It started at breakfast.
They were at a diner two exits off the highway, the kind of place with laminated menus and a spinning pie display and a waitress who called everyone hon. Max had eggs. Gwen had toast and was reading. Ben had a stack of pancakes and was looking out the window at the street outside with those quiet steady eyes.
A man ran past the window.
Then another man ran past the window chasing the first man and holding what was clearly someone else's bag.
Ben watched this. Looked at his pancakes. Looked at Gwen.
"I'll be right back," he said.
"Ben—"
He was already out the door.
Gwen looked at Max. Max looked at his eggs. She was out the door four seconds later.
Max sat alone at the table for a moment.
He picked up his coffee.
"Take it seriously," he said to the empty seats.
He drank his coffee.
Ben caught up to the bag snatcher two blocks from the diner in an alley that dead ended at a chain link fence. The man turned around when he heard footsteps and found a ten year old boy standing at the alley entrance and visibly relaxed.
Ben looked at him. At the bag. At him.
He tapped the Omnitrix, two fingers, slow and deliberate, like pressing a button he'd pressed a thousand times.
Blue crystal erupted from the ground in a wall directly behind the man, sealing the fence. Then two more walls on either side, boxing him in. The man looked at the walls. At Diamondhead. At the walls again.
"Put the bag down," Diamondhead said.
The man put the bag down.
"Sit."
The man sat.
Diamondhead picked up the bag and walked back out of the alley. Green flash. He was human again before he reached the street.
Gwen was standing at the alley entrance with both hands raised and a barrier half-formed that she hadn't needed to use.
Ben held up one finger.
"One," he said.
Gwen lowered her hands. "I was right behind you."
"You were right behind me while I handled it," Ben said.
"I had a plan."
"I had a result."
They walked back to the diner. Max was on his second coffee and had paid the bill already.
"Well?" he said.
"One nil," Ben said, sliding back into the booth.
Max looked at them both. "Take it seriously," he said.
"We did take it—"
"That man could have been armed. You went in alone without telling me, without a plan, without—"
"I had a plan," Ben said. "Diamondhead. It worked."
Max looked at him.
"It won't always work," Max said. "Next time you tell me first."
Ben picked up his fork. "There's going to be a next time?"
Max looked out the window at the town around them.
"With you two?" he said. "Yes."
The second encounter happened at eleven in the morning outside a convenience store.
Three men. Two inside the store with the cashier on the floor and one outside watching the street with his hands in his jacket in the specific way of someone with something in his jacket.
Max saw the outside man first. He slowed the Rustbucket without stopping and looked at the store.
"Robbery in progress," he said. "We call it in and wait for—"
Gwen was already out of the car.
She walked toward the outside man with the casual purpose of someone heading into a store and the man looked at her and by the time he registered that the pink-white light gathering in her hands was not normal she had a binding around both his wrists and ankles that pulled tight and sat him down on the pavement outside the store before he made a sound.
She caught the gun that fell out of his jacket with a small disc of energy before it hit the ground, wrapped it up and set it aside, and walked into the store.
Ben got out of the Rustbucket and looked at the man sitting on the pavement wrapped in glowing pink-white energy.
He looked at the store.
He looked at the man.
He got back in the Rustbucket.
"One all," he said.
Max looked at the store. At the man on the pavement. At Ben.
"Take it seriously," he said.
"Gwen took it seriously," Ben said. "Very efficiently actually."
"Both of you. Together. That's—"
"She was already out of the car."
"Ben."
"I'm just saying it was fast."
Gwen came out of the store with the cashier and two other people who had been inside and the two remaining men wrapped in energy bindings behind them like she was walking dogs. She handed them off to the cashier who stared at the glowing restraints with an expression nobody had trained him for.
She got back in the Rustbucket.
"One all," Ben said.
"I know," Gwen said. She picked up her notebook and made a mark.
Max looked at both of them and then at the road and started driving.
They stopped for lunch at a park in a small town at half past twelve.
Sandwiches from a grocery store, eaten on a bench while the afternoon warmed up around them and people moved through the park on their various ordinary errands. Max ate his sandwich and watched the park with the practiced attention of someone who had never fully stopped being on duty.
Ben was halfway through his when he looked up.
Across the park a man on a bicycle was moving fast through the crowd with something in his hand that he hadn't had when he arrived, a woman was shouting after him, pointing, too far back to catch up. The bicycle was already at the far path and picking up speed.
Ben stood up.
He tapped the Omnitrix on the run, a single tap as his feet hit the path, the back of his hand connecting with the device mid-stride without slowing down.
Green flash.
Stinkfly launched off the path and into the air in one motion, dark iridescent wings finding the air current above the park instantly, four eyes locking onto the bicycle below. He didn't chase it along the path, he went straight over the tree line and cut the angle, coming down ahead of the bicycle on the path beyond the park exit.
The cyclist came around the corner and hit his brakes.
Stinkfly landed in the middle of the path in front of him and looked at him with four eyes that were not the eyes of something that needed the bicycle stopped to stop the bicycle.
The cyclist dropped the bag and put his hands up.
Stinkfly picked up the bag. Green flash. Ben stood in the path holding a bag, the cyclist with his hands up in front of him, and Ben pointed at the bench he'd left.
"That way," he said. "Sit down."
He walked back through the park and returned the bag to the woman who stared at him with an expression he had no file for and he looked at the ground and kept walking.
"Two one," he said, sitting back down on the bench.
Max handed him the rest of his sandwich.
"Take it—"
"Seriously," Ben said. "I know."
"You left your lunch."
"I came back for it."
"You didn't tell me you were going."
"You watched me go."
Max looked at the park. "Take it seriously," he said.
