It took three hours, two arguments, one near-forest-fire, and a bribe of letting her hold Ben's hand for thirty seconds (Ben's expression during which could best be described as "hostage video") to get Gwen to agree to try a different alien.
"I don't see why I have to," she said, for the forty-seventh time. She was currently human, the Omnitrix having successfully timed her out twenty minutes ago despite her best efforts. She'd screamed at it for a solid minute afterward, then sat on the ground and sulked in a way that was impressive for a ten-year-old and would have been genuinely frightening as a seven-foot fire alien.
"Because Grandpa said so," Ben replied, from a safe distance of fifteen feet. He'd learned through painful trial and error that this was the minimum range at which he could react to a Gwen lunge. Anything closer and he'd end up face-first in whatever geography her current alien form was sporting.
"Grandpa said to try a different one. He didn't say I had to like it."
"Nobody's asking you to like it. We're asking you to do it."
"I like Heatblast."
"We know you like Heatblast. Everyone within a three-mile radius knows you like Heatblast. The TREES know you like Heatblast. Several of them know firsthand."
Gwen huffed and looked down at the Omnitrix. It had recharged five minutes ago—she'd felt it like a jolt of electricity, a full-body awareness that made her fingertips tingle and her heart race. The dial was right there. Heatblast was right there. One press and she'd be warm again, she'd be big again, she'd be able to scoop Ben up and hold him against her and feel that perfect, all-consuming certainty that everything was right in the world—
"Gwen. Different alien."
"I KNOW."
She stared at the holographic display. The silhouettes rotated slowly, each one a mystery, each one a stranger. She didn't want strangers. She wanted Heatblast. Heatblast was warm and perfect and her chest was the ideal size for storing a Ben and—
Focus, Gwen.
She forced herself to actually look at the options. Really look. Not the dismissive speed-scroll she'd done before, but an actual evaluation, applying the analytical mind that had earned her straight A's and the quiet resentment of every other student in her class.
Criteria, she thought. What am I looking for in an alien form?
The answer came immediately, unbidden, and completely without her permission:
1. Can it protect Ben?
2. Can it hold Ben?
3. Does it have a chest adequate for storing Ben?
4. Is it warm?
She blinked. Shook her head. Tried to access the part of her brain that cared about things other than Ben.
It was a very small part. Getting smaller.
"How about that one?" Max suggested, pointing over her shoulder. He'd come outside with a cup of coffee and the energy of a man who had accepted that his retirement was over. "The fast one."
Gwen looked at the silhouette he was indicating. It was sleek, aerodynamic—a raptor-like form with a long tail and a shape that suggested speed. Pure, concentrated velocity.
"It doesn't look very warm," Gwen said skeptically.
"It's not supposed to be warm. It's supposed to be fast."
"Why would I want to be fast?"
"So you can get to Ben quickly if he needs you," Max said, and the words left his mouth before his brain could catch up and apply the filter of maybe don't feed the obsession.
Gwen's eyes widened.
"Get to Ben quickly," she repeated slowly, as if the words were a revelation handed down from on high. "Get to Ben... quickly. As in—faster than anything that might be trying to hurt Ben. Faster than any threat. I could—I could be there before anything happened. I could—"
"Oh no," Ben whispered, from fifteen feet away. He'd heard. He'd seen the light in her eyes. He knew that light. It was the light of Gwen having an idea, and Gwen's ideas, historically, ranged from "annoyingly effective" to "dear God why."
"I'LL TRY IT," Gwen announced, and slammed the dial down before Max could add any caveats, conditions, or pleas for moderation.
The transformation began.
Slow, as always. Gwen's slow, savoring, completely-wrong-according-to-every-Omnitrix-specification transformation, starting at her wrist and spreading outward like ink in water.
But this one was different from Heatblast.
The skin change came first—not magma this time, but something sleek and smooth. A deep, vivid blue that spread up her arm like a second skin being painted on, semi-metallic and gleaming in the morning sun. It had a texture to it—not scales exactly, but something close. Something that looked like it had been designed by evolution to cut through air resistance like a knife through butter.
