The first time it happened, Max told himself it was curiosity.
The Omnitrix had recharged sometime around 6 AM—he knew because the soft green pulse from the bunk area changed frequency, shifting from the slow, dormant rhythm it had maintained all night to something brighter, more active. More awake.
He knew because Gwen was awake three seconds later.
Max had been at the small kitchenette, preparing breakfast. Not his usual fare—he'd made a tactical decision to go conventional this morning. Normal eggs. Normal toast. Normal orange juice. The kids had been through enough without adding marinated grasshopper omelets to their list of traumas.
He heard the bunk creak. Heard bare feet hit the floor. Heard the soft, rapid pad-pad-pad of a ten-year-old girl moving with purpose.
"Gwen," he said, without turning around. "What did we talk about last night?"
Silence. The footsteps stopped.
"...Not to activate the watch without discussing it first," Gwen recited, in the tone of a student repeating a lesson they fundamentally disagreed with.
"That's right."
"But it's recharged now."
"I'm aware."
"So we could discuss it. Right now. And then I could—"
"After breakfast."
"But—"
"After breakfast, Gwen."
Max turned around. His granddaughter stood in the narrow corridor of the Rust Bucket, still in her pajamas—a set covered in little cartoon cats that seemed deeply incongruous with the conversation they were having. Her hair was mussed from sleep, or from the lack of it. There were shadows under her eyes that told Max she'd spent most of the night staring at the ceiling. Or, more likely, staring at the Omnitrix.
Her left hand was cradling the device against her stomach. Not reaching for the dial. Just... holding it. Like a security blanket.
"Where's Ben?" she asked.
"Still sleeping."
"Is he okay?"
"He's sleeping, Gwen. In the bunk directly above where you were sleeping. You would have heard if something happened."
"But is he warm enough? The nights get cold out here, and his blanket looked thin, and—"
"Gwen."
She stopped. Blinked. That look crossed her face again—the one Max had seen last night. The brief flicker of self-awareness, of a girl recognizing that her own thoughts didn't quite belong to her, followed immediately by the thoughts reasserting themselves with cheerful, bulldozing certainty.
"I just want to make sure he's comfortable," she said, as if this were the most reasonable thing in the world. As if obsessive concern for a cousin she'd spent the last three years treating like a mildly irritating insect were perfectly normal behavior for a Wednesday morning.
"Eat your eggs," Max said.
Breakfast was a tense affair.
Ben stumbled out of the bunk area at 7:30, groggy and rumpled, his hair doing things that defied geometry. He slumped into the dining booth, mumbled something that might have been "good morning" or might have been "grmphng," and reached for the orange juice.
Gwen, who had been sitting across from him with the coiled energy of a spring-loaded trap, immediately brightened.
"Good morning, Ben! Did you sleep well? Are you hungry? Do you want more toast? Grandpa made toast. It's really good toast. Here—" She grabbed a piece of toast from her own plate and held it out to him. "—take mine, I already had some."
Ben stared at the offered toast. Then at Gwen. Then at Max.
Max gave him a look that said, very clearly: I know. Just roll with it.
"I'm... good," Ben said slowly, taking the toast because it seemed easier than arguing. "Thanks?"
"You're welcome!" Gwen beamed. Full wattage. No sarcasm, no ulterior motive, no hidden barb. A genuine, unfiltered, 200-proof beam of pure goodwill directed at Ben Tennyson, who had never in his life been on the receiving end of such a thing from this particular source.
It was deeply unsettling.
"So," Ben said, chewing carefully. "Are we gonna talk about the... thing?"
"The watch," Max said, sitting down with his coffee. "Yes. We need to talk about the watch."
Gwen's hand drifted to the Omnitrix. "I've been thinking about this very carefully—"
"You've been awake for ninety minutes."
"I've been thinking about it very carefully for ninety minutes, and I think the responsible thing to do would be to practice with it. Learn to control it. Understand its capabilities." She delivered this argument with the polished confidence of a debate team captain, sitting up straight, making eye contact, hands folded on the table—the picture of reasoned, mature discourse.
The effect was somewhat undermined by the fact that her left thumb was already resting on the Omnitrix faceplate.
"Gwen, we talked about the personality changes," Max said carefully. "When you transformed last night, you... weren't entirely yourself."