The afternoon produced three more encounters that Ben and Gwen handled off the road between towns, a shoplifter, a man who grabbed a woman's phone outside a café, and something that started as two people arguing and became two people throwing things at each other in the middle of a car park until Gwen put a barrier between them and Ben stood to one side and watched until they calmed down.
That last one Ben argued wasn't a capture for either of them.
Gwen argued the barrier counted.
Ben argued stopping a fight wasn't the same category as stopping a crime.
Gwen argued the man had thrown a bottle at someone's head.
Ben argued that wasn't in the rules.
Gwen pointed out there were no rules.
Ben said there were implied rules.
Max said take it seriously.
Both of them looked at him.
"The argument or the work?" Gwen said.
"Both," Max said.
By late afternoon the score was four to three, Ben leading, and they were back in the Rustbucket on the highway with the sun going gold outside and Max making quiet driving sounds that indicated he had run out of things to say about their approach and had decided to save his energy.
"The phone snatch counts as mine," Ben said.
"You went Fourarms on a phone snatch," Gwen said.
"I transformed before I knew it was just a phone."
"You transformed because there was a running person and you wanted the point."
"I transformed because there was a potential threat—"
"You said and I quote, that one's mine, before you even saw what he took."
"I said that to establish—"
"Ben."
"A strategic claim on the encounter—"
"That is not what strategic means."
"It's what it means in this context."
Max looked at the road. The road looked back at him impassively.
"Take it seriously," he said. To the road mostly.
The fifth encounter came just before evening in a town they were passing through on the way to the next campsite.
Ben saw it first, two men coming out of a jewellery store fast and wrong, a smashed display case visible through the window behind them, an alarm going off that nobody was responding to yet because the street was quiet and the town was small.
He was out of the Rustbucket before it stopped moving.
"Ben—" Max said.
"I see them," Gwen said. She was already out too.
The two men split directions, one going left down the main street, one going right into a side road. Ben went right without discussion because the side road was narrower and Gwen was better in open space.
He rounded the corner and the man was thirty meters ahead and running hard. Ben reached up without breaking stride and tapped the Omnitrix, a running tap, casual and practiced, barely a movement at all.
The green light started.
It was halfway through, the shape of him already shifting, already growing, the blue crystal beginning to push through the skin from the shoulders down, when something pink-white came over his head from behind and wrapped around the running man's ankles and pulled tight and sat him down on the pavement hard.
The crystal receded.
Ben stood in the side road in human form with half a transformation's worth of residual green light fading off his shoulders and looked at the man sitting on the pavement wrapped in Gwen's binding.
He turned around.
Gwen was at the corner.
She had her hand raised and the binding running from her palm to the man's ankles and she looked at Ben with an expression of complete innocence.
"That was mine," Ben said.
"I assisted," Gwen said.
"You interrupted a transformation."
"The capture is complete."
"I was transforming."
"And now you don't have to," Gwen said pleasantly. "You're welcome."
Ben looked at the man on the ground. At Gwen.
"That does not count," he said.
"Four all," Gwen said. She lowered her hand. The binding held without her support now, locked in place. She walked past Ben toward the main street. "Come on. Grandpa will have the other one."
Ben stood in the side road.
He looked at the man on the ground.
"She did that on purpose," he told him.
The man had no useful input.
Ben followed Gwen back to the main street.
Max had the other man sitting against the Rustbucket's wheel with his hands zip-tied, actual zip ties from the Rustbucket's supply kit, which was apparently where Max had landed on the question of how he was participating in this.
He looked at Ben and Gwen coming back from the side road.
"Four all," Gwen said.
"She stole my transformation," Ben said.
"I completed the capture efficiently," Gwen said.
"Mid-transformation."
"The method isn't specified in the—"
"You said there were no rules and then you used the no-rules to—"
"Benjamin."
"She interrupted—"
"Benjamin Kirby Tennyson," Max said. Not loud. Just the particular register that ended sentences.
Ben stopped.
Max looked at both of them.
"You did well today," he said. "Both of you." He looked at Ben. "But you're still going in without telling me first."
"There wasn't time—"
"There's always one second," Max said. "You told me that."
Ben closed his mouth.
Max looked at Gwen. "And you."
Gwen looked attentive.
"Good instincts," Max said. "Work on talking to each other before you split directions. You went right because Ben went right and it worked out. It won't always."
Gwen nodded.
Max looked at them both one more time.
"Take it seriously," he said.
"We captured eight people," Ben said.
"Take it seriously," Max said.
He got in the Rustbucket.
They were twenty minutes back on the highway, the evening coming in gold and long-shadowed, Gwen writing in her notebook and Ben looking out the window with the settled quiet of someone who had used a good amount of their day well, when the device in Ben's pocket buzzed.
He pulled it out.
The small round badge, Gellix's data, Ted's gift, the Plumber network in his palm, was lit up on the control side. A single steady pulse. Not urgent. Not an alarm. Just present and insistent and new.
Gwen looked over. Her badge was doing the same thing.
Ben looked at Max in the rearview mirror.
Max had already glanced at his own communicator on the dashboard. His expression had shifted, not alarmed, just recalibrated. The road trip expression replaced by something older and more focused.
"What is it?" Ben said.
"Alien threat signature," Max said. "Forty miles up the road." He checked the communicator again. "Minor classification. Single entity. No faction tag."
Ben looked at the badge in his hand.
Then at the road ahead through the windshield.
The gold was going out of the evening fast and the highway stretched forward into something that was about to be less ordinary than it had been all day.
"Minor," Ben said.
"Minor," Max confirmed.
Ben put the badge back in his pocket.
Outside the window the last of the gold faded and the road ahead went blue-grey in the early dark and the Rustbucket's engine groaned its usual groan and kept going.
"Four all," Gwen said quietly. Not really to anyone.
Ben said nothing.
The badge buzzed once more in his pocket and went still.