Chapter 25 - Back to Work

WEATHER CONDITION CHANGE PROTOCOLS

FIELD TEST INITIATED

< target name = Benjamin Kirby Tennyson>

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What is the difference between a thunderstorm and a computer mainframe.

Control.

Grandpa Max surprised you by eagerly turning in his seat, facing the two of you.

"How would you kids feel about a store noted for its wide variety of tentacles?" 

Looking up from the Omnitrix alien database, I quickly look to my cousin without thinking, and locking eyes with hers, your own widen before dropping to her shoulders.

Huh . . .

you both have the same shade of eye color.

Who knew?

Ignoring that, I look to her once more and offer her a helpless expression. 'Help me.' You mouth.

She has a new stash of actual food from our last pit stop.

She looks confused, before quickly hiding her snickering behind a hand. Turning back to your grandpa, she offers you a wink. "We'd love to go grandpa!" 

Traitor! She mockingly mouths back sorry to you, and you can't help the amusement that hits you.

Later, entering the bathroom to shower for the first time in a week. There's a reason Gwen criticizes you for your stank, and you don't plan to change that anytime soon with the hero time.

It's with the quick pull of your shirt, that you're left astonished. It's not as though you'd simply gone unaware of your body for such a long time, it's just that you'd had little to no reason to pay any attention to your muscles; why would there have been a change in the first place?

However, this clinches it.

You check your underwear (not that you expect anything, it's not like you wouldn't have noticed THAT) and are thankful that you're unchanged.

Snapping your underwear back into place, you bolt out of the room, high pitched scream coming out of your throat. "Grandpa!" 

He's quick to turn, with a worried 'What is it?' coming from him. He's stunned into silence at the sight of you, mouth agape.

Gwen turns as well, looking first from your face, and then down to your abdomen. Her mouth drops.

I have only one thing to say, "I think the watch is changing me."

Your cousin's eyes flash up to yours, and with a flushed face, she quickly turns her eyes away.

"Go put a shirt on you DOOFUS!" 

"No wait," Grandpa hurries, approaching you quickly. "This is serious Ben. How did this happen? This is the musculature structure of a professional athlete, and I have a difficult time believing you've had this all this time." He pauses. "You said it was the watch."

You take a minute to think before answering.

Ever since I got it I've noticed myself getting smarter, faster, and now stronger...I think that there might be something wrong with the Omnitrix." You say embarrassed at first before becoming concerned.

Soon enough though you can feel the Rustbucket come to a stop, though far sooner than you expected. You head outside and find that your Grandpa has decided to start putting up what looks to be some sort of obstacle course of some kind. 

"Hey Grandpa, what the heck is all this for?" You ask as you come over to where he is working.

"You said you thought the watch had been affecting you, so I wanted to test just how much its done already, so I'm setting up a course that I'm going to have you go through as yourself. Do you want to help me set it up?" he asks you, holding out a wooden rod.

"Eh, why not?" Ben says before beginning to help set up the course. Soon enough the course begins to take shape, and about half an hour of hard work later the course is finally set up.

The obstacle course starts off pretty simple, making your way over, under and between things, but soon enough things start getting taken up a notch. The first thing that gets thrown at you, quite literally you might add, is a bunch of old empty cans tied to strings. Of course being the size that they are they can't really hurt you, but you dance between them all the same. It's when the filled paint cans start swinging that you become somewhat concerned for your health, but same as with the soda cans you dodge them as you keep moving forward. Of course you really weren't expecting a full size log of all things to come swinging at you, but even with being surprised by it, you baseball slide under it, almost like you were playing a high speed game of limbo. Thankfully it seems like the log was the last test of your reaction speed, at least that's what you think that was a test of. The next obstacle you encounter seems to be the extremely large spare tire for the Rustbucket, being placed in such a way that you'd have to move it to proceed. Seeing no other way forward you start flipping the tire like you've seen a couple of athletes doing in videos.

