The harsh, static hum of the living room television was the last thing he remembered.
He had been sprawled on the worn fabric of his couch, watching Ben 10 for a hit of pure childhood nostalgia, when an unnatural heaviness settled behind his eyes.
It wasn’t standard fatigue—it was a sudden, violent pull, like his consciousness was being ripped out through a narrow valve.
Then came the darkness.
Absolute, suffocating, and terrifyingly silent.
He couldn’t feel his arms.
He couldn’t feel his legs.
Panic flared instantly in his chest, but he couldn’t even draw a breath to scream.
Was he dying?
Was this a stroke?
A coma?
Wake up, he pleaded with himself, thrashing against the paralysis.
Just open your eyes.
Wake up!
With a brutal suddenness, the void shattered.
Sensory overload hit him like a freight train.
The first thing that returned was touch—not the soft plush of his familiar couch, but a bitter, bone-chilling cold pressing against his cheek.
He was lying on his side on a surface so unnaturally smooth it felt like polished ice, yet hard as diamond.
His eyes snapped open.
He wasn’t in his apartment.
He wasn’t in a hospital.
High above him, a vaulted ceiling of seamless, cold-rolled alloy swept out into the shadows, illuminated only by a series of low-hanging, pulse-emitting blue light strips.
Every few seconds, those lights flickered, casting distorted shadows across the towering metal walls surrounding him.
He tried to push himself up, but his limbs felt wrong.
Heavy.
Too thin.
Before he could process the impossible geometry of the room, a white-hot spike of agony drove straight into the center of his brain.
He collapsed back onto the deck plating with a ragged gasp, clutching his temples as his vision burst into blinding white noise.
It felt as though someone were violently shoving a burning iron rod into his skull, dumping gigabytes of raw, terrifying data directly into his neural pathways.
It wasn’t just memories; it was a sensory nightmare.
Complex quantum formulas he had never seen before burned into his mind like branding irons.
Decades of tedious laboratory work, the intricacies of alien biology, star charts of distant galaxies, and a deep, toxic, suffocating resentment toward an individual named Azmuth—all of it crashed into his consciousness at once.
What is this?!
Get out of my head!
he screamed internally, writhes against the agonizing flood.
Holographic schematics flashed across his inner eyelid: genetic codices, energy distributors, phase-shift modules.
He could feel the weight of an alien ego clashing with his own, a storm of memories that belonged to a creature born light-years away from Earth.
For ten agonizing minutes, he lay on the cold metal floor, his body shaking violently, his teeth grinding together so hard he could taste blood.
He lay there, chest heaving, listening to the quiet, rhythmic thrum-thrum-thrum of heavy machinery vibrating through the floor beneath him.
Breathing heavily, he lifted his hands to his face.
They were pale—almost ghostly white.
His fingers were long, slender, and unnaturally delicate.
Trembling, he brought his hand up to touch his hair.
It wasn’t his short, dark crop.
It was silky, smooth, and fell into his eyes in long, stark-white strands.
A few feet away, a puddle of condensation had formed near a drainage grate in the floor.
Heart hammering against his ribs, he dragged himself toward it on his elbows, every muscle in his body protesting.
He leaned over the small pool of water and stared into the reflection.
Pale skin.
Snow-white hair.
And eyes that glowed with a sharp, irate, crimson light.
“No…” he rasped.
The voice was wrong.
It was crisp, melodramatic, and carried an innate edge of arrogant irritation.
“No, this…
this is impossible.”
He knew that face.
He knew those eyes.
“Albedo,” he whispered, the name tasting like lead on his tongue.
He hadn’t just transmigrated.
He had taken over the body of Azmuth’s brilliant, disgraced, and deeply unhinged former assistant.
A cold sweat broke out across his back as the full reality of his situation set in.
He forced himself to look past his reflection and actually analyze his surroundings.
He was trapped in a small, circular holding cell.
The front of the cell wasn’t made of bars, but a thick, shimmering crimson force field that hummed with enough voltage to turn a full-grown Vulpimancer into ash in a fraction of a second.
Beyond the barrier lay a cavernous, dimly lit corridor.
Step…
clank.
Step…
clank.
The heavy, mechanical footsteps echoed down the hallway.
A moment later, a seven-foot-tall automated security droid hovered past his cell.
Its singular, glowing red optic swept across the interior, casting a deadly scanning laser over the floor just inches from where he lay.
This wasn’t just a room.
It was a high-security penal facility designed specifically to contain cosmic-level threats.
Panic roared in his chest, threating to drown out his rational thoughts.
He had no powers.
He was stuck in a fragile, flesh-and-blood body.
He was trapped in a space jail with no weapons, no allies, and no way out.
If the guards realized he wasn’t acting like the original Albedo, or if they decided he was too dangerous to keep alive…
Stop, a voice inside his mind commanded.
It was his own voice, but backed by the hyper-logical, analytical architecture of the Galvan brain he now inhabited.
Panic is an emotional waste of energy.
Panic is human.
And right now, you possess one of the sharpest scientific intellects in the known universe.
He forced his racing heart to slow down, taking deep, measured breaths through his nose.
He closed his eyes, leaning back against the cold wall, and began to rifle through the vast ocean of knowledge now stored inside his head.
Albedo’s memories were a goldmine.
The alien didn’t just know how to build devices; he understood energy physics, structural engineering, and security algorithms better than almost anyone in the galaxy.
He opened his eyes, his crimson gaze sharp and focused.
The fear hadn’t vanished, but it was now tightly chained beneath cold, calculated logic.
He sat completely still for the next two hours, observing the corridor.
He didn’t move a muscle.
He tracked the patrol droids, timing their sweeps down to the millisecond.
He listened to the hum of the energy barrier, identifying a faint, periodic microsecond dip in power whenever the corridor’s primary ventilation system cycled.
Most importantly, he noticed a tiny, loose piece of copper wiring sticking out from the base of the cell’s internal bench—a leftover flaw from a past inmate’s crude attempt at sabotage.
“They think I’m a broken prisoner,” he murmured, a slow, dangerous smile touching his lips as he carefully worked the copper wire free with his fingernails.
“They have no idea who is sitting in this cell.”
He didn’t have his original body, and he certainly didn’t have a peaceful life anymore.
But as he gripped the tiny piece of wire, feeling the sharp cold metal against his skin, a strange, thrilling sensation settled in his chest.
He was Albedo now.
And he was going to break out of this nightmare.