Ben Tennyson really didn't want to waste a weekend on repeatedly invading an alien intruder's dreams. And that was before the dark blue horse with the superiority complex called dibs.
The heroic life isn't necessarily glamorous. Ben didn't get to fight the most recent alien to pop out of a pocket wormhole, because it collapsed shortly after arrival. The weird quadruped (a hand at the end of its tail, eyes where its nostrils should be) is currently doing nothing more than sleeping the trip off. But the Plumbers need to know what it's doing here -- and as long as it's asleep, there's only one means of interrogation available. Which requires using one of his least-favorite forms, but... that's the heroic life for you.
It's just that someone's already invaded that alien's dream.
And she has no problems with telling Ben how bad he is at it.
Even at the age of ten, in the middle of finding out that his grandfather had once held the coolest job ever -- even then, he'd had questions. And perhaps the most crucial had been about the name. How could the profession of locating, monitoring, and dealing with extraterrestrial arrivals -- again, the coolest job ever -- have possibly wound up with that ridiculous, mundane, and perfectly boring title?
The initial answer had been less than satisfactory, especially at that age of ten: ultimately, it was about plugging the leaks. But a few years had passed since then, and he had begun to recognize some of the subtleties.
For starters, the title was exceptionally convenient. Being a member of a government agency which technically wasn't supposed to exist made it a little hard to prove authority, and pulling rank was something of a problem. Outright muscling your way into an area effectively became impossible. But if you just told them what you were, by title -- then it was usually going to be a free pass. Those who guarded buildings would typically step aside, because it was a choice between letting you in through the front or risking having a tide of brown water strike them from the back. Outdoor problem? There's pipes everywhere: just ask them! You could find an excuse to be practically anywhere in the world and if that location was at sea, then it was probably going to be something about investigating fluid runoff.
The title was also about practicality. You went in with the tools available and you kept working until everything was solved. It was also best to prevent people from trying to make their own repairs, because that usually just made the problem worse. Some of those post-DIY cleanup operations had come close to going global.
You cleared the clogs. Kept the flow of the world running normally. It was also a job which led to having a lot of odd bits lying around: you weren't always sure what some of them did, but you hung on to everything because eventually, there was going to be a repair which required whatever-that-was and when it came along, you'd instinctively know its time had come. Plus everything they did wound up costing far more than it should have, and someone always had to pay that bill because otherwise, who was going to do it the next time around?
The name had layers.
But there was another truth to the job's title: something which required significant direct experience before the sheer twinned humor and horror of it broke through. And ultimately, it had taken Ben Tennyson about six years to spot the joke.
Those who dealt with the presence of aliens on Earth were called 'Plumbers' for the following reasons: they were brought in when the worst of it was about to explode from the hidden underlayers, they spent their lives in trying to keep it from overflowing, and saving the world meant fighting while you were up to your neck in a rising tide of brown stuff. Trying to fight back the kind of flood which an entire universe could bring to bear against a single world, while desperately hoping not to drown.
Also, if your no-longer-quite-as-retired grandfather happened to call you in on a Saturday morning because a potential problem had popped out of an invisible pipeline, then your entire weekend was clearly about to get flushed.
Ben hadn't been to Mount Rushmore in a while. It was the first of the Plumber headquarters he'd encountered during that summer road trip, and that alone made it a special place. But most of what he remembered about it (beyond the fear and terror and phantom sensations of those strangely-dry facial tentacles running across his arm) was the emptiness.
He'd been told it was one of the least-used facilities. And as with most of the hidden locations, it could be made to serve as a command center: every last satellite location (including the one in orbit) had to be prepared to take over for the whole thing, because it was presumed that any truly major incursion might lead to all of the others being lost. As such, it had everything. There was a communications hub, medical facilities, weapons storage -- especially weapons storage. If Rushmore ever turned into the location of the last stand, then the final fight was going to be a well-armed one. The mountain was where the Plumbers kept their final resorts: the things they didn't want to use, along with those pieces of technological flotsam and jetsam which simply weren't understood, couldn't be safely destroyed, and had to be kept somewhere.
There was a well-guarded room buried deep within stone and if the last crisis was ever truly upon the little planet -- then it was understood that a Plumber would venture within, deactivate the shielding around one of the strange objects, and finally learn what this button did.
But there just wasn't very much space cleared within the mountain, especially when compared to some of the other hidden places. It wasn't considered to be a priority assignment: even with the Plumbers fully active again, Rushmore typically ran at minimum staff -- and there were days like this one, where the hollowed-out high-tech corridors were just about empty. To Ben, Rushmore forever felt like a place which was waiting for the next thing to happen and when he walked its halls, what little staff there was tended to clear out ahead of him.
