Ben lay in his bed stunned; he’d actually been awake and
aware that something...unusual was a foot well before any of his team mates,
but he’d never gotten a chance to raise any kind of alarm...
----
Earlier, just after midnight...
----
“Ben, wake up”
As his mind slowly rose to consciousness, his head still apparently
stuffed with cotton wool, he was aware that whoever was speaking had been saying
the exact same thing over and over for some time, seemingly stuck on a kind of mental
loop. The voice itself he didn’t recognise, it had a coarse, raspy quality too
it, and yet there was something...
“Ben, wake up”
“I’m up, am up...”Ben growled/slurred, prying his eyes open
and swinging them over to the source of the voice. Whoever it was, was standing
over on the far side of the room looking into his mirror (god how he hated that
mirror...but there was no use going out with smuts all over him) but he could
only make them out in silhouette, as the only light source in the room was over
the mirror itself; however the sheer size and bulk of that silhouette should
have been enough to set off the alarm bells in his head...and yet they were silent,
some deep instinctive part of him KNOWING there was no threat here, despite the
seeming stranger in his room...
Of course those self same alarms began to BLARE as he hauled
himself from his bed; his weight was wrong, his height was wrong, his centre of
balance was off, his BODY was wrong... the unaccountable discrepancies throwing
him off and even rising nausea...
Rather than stopping, Ben locked his eyes on and stumbled towards
the large shadow in front of the mirror, some strangely...protective urge
driving him on, but then his eyes slid past the figure locking on his own
reflection, and he suddenly became light headed...
The first thing to strike him was...he was HUMAN...Oh, God
he was human...no more MONSTER seemingly made up of a pile of orange rubble...the
second thing was that he wasn’t Ben Grimm...
Ben hadn’t ever exactly been an oil painting, but who ever
this was staring back in the mirror was someone whose looks would cause little old
ladies to cross the street and little kids to piss themselves in terror...
He was bald as an egg, with heavy looming brows, and he’d
put on at least two foot in height, making him about 8ft tall, but he was also
almost comically broad turning him into a huge, looming presence whether he
liked it or not...his face seemed to be made up mostly of scars and pock marks,
one massive one in particular bisected his head right to left, running from the
back of his scalp, across his face, through his badly set nose (which had obviously
been smashed so often it was now almost flat and spread across his face) across
his cheek (which drew back his lip, into a kind of unpleasant, permanent half
smirk) and down his jaw line...
But if possible it was his body that was worst, it was in some
way almost deformed with muscle...there was no symmetry or lines too it, just muscle
bulging everywhere, seemingly on the verge of bursting, different muscle group
unevenly developed...thick knotted cords of sinew straining against too tight skin...it
was like the ultimate advisement for the consequences of steroid abuse...and
hanging between his legs almost it his knees, like the fever dream of some deranged
porn director, or a hideously deformed snake was his...literally... monstrous
cock; as thick around as a coke can, it’s head almost the size of a grown man’s
clenched fist and backed up by balls the size of large goose eggs...it looked
less like a part of his body and more like a weapon intend to inflict damage...
As he’d been taking this all in, he’d continued, dazed to
move towards the mirror; having no reached it, he turned to look at who had
first called him over...