BEN 10: ULTIMATE ALIEN
"Hard Light"
A Fan-Made Episode Script — Written in the style of Dwayne McDuffie
COLD OPEN
EXT. BELLWOOD — CITY HALL PLAZA — 11:14 AM
Bright morning. Hard sun on white stone steps. A farmer's market fills the plaza — tomatoes, flowers, a man selling honey from a cart shaped like a beehive. Ordinary Tuesday with good weather.
Then the fountain in the center of the plaza stops.
Not runs dry. Stops. Mid-arc. The water hangs in the air, frozen, a perfect parabola of suspended droplets catching the sunlight.
Nobody notices for about three seconds.
Then everybody notices.
Then the benches crystallize.
Not shattering — crystallizing, their wooden surfaces converting to a pale, translucent mineral structure from the contact point of the fountain's frozen water outward, spreading slowly, methodically, like frost moving in fast-forward.
The honey cart crystallizes.
The tomatoes crystallize.
The man who was selling honey backs away from his cart and watches it go pale and rigid and permanent.
At the center of all of it, standing in the dry fountain basin, is SILICA.
She looks like she was cut from the same material she's spreading — translucent white-pale crystal, faceted and precise, roughly human in shape but taller, thinner, each movement producing a faint musical chime where her surfaces contact each other. Her eyes are two flat, colorless planes that reflect everything and show nothing.
She isn't attacking.
She's converting.
Everything she touches — or that the water she froze touches — becomes like her.
She looks around the plaza.
At the crystallized ordinary things.
And something in her flat, reflective eyes looks almost like longing.
SILICA
(voice like wind through a glass corridor)
This is better. Everything should be this.
Her hand reaches toward a flower stall.
BEN TENNYSON appears between her hand and the flowers.
BEN
(breathing slightly hard from running — he just got here)
Hey. Let's — let's talk about "everything should be this" before we make it everything.
She looks at him.
At the Ultimatrix.
Her head tilts.
SILICA
(quietly)
Interesting. That contains crystal-based life.
BEN
(carefully)
Among other things, yeah.
SILICA
(reaching past him toward the flowers)
Then you understand. Crystal is permanent. Crystal is perfect. Everything else is—
Ben steps sideways, blocking again.
BEN
Everything else is people's stuff. And those people would like it back.
Her flat eyes settle on him.
Something shifts in them.
Not warmth.
Decision.
SILICA
You will not stop the conversion.
BEN
(hand already on the Ultimatrix)
We'll see.
ACT ONE
He slaps the dial.
[TRANSFORMATION SEQUENCE]
Green flash — white-out — DIAMONDHEAD lands between Silica and the flower stall, pale green crystal catching the morning sun.
BEN (AS DIAMONDHEAD)
(settling into a ready stance)
Diamondhead. Crystal versus crystal. I can work with this.
Silica looks at him.
Studies him.
Her hand extends — not a punch, a touch — fingertips reaching toward his crystalline forearm.
DIAMONDHEAD
(stepping back)
Yeah, I'm going to not let you do that.
He fires a shard-volley — sharp, fast, aimed low to drive her back from the flower stall without the shards contacting anything crystallizable behind her.
She doesn't dodge.
She lets them hit.
The shards strike her torso — and convert. Each pale green Petrosapien shard that contacts her body shifts to her translucent white in under a second, absorbed into her structure, made like her.
DIAMONDHEAD
(staring)
...You just ate my attack.
SILICA
(looking at the converted shards now part of her shoulder)
Crystal recognizes crystal. Yours is simply — incomplete. Unfinished. I can fix that.
She steps toward him.
DIAMONDHEAD
(backing up, thinking fast)
She converts crystal to her type. That means every shard I fire is raw material for her. Direct contact — same problem. I'm fighting someone who gets stronger the more I fight like myself.
Her hand extends again.
Diamondhead sidesteps — and tries a wide arc shard, aiming past her to collapse a section of the empty fountain basin as a barrier between them.
She steps through the rubble.
What the shards touched converts.
The barrier becomes an extension of her.
DIAMONDHEAD
(backing toward the plaza edge)
Okay. Every piece of crystal I put in the field, she owns. Can't use my own material against her.
(grim)
And I can't use anything else. I'm a crystal alien. That's the whole kit.