"Oh," Gwen said, and her voice was already starting to change—not deeper like Heatblast, but faster. The word came out slightly accelerated, as if her vocal cords were warming up. "Oh, that's—that's different—that's—"
The change raced up her arm and across her shoulders, and as it went, her body began to shift. Her frame elongated—stretching, streamlining, her torso pulling upward as her legs began their own transformation below. A tail erupted from the base of her spine with a sound like a whip crack, long and thick and blue, immediately beginning to twitch with restless energy.
And then—inevitably, impossibly, in complete defiance of what the species was supposed to look like—came the curves.
Kineceleran physiology, according to every xenobiology textbook in the Plumber database, was lean. Stripped-down. Aerodynamic. Built for speed and nothing else—every ounce of mass optimized for velocity, every curve minimized for reduced drag. A Kineceleran body was a racing machine, pure and simple.
Gwen's body had apparently not read the textbook.
Her hips expanded first, spreading outward with that same slow, relentless inevitability that characterized all her transformations. The sleek blue skin stretched to accommodate them, the semi-metallic surface gleaming as it was pulled taut over widening hips that had no business existing on a speed-based life form. Her thighs followed—enormously, each one swelling with a ponderous fullness that would have added catastrophic drag to any conventional sprinter but somehow, somehow, only seemed to make her legs look more powerful.
They were thick. Not Heatblast thick—a different kind of thick. Where Heatblast's lower body had the heavy, geological grandeur of a mountain range, XLR8-Gwen's thighs had the dense, coiled power of a predator's haunches. Massive, yes. Absurd, absolutely. But every impossible inch of them looked like it was loaded—spring-loaded, tensed, ready to explode into motion at any moment.
Her calves reshaped themselves into digitigrade legs—raptor legs, built for sprinting—but even these were disproportionately thick, the muscle groups swelling far beyond their standard Kineceleran dimensions. Her feet narrowed into the species' characteristic wheel-like structures, but the legs above them were like tree trunks mounted on roller skates.
Her backside—already expanded to proportions that would have made an aerodynamics engineer weep into their calculations—jutted out behind her with a prominence that the tail seemed to frame rather than counterbalance. It was absurd. It was structurally confounding. It should have made her fall over backward.
Her waist pulled in—tight, narrow, a dramatic pinch between the continent of her hips and the landscape above—and her chest expanded. Not as much as Heatblast. Noticeably, measurably less than Heatblast. But still well beyond anything that belonged on a Kineceleran, straining against the natural constraints of the species' sleek design like someone had tried to fit watermelons into a wetsuit.
Her face was the last to change. A helmet-like structure grew over her head—the species' characteristic visor, black and aerodynamic—but it framed a face that was unmistakably Gwen, rendered in blue and black, with bright green eyes that blinked once, twice, and then—
—locked onto Ben.
"Oh," XLR8-Gwen said, and her voice was fast. Not fast like someone talking quickly. Fast like someone who experienced time at a different rate than everyone else. Every syllable was precise, clipped, delivered at approximately three times normal conversational speed. "Oh-oh-oh-BEN. Hi-Ben-hello-Ben-you-look-cold-are-you-cold-you-should-wear-a-jacket—"
"It's eighty-five degrees—"
"—I-could-get-you-a-jacket-I-could-get-you-TWELVE-jackets-I-could-get-you-every-jacket-in-the-STATE-I'm-very-fast-now-did-you-know-I'm-fast—"
And then she was gone.
Not gone-gone. She was standing next to Ben. She'd been fifty feet away a millisecond ago, and now she was right next to him, the air displacement from her movement hitting him a full second after she'd already arrived. Dirt and leaves swirled in her wake. The camp chair she'd passed had been knocked over by the sonic boom.
Ben yelped and stumbled backward.
Gwen was vibrating. Literally, physically vibrating—her entire body buzzing at a frequency that was almost but not quite visible, a constant, low-level tremor that made her seem slightly blurred at the edges. Her tail lashed behind her in rapid, excited arcs. Her massive, powerful legs shifted in place, the wheel-feet making small, restless circles as if standing still was physically painful.
"Hi!" she said, and she was right in his face, her green eyes bright and wide and absolutely manic behind her visor. "Hi-Ben-I-missed-you—"
"You JUST saw me! You were looking at me WHILE you transformed!"
