For the first time since arriving in this void of whirling stars and endless cosmic expanse, Jay's eyes widened in genuine shock.
The wheel had finally stopped. And what it had landed on left him speechless.
Slowly, Jay turned toward Rob. His stare locked onto the being, flat and unreadable on the surface, yet carrying a storm of emotions beneath it. Disbelief. Confusion. Suspicion. A dozen questions, and perhaps a few accusations.
For a moment, he didn't even know where to begin. There were simply too many things wrong with what he had just seen.
He paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts before finally voicing the first question that came to mind. "Why are there world crossovers?"
Rob fell silent. For a second, he seemed almost reluctant to answer.
"That's... the rules."
Jay stared at him. A long, uncomfortable silence followed.
Then, with a perfectly flat expression, he asked, "Who makes the rules?"
Rob opened his mouth, paused, and closed it again.
Jay's eyes narrowed. "Rob."
"The rules make the rules."
Another silence. Jay continued staring. Rob shifted awkwardly under the gaze.
"That is somehow the dumbest thing you've said since I got here."
"The rules don't appreciate being called dumb."
Jay blinked. "The rules can hear us?"
"No."
"Then how do they know when they're being insulted?"
"They just do."
Jay slowly rubbed a hand over his face. Every answer somehow created three new questions.
By now, Jay was beginning to think Rob was insane. The erasure felt too deliberate to be accidental, and the more he listened to these so-called rules, the more hollow they sounded. It was like a script someone had written to keep him compliant.
He reined in his temper before it could get away from him, redirecting the heat into something more useful.
The Marvel universe alone was dangerous enough to warrant a respin. Cosmic threats, reality-warpers, gods with anger issues. Surviving any one of those settings was already a long shot.
But Marvel and DC folded into the same reality? That was basically a death sentence dressed up as one.
And those were just two of the four.
His survival instincts didn't ease in gradually; they snapped on all at once, sharp and urgent, cataloguing threats before he'd even consciously decided to start.
A fusion of four universes meant the rules of physics, magic, and power scaling wouldn't just be complicated. They'd be unstable. Unpredictable in the worst possible ways.
"How would the fusion even work?" Jay asked, dreading the answer but not ready to discard the proposition until he understood exactly what he was walking into.
Rob cleared his throat. "The first two worlds are the foundation. Think of the other two as seasoning, enough to matter, not enough to overwhelm."
It did nothing to relax him.
Jay spent several minutes in silence, turning the decision over from every angle. His options were straightforward enough: accept the world as given and leverage his meta-knowledge to carve out an advantage depending on the timeline, or respin and gamble on landing somewhere he knew even less about. Neither option was clean.
He could feel Rob's gaze pressing into the side of his head like a thumb on a bruise, wordlessly urging him to hurry up. Finally, he let out a slow breath.
"Fine," Jay said.
He accepted. It wasn't confidence, not exactly. It was more of a calculated gamble.
He knew the Marvel and DC universes well enough, and his familiarity with Invincible and Ben 10 filled in most of the remaining gaps.
As dangerous as the fusion was, it wasn't a leap into complete darkness. There were risks, certainly, but there would be risks no matter what world the wheel landed on.
At least here, he had knowledge he could leverage. And he still had the ability spin. With how high-level his destination was, he had to get something good, right? He could only hope.
Rob snapped his fingers. The wheel disappeared, replaced by another. Same design, but with a whole different feel to it.
Like before, Jay wasted no time. He walked up to it, gripped the giant lever, and yanked it back hard, sending the wheel into motion. It spun fast, too fast to read, just a blur of color and text bleeding into each other. But as it slowed, the words began to take shape.
Jay stared at the spinning wheel and couldn't help but blink in sheer astonishment. Rob wasn't joking.
The wheel blurred past entry after entry, each one more absurd than the last. He caught glimpses as they flew by: Uchiha Bloodline, One For All, Magic Grimoire, The Force, Ten Shadows Technique, Null Magic, Witch Factor, The Death Note, Wisdom King Raphael, Ruler's Authority, Tier Magic, Energy Bending, Spear of Longinus, and those were just the ones he could actually read before they were gone again.
