James didn't give himself time to think.
He drove his shoulder into the basement door and it gave way on the first try, splinters scattering across the hallway floor. He took the stairs two at a time, the red ring burning steadily on his finger, and pushed open his uncle's bedroom door.
His uncle was already sitting up, blinking against the darkness, confusion on his face for exactly one second before a blast from the ring punched clean through his skull. The body dropped with a dull, final thud. His aunt's scream lasted less than a breath before a razor-thin construct severed it at the source.
James stood in the doorway and looked at what he had done.
The urge to be sick hit him immediately — but what came up wasn't vomit. A corrosive red substance poured from his mouth, splattering across the floor and spreading to the bodies, eating through flesh with a quiet, horrible efficiency until nothing remained but bone and jewelry. Then it caught fire. The flames moved fast, finding the furniture, the curtains, the walls.
He turned away from it.
His cousins were in the hallway, drawn out by the noise, frozen in their doorways. When they saw him, they bolted. They made it four steps before red constructs — rope-like tendrils — caught them by the ankles and dragged them back, spinning them around to face him.
James looked at them for a long moment. Whatever they saw in his eyes made them whimper.
"Jesus died for our sins," he said, his voice conversational, almost gentle. Behind him, tendrils were already breaking apart furniture, pulling lengths of wood into crude, deliberate shapes. He pressed them flat against the hallway wall in the shape of a cross — two crosses, side by side. "You're dying for yours." He tilted his head slightly. "You could've been decent. You chose not to. But that's alright." The stakes drove through their palms and feet in one sharp motion, pinning them to the wall as their screams tore open the house. "I've become something worse than what you feared. And I've come to collect."
He left them there — to bleed out, to burn, or both — and went back down to the basement.
He moved quickly and deliberately. Comics. Kittens, bundled carefully into his bag. Homework. Birth certificate. He took everything that mattered and left everything that didn't.
At the top of the stairs, he pulled the red ring off his finger.
The clarity that rushed in was immediate and cold and merciless. He barely made it to the corner before his stomach emptied. He crouched there for a moment, breathing through his nose, taking stock of what he'd just done, then stood up, gathered his things, and walked out the front door.
He was halfway across the yard when the house exploded behind him — the kitchen gas cylinders going all at once, a pressure wave that knocked heat across his back. He didn't run. He turned and watched it burn.
A small smirk crossed his face.
It vanished when he heard the sirens.
The paramedics treated him for minor burns on-site. The kittens, apparently unhurt and deeply unimpressed by the chaos, were checked over and then escorted with James to the police station, where a detective with tired eyes sat him down in a beige interview room and set a voice recorder on the table between them.
"So, Mr. Willow," the detective began, "do you have any idea what caused the fire — or the deaths of your uncle and his family?"
James looked down at the table for a moment, then back up. His eyes were red-rimmed. His voice came out quiet and unsteady.
"After they beat me, they locked me in the basement. That's my room, by the way." He paused, swallowed. "I blacked out from the pain. When I came to, I could smell the smoke. My nose was broken — I tried to reset it myself. Then I just... I grabbed my things and the kittens and tried to get out without getting burned." He hesitated, like he was deciding whether to say the next part. "On the way out I saw a shadow moving through the back door. Heading toward the forest. I didn't follow. I heard the explosion and I just ran."
He let two tears fall. Not many — just enough.
The detective studied him for a long moment, then leaned back and exhaled. "I'm sorry, kiddo. You shouldn't have had to go through any of that." He reached across the table and picked up the birth certificate. "Smart thinking, grabbing this. It'll speed things up considerably when we process you back into the system. Try not to stress too much — we'll get you sorted."
"Thanks, detective," James said quietly. "I really appreciate it."
The man nodded, tucked the certificate under his arm, and left the room.
James waited until the door clicked shut.
Then, just briefly, he smiled.
Three Months Later
They were the three best months of his life, and it wasn't close.
The inheritance his parents had left him — held in trust all these years, now finally and entirely his — turned out to be substantial enough to move on. He purchased the warehouse outright. Sold the Alfa Romeo through the right channels for a figure that surprised even him, then poured the money into renovations: insulation, electricity, proper plumbing, a reinforced underground vault accessible only to him, and enough livable space above ground that it no longer resembled an abandoned warehouse at all.
He bought a secondhand car — nothing remarkable, nothing that would draw questions — to avoid the obvious problem of arriving places in vehicles that shouldn't exist yet.
For the first few weeks he lived alone, which was fine in theory. In practice it turned quiet very quickly, and quiet had never been kind to him. So he extended an open-ended invitation to his friend Steve and Steve's girlfriend, and they accepted, and the place stopped feeling like somewhere he was just surviving.
There were adjustments. The main one involved the corridor that led to the vault — he converted the visible section into a workshop for soldering and electronics, hiding the vault door in plain sight behind a pegboard of tools. For security, he skipped the conventional route entirely. Instead he'd farmed twenty Pokémon from his collection — Gengars, Weaviles, Murkrow, and Honchkrow — pairing each ghost-type with a dark-type and sending them out in rotating shifts to patrol the building and surrounding area.