"That-was-AGES-ago-that-was-like-thirty-seconds-ago-do-you-know-how-long-thirty-seconds-is-when-you-think-this-fast-it's-like-a-YEAR-Ben-I-missed-you-for-a-YEAR—"
She grabbed him. Of course she grabbed him. Her arms—sleek, blue, powerful, vibrating with that constant internal buzz—wrapped around his midsection with the speed of a striking cobra, and before Ben could even process the concept of escape, he was pressed against her chest.
It was... different from Heatblast.
Heatblast's chest had been warm, soft, and approximately the size of a small country. XLR8-Gwen's was cooler—room temperature, more or less—and while it was still significantly larger than any Kineceleran chest had any right to be, it was noticeably smaller than the volcanic expanse he'd been subjected to before. Also, it was vibrating. Everything was vibrating. Ben's entire body buzzed with sympathetic resonance as Gwen held him, like being strapped to a massage chair set to "earthquake."
"Gwen—GWEN—"
"Shh-shh-shh-you're-okay-I've-got-you-you're-safe—oh-WAIT."
She released him. Vanished. Reappeared three feet to his left. Vanished again. Reappeared behind him. He spun around just in time to see her disappear again, a blue-and-black blur that left afterimages on his retinas.
"GWEN, WHAT ARE YOU—"
"PERIMETER CHECK!" Her voice came from everywhere and nowhere, dopplering wildly as she circled the campsite at a speed that turned her into a continuous streak of blue. "Gotta-make-sure-it's-safe-gotta-check-for-threats-gotta—FOUND ONE!"
She skidded to a halt next to a rock. A rock. A normal, everyday, geology-class-would-be-bored-by-it rock, roughly the size of a softball, sitting in the grass near the path to the restrooms.
XLR8-Gwen stared at it with the intensity of a bomb disposal expert.
"This-could-trip-you," she said. "You-could-be-walking-to-the-bathroom-and-you-could-TRIP-on-this-and-FALL-and-HURT-yourself-and—"
She picked up the rock and threw it. At Kineceleran speed. The rock left her hand at approximately the velocity of a bullet, sailed over the tree line, and disappeared into the sky with a faint whistle. Somewhere, distantly, there was a splash. She'd thrown it into the lake. The lake that was half a mile away.
"There," she said, satisfied. "Safe now."
She blurred again. Appeared next to a tree branch that was hanging low over the path. Studied it. Concluded that it represented a potential eye-poking hazard.
SNAP.
The branch was removed. And the branch above it. And the one above that. And, for good measure, three branches on the tree next to it that she had determined were "suspicious."
"Gwen!" Max called from the picnic table, where he was watching this spectacle with the expression of a man writing a very long incident report in his head. "The trees are not a threat!"
"THEY-COULD-BE!" Gwen shouted back, already on the other side of the campsite, where she was eyeing a pinecone with murderous suspicion. "Ben-could-STEP-on-this-pinecone-and-it-could-HURT-his-FOOT—"
The pinecone was launched into orbit. Or at least into the upper atmosphere. It was hard to tell.
She found a slightly raised tree root crossing the path. "TRIPPING-HAZARD." She ripped it out of the ground, taking a significant portion of the path with it.
She found a puddle. "SLIPPING-HAZARD." She was gone and back in two seconds, holding an entire roll of paper towels she'd retrieved from the Rust Bucket, and dried the puddle.
She found a bee.
"STINGING-HAZARD."
"Gwen, do NOT kill that bee—"
She didn't kill it. She relocated it. One moment the bee was buzzing peacefully near a wildflower. The next moment, it was three miles away, deeply confused, deposited in a meadow by a blue blur that had whispered "stay-away-from-my-Ben" before vanishing.
Ben watched all of this from the center of the campsite, rotating slowly in place as Gwen pinballed around him at mach speed, systematically identifying and eliminating every conceivable source of minor inconvenience within a two-hundred-yard radius.
"She's insane," he said to Max.
"She's... thorough," Max offered.
"She just threw a PINECONE into SPACE."
"...Enthusiastically thorough."
Fifteen minutes and approximately four hundred eliminated "hazards" later, XLR8-Gwen declared the campsite "acceptably-safe-for-now-but-I'll-keep-checking." She had cleared every rock, stick, pinecone, acorn, leaf pile, slightly uneven patch of ground, and insect from an area the size of a football field. The campsite looked like it had been swept by the world's most aggressive landscaping crew.