"I was more myself," Gwen corrected instantly, and there was a flash of something fierce in her eyes. "I was a better myself. I was—"
"You called me sweetheart and tried to carry me like a baby," Ben said flatly.
"You looked cold!"
"IT WAS SEVENTY-TWO DEGREES!"
"Can we—" Max held up a hand. "Can we focus, please. Gwen. The personality shifts are concerning. When you're transformed, your behavior changes significantly. You become... attached to Ben. Protectively. In a way that isn't—"
"Normal?" Gwen's voice was very quiet. "Is that what you were going to say?"
Max paused. Chose his words. "...Proportionate."
"I just care about him."
"You tried to fight the Omnitrix's safety timeout because you didn't want to stop holding him."
"That's—" Gwen faltered. Opened her mouth. Closed it. Her brow furrowed, and for a moment the analytical Gwen—the real Gwen, maybe—surfaced. "Okay. That's... I can see how that might be... slightly..."
She trailed off. Her thumb pressed down on the faceplate.
Click.
The dial popped up. The holographic display flickered to life—that same circular roster of silhouettes, alien forms arrayed like options on a menu. Max caught a glimpse of them as the dial rotated: something with four arms, something with a tail, something crystalline, something fast, something—
Gwen's hand was already moving. She didn't look at the display. She didn't browse. She didn't consider her options. Her fingers found the dial and rotated it with the precision of a safecracker, spinning past silhouette after silhouette without a moment's hesitation until she landed on one very specific form.
The fiery one.
"Gwen, WAIT—"
She slammed the dial down.
The transformation was just as slow as the first time.
That was the thing that got Max—the thing that set his Plumber instincts screaming. The Omnitrix was designed for instant transformation. Every report, every piece of intelligence, every theoretical model—they all agreed. User presses dial, user transforms, elapsed time approximately 0.3 seconds. That was the spec. That was how it was supposed to work.
Gwen's transformation took almost thirty seconds.
And she savored every one of them.
It started in her hand again—the left one, the one wearing the Omnitrix. The skin darkened, reddened, began to glow from within as magma-lines traced across her fingers like veins of liquid gold. The change crawled up her wrist, her forearm, eating the sleeve of her pajama top as it went, and Gwen's eyes fluttered half-closed.
"Oh," she breathed. "Oh, there it is."
"Gwen—" Max started.
"Shh," she said. "Shh, shh, shh. It's happening."
The transformation rolled up her arm, across her shoulder, and began to spread across her chest. And as it spread, it changed things. Her pajama top—the one with the little cartoon cats—didn't burn away so much as it was replaced, the fabric dissolving into the magma-skin as Gwen's torso expanded, shifted, grew. Her shoulders broadened slightly. Her posture straightened. She rose an inch in her seat. Then two. Then three.
Her midsection pulled in as the magma-skin flowed down her stomach, her waist narrowing with that same slow, honeyed contraction, and then—
Then came the rest.
Her hips hit the edges of the dining booth first. The vinyl seat groaned as her lower body expanded with that glacial, inexorable fullness, each hip swelling outward like bread dough in a too-small pan. The booth, designed for normal human occupants, began to creak alarmingly. Her thighs followed suit, thickening and pressing together, then pressing against the underside of the table, then pushing the table toward Ben as they continued their impossible expansion.
The bench seat cracked.
"Maybe we should—outside—" Max suggested urgently, as the Rust Bucket's structural integrity entered the conversation.
Gwen was already standing. Or rather, she was already rising—the transformation lifting her upward as her legs lengthened, her feet bursting through her cat-print pajama bottoms (which had been fighting a losing battle for the last ten seconds). She hit her head on the Rust Bucket's ceiling when she was only about two-thirds done, and had to hunch—a posture that only emphasized the dramatic curvature happening everywhere else.
"Outside," Max repeated, more firmly.
Gwen—half-transformed, a bizarre chimera of ten-year-old girl and impossibly proportioned fire alien—squeezed through the Rust Bucket's door. It was a tight fit. A very tight fit. The doorframe protested audibly as her still-expanding hips met its fixed dimensions, and for a moment it seemed like she might actually get stuck, which would have been a problem for reasons both practical and conversational.
But she made it through—barely—and stepped out into the morning air, and the transformation continued.
