#transylian

This thought mainly came from the idea that it’s generally bizarre to have not only an alien mummy - which connects in a different way than most to the ancient alien trope especially around Egypt - AND a Frankenstein’s monster construct, based on a very independent and specific story written by Mary Shelley in what’s considered to be one of - if not THE - first science fiction novel. The concept of a bipedal wolf alien is hardly odd at all, considering the logical steps that one could evolve in such a way aren’t too high for leaps and bounds, but I suppose also a ghost alien may be a little too out of reach, but the twists that are made towards ectonurites in their function and form made me think of a curious idea.

So what if, within the context of OS, that the only aliens of the Anur team were Zs’Skayr himself and the Werewolf/Yenaldooshi, for I find from both the modern idea of the werewolf and the yee naaldlooshi that the name has been derived from, that the entire concept of Ben shifting from boy to lenopan in a weird error of the watch fits the concept of man-wolves and witches turning into animals. For whatever bullshit that happened for Ghostfreak to dip out of the watch, whether it be some shred of ectonurite DNA finally regaining it’s sentience or perhaps something else, anything directly affecting Ben and the Omnitrix in this instance at least should maybe be alien fuckery, and Ben having another Omnitrix glitch out causing the DNA absorption mode to slowly come into affect (maybe from the damage it sustained) would probably lead to a new alien in the selection.

But what of the others? What of thep khufans and transylians? What do I do now with the existence of the mummy and doctor Viktor himself?

Well, we have other main characters don’t we? We can’t have everything be just about Ben, now can we?

Perhaps I’m looking too far into this, but in the debut episode of the mummy in ‘Under Wraps’, Gwen made the attempt to cast her spells from within the containment suit... failing because of the suit. But that brought up the idea that, within this arc, while Ben faces against a lenopan and ultimately gaining a new skill set, that Gwen may find her arc-based rival in the mummy as a being of ancient magic, born of the funerary practice of ancient Egypt so long ago.\

With some searching, the rituals of ancient Egyptian burial - the mummifying of the body, the grave goods to send across to the afterlife, the casting of spells - were believed to be necessary in ensuring immortality after death. Hah, if you think that’s interesting, just wait until I tell you this! It was believed that, if the bodies were mistreated after death, that the buried would rise again and look who we find walking around playing quest finder to a team of monsters.

The fucking mummy, that’s who!

Now we essentially have the ancient body of a disrespected undead, perhaps a mage themself responsible for casting spells of their own for the funerals of others, of someone who probably was only a mere serf who has found themselves back in the world of the living and come face to face with a man made of other men and women staring back with eyes in the wrong colour. Yes I am back on my Frankenstein bullshit, and yes, I’m making Viktor the modern Adam by some modern Frankenstein fanperon who accidentally found themself with another crime to humanity.

And baby, this lad is now Grandpa Max’s rival of the Ghostfreak arc.

Of course, the visual design of Viktor is very much influenced by the modern and more bumbling beast takes on Frankenstein’s monster, but he also appears - at least pre-reveal - to have taken on the interest of the academic that the original Shelley monster had. And also, maybe the uglier and disjointed Viktor looks correlates to how much the disrespected mummy wants to work with him rather than target specific assholes who shat on their grave or whatever happened (US archeologists do it like the British and fucked over another country’s historical grounds and got a mummy sent on their asses?), but regardless of that, I find it interesting that he has that dynamic between monster and man.

His debut episode, he is very much a doctor who has found his way into the graces of NASA, and that alone could very much parallel Max in the perspective of a human reaching their hand out towards the stars. But if the grand Dr Viktor is a being made of the parts of people very much passed, a created life searching for life outside of the planet and between the expanse of space itself, boy howdy the modern Prometheus has gotten futuristic and DAMN if that isn’t interesting you can fuck right off i’m joking i’m joking i just think this is very cool-

It is also in this episode, that Max and Viktor are both of their team’s ticket to get within NASA and - very much for the latter than the former - get their hands on rather limited Earth developed space tech, even if Dr Viktor and the mummy don’t have experience of otherwise. And on that note, for as much as Viktor may be reaching to discover more about the stars above, it is Max who has known and met more aliens than the constructed man learning the theories and building the tech to reach them, the two - in this context - parallels of the scientist seeking to learn and the front-liner on the field getting first hand experience of intergalactic contact.