Then she turned her attention back to Ben.
"Come-here," she said, appearing in front of him with a rush of displaced air that ruffled his hair. Her tail was wagging. Could tails wag? Hers was wagging. It whipped back and forth behind her with the enthusiastic energy of a golden retriever who'd just heard the word "walk."
"No."
"Please?"
"No."
"I-just-want-to-sit-with-you."
"The last time you said that, you shoved my face in your—"
"That-was-HEATBLAST-me. I'm-XLR8-me-now. Different-alien. Different-approach." She paused. Vibrated. Her massive legs shifted restlessly, the wheel-feet making impatient circles in the dirt. "I-just-want-to-sit. With-you. Please."
Ben looked at Max. Max, traitor that he was, shrugged.
"She did try a different alien," he pointed out. "And she hasn't grabbed you yet."
"She relocated a BEE."
"She relocated a bee. She didn't hurt it. I'd call that progress."
Ben closed his eyes. Counted to ten. Opened them.
"Fine. We can sit. But NO grabbing. NO chest stuff. NO—"
He was in her lap.
He didn't even see it happen. One moment he was standing, making reasonable demands. The next moment he was sitting in XLR8-Gwen's lap—a lap that was, owing to the spectacularly overstated dimensions of her thighs, more like a padded bench than a body part. Her massive legs formed a sort of cradle around him, her thighs on either side like the armrests of a very organic, very blue, very warm chair.
She was sitting cross-legged on the ground—an arrangement that required some logistical creativity given the size of her lower body—and she had placed Ben in the space between her crossed legs with a speed and precision that suggested she'd been calculating the optimal lap-placement trajectory for the entire conversation.
"There!" she said brightly. "See? No-chest-stuff. Just-lap-stuff. Lap-stuff-is-fine-right?"
"I—you—that's not—"
"Too-late-you're-already-here."
And then she started vibrating.
She had been vibrating before—the baseline Kineceleran tremor, the byproduct of a metabolism running at a thousand times human speed. But this was different. She ramped it up. Deliberately. Like someone turning the dial on a massage chair from "gentle" to "why would anyone need this setting."
Ben felt it immediately. His entire body buzzed with the sympathetic vibration, transmitted through XLR8-Gwen's massive thighs and into his bones. It was like sitting on top of a washing machine during the spin cycle. It was like being inside a purring cat the size of a car. It was—
"Oh," Ben said involuntarily, because it actually felt... "That's..."
"Nice-right?" Gwen said, and he could hear the smile in her voice. "I-can-feel-it-too. It's-like-I-have-a-million-cups-of-coffee-running-through-me-but-in-a-GOOD-way. Everything-is-so-FAST-Ben. My-thoughts-are-so-fast. I-can-think-about-a-thousand-things-at-once-and-every-single-one-of-them-is-you."
"That's... not healthy."
"It's-VERY-healthy. You're-a-very-healthy-thing-to-think-about. Oh!-Your-hair!"
Her hands were in his hair.
She had started playing with it without any preamble or permission, her blue, clawed fingers running through his brown locks with a speed and dexterity that was almost hypnotic. Not pulling—never pulling. Just... touching. Rearranging. Exploring. Her fingers moved so fast that they blurred slightly, but each individual touch was feather-light, almost ticklish.
"Your-hair-is-so-SOFT-Ben. Did-you-know-your-hair-is-soft? It's-SO-soft. I've-thought-about-your-hair-forty-seven-times-since-I-transformed-and-I've-only-been-XLR8-for-twenty-minutes-which-at-my-current-processing-speed-is-equivalent-to-approximately-two-weeks-of-subjective-experience-and-I've-spent-MOST-of-those-two-weeks-thinking-about-your-hair."
"You've been transformed for twenty minutes and you've experienced two WEEKS?!"
"Give-or-take. Time-is-weird-when-you're-this-fast. Every-second-feels-like-a-minute. Every-minute-feels-like-an-hour. I-watched-a-butterfly-earlier-and-it-moved-SO-slowly-Ben-it-was-like-watching-paint-dry-but-you-know-what-WASN'T-boring? Your-FACE. Your-face-is-never-boring. I-could-look-at-your-face-for-a-hundred-years-and—"
"OKAY," Ben said loudly, because if he let her continue, she would. Forever. Literally forever, because she could fit more words into a minute than most people could fit into a day. "Okay. You're—this is—you're playing with my hair."
