Letās get into some Ben 51 angst today lads, and hopefully little meās cruelty is watered down and given decent explanation. Oh itās still definitely cruel but probably not mindless.
Firstly, letās set the situation, the tech-xperts of the facility rigged up a cheap Omnitrix controller. Itās not the highest quality, but itās relatively bug free. Unfortunately it requires a receiver. How is this unfortunate? Because the Omnitrix has retreated into Benās systems. This means an embedded receiver, hard to remove and easily adaptable, needed to be installed.
As a collar.
The Omnitrix is never put into rest mode so it can help be Benās life support system, and while that does mean he gives off an energy signature at all times, it reduces the signature of his transformations. This I believe is because thereās a degree of separation between canon Ben and the Omnitrix that the alien forms are kept at their peak.
Ben 51, who would be energy deficient, canāt afford to be peak performance nor without the support, so the Omnitrix is less effective at its peak than canon.
SO! Moving on to the specifies, Benās stay at Area 51 consists of 3 rotating activities with varying times and lengths. Starting off we have the Isolation stage. As it implies, this āactivityā as Ben calls it out of sarcastic boredom has him spending a nonspecific but long duration of time in his claustrophobic cell.
However, thatās not the main event. This is a chance for the faculty to observe Benās behaviour... without invasive intervention, relatively speaking. During the isolation period, the Omnitrix remote is set to random selection, changing Ben into a different alien every time. He used to constantly try to escape, using the abilities he had as an alien to find any weaknesses, but he only accidentally helped Area 51 develop better tech to keep him in.
How did they stop him?
Well, the collar is not only a receiver, but a ādisciplinary toolā (read: shock collar).
So, overall, Ben doesnāt try to use his Isolation activity as a time to escape. Unless he randomly unlocks a new alien. Which finally worked when he got Alien X, who he would probably name Freyd (based on freed and frayed, yeah I know, on the nose and everything, but itās BEN) after how Bellicus and Serena are named.
But Iām getting ahead of myself.
The second activity is the most energetic, Physicals! And by energetic, I ACTUALLY mean life threatening, because unlike PE at schools, this little activity is designed to find physical weaknesses of Benās alien selection.
What this involves typically are either battle scenarios or environmental scenarios, depending on what the suits up top wanna test. This isnāt meant to train Ben to be better, this is meant as a test for any tech the science team have developed, before sending them off to any dispatch team for on field use. Of course, they canāt just kill Ben, thatāll leave them with highly inefficient leftover alien test subjects, who have less chance of survival than Ben.
Needless to say, quite horrific.
New aliens get subjected to nonspecialised but definitely dangerous bots and environments, and the longer this goes for, the longer Ben refuses to play along. Of course, heās ādisciplinedā into doing as heās told eventually.
Freyd was spared of the experiment, but itās not like they could ever begin to try.
Last but not least, the Medicals! Probably the most gruesome, so proceed with caution, this sounds exactly like it does on the tin. This is the activity that Ben spends the least awake out of all 3, and at least thereās enough mercy to do so. Sure, Area 51 is cruel and inhumane (or perhaps the term should be xenophobic) but at least logistically, it would be a detriment for them to do live surgery.
Unfortunately, aliens have quite the different biology in comparison to humans, so sometimes the types and dosages of anaesthetics donāt... exactly... last through the dissection.
New aliens may have this issue, especially species with wildly different physiology to humans and even other aliens. Ben canāt count on his fingers how many times heās awoken to glaring fluorescent lights and bloodstained silhouettes, but he canāt exactly list an exact number either. But heās definitely got some bad memories about that, and knows a little more about alien biology that canon Ben does.
Whenever heās Big Chill, using a more gender neutral name Ava (lanche), he mourns.
And feel free to beat me until Iām blue for that one this addition wasnāt even on baby meās mind this is recent angst laddies!
In Benās escape, however, does he accidentally leave behind a treat for Area 51ās medical and biological staff. Having violently removed the embedded collar, the hidden tracker less effective if itās taken out before teleporting, the faculty of Area 51 now have a sample of a Celestialsapien.
The missing chunk of Freydās neck.
With that piece of DNA.
They are now one step closer to capturing a God.