Her face changed last, as before. The freckles faded. The orange hair ignited. The green eyes blazed white-hot. And that smile appeared—that warm, radiant, all-consuming smile that had no business being on any version of Gwen Tennyson.
She stood in the campsite, fully transformed, seven feet of volcanic excess under a clear morning sky. Birds that had been singing in nearby trees went silent, reassessed their life choices, and relocated.
And then she turned toward the Rust Bucket.
And looked at Ben.
Ben was standing in the doorway of the RV. He'd watched the entire transformation from across the dinette table with the expression of someone watching a car accident in slow motion—horrified, fascinated, unable to look away.
Now Heatblast-Gwen was looking at him.
That look. That look. The one that said he was the center of the universe. The one that said the sun rose and set according to his schedule. The one that said she would happily rearrange the continental plates if it would make his day slightly more convenient.
"Ben," she said, and her voice was that deep, warm furnace-rumble again, full of smoke and honey and the crackle of a fireplace on Christmas morning. "Oh, Ben. Good morning."
"You already said good morning. When you were, you know. You."
"That was different. That was regular good morning. This is proper good morning."
She moved toward him.
"Gwen—"
"Come here."
"Gwen, no—"
"Come here, Ben."
She reached the Rust Bucket in two enormous strides—each one a seismic event, her massive thighs churning against each other with grinding, sparking friction, her hips swaying with the kind of momentum that could redirect ocean currents. She bent down at the doorway, one massive hand bracing against the Rust Bucket's exterior (which sizzled, adding a new handprint-shaped scorch mark to the RV's collection), and reached for Ben with the other.
He tried to dodge.
He was not successful.
Her hand closed around his midsection with a gentleness that belied its size—massive, glowing fingers wrapping around him like he was a hamster being picked up by a very careful, very affectionate, very on fire giant. She lifted him out of the Rust Bucket doorway, straightened to her full height, and—
—pulled him directly into her chest.
FWUMPH.
Ben's face met a surface that was warm, soft (impossibly, unreasonably, structurally questionably soft for something made of volcanic rock), and approximately the size of a small car. His entire head disappeared into the geography of Heatblast-Gwen's chest, enveloped in a cocoon of heat and gentle pressure and the faint smell of... campfire? Cinnamon? Burning SAT prep books?
"MMPH!" Ben's protest was muffled by approximately six cubic feet of magma-bosom.
"There," Gwen sighed, and it was the sigh of someone who had been holding something in for hours and could finally let it go. A sigh of completion. She pressed him closer, her enormous arms wrapping around his small frame, her fire-hair cascading down around them both like a curtain of warm light. "There. That's better. That's so much better."
"MMMPH! MMPH MMPH!"
"I missed you," she murmured into the top of his head, and small flames from her lips danced in his hair without burning him. "I know it was only a few hours, but I missed you. Every second I wasn't holding you felt wrong."
"GWMMPH! CMMMPHT BRMMPTH!"
"What was that, sweetie?"
She loosened her grip slightly—just enough for Ben to turn his head sideways and gasp for air.
"I SAID I CAN'T BREATHE!"
"Oh!" She adjusted, shifting him so his face was no longer buried in the topographical wonder of her chest but resting against the curve of her collarbone instead. Still pressed against her. Still held. But now capable of oxygen intake, which was a step up. "Sorry! Better?"
"PUT ME DOWN!"
"But I just got you."
"I'M NOT SOMETHING YOU GET!"
"You're something I have," she corrected, with unshakable logic. "And I'm going to keep you. Safe. And warm. And right here." She patted his back with a massive hand, each pat a gentle seismic event that rattled his teeth. "Right here where you belong."
"GRANDPA!"
Max stood outside the Rust Bucket, arms folded, watching this spectacle with the expression of a man compiling a mental report that nobody was ever going to believe.
"Gwen," he said. "Put your cousin down."
"He's fine where he is."
"He's screaming."
"He's just excited."
"He is categorically not excited."
Heatblast-Gwen looked down at Ben, who was red-faced and struggling in her grip like a cat being held by a well-meaning toddler. She studied him with those blazing white eyes, her head tilted, her fire-hair swaying thoughtfully.
"He looks excited to me," she concluded.
"THAT'S NOT WHAT EXCITED LOOKS LIKE!" Ben yelled.