"Yes!"
"Why?"
"Because-it's-SOFT-and-you're-HERE-and-I-LOVE-you."
The word dropped like a bomb.
Not a big, explosive bomb. A small, precise, surgical bomb that detonated in the center of Ben's chest and left a crater shaped like a question mark.
"You—"
"What?" Gwen's fingers continued their hyperspeed exploration of his scalp, completely unfazed. "Oh!-I-can-do-BRAIDS-at-this-speed-want-me-to-braid-your-hair? Your-hair-might-be-too-short-for-braids-but-I'm-VERY-fast-I-could-probably-figure-it-out. Micro-braids-maybe. Or-I-could-just-keep-petting-you. You-like-being-petted-right?"
"I am not a CAT—"
"You-PURR-like-a-cat. Well-you-don't-purr-but-you-made-a-little-'mmm'-sound-when-I-started-the-vibrating-thing-which-is-BASICALLY-purring—"
"I DID NOT—"
"You-DID. I-heard-it. I-hear-EVERYTHING-now. I-can-hear-your-heartbeat-Ben. Did-you-know-that? Your-heartbeat-is-my-favorite-sound. It-goes-bum-BUM-bum-BUM-and-right-now-it's-going-a-little-fast-which-means-you're-either-stressed-or-excited-and-I'm-choosing-to-believe-excited—"
Ben looked at Max with an expression of absolute, soul-deep exhaustion. Max was sitting at the picnic table, watching, his coffee untouched, his expression a complex mixture of scientific fascination and grandparental concern.
"Help," Ben mouthed.
Max held up a finger. One minute.
"—and-your-EARS-Ben-oh-my-gosh-your-EARS. They're-so-SMALL. They're-like-little-shells. Little-perfect-human-shells-on-the-side-of-your-perfect-human-head. I-want-to-protect-your-ears-Ben. What-if-something-LOUD-happens? I-should-cover-your-ears. Here-let-me—"
Her hands moved from his hair to cup over his ears, and the vibrating intensified, and Ben was sitting in a buzzing cocoon of alien thigh and unsolicited affection, his ears covered by gentle clawed hands, his hair recently rearranged into something that might have been micro-braids if you squinted, and—
Beebeep.
The reaction was different this time.
XLR8-Gwen didn't roar. She didn't flare. She didn't do anything dramatic or explosive.
She went still.
In a being of constant, restless, vibrating motion, stillness was terrifying. Every tremor stopped. Every twitch ceased. Her tail froze mid-swing. Her wheel-feet locked. Her fingers, resting over Ben's ears, became rigid.
"No," she said, and her voice was no longer fast. It was slow. Deliberate. Cold in a way that a Kineceleran should never be. "No. I just got him. I just started playing with his hair. His hair is soft and I was counting the individual strands and I am only at forty-seven thousand and I am NOT. DONE."
Beebeep. Beebeep.
"I-JUST-SAT-DOWN," she hissed, and the speed was back in her voice but it was angry speed, sharp speed, each word a dart. "I-JUST-got-comfortable. Do-you-know-how-long-it-took-me-to-find-the-optimal-lap-configuration? SEVEN-WHOLE-SECONDS-which-is-like-a-MONTH-in-my-head. You-are-NOT-taking-this-from-me."
She curled around Ben protectively, her massive body forming a shell of blue-scaled alien around his small human form. Her tail wrapped around them both. Her legs tightened. He was cocooned—wrapped in XLR8-Gwen like a present she refused to let anyone unwrap.
BEEBEEP. BEEBEEP. BEEBEEP.
"I'LL-BE-SLOW-AGAIN!" she shouted at the watch, and there was genuine anguish in her voice—a rawness that cut through the speed and the absurdity and landed somewhere painful. "I'll-be-SLOW-and-WEAK-and-I-won't-be-able-to-hear-his-heartbeat-and-I-won't-be-able-to-get-to-him-in-time-if-something-happens-and-I'll-be-USELESS—"
"Gwen," Ben said, from inside the cocoon of alien limbs. His voice was muffled but present. "Gwen, you have to let it—"
"I-DON'T-HAVE-TO-DO-ANYTHING—"
"You're squeezing me—"
Her grip loosened instantly. Even in the grip of transformation-denial fury, even fighting the Omnitrix with every molecule of her being, she would never risk hurting him. She'd rather be forcibly detransformed a thousand times than cause him a moment of discomfort.