There were several ways in which an observer could have described Ben Tennyson. The boring version was 'Teenager, brunette, green eyes, on the short side, sort of skinny, may own exactly one jacket and probably doesn't know how to put it through the laundry properly.' Those who were more knowledgeable might start with 'bearer of the Omnitrix', and the device's ability to rearrange DNA made any description of 'human' into something part-time. But the Plumbers had experience, and knew that Max's grandson proudly accepted the designation of 'Mobile Disaster Area'.
When Ben was around, things Happened. It was usually best to get some distance before some of them started Happening to you.
"The alarms went off at 10:57 last night," his grandfather told him, striding slightly ahead of the younger through the sterile grey corridors. "We have multiple detection capabilities in that part of the park, along with a few normal cameras. So we saw it come through the wormhole."
"A wormhole," Ben carefully repeated as he maintained his pace. His grandfather was in good shape for his age, but... he was older than a Plumber should have been. If Grandpa Max wanted to take the lead, then his grandson was going to let him have it. "In National Memorial?"
"I know," Max Tennyson casually noted. "It's the first one to open on that exact spot in a few years --"
Ben blinked.
"You get them every few years?"
His grandfather stopped. Turned, with heavy footfalls echoing in the corridors. Calm brown eyes regarded Ben.
"Every Plumber headquarters," the old man patiently said, "is built near or around the site of a known weak spot."
Repeating "Weak spot," didn't seem to be helping. Magnetics? Lay lines -- ley? Was it something Gwen had said? He dimly remembered snickering at the 'lay' bit...
"Think of a stretched-out rubber sheet, anchored with equal strength along every edge," his grandfather carefully told him. "Anything traveling through subspace, or using one of the dimensional vectors to get around lightspeed... that's a steel ball rolling across the surface. A ball which is being steered will make it to the other side. But otherwise, Ben -- it's going to roll along. Eventually, it'll lose momentum. Stop somewhere. And when it does... all of the mass is going to be pressing on one spot. Keep that up for long enough, and the sheet tears. That weight drops through to the other side. To us. And it creates a zone where something is likely to slip through again." A little more softly, with faint traces of humor, "We didn't exactly plan to have a national park built around this one. But we guard it. Just like the others. Because it's easier to come through here. Easier to set up a drop zone for warps, to use the Null Void Projector -- everything. And if there's going to be a breach, then it's likely to start in one specific spot. Which is in a clearing about six hundred yards west of the Presidential Trail. So we've got cameras there. Among other things. Sometimes we get debris. Random bits of tech, which get stored in the usual place. And sometimes we get arrivals."
Ben had a way of nodding which said that he'd known a given fact all along, had just been giving someone else the courtesy of confirming his information, and it didn't work on Grandpa Max either.
The old man was still looking at him.
"This is all in your protocol books," the senior Plumber said.
Ben was sure that his body posture wasn't defensive. His arms weren't folded or anything. "I've been reading them."
Five seconds of silence. Ten. Twelve...
His grandfather sighed. Turned again, and resumed the walk.
"So something came through last night," Ben tried.
"Yes."
A payload of sheer tonal offendedness drifted through the air. "You didn't call me in."
"We don't call you in every time," Max eventually said. "There's plenty of things we're capable of taking care of without you. The Plumbers were managing for a couple of centuries before Benjamin Kirby Tennyson decided to grace the universe with his presence. There's even events which wrap up during school hours, and no one calls you because you have classes --"
With perfect sincerity, "-- I could drop out."
That made the old man stop again. The adolescent automatically paused to match, maintaining the distance between them.
"It's a joke!"
"Really?"
Lightly, "It's always a joke --"
There was a tinge of anger in the strong voice now. "-- then let me know when it starts being funny. You've said that a little too often for the words not to have some force behind them, Ben. I've known you for your whole life, and whatever you try to laugh off with the same punchline starts turning into the truth."
"School just gets in the way," Ben quickly argued. "You've seen that. I'm out in public now. Nearly everything is. I could do everything here full-time, if I just dropped --"
"-- one more word," the old man softly told him, and did while facing forward. Without looking at Ben. "One more word on that sentence, and I send you home."
The corridors were solid, made from a ceramic composite which was more durable than just about anything on the planet. Grey-white. Sterile. Cold.
Finally, the grandson said "It came through last night."
"And from what I saw in the camera footage," Max calmly continued as he resumed his stride, "it got about four steps. Four knee-sagging, rib-heaving steps. Then it collapsed. There's a lot of reasons for not initially calling you in on something, Ben. One of them is not being in a combat situation because the incursion is unconscious. We went out and got it onto a medical transport. Half of the union stayed back to secure and close off the site -- the wormhole's still a little bit open -- and the rest brought our arrival back here."
The teenager was quiet for a moment.
"How is it?"