Max pinched the bridge of his nose. Then he walked over, reached up—way up, because Gwen's current form required a stepladder for eye contact—and tapped her on the elbow. It was like tapping a warm radiator.
"Gwen. Put. Ben. Down. Now."
Something in his voice must have registered, because Heatblast-Gwen's expression shifted from blissful contentment to reluctant compliance. She lowered Ben to the ground with excruciating care, setting him on his feet as if he were made of spun glass, then hovering her hands near him for several seconds after releasing him, ready to snatch him back up at the first sign of... what? A strong breeze? A rogue butterfly?
Ben stumbled backward, face flushed, hair sticking up at angles that would require professional intervention. He pointed at Gwen.
"SHE KEEPS DOING THAT!"
"I'm aware," Max said.
"She GRABBED me and shoved my face in her—in her—" Ben gestured incoherently at the region in question, which was, in Gwen's current form, approximately at his eye level and roughly the size of a Volkswagen. "—IN THOSE!"
"I was hugging you," Gwen said, as if this were a perfectly reasonable clarification. "It's not my fault you're short."
"I'M TEN!"
"And very huggable."
"I AM NOT HUGGABLE! I am the OPPOSITE of huggable! I am a CACTUS!"
"You're my little cactus," Gwen said warmly.
Ben made a sound that wasn't a word. It was the sound of a human brain reaching its absolute capacity for cognitive dissonance and simply refusing to process further input. He turned to Max with an expression of pure, desperate appeal.
"Grandpa. Grandpa. You have to do something. She's—she's broken."
"I'm not broken!" Gwen protested. "I'm improved! I'm—"
"You HATE me!" Ben shouted, wheeling back to face her. "You've ALWAYS hated me! Two days ago you told me I was—" he counted on his fingers "—a 'walking disaster,' a 'monument to poor decision-making,' and 'proof that evolution can go backward!' And now you're calling me HUGGABLE?!"
Heatblast-Gwen's expression went through a fascinating sequence of emotions. Confusion. Discomfort. A flicker of the old Gwen—sharp-tongued, dismissive, perpetually exasperated—surfacing like a fish breaking water. Then it sank again, pulled back under by whatever force was driving her new personality, and the warmth returned.
"I was wrong," she said simply. "I was wrong about all of that. You're wonderful, Ben. You're brave and funny and you have really nice eyes and—"
"OH MY GOD."
"—and your hair does this cute thing when you first wake up where it sticks up on one side—"
"STOP."
"—and I just want to hold you and keep you close and make sure nothing bad ever—"
"STOP STOP STOP STOP—"
Max let them go back and forth for another thirty seconds. Not because he was cruel, but because he was observing. Taking mental notes. Building a profile.
What he noticed:
One: Gwen's first action upon transforming was always to locate Ben. Not to test her powers. Not to examine her new form. Not to explore or experiment. Find Ben. Acquire Ben. Secure Ben against chest. Ensure Ben is warm, safe, and within arm's reach at all times. It was a behavioral priority list with exactly one item on it, and everything else—including self-awareness, social norms, and the laws of personal space—was a distant, irrelevant second.
Two: She had ignored the other aliens. Max had watched her spin the dial. He'd seen the silhouettes—at least ten different forms, maybe more—flicker past in the holographic display. She hadn't even looked at them. Her hand had moved to Heatblast with the muscle memory of someone who'd done it a thousand times, not someone who'd done it once. It was automatic. Instinctive. The other forms might as well not have existed.
Three: The personality shift was total and instantaneous. There was no gradual transition, no slow slide from Normal Gwen to Heatblast Gwen. The moment the transformation began—the moment the dial went down—her eyes changed. Not the color. The intent behind them. One second she was Gwen Tennyson, sharp and analytical and constitutionally incapable of saying something nice to Ben without it being a setup for something mean. The next second she was... this. This adoring, overprotective, chest-smothering force of nature who viewed Ben's physical comfort as her singular reason for existing.
It wasn't normal. It wasn't the Omnitrix's standard operating parameters. And it was getting more intense with each transformation.
Max needed to have a very serious conversation with his granddaughter. Several, actually. About the Omnitrix. About boundaries. About the fact that repeatedly shoving your cousin's face into your volcanic bosom was not an appropriate expression of familial affection regardless of what species you currently were.