Which, of course, was exactly what happened.
The red pulse came. She fought it—oh, she fought it. She blurred, trying to outrun the detransformation itself, vibrating so fast that she briefly became invisible, as if she could phase through the timeout by sheer velocity. But the Omnitrix was learning too, adapting to her resistance, and the red light chased her through every frequency, every vibration, every desperate attempt to stay.
"No-no-no-no-NO—"
Flash.
Gwen Tennyson. Ten years old. Sitting cross-legged on the ground in the middle of a campsite that looked like it had been swept by a supernatural cleaning service. Her arms were wrapped around empty air where Ben had been—he'd rolled free the moment the transformation reversed, having gotten very good at identifying the 0.3-second window of opportunity.
Gwen looked down at herself. At her small, slow, ordinary body.
Her lip trembled.
"I hate this," she whispered.
That evening, after the sun had set and Max had built a campfire (manually, since Gwen wasn't currently able to do it by existing), the three Tennysons sat around the flames in a silence that was only partially comfortable.
Ben was in a camp chair on the opposite side of the fire from Gwen—a strategic placement that Max had arranged with the subtlety of a chess grandmaster. Gwen was wrapped in a blanket, despite the warm evening air, because without her alien forms she felt perpetually, irrationally cold. The Omnitrix glowed softly on her wrist, recharging, counting down to the next fix.
"Gwen," Max said gently. "How are you feeling?"
"Small."
"Besides that."
"Slow. Cold. Weak. Useless. Normal." She said the word like a curse. "I'm normal and I hate it."
Max nodded slowly. "I want to ask you something, and I want you to think about it honestly. Can you do that?"
"...Yeah."
"When you're transformed—either form—how do you feel about Ben?"
Gwen's eyes flickered to her cousin across the fire. Ben was poking at the flames with a stick, not looking at her, but his shoulders were tense. He was listening.
"He's everything," Gwen said quietly. Simply. Without hesitation. "He's the most important thing in any universe. I would do anything for him. I would fight anything for him. I would—" She stopped. Swallowed. "I would stay transformed forever for him."
"And right now? As yourself?"
A longer pause. Gwen pulled the blanket tighter.
"...He's my annoying cousin who got a D in science," she said. Then, quieter: "But I don't want anything to happen to him. I've... I've never wanted anything to happen to him. I just... didn't used to feel it so loudly."
Max filed that away. Interesting. The feelings weren't being created—they were being amplified. A volume dial turned up to a thousand. Normal familial concern, filtered through alien neurology and biochemistry, emerging as all-consuming devotion.
"One more question," Max said. "The different aliens. How would you compare them?"
Gwen's eyes lit up. Not with alien fire—with the unmistakable gleam of a girl who had been asked to make a list. Gwen Tennyson loved lists.
"Actually," she said, sitting up straighter, the blanket falling off one shoulder, "I've been thinking about that."
She reached into the pocket of her pants and pulled out a folded piece of paper. She'd already made notes. Of course she had. She unfolded it with the careful precision of a professor presenting a thesis.
Ben looked up from the fire. "Is that a report card?"
"It's a comparative analysis," Gwen corrected. "There's a difference."
"There really isn't."
She cleared her throat. Held up the paper. It was, Ben could see, covered in neat handwriting with color-coded sections. She'd used highlighters. Where had she even gotten highlighters? Had she packed highlighters for a camping trip?
Of course she had. She was Gwen.
GWEN TENNYSON'S COMPREHENSIVE ALIEN FORM EVALUATION
Version 1.0
(Subject to revision pending further field testing)
ALIEN #1: HEATBLAST (Pyronite)
Overall Rating: 100/10 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (ten stars, would give more but ran out of room)
Power: Perfect. Absolute fire control. Can shoot fireballs, create walls of flame, manipulate temperature at will. Melted a crater. Set four trees on fire by walking. 10/10.
Protection Capability: Perfect. Nothing can get close to Ben without going through a wall of living fire first. Enemies would have to be fireproof, heatproof, AND willing to fight seven feet of volcanic fury to get to him. Threat deterrence rating: absolute. 10/10.