She closes the distance steadily.
No rush.
She doesn't need to rush.
SILICA
(reaching)
You will be permanent. You will be perfect.
DIAMONDHEAD
(one more step back)
I really won't.
He looks at the Ultimatrix.
Already flickering.
DIAMONDHEAD (CONT'D)
(quiet, working it out)
She converts crystal by contact. She absorbs crystal that's like hers. So the answer isn't more crystal.
His eyes go to the morning sun hitting the plaza stones.
The way light moves through crystal.
The way Silica's entire body is translucent.
DIAMONDHEAD (CONT'D)
(realization, quiet)
The answer is what crystal does that she doesn't control.
He slaps the dial.
[ULTIMATE TRANSFORMATION SEQUENCE]
The Ultimatrix symbol SNAPS open.
Diamondhead's pale green crystal structure doesn't just harden.
It changes color.
Deep crimson red bleeds through his crystal lattice from the Ultimatrix outward, the pale green darkening to a rich, saturated ruby that catches the morning light and refracts it in deep red-orange patterns across the plaza stones. His frame broadens, crystal plating layering over a dark navy underlayer — deep blue-black between the crystal sections like the space between stars. His shoulders erupt in massive spiked crystal formations, each one a different angular length, catching sun from multiple directions at once. His hands extend into multi-fingered crystal claws, faceted at every joint. The Omnitrix symbol settles at the center of his chest in green, the only color on him that isn't red or dark.
He doesn't grow taller.
He grows denser.
Every surface angled precisely.
He stands in the morning sun and the plaza lights up around him in fractured red light — the refraction of his crystal body splitting the sunlight into a thousand directed beams, the geometry of his new form designed not just to be hard but to do something with light.
Silica stares.
BEN (AS ULTIMATE DIAMONDHEAD)
(voice deeper, each word faceted — clear and hard and precise)
Ultimate Diamondhead.
Her flat reflective eyes take him in.
And for the first time, something in them isn't decision.
It's uncertainty.
SILICA
(carefully)
...You are still crystal.
ULTIMATE DIAMONDHEAD
(steady)
Yeah. But now I'm crystal that does something you can't absorb.
ACT TWO
He raises both clawed hands.
Not to fire shards.
To focus.
The morning sun hits his crimson-red crystal plating and the refraction is immediate and total — concentrated beams of split light pouring from every faceted surface, directed, precise, filling the plaza with a grid of focused light that heats the air where it lands.
Not fire.
Photonic concentration.
Light through a lens, but the lens is his entire body.
SILICA
(stepping back from the nearest beam)
Light. You are redirecting—
ULTIMATE DIAMONDHEAD
(walking forward slowly, every step shifting the refraction grid)
You convert crystal. You absorb crystal. You can't absorb light. And my crystal generates more of it the brighter the sun gets.
He takes another step.
The grid shifts, tightens around her position.
SILICA
(moving, finding gaps)
This does not stop the conversion. The plaza is already—
ULTIMATE DIAMONDHEAD
(interrupting, calm)
I know. I'm not trying to stop it yet.
He's herding her.
Step by step, the refraction grid closing off angles, the beams from his shoulder spikes and arm plating redirecting across the plaza stones in overlapping patterns, creating walls of concentrated photonic pressure that she can't walk through without her translucent body refracting them further — her own crystal structure working against her the way his worked against him.
Her body is a lens too.
A lens aimed in every direction at once.
When she steps into the refraction grid, her own crystal scatters the beams unpredictably, overwhelming the directional control of her conversion spread.
SILICA
(stopping, the beams from her own refraction scattering her outward conversion pattern)
I cannot—the spread is—
ULTIMATE DIAMONDHEAD
(gentle)
You convert by touch and contact spread. Scattered light breaks the contact geometry. Your own crystal body is doing it.
He stops walking.
Stands in the center of the plaza.
The refraction grid holds, sustained by the morning sun hitting two hundred perfectly angled crimson facets.
ULTIMATE DIAMONDHEAD (CONT'D)
(quiet)
You can't spread what you can't aim.
ACT THREE
Silica stands in the disrupted grid, her conversion spread broken into random directions, the plaza's crystallization stopped at its current edge.
She looks at her own hands.