The old man heard the compassion and worry lurking under the mask of casualness, then carefully hid his own smile. "Asleep. It's been asleep for hours, and we think it's likely to stay that way because that's how it's recovering. We've seen this from other species. A sort of healing coma, Ben: everything else shuts down so the body can repair itself. But there were no visible wounds. From what the medics are willing to guess, the passage did something. Completely exhausted it. And since we don't know how to help it... we're just letting it sleep. For now."
They don't know how to help it. They have records on what has to be dozens of species from direct contact, hundreds more on data transfer, and they don't know...
Ben took a slow breath.
"What is it?"
"That's the first reason for you being here," Max Tennyson said. "I was hoping you could tell me."
Rushmore had everything required to serve as a full control center for Plumber operations. That included the medical facilities.
And the cells.
There weren't very many of the latter. About two dozen. Each had to be accessed via airlock, because some aliens had different atmospheric requirements. Specialized bulbs in the cell itself allowed flexible lighting -- and, if necessary, some degree of harder radiation. And any unit could be flooded at need: you had to keep the aquatics somewhere.
Basically, if an alien required an environmental condition in order to survive -- vacuum very much included -- then the cells were capable of creating it. And this one...
"We did the basics," his grandfather said. "The medics managed to get some scans in. It's not having any trouble dealing with our atmosphere, or operating in Earth's gravity."
"But you don't know enough to try treating it."
"No."
"And you don't know what it is." He felt his voice rise with excitement on the last word, was briefly grateful that it had stopped cracking some time back.
"Do you?"
He looked through the transparent front panels. Let his gaze cross the airlock, move into the cell, across the alien form...
It almost could have been a Vulpimancer. It was close to Wildmutt's size, perhaps would have been somewhat taller if the quadruped had been standing. It was collapsed on the cold cell floor, the limbs were splayed in all directions...
But he knew Vulpimancers. (Knowledge which rose from the level of instinct, after spending so much time in the form of one of the watch's ten original species.) Their fur didn't go that dark, not to that deep blue which coated so much of this alien's body. He'd never seen the sky-hued streaks which covered the lower edge of the muzzle, along with the chest and forepaws --
Not forepaws.
He'd just spotted that. The back legs had proper paws, and the claws looked sharp. The fore ended in a quartet of splayed digits. Something which could be folded in to allow for the equivalent of knuckle-walking, because the alien's natural posture was that of the quadruped -- but they could also be utilized as rough hands.
The head was far too elongated. Lips went almost all the way back to the neck, and he could catch glimpses of white fangs with every breath. Triangular ears shifted position as the creature slept, wide shoulders smoothly met the rib cage, and then the alien's body narrowed as it moved back towards the tail and --
-- there was another section of sky-blue at the very back of the tail. And where a tip or tuft should have been...
The alien moved slightly as it slept. The grasping digits at the end of that tail pulled together into a fist, and thumped against the floor.
"Do you know?" his grandfather quietly asked him.
"I thought Vulpimancer at first," Ben admitted. "It's at least a little like Wildmutt. Just as blind --"
"It's not blind."
Ben looked at the smooth fur on the sides of the head. Checked the slanting slope of skull along the top. Nothing.
"Where are the eyes?"
"Look at the very front of the head -- no, move up..."
He did. His breath caught in his throat.
"I thought those were pinched nostrils."
The old man shook his head. "No. And that little pink spot isn't fur discoloration. It's the nose."
He could see it now. Optical organs within vertical inches of the mouth's front fangs. Facial features scrunched into the smallest possible space.
"The medics told me that the braincase is fascinating," his grandfather said. "Do you know what it is, Ben?"
"Not on sight," he admitted.
"Does the Omnitrix?"
He pushed back one sleeve of the battered green jacket. Looked at the upper surface of the miracle which had defined so much of his life.
The Omnitrix had changed over the years, as had he. Growing up together. But the activation panel always had that touch of the hourglass to it. The inventor claimed coincidence, something entirely accidental. Ben wasn't sure. You stopped believing in coincidence, if you spent enough time as a hero. Destiny began to take its place, acquiring solidity and ever-increasing weight.
He raised his left arm, held it out so that the watch's upper panel was facing the cell. The center light turned yellow, and a beam of pure inquiry penetrated that which was not entirely glass.
The light moved up and down across the sleeping form. The tail's fist thumped the floor again, harder. And the Omnitrix beeped. Four tones: two rising, two falling, just before the yellow light went out.
"No," Ben just barely breathed.
It doesn't recognize this. I can learn about this. I can be this...
"I can't get a proper scan this way," the adolescent hurriedly declared as his heartbeat accelerated. "It's just doing a visual comparison. If you let me into the cell, I can get its DNA --"
"No."
His grandfather had said that. The tone meant the senior Plumber was backing it up.