Warmth: OH MY GOD. Perfect. Perfect. I'm literally made of fire. I can keep Ben warm forever. He will NEVER be cold. I can adjust my surface temperature to exactly the right level for optimal Ben comfort. I tested this. His ideal ambient temperature appears to be approximately 78°F. I maintained a 78°F contact surface for the entire duration of our last hug. He didn't complain about being cold even ONCE. He didn't complain about being warm either but I think he was just being polite 10/10.
Chest: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (thirteen stars)
Perfect. Absolutely perfect. Ideal dimensions for Ben storage. He fits perfectly. His whole head fits. It's soft (how is lava soft?? I don't care, it's soft). It's warm. It's the perfect temperature. When I hold him there I can feel his heartbeat and it's the best thing I've ever experienced in any form. The curvature-to-Ben ratio is exactly right. I did the math. I did the math TWICE.
Heatblast's chest is 10/10, but honestly, the scale doesn't go high enough. If I could give it a score in scientific notation, it would be approximately 1 × 10^47 out of 10.
Holding Capability: Can carry Ben with one arm. Can carry Ben with NO arms, just by pressing him against me and walking. He's so small and light and precious and HOLDABLE. The arm-to-Ben circumference ratio allows for complete enclosure with approximately 40% arm overlap, creating a sealed pocket of safety from which no harm can reach him. 10/10.
Mobility: Moderate. Can fly (sort of—more like rocket-assisted jumping). Walking speed is slow due to the absolute wagon I'm dragging proportional distribution, but who needs to walk fast when you're on fire? 7/10.
Time Limit: The WORST. The Omnitrix keeps trying to time me out and I HATE IT. I managed to override it once but it's getting harder. Every beep fills me with rage. Every red flash is a personal attack. I will find a way to stay Heatblast forever if it's the last thing I do. -1000/10 for the timeout. The Omnitrix should be ashamed.
Overall Assessment: Perfect. Flawless. No notes. Best alien. Best body. Best me. If I could be Heatblast forever, I would, and I would spend every second of forever holding Ben.
She paused. Took a breath. Turned the paper over.
ALIEN #2: XLR8 (Kineceleran)
Overall Rating: 5/10 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Power: Speed. Lots of speed. So much speed. I ran a perimeter check of the entire campsite in 0.3 seconds. I can perceive events in slow motion. I caught a fly. I caught TWELVE flies. I counted the number of pine needles on a tree (47,832). I vibrate constantly which is honestly kind of fun? 7/10.
Protection Capability: Good but different from Heatblast. Can't create walls of fire, but CAN remove every conceivable hazard from Ben's environment faster than he can encounter them. Cleared all rocks, sticks, pinecones, insects, uneven terrain, sharp edges, low branches, suspicious puddles, and one (1) bee from the campsite. Total elimination of tripping, slipping, stinging, poking, and stubbing hazards within a 200-yard radius. Ben is now statistically safer in this campsite than he would be in a padded room. 8/10.
Warmth: Bad. Room temperature. I'm basically a giant cold lizard. I tried to warm Ben up with friction (vibrating against him very fast) and it sort of worked but it's not the SAME. Heatblast is WARM. Heatblast is a FIREPLACE. XLR8 is a... slightly warm... vibrating... thing. 3/10.
Chest: Inadequate.
Let me be clear. It's not SMALL. By any normal standard, it's... substantial. It's... there's a lot of it. But it's not HEATBLAST. Heatblast's chest is a kingdom. XLR8's chest is a... a province. A nice province. A province with good amenities. But when I held Ben against it, his face didn't disappear completely. I could still see the top of his head. That's UNACCEPTABLE. The whole point is FULL IMMERSION. If I can see any part of Ben while he's being chest-hugged, the chest is too small. 4/10.
(Note: Still bigger than anything that should exist on a Kineceleran. The Omnitrix is doing something to the proportions of every form. I am choosing not to question this because questioning it might make it stop, and I don't want it to stop.)
Holding Capability: Different. Can't carry Ben against my chest as effectively (see: inadequate chest), BUT the lap situation is excellent. My thighs create a natural cradle/basin that is ideal for Ben placement. He fits in my lap like he was designed for it. Played with his hair for twenty minutes. Counted 47,000 individual strands before the STUPID WATCH timed me out. I wasn't DONE. 6/10.
