The word cut through his tirade like a knife. "That's what you are. All that training, all that self-righteousness, and you got bodied by one woman. Pathetic."
"Ben," Grandpa warned, but I was on a roll.
"You walk around acting like you're God's gift to mutantkind, but the second soone with real power shows up, you fold like wet paper. And you wonder why people don't trust the X-n?"
Scott lunged forward, or tried to. His injuries turned it into more of an aggressive stumble. "You don't know anything about—"
"Scott, stop."
Jean Grey's voice was quiet but carried the weight of exhaustion and pain. She'd managed to stand, though she swayed like a drunk sailor. Blood had dried under her nose, painting her upper lip rust-red. But her green eyes were clear, focused, and filled with sothing I hadn't expected.
Regret.
"He's right," she continued, placing a restraining hand on Scott's arm. "We were wrong."
The street went silent except for the distant sound of fleeing insects and far-off sirens. Even Kitty, who'd been helping the cocooned councilwoman, stopped to stare.
"Jean, you can't be serious," Scott protested.
"I am." She turned to face fully, and I saw what it cost her. Pride was a hell of a thing to swallow, especially when you'd been trained to believe you were always on the right side. "Ben, right? I’m Jean Grey. I apologize. For trying to enter your mind without permission. For treating you like a threat instead of a person. That was... that was wrong of us."
I was a little caught off guard. In all my mories of the X-n, both from comics and movies, genuine apologies were rarer than peaceful solutions. They usually just punched their way through misunderstandings.
Grandpa stepped forward, and his weathered face held approval. "Takes guts to admit when you're wrong, young lady. Not many folks your age have learned that lesson." His expression hardened as he looked at Scott. "If you hadn't apologized, I was planning to have so very pointed words with this Charles Xavier of yours. About boundaries. About consent. About what happens when his students threaten my grandchildren."
Scott scoffed, the sound wet with blood. "You think you could—"
"Boy," Grandpa's voice dropped to sub-arctic temperatures, "The world is bigger than you can see through those red-tinted glasses. I'm Maxwell Tennyson, forr Magister of the Plumbers, and I’ve dedicated decades of my life to dealing with threats to this planet since before you were born. Don't test ."
Although they hadn’t recognized Grandpa’s face before, his na made all three of them flinch. The councilwoman passed out on the side. Jean was sweating now, and Scott’s lips trembled in shock. Every superhero group worth a di knew about the Plumbers.
Jean squeezed Scott's arm harder, and he subsided with visible reluctance. She nodded at Grandpa, accepting the rebuke with more grace than I'd have managed.
"We’re extrely sorry, truly, Sir. We weren’t aware of your identity…You're right to be angry," she said. "We violated your trust. The Professor taught us better, but we... I let fear override ethics. There's no excuse for that."
“Yes,” Grandpa nodded. Both Gwen and I were watching him with glittering eyes. He was so cool!
"But this is still going to cause problems," she continued, gesturing vaguely toward where Rogue had vanished. "That mutant—Clancy—he'll be joining Magneto now. The Brotherhood will grow stronger."
"And whose fault is that?" Gwen spoke up for the first ti, stepping out from behind Grandpa. "If you'd approached him like a person instead of a problem to be solved, maybe he'd have listened."
Kitty Pryde approached our group, her young face a mixture of disappointnt and resignation. She looked at for a long mont, those brown eyes searching for sothing. Understanding, maybe. Or just trying to figure out how soone her age could be so cynical.
Finally, she sighed. "We really screwed this up, didn't we?" She said, definitely recalling how she was yelling at for help. However, I couldn’t bla her for that, given that she was seeing her two teachers getting beaten.
"Yeah," I agreed simply. "You did."
She flinched but nodded. "Anna is not in the right fra of mind right now. For what it's worth... thanks for not letting her hurt us worse. You could have, but you didn't."
I shrugged. "I'm not a monster. Just soone who believes in consequences."
The X-n gathered themselves slowly, painfully. Scott needed Jean's support to walk, and Kitty helped the councilwoman they'd freed from Clancy's cocoon. They looked less like Earth's Mightiest Heroes and more like kids who'd bitten off more than they could chew.
As they limped away, Jean looked back one more ti. "We'll do better," she said quietly. "I promise you."
I watched them go, feeling satisfied and yet oddly hollow. Victory tasted like ash when it ca at the cost of idealism. But that was growing up, learning that the good guys weren't always good, and the bad guys weren't always wrong.
"Co on," Grandpa said, his hand warm on my shoulder. "Let's get out of here before the authorities show up with questions we don't want to answer."