"No? It's new! I can find out what it is through becoming it, Grandpa! We keep finding stuff that Azmuth missed, and you know he'll want the data --"
"-- it's under medical monitoring," Max Tennyson said, "because from what we can tell, it's exhausted and needs to heal. It's in a cell because we don't know why it came through the wormhole. We don't have its intentions. And with a complete unknown, something where we had every union member in Level 10 hazard equipment just to bring it in here -- we do not send people into the cell. Not without the kind of protection which the Omnitrix can't scan through. Not even for my grandson." And the brown eyes went hard. "Especially for my grandson. Ben, this is still from the protocol book.--"
'-- I've been reading it!"
He had. The cover clearly counted.
The old man said nothing. Ben pulled back from the viewing panel, dropped his arm and let go of the sleeve while muttering to himself. He'd recently taken to learning curses in exotic foreign languages for just such an occasion. His grandfather knew all of the alien ones, including that which required trying to rip off your own left ear.
"So it's an official unknown," Max finally went on. "And that brings us to the other reason I called you in."
The muttering teen, who couldn't think of anything even remotely as important as a fresh transformation, waited.
"Communication," the old man told him.
The muttering stopped.
"Communication," Ben repeated, because that was a good way of buying time until people realized they needed to tell him more stuff.
"It collapsed before it said anything. The medics don't want to wake it up in this state: with other species, you can't interrupt a healing sleep casually and hope it'll resume on the other side of the discussion. And since it's new, the language won't be in any records. The brain structure doesn't give us a guarantee that the translators are going to work. And we still don't know how it came through, or why. Someone has to speak with it. That's you."
"How?" was a very natural question. "None of my aliens have the power to just translate! And if you're thinking of telepathy, then I don't have an unlock for Synaptak's species. Brainstorm just projects his thoughts --"
"It's asleep," his grandfather smiled.
"It sleeps," Ben failed to buy time. "Most aliens sleep --"
"-- REM sleep," the old man added. "Near-constant. The medics verified that much. It's dreaming, Ben. And if it can dream..."
Green eyes blinked. The world came back on the other side of it, so Ben ranked the move as a failure.
"No."
"Yes."
"Oh no..."
"Ben --"
"Don't make me do this."
"I'm not making you do anything," the senior Plumber said. "I'm asking."
The teenager's shoulders went limp.
There was a device on the left arm, and it only weighed about three pounds. Except for when it tried to drag him down.
"Take a few minutes," his grandfather told him. "Get ready. And then bring out Pesky."
He'd asked Azmuth about it once, during a basic maintenance session shortly after -- something had happened. And there were two possible horrors associated with asking a question of the Omnitrix's creator. The first was that the self-titled most intelligent being in the universe would decide it was a stupid question. And if that happened, you would know it. Because he would tell you. Azmuth would verbally walk all over you, up one side and down the other. If the little Galvan was in a particularly bad mood, then the adhesive pads on the bare feet would make it a little more literal. There would be a few extremely angry pounds of grey alien stomping across your body, because the whole of you was stupid and he wasn't going to quit until after every last cell had been made to recognize its inferiority.
But the frog eyes had simply blinked. (The eyelids were on the sides, closed in towards the center. You got used to it after a while.)
"Default for every transformation will match the bearer," he'd said. "So for you, that's a male equivalent. For the species which have what you could consider to be males. If there isn't a direct correlation, then you'll get as close as possible. And if that can't be done, then it'll be the base form. Why?"
There were two possible horrors which could rise from asking Azmuth a question, and the second was that he would answer it.
"Default," Ben had repeated.
"You're trying to buy time to think again," the inventor had immediately grumbled. "It's very transparent. And annoying. And with you, generally pointless. I asked you why --"
"Can't you just create -- an artificial chromosome? Add that to every species in the watch?"
Azmuth had blinked again.
"An artificial chromosome."
"See? What does it mean when you repeat stuff? What are you trying to buy time for --"
"I wanted you," the Galvan had said, "to hear that from the outside. In the hopes that it would actually reach your ears. Ben, in order to experience existence as other species through the Omnitrix, you must be as they are. Without artificial modifications like creating 'males' for those who don't naturally have them. Something which might completely unbalance their genetic structure."
"But if you looked it as a challenge --" argued that part of him which wasn't really comfortable with any of the memories from What Had Just Happened.
Azmuth stared at him for a few seconds.
"Benjamin?"
"...yes?"
"Have you ever noticed that when you change... you benefit from a rather interesting feature of the Omnitrix?"
"Transforming?"
"No." Far too calmly for the irascible genius, "The one where you happen to remember who you are."