Mobility: 10/10. Obviously. I'm the fastest thing alive. I can be at Ben's side in less than a millisecond from anywhere in the campsite. If something threatens him, I can have him in my lap and be three states away before the threat finishes forming. Speed is the BEST power for Ben protection.
However. Speed has a downside. When I'm this fast, every second without Ben feels like a minute. Every minute feels like an hour. The time I spent doing the perimeter check—0.3 seconds in real time—felt like five minutes of being away from him. Five minutes where I couldn't see him. Five minutes where something could have happened. It was AGONIZING.
Time Limit: Still the worst. Still hate it. Fought it and lost this time because the Omnitrix is a COWARD that waits until I'm comfortable and then RIPS EVERYTHING AWAY—
(The handwriting here became noticeably more aggressive, the pen nearly tearing through the paper.)
Overall Assessment: Okay. Fine. It's fine. It's not Heatblast. Nothing is Heatblast. But the speed is useful for getting to Ben fast, and the lap thing is nice, and the vibrating is... pleasant. For both of us. He made the 'mmm' sound. He DENIES making the 'mmm' sound but I heard it at 47x normal auditory sensitivity and I have a VERY good memory.
5/10. Would use again only if Heatblast is unavailable or if a situation specifically requires speed. Or if I want to play with Ben's hair. The hair thing was really nice.
Gwen lowered the paper.
The campfire crackled.
Ben stared at her.
Max stared at her.
"...You graded your alien forms," Ben said.
"Comparatively analyzed," Gwen corrected.
"You gave Heatblast a hundred out of ten."
"It deserved more. I was being conservative."
"You gave Heatblast's chest thirteen stars and a score in SCIENTIFIC NOTATION."
"The standard rating system was inadequate to express—"
"You called my face your FAVORITE THING TO LOOK AT."
"That's not what I—" Gwen paused. Reread her notes. Her human face—her small, ten-year-old, non-volcanic face—flushed bright red. "I—that was—I was in an altered mental state when I wrote—"
"You wrote this AFTER you detransformed!"
"...The feelings linger a little."
"A LITTLE?!"
"They linger a LOT, okay?!" Gwen clutched the paper to her chest, face burning. "They linger and I can still feel them and I KNOW it's weird but I CAN'T HELP IT and—and your hair IS soft, okay?! That's not—that's just a FACT! That's OBJECTIVE! I would have noticed that even WITHOUT the Omnitrix!"
"You have NEVER touched my hair before!"
"Well maybe I SHOULD HAVE!"
Silence.
The fire popped.
A cricket chirped, thought better of it, and went quiet.
Gwen and Ben stared at each other across the fire, both red-faced, both breathing hard, both grappling with the uncomfortable reality that their relationship had been fundamentally and irreversibly altered by an alien wristwatch from space.
Max Tennyson drank his coffee.
"I'm going to bed," Ben announced, standing up.
"Sleep well!" Gwen called after him, and her voice cracked halfway between Normal Gwen sarcasm and Omnitrix Gwen sincerity, landing in an uncanny valley of emotional ambiguity. "I—make sure you—your blanket—the thin one—"
The Rust Bucket door slammed.
Gwen sat by the fire, clutching her comparative analysis, the Omnitrix glowing softly on her wrist.
"Grandpa?"
"Yes, Gwen?"
"...How long until it recharges?"
Max looked at his granddaughter. His brilliant, type-A, straight-A, color-codes-her-highlighters granddaughter, who was sitting in a blanket by a campfire, asking him when she could next become a giant alien so she could hold her cousin against her chest.
"Get some sleep, Gwen."
She nodded. Stood up. Walked toward the Rust Bucket. Stopped at the door.
"Grandpa?"
"Yes?"
"...Heatblast's better."
"Goodnight, Gwen."
She went inside.
Max sat by the fire for a long time after that, staring at the flames, thinking about Pyronites and Kinecelerans and the way his granddaughter's handwriting had gotten more intense every time she wrote his grandson's name.
The Omnitrix pulsed green in the darkness of the Rust Bucket.
Gwen's fingers found it in the dark.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
TO BE CONTINUED...