But first, he needed to see something.
"Gwen," he said, stepping between her and Ben (who had retreated behind a camp chair, as if that would help). "I want you to try something."
Heatblast-Gwen looked down at him. She was still radiating contentment from her brief Ben-snuggling session, her body pulsing with warm, satisfied light, her fire-hair crackling softly.
"What is it, Grandpa?"
"The watch has other forms. I saw them on the dial. I'd like you to try one."
A shadow crossed her face. Subtle, but there. "Why?"
"Because understanding the device means understanding all of its capabilities. Not just one."
"But I like this one." She gestured at herself—a sweeping motion that encompassed approximately seven feet and several hundred impossible curves' worth of volcanic real estate. "This one is perfect. I'm strong, and I'm warm, and I can protect—"
"Gwen."
"I can try another one later—"
"Gwen, this isn't a request."
She stared at him. Her flames flickered. For a long moment, Max saw conflict play out across her molten features—the desire to comply with her grandfather warring against a deep, almost primal reluctance to be anything other than what she currently was.
"...Fine," she said eventually. "But I'm transforming right back after."
"We'll discuss it."
"I'm transforming right back after, Grandpa."
Max didn't argue. He gestured toward the Omnitrix. "Go ahead."
Gwen looked down at the device on her wrist. In her Heatblast form, it was partially merged with her magma-skin, the green hourglass glowing against a surface of flowing orange and red. She tapped the faceplate, and the holographic dial appeared.
She stared at the array of silhouettes. A dozen alien forms, each one unique, each one offering entirely different capabilities, entirely different experiences. Any one of them could be extraordinary. Any one of them could be transformative—literally.
Gwen spun the dial back to Heatblast.
"...That's the same one, Gwen."
"Is it? Oops."
"Gwen."
"I don't want a different one!"
"Try. One. Different. Form."
Her flames crackled with annoyance—actual, visible annoyance, sparks shooting from her hair like an angry Fourth of July display. She spun the dial with exaggerated reluctance, each click of the holographic selector accompanied by a huff of fire.
Click. Four Arms. She passed it.
Click. XLR8. She passed it.
Click. Diamondhead. She passed it.
Click. Something that looked like it was made of slime. "Ew." She passed it.
Click. Heatblast.
She stopped. Her hand twitched toward the dial.
"Keep going," Max said.
"But—"
"Keep. Going."
She let out a frustrated groan that sounded like a volcanic vent releasing pressure and forced herself to spin past it.
Click. Something insectoid. She passed it.
Click. Something ghostly. She passed it.
Click. Something with vines. She paused, made a face that suggested she'd rather eat Grandpa's cooking, and moved on.
She completed an entire circuit of the dial and ended up right back at Heatblast.
"There's nothing good," she declared.
"You didn't try any of them."
"I don't need to try them. I can tell just by looking. They're all wrong. This—" She pressed her massive, glowing hands against her own body, running them down the dramatic topography of her sides with an appreciative motion. "—this is right. This is what I'm supposed to be."
"Gwen—"
"Can I have Ben back now?"
"NO!" Ben shouted from behind the camp chair.
"He sounds stressed," Gwen said, with the deep concern of a mother hearing her child cry. "Stress is bad for you. I should hold him."
"Holding him is CAUSING the stress!"
"That doesn't sound right."
Beebeep.
The effect was immediate. Predictable. And, to Max's growing concern, escalating.
Gwen's head snapped down to the Omnitrix. Her expression went from warmly concerned to volcanic in the space of a heartbeat. Her entire body flared—temperature spiking, flames roaring, the air around her distorting into a heat shimmer that made the trees behind her look like a Monet painting.
"Oh no you DON'T," she snarled at the watch.
Beebeep. Beebeep.
"NOT NOW! I JUST got here! I just started holding Ben and you're ALREADY—"
Beebeep. Beebeep. Beebeep.
"SHUT. UP."
She clamped her hand over the Omnitrix. Her body blazed white. The ground beneath her feet liquefied. A nearby picnic table—standard-issue campground furniture, bolted to a concrete pad—began to smolder.
But Max was watching closely this time, and he saw something he'd missed in the darkness last night.
Gwen was shaking.