It hadn't made any sense. "Well -- yeah. Unless I use one form way too often, but you know about --"
"-- I had to build the Omnitrix so that it would truly transform the wearer into another species. This includes a full-scale change to the brain. And different aliens have different brain structures, don't they? Proportions, new centers for control of functions which a human doesn't have, and I had to make sure all of your RNA chemical traces would carry over to every result. Including with those species which don't use RNA. Or chemical traces. And then there's the ones which don't have actual neurons. Try to imagine what I had to do in order to let you do anything other than mindlessly recite trinary code as a Mechamorph, Ben, because I already did. And then I created it. I'd explain the details, but neither of us is going to live long enough to find the words which would allow you to comprehend them."
"Um..."
"Additionally," the alien had gone on, speaking from the heart of an exceptionally vicious inner peace and doing so while striding about halfway up Ben's thin chest, "have you ever considered where your food goes? Let us say that you drink one of your objectionable 'smoothies' while once again disregarding what the composition is doing to your lifespan. The complete contents of the largest container you can purchase. And before digesting it all, you make the rare wise decision to become a Galvan. You are carrying more fluid than our stomachs can contain. Why does it not simply erupt from any and all orifices, Ben? In fact, were you to take a Nanochip form while flush with flavored liquid chemicals, why do you not simply explode?"
"Um," Ben had said, and hoped not to remember his dreams that night.
"Have you ever considered that?" said the inventor from his place atop Ben's sternum.
"...no."
"I did. And had to solve that too."
"...oh."
"Did you ever think to thank me? For retention of identity, along with simply not dying?"
"...no."
"Well?"
"...thank you."
"And you want an 'artificial chromosome' on top of that," Azmuth had reminded him. "When it could unbalance the system. And lead to minor side effects. Such as exploding. Very well. Should I start on that now?"
"...no."
"Good. I'm running maintenance. Shut up."
He'd jumped down to Ben's left arm, gone back to tinkering.
"You said 'male' was the default for me. Or close to it."
"I said to shut --"
"-- for me. So if a girl put it on, or something went wrong --"
"BEN. SHUT."
Ben considered himself to be utterly secure in his masculinity. In fact, as someone who was on the short side, sort of skinny, and who'd discovered that he added muscle mass with somewhat less ease than he became highly radioactive (as NRG, for ten minutes at a time), he was so secure in his masculinity that he regularly changed himself into hulking aliens who were far larger, stronger, and more muscular than he would ever be. The bigger and tougher, the better. Humongous was fine. Humongasaur was better than that. Because that was just how secure he was. And he had absolutely never taken on a form in privacy simply for the sake of pulling down its pants. For the species which had pants. So there.
...well, okay. A few times.
...look, there were some occasions when the Omnitrix's normal time limit had been overridden for a while. He usually wasn't any given thing long enough to worry about going to the bathroom, but he'd held Bullfrag's form for days and eventually, that was going to mean investigating the Incursean version of a toilet. Getting a look was practical.
He'd looked as Fourarms once. Never again. And then he'd had weird dreams about electrical outlets for a week.
But he'd just assumed, when he was ten. He was a boy, so all of his aliens were going to be boys. It had made sense.
He'd grown up. (Well, most of the way.) He'd still felt that made sense.
And then his Big Chill form had laid fourteen eggs.
He would become a male, or the closest equivalent -- if that species had males. Necrofriggians didn't, and now Ben was technically a parent. The hatchlings had automatically headed for the species' home planet, which presented certain difficulties in seeing his kids.
Some species functioned without sexual reproduction. They didn't have males. Or they didn't function as Ben understood things to work. (A lack of personal experience translated this to 'poorly'.)
The form which Ben, with his usual genius naming skills, had labeled as 'Pesky Dust'... that was from a species which was apparently known as the Nemuina.
As a transformation... Pesky had some problems.
Pesky had navy-blue 'hair', which stood up straight like a troll doll which had been dipped in glue. That was about a fifth of Pesky's height, which didn't help much because with the 'hair' included, Pesky was about twenty-two inches tall.
The green eyes (because all eyes were green throughout the changes, for the species which had them) were almost luminescent. The color also took up the whole of the ocular surface, and set off nicely against the pinkish-purple spots on Pesky's aquamarine cheeks. And chin. Pesky always looked as it was in the middle of a slightly embarrassed blush.
The hands were too slim. Fingers (just two) and thumb were nearly two-dimensional. The limbs had no true strength. Pesky possessed very little mass, and that was a necessity because the fragile butterfly wings on its back couldn't lift much. As it was, Pesky could fly, and the small form was fairly agile in the air... but it wasn't very fast. And it was also incredibly easy to follow, because flight produced a glowing trail of light. There didn't seem to be anything Ben could do about that.
There were a lot of ways to describe Pesky. 'Fairylike' was accurate. 'Like one of those old toys, you know the ones, they got banned, you put them on a spinner and pull the cord and they fly straight up for about ten feet and then come down and either go into someone's eye or shatter on the sidewalk' required some reference material. But you could definitely use 'delicate' with complete accuracy. 'The girliest thing ever', however, would have pretty much headed off any ten-year-old's list.