We walked back to the Rust Bucket in silence, each lost in our own thoughts. The crisis was over, but I had a feeling the ripples would spread far wider than any of us could predict.
****
The concoction in my hands looked like soone had liquefied a swamp and added chunks of... sothing. The sll alone made my eyes water, and that was through my still-congested sinuses. Grandpa watched expectantly as I raised the mug to my lips.
"Bottoms up, kiddo! This batch has extra tiger balm for potency!"
The first sip hit like a freight train of awful. Seaweed, motor oil, and what I desperately hoped wasn't actual tiger. My throat tried to close in self-defense, but I forced it down, gulp by agonizing gulp.
“Baghh!”
"There we go!" Grandpa bead like he'd just won a Nobel Prize. "You'll be right as rain in no ti!"
"Already feeling better after that fight, actually," I wheezed, setting down the empty mug with shaking hands. "The cold's almost gone."
"See? The redy's already working!"
I didn't have the heart to tell him correlation wasn't causation. Besides, my mind was already elsewhere, replaying the fight, the near-disaster, the ten-minute countdown that had almost gotten us killed.
Gwen and Grandpa started talking, her voice still shaky from earlier. He was doing that thing where he pretended to organize supplies while actually keeping her talking, drawing out her fears so she could face them. Good old Grandpa, always knowing what people needed.
But I tuned them out, lost in my own spiraling thoughts.
What if it hadn't been the X-n who'd found us? What if it had been real villains, Doctor Doom, the Masters of Evil, any number of cosmic threats who wouldn't have stopped at a little mind-reading? When that tir ran out and I'd turned back from Wildmutt, we'd been sitting ducks. Gwen's magic was growing stronger, but she wasn't ready for that level of threat. And Grandpa, for all his hidden badassery, was still human.
This wasn’t a PG-13 cartoon. The ti limit was going to get us killed soday.
I'd avoided ssing with the Omnitrix so far. Every episode where Ben tried to hack it ended in disaster. Kevin 11, the SDM malfunction, that whole ss with the Omnitrix going into self-destruct. Azmuth had built in those safeguards for a reason.
But Azmuth had also designed it for Max Tennyson, not a kid like . What I had above Grandpa was that I was soone who knew what was coming.
I had an idea what could solve this problem. Grey Matter.
The Galvan form could interface with the watch properly. He had the intellect, the instinctive understanding of Galvan tech. If I wanted to tweak the Omnitrix, he was the best choice.
But Azmuth, clever bastard that he was, had put the Omnitrix symbol on Grey Matter's back specifically to prevent self-modification.
And the popular fan theory about using Upgrade? I'd tried that already. Turns out you can't rge with sothing that's already rged with you. The Omnitrix just gave an error beep that sounded suspiciously like laughter.
So Grey Matter it was. But I'd need tools. Specifically, tools that could reach where my tiny alien hands couldn't.
"Grandpa," I called out, interrupting his gentle counseling session. "Can I get so of your Plumber gadgets?"
He looked up, surprised. "Hmm? Why?"
"I'll disassemble them. Just... trust on this."
Our eyes t, and I saw him weighing the request. The old Max would have asked twenty questions, demanded explanations. But I'd proven myself against the Hulk, against Rogue. I'd made the hard calls and co out ahead.
"Alright," he said finally. "But be careful, Ben. So of that tech has safeguards that—"
"I know. I'll be careful."
He disappeared into his secret compartnt, returning with an armload of alien tech that would make Area 51 weep with envy. Blasters, scanners, so kind of dinsional stabilizer that humd with barely-contained energy.
All obsolete by Plumber standards, but centuries ahead of Earth tech.
Perfect.
****
Three days later, I sat hunched over the RV's dinette table in Grey Matter form, surrounded by the cannibalized remains of Grandpa's gadgets. My massive brain processed information at superhuman speeds, tiny hands moving with surgical precision as I assembled my creation.
Four chanical arms, each no bigger than a pencil, lay before . Unlike Doc Ock's massive tentacles, these were built for finesse, not combat. Micro-servos from a Tetramand strength enhancer provided the motion. Optical fibers from a Petrosapien scanner gave them sight. The neural interface ca from a Galvan teaching helt, modified to work wirelessly.
No spinal attachnt needed. No invasive surgery. Just a simple helt that would translate thought into action, connected via quantum-entangled particles that made Bluetooth look like smoke signals.