He remembered the first time he'd released a Gengar from its Poké Ball. He'd been braced for something cartoonish, something familiar — the wide grin, the soft purple, the goofy red eyes from the games and the anime. What materialized instead was something else entirely: darker grey than purple, fur where there shouldn't be fur, and eyes the color of glacier ice that fixed on him with an intelligence that had no business being there. The feeling that came with it was a full-body conviction that he was about to die.
He wasn't. The Gengar had spent the next thirty minutes apologizing in a low, echoing voice for the false alarm, which somehow made the whole experience stranger. Eventually James forgave it, released the first dark-type — a Weavile, which produced a sensation less like impending death and more like standing at the edge of an infinite drop — and got on with things.
The Pokémon energy was disorienting at first, but he suspected the effect would dull with repeated exposure. It already had, somewhat.
On a clear evening roughly a week after his roommates moved in, James sat on the roof with a bag of twelve yellow power rings in his lap and watched the stars come out.
Steve and his girlfriend had gone out for the night. The building was quiet beneath him. He reached into the bag and lifted one ring between two fingers, turning it slowly in the fading light.
"Alright," he said to no one. "The odds of this going sideways are probably sixty, seventy percent." He considered that. "Still worth it."
He addressed the rings properly then, the way something like this deserved to be addressed.
"Go. Find people who understand fear — not just feel it, but understand it. People who can use it to protect others. Find them anywhere on the earth. Find them anywhere beyond it."
He opened the bag and tipped them.
The rings scattered outward in every direction, gleaming trails cutting through the dark — and then four of them changed course entirely. Instead of arcing outward across the horizon, they turned upward. Straight up, accelerating, vanishing into the dark between stars.
James stared after them with his mouth open.
"Well," he said finally. "That's probably going to be a problem. Eventually." He closed his mouth. "Future me's problem."
He picked up the empty bag and headed back inside. On the way down the roof stairs, a thought occurred to him — the roaming Pokémon, the ones he'd been considering releasing into the wild. Let some of them scatter. See what happened. The campers in the state forests nearby would have interesting nights. And if a few spread further out —
That'll cause a frenzy, he thought, smiling to himself as he pulled the roof door shut behind him.
Worth it.
The next morning, James stood at the entrance to the vault and took stock.
The space was vast — large enough to comfortably fit three Airbus A380s with room left over for a handful of speedboats. It had been excavated and constructed by a rotating crew of Timburr and Golurk working in shifts, and the result was something that felt less like a room and more like a private wing of a museum dedicated to fictional universes made real.
He walked the first hallway slowly, notebook open, pen moving.
The power rings occupied an entire shelving unit of their own — sixty each of green, blue, red, orange, and violet; sixty yellow, now down to forty-eight for obvious reasons. Each set in its own labeled tray, each tray sealed against interference.
Further along: the Omnitrix collection, catalogued by variant and universe of origin. The main unit — the one he considered his — was currently inactive, sitting in its own case. Alongside it: four Omniverse-era watches from 5YL, four from the Ben 23 timeline, six each from Mad Ben, Albedo's recreated Ultimatrix, Nega Ben, Bad Ben, and Benzarro's reality. Two Ben 10,000 Omnitrixes. Two Alien Force models. Ten classic-era units, still sealed in stasis pods. Four pairs of Biomnitrix gauntlets.
The symbiote jars came next, each one sealed in containment designed for hazardous materials — Venom, Anti-Venom, Carnage, Toxin, Phage, Scream, Agony, the Extrembiote, Rascal, Misery, Riot, Laser, Silence, and Serpent, all dormant and waiting.
Lightsabers and kyber crystals in a temperature-controlled cabinet — twenty blue, twenty green, twenty red.
A Sonic section that still felt slightly surreal to him every time he looked at it: Metal Sonic, currently inactive and suspended in a support frame; the chaos emeralds, each one isolated in radiation-grade containment; and one occupied stasis pod, its occupant small and blue and loyal, tested and confirmed.
The Marvel shelf held the web-shooters — thirty pairs — alongside fifteen variants of radioactive spider, each one from a different iteration of the Spider-Man story. The black-and-green suit. The Prowler battle suit. The Black Panther suit. The Mark 50. A Captain America shield. Twenty pounds of raw vibranium in sealed ingots. A JARVIS flash drive.
The anime section was the one that still occasionally caught him off guard when he walked past it. The Death Note. Three of Gaara's sand gourds. A complete set of ninjutsu scrolls. The seven ninja swords. Deep beneath the vault floor, sealed in its own reinforced chamber: the Gedo Statue. And on a shelf near the back, carefully containerized: the tailed beasts, each one reduced to a dense sphere of chakra in a color corresponding to its beast — all except Shukaku, who had already been sealed in a teapot when he'd found it, and who had stayed in the teapot since.