At the refracted light scattering from them.
At the farmer's market — crystallized tables, crystallized carts, a crystallized fountain arc — permanent, precise, everything she touched made like her.
Something in her flat, reflective eyes changes.
Not anger.
Something older.
SILICA
(quietly)
It is only better when it spreads.
(beat)
When it is everything.
Ultimate Diamondhead looks at her.
At the crystallized plaza around her.
At the longing in her flat eyes that she doesn't know is longing.
ULTIMATE DIAMONDHEAD
(careful)
You're alone in what you are.
She doesn't answer.
Which is an answer.
ULTIMATE DIAMONDHEAD (CONT'D)
(quiet)
You convert everything around you because the only thing that feels right is when everything is like you.
The refraction grid holds.
Neither of them moves.
SILICA
(barely)
Is that not — reasonable.
ULTIMATE DIAMONDHEAD
(honest)
I get it. I do.
(beat)
But those people's stuff wasn't yours to change.
A very long beat.
The morning sun moves slightly, shifting the grid.
SILICA
(looking at the crystallized honey cart)
Can it be reversed.
Ultimate Diamondhead looks at the cart.
At the plaza.
ULTIMATE DIAMONDHEAD
(honest)
I don't know. That's a question for people smarter than me.
(beat)
But I know it can't be reversed if you keep going.
Silence.
A bee — actual bee, completely unbothered by any of this — lands on the crystallized honey cart.
Looks around.
Flies away.
Silica watches it go.
SILICA
(finally)
...I will stop.
The conversion field — still active at its edges, a faint shimmer in the air at the plaza's perimeter — dims.
Goes out.
The plaza is still crystallized where it already was.
But it stops there.
Plumber vehicles round the plaza entrance, summoned by the conversion alerts flagging across the city grid. Ultimate Diamondhead reverts — green flash — and Ben stands in the morning sun, ordinary and small, the red refraction grid gone, the plaza stones just plaza stones again.
He looks at the crystallized farmer's market.
At the perfect, permanent arc of fountain water hanging in the air.
At the man who used to sell honey, standing at the edge of the plaza, looking at his cart.
Ben walks over to him.
HONEY SELLER
(quiet, staring at the crystallized cart)
...Is it coming back?
BEN
(honest)
We're going to try.
The man nods.
Ben looks at the cart.
At the frozen water arc.
At the crystallized plaza spreading around the fountain basin.
At Silica, now still, being carefully approached by the Plumber team.
He looks at the morning sun.
Still hard and bright.
Completely indifferent to all of it.
BEN (CONT'D)
(quiet, to himself)
Yeah. We're going to try.
TAG SCENE
EXT. BELLWOOD — CITY HALL PLAZA — LATER
The Plumber team has Silica in a careful containment — not a cage, a conversation, two xenobiologists working through translation protocols with her while a third takes readings on the crystallized surfaces.
Ben leans against a non-crystallized column, watching.
Max on comm.
MAX (V.O.)
(filtered)
Petrosapien-adjacent crystalline biology. We've seen traces of her species before — usually on worlds with no other life. They tend to convert their environment because there's nothing else there to convert.
BEN
(watching Silica talk to the xenobiologists)
She'd never been somewhere with people in it before.
MAX (V.O.)
Probably not. The conversion is instinctive. She likely didn't understand it would be a problem.
BEN
(quiet)
She understood when I asked her to stop.
A beat.
MAX (V.O.)
The crystallized surfaces — the Plumber materials team thinks they can reverse most of it. It'll take time.
BEN
(looking at the frozen water arc)
What about that?
MAX (V.O.)
(a beat)
...That one's going to take longer.
Ben looks at the arc.
Water, frozen mid-parabola, catching the morning light.
Actually kind of beautiful.
BEN
(to himself)
Huh.
He pushes off the column.
Walks toward the plaza exit.
Stops.
Looks back at the crystallized farmer's market.
At the frozen arc.
At Silica, talking carefully with the xenobiologists, her flat eyes something almost like attentive.
BEN (CONT'D)
(to nobody, quiet)
Everything permanent and perfect.
He considers that.
BEN (CONT'D)
Sounds exhausting.
He walks away into the morning.
FADE TO BLACK.
END OF EPISODE