He didn't even want to think about what he was missing in the blur. Literally anything. The man had meant literally anything.
The wheel began to slow, crawling past a Chaos Emerald entry, then crept over The Book of Souls, and finally, mercifully, clicked to a stop.
[The Omnitrix]
Jay blinked, genuinely stunned.
Then his mind shifted gears almost immediately, already pulling apart every angle of what the Omnitrix meant for where he was going.
The Omnitrix. Of all the things on that wheel, of all the cosmic artifacts, forbidden techniques, and reality-bending abilities he'd glimpsed in that spinning blur, he'd landed on the one thing that was arguably the most rounded pick he could have landed on.
Jay turned it over in his mind methodically.
The Omnitrix wasn't just a weapon. It wasn't just a transformation device.
It was a genetic library containing the DNA of hundreds of thousands of species from across the universe, each one a different toolkit for a different problem. Need raw strength? There were options.
Need to think his way out of something? More options. Stealth, speed, size manipulation, energy projection, biological adaptation to any environment? Options.
In a fused world where the rules of power scaling had been thrown into a blender, that kind of flexibility was beyond useful.
The wheel disappeared, leaving only Jay and Rob in the void once more.
"Let's wrap this up," Rob said, impatience lacing his tone. "Name your modifications."
Jay nodded, but before proceeding, he had a few important questions he needed answered before making any modifications. "I have a few questions."
"Of course you would," Rob said, sighing heavily before signaling for Jay to continue with a hand gesture.
"The wheel just said Omnitrix, not which version. Does that mean I'm getting one with the combined functions of every variant?"
Rob paused for a second, as if the idea hadn't even crossed his mind, before finally nodding. "Yes, but you won't have access to all the functions from the start."
Jay smiled. Sure, not everything would be available right away, but as long as it would be eventually, he didn't mind. He wasn't looking to be overpowered from day one. That would just get boring fast.
"Now, what modifications would you like to make?" Rob said, urging him on.
Jay took a few seconds, running through ideas and picking them apart at a rapid pace. No more than five seconds passed before he settled on his first choice.
"I want to be the Omnitrix," Jay said, shifting his gaze to Rob to gauge whether it was even possible.
Rob said nothing. He just stared at him with a deadpan expression.
Only then did Jay realize he hadn't given the full context of what he meant. He'd expected Rob to simply understand, not for it to need an explanation.
"I mean, I want the Omnitrix to be an innate ability. The watch would just be a physical manifestation of that ability..." Jay made sure not to miss a single detail, emphasizing that the Omnitrix's functions would still remain in full effect, failsafes and all.
By the time Jay finished speaking, Rob's face had gone completely ashen.
"Next one," Rob said, his tone making it obvious he couldn't wait to be rid of Jay.
"I want to be capable of transforming into alien creatures and lifeforms from across all of fiction."
Rob didn't look surprised this time around, as if he had already expected him to say something along those lines. He nodded. "Understood."
"Now please state the last thing you want."
Jay didn't hesitate. He already knew exactly what he wanted.
"The Omnitrix. My ability exists beyond external influence. It cannot be copied, suppressed, blocked, absorbed, stolen, or altered, regardless of who is trying."
"Fine. If that's everything, I'll send you on your way," Rob said as he raised his hands, his fingers already beginning to move toward a snap.
Jay's eyes widened immediately.
"What? Wait!" he exclaimed. "I still have questions!"
There was still far too much he didn't know. He needed details about his reincarnation, where he would be born, who he would become, whether he would retain his memories from the beginning, and countless other things that suddenly felt far more important now that the process was actually about to begin.
His mind raced as he tried to decide which question to ask first, but before he could get a single word out, Rob's fingers came together.
The snap echoed throughout the void, and in that instant, Jay felt his consciousness violently torn from this plane beyond existence.
The sea of stars vanished from sight, the endless cosmic expanse collapsed into darkness, and the last thing he saw was Rob's thoroughly relieved expression before everything disappeared.
Then there was nothing.