Not from the effort of fighting the timeout—though that was clearly immense, her entire body a war zone between the watch's insistence and her own furious refusal. She was shaking because she was afraid. The prospect of returning to her normal body—her small, weak, ordinary, human body—was terrifying her. Like being asked to drown. Like being told to stop breathing.
"I don't want to go back," she whispered, and her voice broke—cracked like cooling magma, light spilling through the fissures. "I don't want to be small again. I don't want to be cold again. I don't want to—to not feel—"
She looked at Ben. Even from behind the camp chair, half-hidden, he could see her eyes—blazing white, but somehow conveying the desperate, pleading vulnerability of a child about to lose something precious.
"I don't want to stop loving you this much," she said quietly.
Ben's heart did something uncomfortable in his chest.
"Gwen—"
The Omnitrix pulsed red. Hard. Final.
This time, she couldn't hold it.
The transformation reversed—fast, faster than the forward transformation, as if the watch had learned from last time and adjusted its approach. The magma cooled, the flames died, the impossible proportions deflated, and Gwen collapsed inward like a star going dark, seven feet becoming four-and-a-half in the span of three seconds.
Flash.
Gwen Tennyson. Ten years old. Cat pajamas. Blue hair clip.
She stood in the campsite, trembling, her arms wrapped around herself, and she looked so small—not just physically, but existentially. Diminished. A candle after the bonfire.
Her hand went immediately to the Omnitrix.
"No," Max said. He was beside her now—had moved the moment the transformation reversed, and his hand closed over hers before she could reach the dial. Gentle, but firm. "Not yet."
"But—"
"It needs to recharge, Gwen. And you need to breathe."
"I don't want to breathe, I want to—I need to—Ben needs me to—"
"Ben is fine."
"He's NOT fine, he's over there all by himself and he's probably cold and—"
"It's eight in the morning and it's seventy-five degrees."
"—and I can't protect him like this, Grandpa, look at me, I'm—I'm nothing like this—"
"You're my granddaughter," Max said, and his voice was very, very gentle. "You're brilliant and capable and you are not nothing. You were never nothing."
Gwen looked up at him with eyes that were green again—human green, regular green, the green of a girl instead of a star. They were wet.
"It doesn't feel that way," she whispered.
Max knelt down and hugged her. She was small in his arms. Human-small. Child-small. Fragile in a way that Heatblast never was, never could be.
Over her shoulder, he met Ben's eyes.
Ben was standing now, the camp chair forgotten. He was watching his cousin—this girl who had spent years making his life difficult, who had perfected the art of the cutting remark, who had never once shown him an ounce of genuine warmth—cry into their grandfather's shoulder because she couldn't be a giant fire alien who loved him.
The look on Ben's face was not disgust. It was not amusement.
It was worry.
Later—after Gwen had calmed down, after she'd changed into regular clothes, after she'd eaten two pieces of toast with mechanical joylessness—the three of them sat outside at the surviving picnic table (the one Gwen hadn't smoldered) and had what Max privately called a "situation assessment."
"Here's what I know," Max said, hands folded on the table. He'd made a decision. Half-truths wouldn't cut it anymore. "That device is called the Omnitrix. It's an alien technology—the most powerful one in this part of the galaxy. It allows the wearer to transform into different alien species."
He paused, letting that sink in. Two pairs of eyes stared at him—one green, one brown.
"How do you know that?" Ben asked.
"I'll explain everything. In time. For now, what matters is this: the Omnitrix is supposed to transform the user instantly. And the personality of the user is supposed to remain unchanged. What's happening with Gwen—the slow transformation, the personality shifts—that's not normal."
Gwen's hand crept toward the Omnitrix. She caught herself. Pulled it back. Her fingers twitched.
"Something about the bond between Gwen and the Omnitrix is... different," Max continued. "I don't know if it's a malfunction, or a feature I'm not aware of, or something unique to Gwen herself. But until we understand it better, we need to establish some ground rules."
"Rules," Gwen repeated flatly.
"Rule one: No transforming without discussion first. We decide together when and why."
"What if Ben's in danger?"
"Then you transform. But only if there's actual danger. Ben being mildly chilly does not constitute danger."
"I maintain that it does."
"Rule two," Max pressed on. "When you transform, you try different aliens. Not just Heatblast. The Omnitrix has multiple forms, and we need to understand all of them."
