- ZION NATIONAL PARK -
Southwestern Utah, USA – 11:42 PM Local Time
The sandstone cliffs loomed in the moonlight, their jagged silhouettes etched against the sky like sentinels. Pine trees swayed gently in the wind, and the occasional rustle of wildlife echoed in the stillness. For a moment, the park slept in quiet splendor.
Then the roar came.
It wasn't just loud; it shook the terrain. Birds exploded from the trees. A buck bolted from the brush. Rivers rippled against their banks, startled from their slumber. Somewhere deep within the forest's interior, a massive shape loomed. Trees creaked and snapped in its wake.
Rushing through the woods were S.H.I.E.L.D. agents in tactical gear, headlights cutting beams through the dark as all-terrain vehicles halted just beyond a clearing. Boots hit the ground hard. Safeties were clicked off. Targeting systems hummed to life. All eyes rose.
"What the hell is that thing…?" one agent whispered, transfixed.
Standing over twelve feet tall was a living wall of scaled muscle. Its skin was a leathery ochre, thick and uneven like it had been forged in volcanic stone. The beast's upper torso was broad and powerful, every breath expanding its armored chest in deep, seismic motions. Moonlight skimmed the curve of its ridged spine, caught along the natural plating that stretched across its forearms and down its shoulders like organic armor. It moved with weight and violence coiled beneath its skin.
The face was brutish, vaguely saurian, but smarter than it should have been. Golden-yellow eyes narrowed beneath a jutting brow, calculating. No snout, just a flat, heavy nose and a wide jaw, thick and bulldog-like, made for absorbing blows and smashing skulls. A faint snarl peeled its lips back, revealing blunted teeth built to crush rather than tear.
A jagged black spike jutted from one shoulder, smooth, glossy, and obsidian-like. It curved slightly upward, an unnatural protrusion that looked like it belonged on a predator from another world.
Emblazoned across a thick black-and-white band running diagonally from its shoulder to hip was a strange symbol, glowing, alien, unmistakable. The Omnitrix. No longer a device. Now a part of it. Embedded like a power core fused to the DNA of a monster.
It stomped forward, its tail swinging low like a wrecking ball. Its knuckles brushed the ground with simian posture as it dropped slightly, hunched. The creature's fists clenched with a sound like rocks grinding together.
Then came the second roar. Louder. Closer.
A primal warning, one last chance to stand down.
Some agents froze. Others flinched. But the command sliced through every earpiece.
"Engage and subdue!"
Agent Volaskos' voice, sharp and unrelenting.
Triggers were pulled. Darts and shock rounds lit up the clearing. Muzzle flashes burst like fireworks.
Nothing worked.
The creature took a step forward, then another, and launched.
Using its immense arms like pistons, it vaulted into the air, casting a monstrous shadow as it came crashing down.
Metal bent. Trees cracked. Screams followed.
This was no ordinary night. And this was no ordinary alien.
But how did we get here?
To answer that, we need to rewind. Back to the scrapyard. Back to the desert.
Back to a young man chasing ghosts.
Back to where it began.
- CHICAGO SUMMER 1990 -
House Party, USA – 9:30 PM Local Time
The humid breeze of a Chicago summer night clung to everything. Still air, buzzing with life. In a quiet residential neighborhood, one house broke the silence, alive with music, laughter, and the celebration of youth on the edge of something bigger.
Out front, teens lounged on the porch, some smoking, others mid-conversation, heads nodding to the beat that spilled through the open windows. Groove is in the Heart pulsed into the street like a heartbeat.
Inside, the atmosphere was denser, almost claustrophobic. The house had become a furnace of limbs, bodies pressed close on what was once a living room floor, now a dancefloor. Some moved with rhythm, others just tried to move at all. A boombox near the wall blasted Bell Biv DeVoe, Janet Jackson, LL Cool J, a rotating soundtrack of pure 1990 energy.
In the kitchen, a couple giggled their way outside, slipping into the backyard with a brown paper bag and trouble in their eyes. Pizza boxes, half-crushed chip bags, and soda bottles cluttered the counters. A wrinkled "Class of '90" banner dangled above deflated balloons and disposable cameras tossed like afterthoughts across the table. An old TV in the corner played muted Saved by the Bell reruns no one paid attention to, background noise to a memory in the making.
Upstairs, things were quieter.
Still loud. Still alive. But softer. More personal.
A small group of seniors sat in a bedroom circle — drinks in hand, laughter floating in waves. They passed time with slurred dreams and half-formed plans. Among them sat Ben Summers, younger than we'll ever know him again. Emerald eyes glassy, cheeks flushed from something stronger than soda, a red plastic cup resting against his knee.
"So what're you guys gonna do?" one of the boys asked, voice hopeful. "I'm gonna head off to the military."
Nods followed. College. Sabbaticals. Parents' plans and vague ideas.
Then came the shift. everyone looked to Ben. He chuckled, rubbing the back of his neck.
"Well uh… I actually already got my college admission letter…" he mumbled.
The group leaned in. One girl, tipsy and warm, slid in close beside him — arms draping over his, her cheek brushing his shoulder. He stiffened.
"C'mon, handyman," she teased, voice honey-slow. "Where'd you get in?"
Ben swallowed. Cleared his throat.
"It's uh… M.I.T."
A beat. Then the room exploded in cheers.