And in combat... Pesky didn't have a Galvan's innate resilience. Nanochips were much smaller, but they also had some density -- and anything that tiny was extremely hard to target. Pesky was just large enough to hit and far too small to hit back. In a physical fight, a Nemuina would quickly be destroyed.
Which was why the species hadn't evolved to fight that way.
Nemuinas produced a dustlike substance from pores on their hands and wings, a faintly-glowing trail of yellow. It was a powerful sedative. Just about anything which breathed would fall asleep within a few seconds of taking it in.
It didn't last long. A few minutes at most for each dose, and that was usually more than enough time to get away. But the Nemuina had taken it further. Because while the victims slept... they entered a dream state.
A Nemuina could enter dreams, using the dust as a sort of telepathic conduit. Control the environment, use it to explore the sleeper's mind. Search for answers to vital questions.
Or... just maybe... communicate.
The form which Ben called Pesky Dust had power: the ability to drop most creatures who made the mistake of inhaling was extremely useful. But there were factors which balanced that power. The dust had a strictly limited range. Anyone with their own air supply was going to be fine. Filters did a lot to keep Pesky's abilities out. Any AI which was sufficiently advanced enough for sarcasm tended to laugh. Some aliens didn't sleep or dream, and they didn't know if the dust worked on all of the ones which did.
Pesky was small and fragile and extremely girly and Ben, who had spent multiple nights involuntarily turning into Big Chill until the reproductive cycle had finished, wasn't entirely sure the Nemuina was male. He'd never had enough privacy with the form to lift the garment and find out.
(Not that all aliens had identifiable genitals.)
But then there was the garment itself. Ben constantly denied that Pesky was wearing a dress, no matter how often Kevin and Gwen brought it up. (Kevin usually snickered.)
The unknown alien in the cell, a creature from a place so remote that Azmuth had never found it... was about the size of Wildmutt, with claws and fangs and sheer mass added to the bonus of an extra fist at the end of the tail.
Transforming into Pesky made Ben feel a lot of different things.
The biggest one was vulnerable.
He was in the airlock. Grandpa Max was in the hallway outside the cell, and the alien... slept.
"Ready when you are," the old man told him.
Ben took a deep breath. Pulled back the left sleeve, exposed the interface.
Work.
There were times when he felt that the Omnitrix could hear his thoughts. Mostly just before it ignored them, usually for the sake of comedy.
On a bad day, it was sort of like having a permanently-attached cat. It might appear to cooperate occasionally, but it really did whatever it wanted. It loved to ignore him. And if it ever blew the landing, that was somehow his fault, plus the Omnitrix had totally meant to do that anyway. In that aspect, it was very much like its creator.
He manipulated the interface. A fragile-seeming silhouette appeared.
Work. You'll work because I don't want to do this. Because you know how I feel about becoming Pesky. So you'll work in order to get a laugh out of that. I don't want to do this.
But it was a new alien. A new person. Someone who might be lost. Far from home, not knowing where it was or if there was any way back. Lost and -- afraid. And until it woke up, Pesky was the only way to help.
Ben took a small breath. Sat down on the floor, arranged his legs because it was best to do so before they thinned and shrunk. There had been times when changing into Pesky while standing left him hovering above the floor: sitting was safer.
Another breath, just to relish the feeling of air entering human lungs.
He triggered the Omnitrix.
When he was ten, he'd never thought about what had to be happening inside. DNA chains ripping themselves apart. Chemical traces of memory trying to find some way to exist. But if Azmuth really wanted to produce horror, he answered questions.
Multiple people had asked him if the process hurt. It didn't. The first things to go in any change were the pain receptors and out of necessity, they were the last things to come back.
He'd also been asked about what it felt like. To be a different species, to see through its eyes and think with its brain. (Pesky's vision ran out at the fringes of orange: anything beyond that showed up as black. The ultraviolet compensation on the other end was especially pretty, but Pesky couldn't remember what red looked like. Pesky couldn't even imagine red...) And with Gwen and Kevin, with whom he could be honest... he'd told them that he couldn't think about it too much. To become a Tetramand and think as a human was to realize that you now had four arms and no idea how to make two of them work. He'd spent his first minute as a Pyronite screaming about being on fire...
You had to lose yourself in the new body. Operate on instinct, on reflex. Let the form simply... function. It understood how to survive. It led the way.
You had to lose yourself in the new body.
And if you stayed in it too long...
...he'd had to be Bullfrag for days...
...the alien body was sitting on the cold airlock floor.
Sounds were sharper. (The 'hair' picked up vibrations, amplified ambient noise for a species which needed some extra warning. It could be trimmed, but doing so weakened the sense until it grew back.) Temperatures seemed to strike more deeply: less body mass to keep them out. Air currents roiled across the ineffective armor of skin.