It's somewhat difficult to move it at first, but with determination and momentum you manage to move the tire enough to move onwards. Of course once you see what's on the other side you debate on whether or not it was worth it to move the tire, considering the rather large climbing wall. Your eyes quickly scan it, looking for a way up to the other side, you manage to find a path up to the top and begin to climb. Once you do find a path up you climb rather quickly up the wall, when you get to the other side you see Grandpa Max with a contemplative look on his face and Gwen with a rather startled look, stopwatch in hand.

"Hmm...you are right, the watch has been affecting you. I wasn't expecting you to get through the course as quick as you did, and not without a couple of bruises to show for it." Grandpa Max says.

If I had known what was happening then I would have dropped everything that moment and prevented such tragedies.

I could've saved everyone.

I had the power. I was practically there. Unlike Peter Parker, I chose my power, the responsibility, the consequences. I had all the of the universe on my wrist.

One of my few failures as "The Hero of Heroes".

"Alright, first things first, let me see you throw a punch." He says once you've got the sandbag set up.

"Alright, but why?" I ask curiously.

"Well it'll help me establish a baseline for how much you know, also  it's so I know how much I have to make you unlearn first as well." He answers.

"Alright, I guess that makes sense." You reply, before getting ready to throw a punch. You put all the force you can muster into your punch, and then look over to your Grandpa to see if you can glean anything from his expression.

"Okay so that wasn't horrible, but let me show you what you're doing wrong. You see...." He says after a moment, before delving into a lesson oh how to move your body to best get more force from a punch, etc.

Ben groaned, flat on his back in the grass, the morning chill sucking the heat right out of him. The sky above was only just brightening from the sun, and it honestly was way too early to be up -

"Get up." Came the man's command, a large shadow coming to loom over Ben, stepping out of the morning fog like a wraith. "Or are you giving up already?"

Ben groaned again before he sat up, grabbing the blunted practice knife he'd dropped beside him. Staggering to his feet, he raised the knife in front of him in the defensive stance he'd been taught.

Yes, it was way too early to be up, even on a weekday, but he'd made that choice. He needed help, after all. Plus, it was kinda nice to have something to do immediately after waking; it gave him no chance to linger in bed and think too much-

Stop. He needed to focus on the here and now. So he straightened and smirked at his adversary.

"In your dreams, old man."

Grandpa Max grinned before steadying his own stance and beckoning Ben over with a curt instruction. "Again!"

Max eyed his grandson with no small amount of amusement as the boy idly sipped some water, slumping over the booth table. Beside the child rested a back-pack for school, though he wouldn't be needing it for a while yet. The kid was a little roughed up, but the bruises on him were not from their training session; Training. The kid never ceased to surprise him.

"I think you did well, especially for a first time." Max remarked, downing some coffee, sighing happily.

Your training with grandpa goes over well enough, him teaching you how to jab and better protect yourself. Nothing flashy, not even worth noting. Grandpa makes mention of how you're progressing pretty well, though you personally have your doubts. 

It feels like you're just chugging along, getting no better or worse for it.

It should come as no surprise then, that when you swapped into your brawling midfight as a way to seize the element of surprise, grandpa ducked and weaved before laying you out flat on the ground with a softened blow from his boxing glove. 

Well, you wouldn't be trying that again.

"Ha! Eat my fist, old man!"

"Oh I'll show you how it's done, whipper snapper!"

While later , Gwen glanced up from where she was reading up on her spells in her bunk, trying to glare but fighting to hold back a grin. Grandpa and Ben were going wild on the new Sumo Slammer game that her mother had sent over for Ben.

Everything was almost ideal.

REEEEEE

REEEEEE

REEEEEE

Of course that's when everything went to shit with a emergency broadcast from the Omnitrix.

Opening the holographic menu, I slam on the new Uniform Mode. I got the idea of quick change from remembering anime and the energy to matter abilities of the watch.

'Chromastone, Shocksquach , Terraspin - I gotta think-'

Each year, excluding droughts and war, nearly 500 incidents across the globe meet a disaster.

Most of them were not in my backyard.

I would look back at this moment as the moment when the entire world became my backyard after remembering that little tidbit.

