For the first time in weeks, Brendon woke up and didn't immediately feel the weight of a war on his chest.
No lab to dismantle.
No mercenary to intercept.
No corporate empire snapping at his heels.
Just quiet.
The Pause
He let himself drift. Slept in, for once. Ate takeout straight from the box. Wandered the city with no destination, just another face in the crowd. Even Alicia commented that she barely recognized him without the lines of tension in his jaw.
"You look… human again," she said with a smirk one afternoon, tossing him a soda across the couch.
He caught it clumsily. "Don't get used to it."
But for two whole days, he tried.
No armor.
No schematics.
No plans.
Just Brendon existing, watching the world move without him steering every piece.
And in that stillness, he realized how tightly wound he'd been. High strung for the better part of a month, sprinting without stopping. If he'd kept going, he would've burned out.
The pause wasn't weakness. It was sharpening the blade.
The Spark
On the third day, sitting on his workshop balcony while the city hummed below, the idea struck him.
He'd been building machines. Fixing problems. But that wasn't enough.
One person — even armed with the Omnitrix — was still just one person.
What if he built people?
Not soldiers. Not vigilantes. A community. A hub for minds that didn't fit into the neat molds the world tried to jam them into.
Students. Tinkerers. Dreamers. The overlooked and the underfed, the kids who sketched engines in the margins of their math homework or wrote theories no teacher would bother to read.
People like him.
The thought lit a fire in his chest that Hammer's war never had.
The Renaissance
The announcement came the next day.
A livestream broadcasted from his company's official channels, his face sharp and serious against a backdrop of neon-light schematics.
"The world has stagnated," Brendon said, voice steady, every word measured. "We chase profit instead of progress. We fight over scraps when we could be building futures. That ends here."
He leaned forward, letting the weight of his words settle.
"This is not about me. It's about us. A renaissance — a rebirth. A community for anyone who dares to dream, to create, to push forward."
He laid it out: a compound being built on the outskirts of New York. Secure, sustainable, future-ready. Close enough to the city to tap into its lifeblood, far enough to withstand another alien skyfall if the Chitauri ever tried round two.
He didn't sugarcoat it. Membership would not be easy. "There's no test of what you can build or prove. The only test is your hunger. Your drive to push a field forward — any field. Science. Art. Medicine. Engineering. The community will not judge what you can do, but how far you want to go."
The Platform
Then came the hook.
A new app, sleek and minimalist — half Instagram, half forum. Brendon unveiled it with a swipe of his hand.
Every applicant would have a profile, a feed, and access to a community channel: a live countdown, discussion boards, and streams where Brendon himself would appear in the weeks leading up to the launch.
"This is not just an announcement," he told the viewers. "This is an invitation."
Applications opened immediately.
Countdown
One month.
Thirty days for the world to hear the call, for dreamers and outliers to rally to the spark he'd lit.
In that time, he'd refine the compound, polish the app, and prepare to sift through the flood of applicants.
Brendon ended the livestream with a single line:
"The world doesn't need heroes. It needs builders. Let's start building."
The feed cut, leaving his face frozen in determination across a thousand screens.
And in the silence after, Alicia shook her head, half in disbelief, half in admiration.
"You really don't do anything halfway, do you?"
Brendon cracked a rare smile. "Not when it matters."