"Ready?" his grandfather asked.
"Rrrrready --"
That voice. It always shocked him, and it had only gotten worse after Kevin had played him a phone recording of it. Pesky spoke with a trill and a purr -- at the same time. Pesky had a voice suitable for the sort of toyline mascot which cancelled out testosterone through proximity.
"All right," the senior plumber told him. "Give me some dust." (Crucial micro-pores opened, and yellow mist went into the air. A small sampling chamber near the top of the airlock's second door pulled it in, then sealed.) "I'm monitoring our guest for reactions and sending the data down to Medical. If they see anything adverse, we stop."
The alien nodded. Waiting.
The smaller airlock cycled. Yellow mist went into the cell, sunk down to the sleeping alien and surrounded the too-long head.
"No reaction so far --"
The stranger breathed. Pulled in the dust, and brought Pesky's soul with it.
It's instinct.
You can't think about it. If you think, it doesn't work.
The alien needs to speak with the new arrival. So there's supposed to be an appropriate setting for that. Of course, this is usually whatever Ben considers to be an appropriate setting. Khyber got stuck in the back of the old RV, and a dreaming mind didn't see anything unnatural about being on board the Rustbucket in its glory days. That was something Ben chose because it was comfortable for him, and the hunter just went along for the ride.
So this should be a place of safety and protection. Something which forms on its own.
It's a jungle.
The hovering little alien frowns: something which makes it feel as if several vital muscles are being strained. This isn't...
It tries to alter the domain. Make it into something with a decent couch and, if at all possible, much lower humidity.
Nothing happens.
When Ben was ten years old, he went on a roadtrip across America with his cousin and grandpa, and that changed his life. But years have passed. He's been to other planets now, along with exploring a few more portions of his birthplace. This looks a little like South America. That could be rosewood over there, and that flowering plant -- well, if you figure that black is where the red should be, then it's probably heliconia. Except...
The colors (for what the alien can see of them) are too sharp. Too solid. Everything seems to exist at a higher degree of refinement, but does so with fewer definitions. There aren't as many shades or fine hues. Green only has so many gradients available. Lines and curves feel amplified...
Where is it?
This is a dream. So where's the dreamer?
The alien strains. Tries to change the dream itself, and nothing happens. Then it tries to think about what it's doing, and that just gets in the way.
There's never been a dream which it couldn't influence. Figments that weren't outright controlled. But this is a dream, because the alien is here. And the dreamer has to be somewhere within the dream.
Unless the dreamer is the jungle.
"Hello?"
Nothing. No response. The swaying of tall grass probably doesn't count.
...okay. The clock is ticking. Alien instincts and limited experience both insist that time can go strange in a dream -- but somewhere on the outside, the Omnitrix is counting down. There's only so much duration available before reversion.
The little alien flies, and -- it's awkward. It's never had to do this before. The dream always became what the alien desires. Searching is new. It's also highly visible, because there's that glowing light trail behind it and there's still nothing to be done about that.
Several vines are dodged. The garment nearly gets snagged on thorns, and that's never happened before either. And the alien is trying to count seconds (something almost reflexive to every change now, because the Omnitrix always has the clock running), but time can be different in a dream and it's sure that at least a few minutes have passed in this search, a few minutes out of no more than ten and --
-- the 'hair' vibrates.
Something just crashed through wood, up ahead on the left. There was enough force to break multiple branches. Whatever's moving is big...
The alien hesitates. Hovers, as light drifts down.
It's just a dream. I'll be okay.
It flies towards the noise. The sonic antenna twitches, helps it center --
-- and there it is.
The stranger looks a lot bigger up close. Huge blasts of air somehow surge through the tiny nose -- no, it's not just the nose: the creature also does some breathing through the mouth. The eye placement seems more wrong than ever, but -- no one can help the way they evolve. And the legs kick at branches, the forelimbs pull them apart and the grasper at the end of the tail makes sure no splintered remnants come close to drawing wounds.
The stranger is pushing through dense underbrush and too many low branches. The ears are aloft and twisting, it keeps gulping at the air, and the head is constantly shifting from side to side because that strange placement gives it just about no peripheral vision. In military terms, it has to keep checking its three and nine: the probing tail looks after the six.
Every sense it has is on high alert. And it just keeps pushing forward...
...Ben knows what it's doing.
Ben was on the receiving end of this, because that's what Khyber wanted.
Okay. Just ask.
The alien's wings try to pick up speed. A small body comes in high, because it may only be a dream, but -- it's not sure the dreamer knows that, and this is a dream which won't change. The alien wants to be out of forelimb range.
It comes in above the stranger, and light drifts down in front of those odd eyes.
The stranger looks up.
"You'rrrre hunting for something," the alien says. "Can I help you look?"