Ben — always the tinkerer, the one who could fix anything, make treasure out of scrap — had done it. They all had talent, sure. Engineering prep bred that into them. But Ben? Ben had brilliance. And now he had a ticket out. A chance to use real tools. Real labs. Real future.
He smiled through the noise, pretending not to choke on the moment.
Because deep down… he was proud too.
And yet, there was always that other feeling.
Like maybe the world was too small.
Like maybe Earth was a cage.
Like maybe this new chapter wasn't just a beginning.
Maybe it was the key to something bigger.
- MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 1993 -
Cambridge, MA – Autumn 1993
You'd think someone with Ben's talents would feel right at home at a place like M.I.T., surrounded by brilliance, innovation, minds wired like his. And yet, that same sensation he'd had three years ago never left him. Earth still felt… stifling. Cramped.
During his time at the institute, nearly every project he pursued leaned toward the stars: orbital mechanics, deep-space communications, speculative propulsion tech, even crude SETI-style signal searches. While other students built drones and practical AI, Ben was sketching starships and chasing proof that humanity wasn't alone in the galaxy.
It didn't take long for his peers to brand him the campus eccentric. The conspiracy kid. The alien guy. He scoured old UFO forums, poured over declassified documents, chased data anomalies from old SETI logs, and when he wasn't doing that, he was scavenging scrap to build strange prototypes that no one asked for. Still, his raw genius kept professors intrigued and got him published more than once. But even so, something always felt off.
Maybe he just wasn't meant to be there.
That thought followed him more than any other, especially on the night everything changed.
September 17th, 1993.
Ben was out on one of his usual midnight strolls, prowling the quieter corners of campus for salvage, busted radios, broken servers, disused machinery. Anything he could bend to his next personal project. The night air was brisk, the campus silent, bathed in amber by the streetlamps. Then the sky… caught fire.
It was sudden. Violent. Brilliant. A pulse of molten orange lit the clouds from behind, casting ghostly shadows that darted across the sky. And in those shadows; dark shapes. Sleek. Geometric. Moving with impossible precision.
"...Spaceships," Ben whispered, the word barely audible over the rapid beat of his own heart. His eyes shimmered with something between wonder and mania. A laugh, breathless and ragged, slipped from his throat.
Just as quickly as they'd come, the sky returned to stillness. Quiet. No smoke. No wreckage. No sign. By morning, the news had their answer: solar flare. Harmless. Rare, but explainable.
But Ben knew better. He'd seen them.
He told anyone who would listen. Professors. Classmates. Message boards. Nobody believed him. Not even his own family. His grandfather, the only one who had ever truly understood him, begged him to let it go. To move forward. To stop chasing ghosts.
They argued. More than once. Max reminded him of the future he was building, the work he'd already done, the doors he was about to open. But in the end, Ben made his choice.
He left M.I.T. behind.
Left his apartment, his research, his scholarships. Everything. He packed what he could into a beat-up duffel bag, took the old RV his grandfather reluctantly handed over, and vanished into the country, chasing what everyone else refused to see.
That search eventually led him to Utah. Something drew him there — call it instinct, fate, madness. But Utah's deserts were vast and quiet and easy to disappear into. Ben cut ties with his old life and lived only for the search, following traces, signals, fragments of the unknown.
And it was there, in the red-rock silence of the American southwest, that destiny finally answered.
- UTAH DESERT -
Utah Desert, USA – 8:35 AM Local Time
Parked deep in the stretches of the desert, Ben had finally stopped driving. The early morning's chaos still clung to him; the image of that crash, and now this thing on his wrist. His wrist.
Gripping the strange device, he yanked and twisted, trying to rip it off.
Nothing.
Panic setting in, Ben sprinted to the RV's toolbox. He pulled out a screwdriver and wedged it between the watch and his skin, trying to pry it off. There was a sharp snap, metal shearing. He stared at the broken tool in his hand, stunned.
Over the next twenty minutes, he tried everything. Pliers. A crowbar. Even a power drill. But nothing worked. The watch wouldn't budge. Wouldn't crack. Wouldn't even scratch.
It was fused to him now, and it wasn't going anywhere.
Ben slumped onto one of the RV's seats, breath shaky. The realization was a storm in his chest. This… this thing was alien. Technology unlike anything he'd seen. The weight of it pressed down on him, terrifying, yes. But exhilarating, too.
For years, he'd searched for proof. Dug through government conspiracy forums. Scanned skies. Tinkered with tech no one cared about but him. Now? He didn't just have proof, it was literally on his hand.
He laughed for half a second before his stomach sank.
"If I go public… the government's gonna take it. They'll lock me up in Area 51 or…" He swallowed. "Silence me, make me disappear."
His mouth went dry. The paranoia came fast. He wasn't alone out there. Someone else had come to that crash site. Someone looking for this thing.
Ben looked at the device again. His heartbeat raced. The panic returned; chest tightening, breath shortening, the world tilting. He couldn't breathe. Couldn't think.
Then, a lull.
A hum, soft and steady. The white trim of the watch began to glow green.
The panic eased. A strange calm washed over him, artificial, maybe, but welcome. He felt it like a whisper in his mind, reassuring him. Guiding him.
His eyes shifted, to the tangle of wires in the van's corner. A laptop, half-buried under tools. The screen flickered on without being touched, its familiar blue glow overtaken by the same pulsing green as the watch.
An insignia appeared, unfamiliar, etched in the middle of the screen.
Alien code poured across it in real time.
The device was syncing. Assimilating.
Something was awakening.