"Fascinating," I muttered in Grey Matter's high-pitched voice, surprised by my own work, making final adjustnts to the control helt. "The quantum entanglent should maintain a connection even through dinsional barriers. Theoretical range of twelve parsecs, though power consumption increases exponentially past local space."
"You're such a nerd," Gwen comnted from her spot on the couch, but there was fondness in it. She'd been watching my work with poorly hidden fascination, the Archamada Book forgotten in her lap.
"Says the girl who's been reading the sa page for an hour because she's too busy watching work."
She flushed. "I'm making sure you don't blow us up!"
"Please. I'm a super-genius in this form. The probability of explosive failure is only twelve-point-three percent."
"Only?!"
I ignored her, activating the neural crown. The chanical arms twitched to life, responding to my thoughts with beautiful precision. They moved like extensions of my will, each one capable of manipulations too delicate for even Grey Matter's tiny fingers.
"Perfect," I breathed, then louder, "Initiating primary objective."
The Omnitrix symbol on my back seed to pulse with warmth, like it knew what was coming. I directed the arms to reach around, their caras giving a perfect view of the device that had changed my life. Alien script flowed across its surface, morphing between languages I sohow understood instinctively.
"Ben," Gwen's voice was tight with worry. "Are you sure about this? What if you break it? What if it self-destructs? What if—"
"What if I die because I can only fight for ten minutes at a ti?" I countered, not looking away from my work. "What if the next villain doesn't conveniently wait for to recharge? This limit will get us killed, Gwen."
She fell silent. We both knew I was right.
The arms moved with perfect precision, accessing panels that my physical form could never reach. The Omnitrix's code flowed past my enhanced vision—beautiful, elegant, impossibly complex. But patterns erged. Safeguards, limitations, training wheels for a young user.
Ti seed to slow as I worked.
Sweat beaded on my tiny grey forehead despite the RV's air conditioning. One wrong move, one misplaced command, and I could lock the watch forever. Or worse. Activate self-destruction.
But I understood it now. The tiout wasn't a power limitation—it was a safety feature. The Omnitrix could run indefinitely, but Azmuth had limited it to prevent genetic damage to young users. Their DNA needed ti to resettle between transformations.
Except I wasn't that young. And more importantly, I knew the workaround.
My chanical fingers danced across hidden keypads, inputting codes that existed in my brain like inherited mory. The Omnitrix beeped, questioned, and protested. I answered each challenge with the certainty of soone who'd seen the future.
Finally, after what felt like hours but was probably minutes, I found it. The tiout subroutine. A few careful adjustnts, a bypass here, a reroute there…
Then it happened.
– Pssstcheww…
"Done," I whispered.
The Omnitrix pulsed once, acknowledging the change. No alarms. No self-destruct. Just acceptance.
I waited, hardly daring to breathe. Five minutes passed. Then ten. Then fifteen.
Grey Matter's form held steady. No red warning lights. No forced transformation.
"Holy shit," I laughed, the sound weird in Grey Matter's voice. "It worked!"
Twenty minutes. Thirty. I could feel the transformation holding steady without any strain or degradation. I manually triggered the change back to human, landing on my feet with a grin that probably looked manic.
"It worked!" I repeated, staring at the Omnitrix with sothing approaching awe. "No more ti limits!"
Gwen was at my side instantly, smoothie forgotten as she grabbed my wrist to examine the watch. "You actually did it?! You hacked alien technology!? T-this doesn’t make any sense!"
"Fortune favors the bold," I quoted, adrenaline making giddy. "Stop being jealous. Want to see sothing cool?"
Before she could protest, I selected a new form. The transformation washed over , and suddenly I stood before her as Wildmutt. But this ti, there was no congestion, no confusion. My enhanced senses painted the world in impossible detail; I felt Gwen's accelerated heartbeat, the faint ozone sll from my equipnt, even the vibrations of insects walking outside the RV.
I held the form for a full twenty minutes, just because I could. When I finally changed back, Gwen was looking at with an expression I couldn't quite read.
"This is cheating. You’re a dumbass, but this watch makes you a genius? Ugh, all my years of study…" she said finally, looking defeated.
"Don’t be so dejected, I’ll give you the rest of the Charms since you’ve been such a cute cousin so far.”
“R-really?!”
“Sure,” I grinned, but inside, my mind was already racing ahead.
No more ti limits ant no more running from fights. No more strategic retreats because the watch tid out. I could really be the hero this universe needed, not just for ten-minute intervals, but for as long as it took.
The Omnitrix pulsed on my wrist, warm and reassuring. Ti to see what this upgrade could really do.
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