But all this comes to ahead with whatever the fuck ectonurites and Zs’Skayr are in comparison to team monster, what is he and what fuckery are his people?

Well, Zs’Skayr is integral to Ben as the alien that never felt his own and made his skin - it’s not his it’s not HIS - crawl whenever he had become Ghostfreak. But with his multiple showings within Omniverse, his significance in association with magic began to spawn and thus, Gwen too gets involved with the schemes of Zs’Skayr, not only from just being occasionally possessed that one time. And reversing back to his reintroduction into the series in UAF as a prisoner kept under watch for crimes unknown to us, but perhaps to Mr ‘top of the board’ galactic police Max Tennyson; dealing with the reincarnated DNA of a ruler of a nation and a criminal of interplanetary degree has never been more Plumber business, but with Zs’Skayr directly impacting on the lives and mental states of his grandchildren, it just got personal.

But what the fuck is up with that? How in the world does Zs’Skayr just do that? To essentially spawn copies of himself from shreds of DNA not just from stored data like the Omnitrix, but from the scattered remains of his ash against the brick and mortar of a preppy... high school? Collage? Whatever it was it was some form of clock tower.

Well, my dear friends, ectonurites are just built like that... because of their exposure to Legerdomain.

How I see it, certain locations within the universe have thinner barriers between dimensions (as actual dimensions and not alternate timelines like Dimension 23) and the thinnest between most planes is within the Forge of Creation, worn thin by the powers of celestialsapiens rather than a naturally fragile veil between realities. On Galvan Prime, for example, there was a veil thin enough for the galvans to discover and experiment with, developing the technology responsible for traversal into the Null Void.

For Legerdomain, a few notable planets have a thinner veil between them and the magical dimension, that being Anodyne, Aldabra and now Anur Phaetos (oh look they all start with ‘a’). The presence of Legerdomain in such proximity is equivalent to UV radiation from the sun, and much like the green grass upon our own planet being the colour suited to reject the majority of Sol’s light, beings like anodites and geochelone aerio have adapted to be filled with mana to the point where they’ve become resistant to the effects of it. In fact, because the veil is thinnest across Anodyne, even breaching the two realities and serving as gateways, anodites have completely converted into energy beings built from the mana itself.

In contrast, ectonurites on Anur Phaetos have become the equivalent of orange/red/magenta grass growing on a planet with an Earth like star, adapting to diametrically oppose mana to take in all of the background mana like a sponge. And akin to UV radiation, mana in such intense is very much a radiation of life energy, and for ectonurites to welcome it with open arms with their anti-mana bodies... well.

You might find that they have more life in them for one person to enjoy...

Between being rather adept with magic should they so try to develop the skills for it and being biologically more welcoming to extraneous life force, a lot of their ghostly powers are the result of mana manipulation in quite the opposite application of anodites, and are magically capable of retaining memories and intelligence in strands of DNA instead of being purely centralised in a brain; possessing one primarily for motor manipulation rather than for sentience. And it is with this intense exposure - what is equivalent - to mana radiation, there is no one form an ectonurite is nor is formed to be.

It is an anomaly to regenerate as one was before, being that the power of regeneration from particles is a form of asexual reproduction were the high presence of mana turns the pieces that used to be you into people entirely new, a planet-wide acknowledgement that - at least to them - reincarnation is very real. It is that anomaly that is why Zs’Skayr is so intrigued by the Omnitrix, because inherent as a machine there is no shred of mana within it, regardless of how much life is stored within it’s database.

The appeal of immortality, of existing as a constantly regenerating being through the use of the Omnitrix, is what led his DNA being gathered and stored within the watch. Though rather unfortunate, the Omnitrix did not end up being simply a DNA storing device as it was planned to be, as a very particular warlord interrupted it’s path towards the Omnitrix’s final and true destination.

And that’s a compilation of what I think might be cool if OS kept with the mutants and magic addition with aliens for I guess a rewritten Ghostfreak arc, with some exploration of ectonurite biology for a bonus, perhaps in some way a series of headcanons I can drag to the more canon settings of the Ben 10 series as a whole. I mean, I certainly am proud of that exploration of anti-mana and the fucked up things it can do to a species’ development, but do tell me what you think of that and my other ideas.