He'd also pulled a few things intended purely for himself. The Cup of Immortality from the Seven Deadly Sins. The Staff of Ainz Ooal Gown. Items he wasn't planning to advertise.
James paused at the end of the hallway and looked back at all of it.
He thought about figures like The One Above All. The Watcher. The One Below All. Beings who observed everything from a comfortable distance and moved pieces when they chose to.
He smiled and turned back to the task at hand.
He spent the next hour packing a box.
Spider-themed equipment, neatly arranged: web-shooters, assorted gadgets, the black-and-green stealth suit folded on top. Underneath the suit, sealed in a breathable container of their own, the spiders — various breeds from various timelines, each one capable of doing exactly what spiders in that genre of story did. The box was taped thoroughly, wrapped again, and labeled with a handwritten note.
He picked up the portal gun — extracted from a Rick and Morty episode some weeks back — and dialed in the coordinates.
Japan. Specifically, a slightly rundown apartment building in a district known for producing people who did interesting things with technology. He stepped through, found the third door on the left, set the box down in front of it, rang the bell, and stepped back through the portal before it closed behind him.
Whatever happened next was someone else's story.
He was still thinking about it when a Honchkrow — one of his roof patrol units — landed on his shoulder and clicked its beak twice. The roommates were back. Ahead of schedule, and with a third person in tow.
James was in the vault.
He grabbed the nearest Omnitrix he trusted — Mad Ben's, currently his most reliable — snapped it onto his wrist, scrolled the dial to Ghostfreak, and pressed the faceplate down gently. The transformation came in a flash of orange light that faded to reveal pale spectral limbs and a single orange eye looking out from a face that was mostly translucent.
He turned invisible. Turned intangible. Phased upward through three floors of reinforced concrete and emerged in his bathroom, solidifying just as the front door opened below.
He tapped the faceplate. The Omnitrix made its timeout sound and the orange flash came and went, leaving James standing in his bathroom in his regular clothes, tugging his sleeve down over his wrist just as his bedroom door opened.
"James? That you? What's all the noise?"
Steve appeared in the doorway, scanning the room with the mild suspicion of someone who had been his friend long enough to know something was always going on.
"Yeah, sorry," James said, stepping out with his phone held up. On the screen, an Omnitrix simulator app was running — bright graphics, transformation animations, the works. "Got a little carried away with this."
Steve stared at the phone, then at him. "Bro. You're in college."
"And?"
"And you're playing with a kids' app."
"The graphics are genuinely impressive," James said, with complete sincerity. "You should try it."
Steve gave the phone one more look of theatrical disapproval, then dropped his bag into the desk chair. "I have papers to read."
"Sure," James said. "Someday."
"Yeah. Someday." Steve was already pulling out a binder.
James sat on the edge of his bed and looked back down at his phone.
Someday, he thought.
Elsewhere
Freddy Mentrout had not had an easy decade.
A bachelor's in psychology had seemed like the foundation for something respectable. The reality had been years of odd jobs, each one smaller than the last, until a contact passed his name to a new outfit — a well-funded operation operating outside the attention of anyone who mattered — and they'd offered him work that paid generously for someone willing to extract information from people who didn't want to give it.
The first time, he'd vomited everything in his stomach and hadn't slept for three nights.
By the end of the first month, the nausea was gone. By the end of the first year, he had a reputation on the dark web and a growing list of private contracts. It was not the life he had planned. It was the life he had. And over time, he had developed something genuine from it — not pride exactly, but expertise. A deep and functional understanding of fear: what it felt like in the body, how it moved through a person, how to locate it and apply pressure to exactly the right place.
Very little surprised him anymore.
So when he woke at two in the morning to find a yellow ring floating at the foot of his bed, his reaction was less terror and more the careful, flat attention of a man who had learned to process unusual things before reacting to them.
The ring spoke.
"Freddy Mentrout. You have been chosen as a member of the Sinestro Corps. Your understanding of fear — not merely as a sensation but as a tool — makes you worthy to wield its power. Will you accept?"
Freddy looked at it for a long moment. Then he sat up, rubbed his face, and considered the situation with the same methodical calm he brought to everything.
He detected no deception in it. No malicious intent he could read. Whatever this thing was, it believed what it was saying.
He extended his right hand. The ring settled onto his middle finger as though it had always belonged there.
What followed was not pain. It was something closer to the opposite — a wave of energy so vast and clean and consuming that the word euphoria didn't quite reach it. It filled every part of him and kept going, and for a full minute Freddy Mentrout sat on the edge of his bed and felt something he hadn't felt since he was a young man with plans.
When it passed, he flexed his fingers slowly and looked at the ring.
He had questions. Many of them. But the first and most pressing one had already taken shape at the back of his mind, quiet and certain and pointed in a specific direction.
Where did you come from?
A slow smile crossed his face.
This, he thought, is going to be very interesting.