Part 3 — Escape
Chapter 2
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Chromastone turned his single eye toward the warehouse window and studied his own reflection.
The figure looking back was humanoid but nothing close to human — indigo crystal from the neck down, the dark lines running through the body like fault lines in stone, the magenta of the hands and face the only color that broke the pattern. Six shards rose from the back in descending pairs, the topmost nearly as tall as the head above them. The single green eye at the center of the face was alert and clear, and it watched the reflection with the focused attention of someone trying to understand a tool they'd just been handed.
He flexed his fingers slowly, feeling the joints move, the crystalline surface catching the gray light from the upper windows. Then he closed the hand into a fist.
Solid. The grip felt solid.
He walked to the nearest wooden crate — a large one, the kind that two people would need to coordinate to lift — and picked it up with one hand. The weight registered, but only as information, not effort. He set it down and looked around the warehouse floor until he found what he was looking for: a loading crate in the far corner, industrial size, the kind that required equipment to move.
He got both hands under it and lifted.
It came up a few feet before the resistance became real, before the crystalline arms reached the edge of what they could manage, and he set it back down without forcing it.
Not as strong as Four Arms. He made the note internally, settled it into the growing catalog he kept of the roster's limitations and capabilities. Strength was present but not the primary feature. That ruled out one category.
He stood in the middle of the warehouse floor and considered the question methodically.
The training process had taught him to approach each new form the same way — work through the list before assuming anything. Strength. Speed. Durability. Senses. Range. And then whatever the form was hiding, because they were all hiding something. Four Arms had been straightforward: strength and durability, a form built entirely around physical presence. Wildmutt had inverted that completely — speed and sensory range, nothing you could see coming until it was already past you. Swampfire and Big Chill both had layers that had taken time to surface, abilities that didn't announce themselves until the situation demanded them.
Chromastone's category was still open.
The window latch clicked.
Gwen came through first, pulling herself over the sill with the practiced ease of someone who had done this enough times that it no longer required thought. She was still in her school clothes — blue sweater, black skirt, leggings — her bag over one shoulder. Kevin followed, dropping to the warehouse floor in a black short-sleeve shirt and jeans, landing with a thud he didn't bother softening.
They both looked at Chromastone standing in the middle of the empty floor.
Neither of them reacted with anything more than mild interest.
That was the product of time and repetition. The Omnitrix faceplate was visible on the chest regardless of the form, and after two years of training sessions in places like this one, Gwen and Kevin had long since stopped being startled by what they found when they arrived. They read the faceplate the way someone reads a name tag and moved on.
Kevin walked over, looked Chromastone up and down with the appraising expression of someone evaluating construction quality, then moved around to the back. He tapped one of the shards twice with two knuckles.
"Huh." He came back around front. "Pretty solid." He looked up at the single green eye. "What's this one called?"
Chromastone had been perfectly still during the inspection. "Chromastone."
Kevin rolled the name around for a moment, his mouth moving slightly like he was testing the sound of it. Then he nodded, the corner of his mouth going up. "I like it. What's he do?"
"Still working that out."
Gwen had found a crate at the edge of the space and made it her workstation. She unzipped her bag, produced a small rechargeable lamp, set it on a taller crate beside her, and clicked it on. The warm light spread across her section of the warehouse floor. She pulled out her textbooks, crossed her legs, and without looking up said, "Did you finish the Wildmutt ability training?"
"Yeah," Chromastone said. "No hidden abilities. What you see is what you get — speed, sensory range, ground tracking. Nothing underneath."
She turned a page. "So how are you planning to figure out this one?"
Kevin was already crouching at the warehouse floor, pressing his palm flat against the concrete. "Old way," he said. "Hit him until something interesting happens."
The change moved up through him from the point of contact. The concrete's properties traveled through his skin and across his body in a gradual, visible process — his arms first, then his torso, then his legs, the surface of him roughening and darkening as the material took hold. What emerged was dense and textured, a full-body coating of earthen matter that turned his silhouette jagged at the edges, brownish-gray plates forming over his clothes with the irregular geometry of broken rock. His hands were the most changed, the fingers thickened, the knuckles pronounced, the whole shape of them capable of morphing further if he chose — clubs, spikes, whatever the situation called for.
He straightened up and rolled his neck once, the stone plates shifting against each other with a low grinding sound.
Chromastone looked at him.
"Your powers are even weirder than mine."
Kevin grinned, which looked strange on a face covered in rock. "You get used to it."
He had always known what he was. For the first years of his life in Bellwood, living with Ben's family after his mother passed and his father had long since stopped being a presence he could count on, Kevin had been entirely ordinary by every visible measure. No abilities, no sign of anything unusual, nothing that set him apart from any other kid navigating the particular difficulties of his situation.
That had held until a few weeks after they arrived in Gotham, when Ben had decided to let them in — to show them the Omnitrix, to explain what he knew, to stop carrying it alone. Kevin had listened to all of it, and then told them he had something to say as well.
He was half Osmosian. His father had been from off-world, his mother human, and the biology had landed in Kevin without announcing itself until his early teens, when the ability had started making itself known in small ways he hadn't understood at the time. His father had been gone since Kevin was four, but not before sitting him down and having what Kevin called, with the particular flatness he used for things that actually mattered, "the talk."
Osmosians could absorb almost anything — inorganic matter, energy, properties from living beings. His father had been specific about the categories. Matter absorption was safe, reliable, the ability working as designed without side effects. Energy absorption and absorption from living beings were different. There was a cost to those, something that happened on the inside that his father had never fully explained, only named as a danger significant enough to require a promise. Kevin had made the promise at four years old and had kept it across every difficult year since.
He didn't absorb energy. He didn't absorb from living things. He worked with what the ground gave him, what walls gave him, what the material world offered freely, and he had become very effective with it.
Chromastone settled into a stance, weight distributed evenly, the six shards on his back catching the lamplight from Gwen's corner.
Kevin raised both fists and let one hand shift into something broader and heavier, the rock plates consolidating into a surface that was less hand and more weapon.
"Whenever you're ready," Kevin said.
(Author's Note:
For those familiar with the source material, Kevin's backstory in canon and Omniverse takes a darker road , one where the absence of guidance leads to consequences that define him for years. That's a compelling story, but it isn't the one being told here.
This version asks a simpler question: what if someone had been there to explain things before they went wrong? Kevin's father was absent, but not entirely ( not Omniverse bullshit story) he was present long enough for one honest conversation, long enough to name the danger and ask for a promise. Kevin was four years old and he kept it anyway.
That single difference doesn't erase the difficulty of his life. It doesn't replace what he lost or make the years easier. But it means Kevin Levin arrives in Gotham with his ability intact and his conscience clean, which changes what kind of person he gets to be in this story.
Some detours are worth preventing. This is one of them.)