A muscle in Gwen's jaw tightened. "The other ones aren't—"
"Rule two, Gwen."
"...Fine."
"Rule three." Max leaned forward. "No grabbing Ben."
Silence.
"...Define 'grabbing,'" Gwen said carefully.
"Picking him up without his consent. Pulling him against you. Shoving his face into your—into—" Max, veteran of a thousand interspecies diplomatic incidents, former commander of a elite paramilitary organization, a man who had stared down warlords without blinking—struggled for the right word. "—into your person."
"I was HUGGING him."
"That was not a hug. A hug involves mutual participation. What you were doing was more akin to engulfment."
"That's a strong word."
"It's an accurate word."
Gwen turned to Ben. "Did you feel engulfed?"
"YES," Ben said immediately. "One hundred percent engulfed. Fully engulfed. I have never been more engulfed in my life."
"You didn't seem to mind at the time—"
"I WAS SUFFOCATING!"
"Okay, fine!" Gwen threw her hands up. "No grabbing Ben! No hugging Ben! No making sure Ben is warm or safe or comfortable! I'll just let him wander around completely unprotected—"
"Gwen."
"—in a world full of things that could hurt him—"
"Gwen."
"—and when something happens, don't come crying to me!"
She folded her arms and glared at the table. Her left thumb was tapping against the Omnitrix. Tap. Tap. Tap. A nervous tic. A countdown.
Max studied her for a long moment. His granddaughter. The smartest kid he knew. The one who color-coded her homework and alphabetized her bookshelf and had never once in her life done anything impulsive.
She was sitting across from him, vibrating with the barely contained need to slam down a dial and become a seven-foot fire alien so she could shove her cousin's face into her chest.
"I'm going to make some calls," Max said, standing up. "Old contacts. People who might know more about the Omnitrix and what it's doing to you."
"There's nothing wrong with me," Gwen said quietly.
Max didn't answer that. He walked toward the Rust Bucket, paused at the door, and looked back.
"Ben."
"Yeah?"
"Keep an eye on your cousin."
Ben looked at Gwen. Gwen looked at the Omnitrix. The Omnitrix glowed green.
"...How long until it recharges?" Ben asked, with the tone of a man asking how long until the bomb goes off.
"Hard to say. Could be an hour. Could be less."
"Great. Super. Love that for me."
Max went inside. The door closed.
Ben and Gwen sat at the picnic table in the summer morning sun. A bird sang. A breeze rustled the trees—the ones that were still standing, anyway.
Gwen's thumb tapped against the Omnitrix.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
"Ben?"
"No."
"I didn't even say anything yet."
"The answer is still no."
"I was just going to ask if you were warm enough."
"IT'S EIGHTY DEGREES."
"That's not a yes."
Ben dropped his face onto the picnic table.
Gwen's thumb kept tapping.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The Omnitrix recharged forty-seven minutes later.
Ben saw the flash of green from the corner of his eye and turned his head just in time to see Gwen's expression transform—not her body, not yet, just her face—from sullen resignation to incandescent joy.
"Don't—" he started.
She slammed the dial.
She went straight for Heatblast.
She didn't even pretend to look at the other options.
And the very first thing she did—the absolute very first thing, before the transformation was even fully complete, while her left arm was still human and her right was already volcanic and her hair was half-orange-half-fire and she was only about five feet tall and growing—was reach for Ben.
He ran.
She was faster.
FWUMPH.
"MMMMPH!"
"Oh, I missed you," Heatblast-Gwen cooed, pressing him against the still-expanding landscape of her chest as the transformation completed around him, her body rising and swelling and curving into that impossible form, her arms wrapping around him with the warm, immovable certainty of continental plates. "I missed you so much, my sweet, precious little—"
"GRMMPHMMPH!"
"—Ben."
In the Rust Bucket, Max heard the muffled screaming. He looked out the window. He saw his seven-foot volcanic granddaughter standing in the campsite, clutching his other grandchild against her chest like a beloved teddy bear, her expression one of pure, transcendent bliss.
He picked up his phone.
He dialed a number.
"...Yeah, it's Max. Listen. I need a favor. It's about the Omnitrix." He paused. Watched Gwen nuzzle the top of Ben's head with her cheek, producing a soft sizzling sound. "...And possibly a family therapist."
TO BE CONTINUED...