As my perception of increased at the same time as my body streamlined for aerodynamics based on millions of years of evolution and alien genetic engineering , it only took less than a couple minutes, a couple seconds in real time, the disaster was painfully slow for me.

Even more so as I try to contact emergency services.

Early the following day, randomly, the depression intensified into a tropical storm as it headed generally westward toward Florida, strengthening into a hurricane two hours before making landfall at Hallandale Beach.

After briefly weakening to tropical storm strength over southern Florida, Katrina emerged into the Gulf of Mexico and began to rapidly intensify. The storm strengthened into a Category 8 hurricane over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico before weakening to Category 5 strength at its second landfall over southeast Louisiana and Mississippi.

Saving those in the way only slightly reduced the damage.

The flooding was actually caused largely as a result of fatal engineering flaws in the flood protection system.

I used one of my new forms that I recently looked up.*

A Limax or thanks to Grandpa, Sludgepuppy.*

No chance to test the other theoretical uses for this.

Spraying my .... fluids over broken or dangerously damaged structures then , as Heatblast, flash drying it to keep it.

I needed a wider view.

'Astrodactyl.'

I fly as high as I can as my body changes.

80% of the city, as well as large tracts of neighboring parishes, were inundated.

The flooding also destroyed most of New Orleans' transportation and communication facilities, leaving tens of thousands of people who had not evacuated the city prior to landfall stranded with little access to food, shelter or basic necessities.

With my abilities it'll take a couple days.

Wait-

I look to see...

I slam as the ground as Four arms as gravity reclaims me.

"Hang on! I'll get you out of there!" I gripped the heavy I beam and slowly lifted I beam that was trapping someone and moved it away.

The man was already unconscious but my systems still gave me life signs which means he was still alive not sure how much longer he would last though.

I pressed the button on my chest. "This is Legion, I've managed to find someone trapped by an I beam, managed to remove it but his legs are crushed. He is still alive though not sure how long that will last."

"Roger that .... Legion , we've marked your location, medical personal are on their way, is his his breathing stable?"

"Yeah."

"Good, then-

The  storm surge caused 53 breaches to various flood protection structures in and around the greater New Orleans area, submerging 80% of the city.

A report by the American Society of Civil Engineers indicated that two-thirds of the flooding was caused by the multiple failures of the city's floodwalls.

I don't believe that.

This world .... It doesn't accept simple (unfair) things like natural disasters. There is always a catch. This storm was too powerful, to quick , too sudden for it to be natural.

The storm surge also devastated the coasts of Mississippi and Alabama, making the costliest natural disaster in the history of the United States.

The total damage is estimated at ....

$125 billion.

The death toll from is uncertain, with reports differing by hundreds.

According to the National Hurricane Center, 1,836 fatalities can be attributed to the storm: 1 in Kentucky, 2 each in Alabama, Georgia, and Ohio, 14 in Florida, 238 in Mississippi, and 1,577 in Louisiana.

Using the Omnitrix scanning abilities to McGuver a searching device for missing people is the one good thing to come from it.

However, searching for 135 people missing in Louisiana wasn't easy.

Many of the deaths are indirect, but it is almost impossible to determine the exact cause of some of the fatalities.

'No. I don't want to know. I got enough on my still maturing mind.'

A report by the Omnitrix ( another unfortunate benefit ) indicates that 966 deaths can be directly attributed to the storm in Louisiana, including out of state evacuees, and another 20 indirectly (such as firearm-related deaths and gas poisoning).

A follow-up study by the Louisiana Department of Health & Hospitals determined that the storm was directly responsible for 1,170 fatalities in Louisiana.

The hurricane left an estimated three million people without electricity.

I guess the Arc Reactor is getting an early release.

The Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff described the aftermath of as "probably the worst catastrophe or set of catastrophes."

Wait until the Alien Invasions.

FIELD TEST ....

FAILURE.

REASSESSMENT.

PREPARING NEW FIELD TEST.

Author's Note:

S.A.M. will return.

I always thought any A.I. made the ultimate recurring villains in modern/scifi setting.

The idea of a weather controlling one disappearing after one episode sounds stupid.

It will become my first OG villain.

Tell me what you think.