Chapter Text
UNIVERSE ONE: DIN (the Dark Iris Nights) — Batman register
No spandex here. Midoriya builds the Omnitrix at nineteen in a condemned engineering annex under Musutafu, three years after a villain wearing his own face burned the district to ash and walked away laughing. He doesn't wear it to be a hero. He wears it because he stopped trusting anyone else to be one.
Cold open:
Rain came down like static, and Midoriya crouched on the lip of the Hosu overpass with the dial cold against his wrist, watching a woman get walked toward a car she wasn't getting out of.
He didn't transform. Not yet. The Omnitrix wasn't a costume. It was a confession he hadn't finished writing.
One conversion, he thought. One body that isn't mine, doing the thing I don't have the stomach to do as myself.
He slapped the dial down.
The alien that came up was wrong in the way a scalpel is wrong — patient, silver, built entirely out of angles. Four of the six men on the overpass ran. The fifth swung a bat and found out what a joint looks like when it bends the direction it was never supposed to.
The sixth just stood there, and said, "Deku?"
Nobody had called him that in three years. Midoriya — inside four hundred pounds of borrowed alien architecture — went very still.
"You're supposed to be dead," the man said, and smiled with too many teeth, and Midoriya understood, with the slow horror of a diagnosis, that he was looking at himself.
UNIVERSE TWO: AXIOM — Iron Man register
Here, Midoriya isn't hiding. He's branding. Twenty-six years old, majority stakeholder of Axiom Dynamics, and the Omnitrix is the prototype he unveils at a press conference instead of a product line, because he built it to save his own life and decided the world could have the leftovers.
Cold open:
"You're telling three hundred journalists," said his CFO, in the tone of a man watching a building fall in slow motion, "that the watch on your wrist can turn you into ten different alien species."
"Eleven, as of Tuesday," Midoriya said, adjusting his cufflink. "I found a new one in the sample data. Looks like a jellyfish. Punches like a freight train."
"And you're doing this live."
"Sponsors love a live demo."
The lights came up. Flashbulbs went off like small-arms fire. Midoriya smiled the smile that had sold four IPOs, held up his arm, and said, "Good evening. My name is Izuku Midoriya, and six months ago I was told I had eleven weeks to live. I'd like to show you what I did instead of dying."
He turned the dial. The stage went green, then white, then silent, and when the light cleared there was something eight feet tall standing where a CEO used to be, and the room didn't scream so much as inhale, all at once, like the whole species had been holding its breath since the invention of fire.
UNIVERSE THREE: THE LONG DIAL — Doctor Who register
No origin here — that's the joke. This Midoriya has always had the Omnitrix, the way the Doctor has always had the TARDIS, and every "first appearance" is a lie he tells a new companion to make himself sound explicable.
Cold open:
"Okay," said Ochako, arms crossed, standing in what was unmistakably the inside of a green wristwatch that was somehow the size of a cathedral, "you're going to tell me this is normal."
"Bigger on the inside is extremely normal," Midoriya said, spinning a dial the size of a dinner plate with both hands. "What's not normal is that we've landed four hundred years too early and there's a version of me down there who's already met you, and he's — hang on—" He squinted at a screen made of dripping light. "Oh no."
"What?"
"He's evil."
"There's an evil you?"
"There's a lot of me," Midoriya said, with the weary cheer of a man who had explained this exact fact roughly nine hundred times across nine hundred different faces. "Most of them turned out fine. Statistically. Coat?"
He was already halfway into a very long scarf.
THE CONVERGENCE: "THE STUCK DIAL"
The crossover isn't a team-up. It's a malfunction. All three Omnitrixes are the same object, refracted — and something in the DIN universe's device cracks during a fight, bleeding a signal across realities that every other dial answers. One by one, the dials jam. Transformations stop clearing. The forms won't shut off, won't switch, won't let go — three Midoriyas trapped inside power they can't put down, at the exact moment their worst-case selves start climbing out of the static to meet them.
Excerpt — the three meet:
The DIN version came through first, soaked, favoring a leg that wasn't healing right, and the alien skin under his coat hadn't gone human in six hours. He looked at the man in the three-thousand-dollar jacket and the boy wrapped in a scarf like a question mark, and said, flatly, "Which one of you is stuck as the four-armed one."
"Nobody yet," said Axiom-Midoriya, checking a readout stitched into his own sleeve. "Give it time."
"I've met time," said the scarf boy. "Time's not going to help."
"You're both me," DIN-Midoriya said. It wasn't a question. His voice had the flat control of a man used to being disbelieved and not caring.
"So are you," said Axiom-Midoriya. "Which means we're the only three people in every universe who know exactly how bad this is about to get. So let's stop being polite about it."
Behind them, in the dark past the treeline, something with Midoriya's exact walk stepped out of the rain, dial gleaming, and did not say hello.
The idea for the counterparts: each hero's evil double isn't a mustache-twirling opposite — it's the thing that version of Midoriya was one bad night from becoming. DIN's counterpart is what happens if the detective stops drawing a line at killing. Axiom's is what happens if the mogul stops pretending the tech is for anyone but himself. The Doctor Who one's is the most frightening: a Midoriya who's lived so many lives across so many timelines that he's stopped believing any single one — including the ones standing in front of him — actually matters.
The climax hinges on the one thing none of the doubles have: three different Midoriyas choosing each other over their own dial. The evil counterparts are alone, even together. The real ones aren't.