The huge mouth opens, and does so almost all the way back to the neck. White incisors glisten, and the stranger takes a breath --
-- there is light drifting down from the alien's hovering form. That's just how flight works for a Nemuina. There's nothing which can be done about it.
Then there's more light.
It's the darkest of blues, it glimmers with hints of embedded sparkles and stars, and it surrounds the little alien. Yanks, and the surprised tiny form can't break free.
This is its domain. The world of dreams, where the weak body has absolute control, and that small alien is sailing backwards now, flying against its will, pulled by light as the helpless flight is steered around branches and past vines, steady descending until it comes to a stop among the tall grasses.
The light winks out.
And before the alien can move, a silver-clad forehoof drops onto its chest.
The dark blue equine head is tilted down. Feathered wings flare out along the flanks of the powerful body, beat against the air in open frustration.
The boy he was at ten would have had no trouble describing the creature. It would have instantly become the new girliest thing ever -- just so long as you expanded the definition of 'girly' to include 'is about to kick your ass'.
Lips pull back from teeth, and the sharp horn is lowered that much closer to the alien's throat.
"You idiot!"
The alien, for whom all the rules have already been overturned, can't speak.
"Do you know how much effort I had to expend in crafting this nightscape?" the equine demands. "To mold the world around one who would expect intrusion, who guards against it and strains to keep their secrets -- and then create a place where, given enough time, they would simply show me why they risked the portal? And I kept my presence secret, let Ahuizotl move as he willed, secure in his privacy -- but YOU --!"
There's something about the way the equine speaks. It's like listening to a newly-graduated English teacher who spent four years in learning when to use 'whom' and five seconds on how to flunk anyone who couldn't.
"-- you just alerted him, did you not? Not a single intruder moving about his nightscape with stealth, but open declaration of presence! It will take so much more to learn of his plans now, it may even be impossible, and that is all because of you --"
She stops. Because there's a crashing noise off in the distance, more wood breaking as the stranger pushes on. It may even be coming towards them.
But she also stops because there's another sound. A very familiar one for the alien. Descending tones of alert, and when viewed through strange eyes, the hourglass symbol is flashing black.
"Your dress," the equine notes with a rather odd calm, "is beeping."
The alien, who has at most two seconds remaining before the Omnitrix times out and the dreamworld vanishes, leaving a human body sitting on a cold floor -- immediately decides to use that scant time for the single most important thing.
"IT'S NOT A DRESS!"
The world goes white --
That was the first time Ben met the equine within dream.
He would have given up the entire weekend and half a summer to have had it be the last.
It was the first time Ben had personally found himself on the wrong side of a Plumber truism regarding alien encounters, and it was annoying.
He had acquired the Omnitrix in a time when just about everyone on the planet seemed to be carrying something with a camera function at virtually all times: a factor which had made it increasingly difficult for the Plumbers to keep alien existence secret. And to be fully honest about it, having a ten-year-old joyously changing into anything the watch could dial up hadn't exactly helped -- but his grandfather had told him that the near-universal presence of recording technology had been pushing the organization ever-closer to going public anyway. Some secrets could only be kept for so long.
And still... during that first summer...
His alien forms had begun to appear in public during an age when recording technology was nearly universal. This had full overlap with the period in which images had become extremely easy to fake. So you had a 'live' video of an alien saving people from a house fire? Give someone twenty minutes with the right app and they could move that fire to the Great Wall. And eyewitness accounts meant very little, because an eyewitness was probably just someone who wanted to trend on social media for fifteen minutes and had invented a story accordingly.
The (surprisingly scant) actual recordings hadn't helped. Early pictures of Ben's aliens didn't come across well. (In particular, XLR8 had an extremely hard time with staying completely still: the Kineceleran tended to vibrate somewhat even when at 'rest', and did so at a pace well above the average smartphone's frames-per-second capacity.) And no image could truly convey the otherworldly qualities of their presence, because so much of that rose from the senses which had been left out. Fourarms' skin had that rasp to it, like contacting low-grade sandpaper. Ripjaws... there was salt in the air around the Piscciss Volann, to the point where anyone close enough would begun to taste it.
And then there was Stinkfly's raw stench. Nothing on Earth could duplicate the Lepidopterran's body odor. Multiple scientists among the Plumbers had vowed to give themselves permanent anosmia rather than try.
Bring it down to two senses from five (or six, as being near Heatblast for too long could dehydrate observers), and early pictures of the alien forms tended to look like bad CGI from ancient movies: to Ben, this was anything over a decade. And still... even with cameras everywhere, a certain Plumber truism had mostly held. The one which said that those who went through alien encounters tended to fumble their phone settings, failed to center the picture, and generally wound up with nothing which could be fully trusted. Assuming they managed to get a picture at all.
You could embed high-speed capture lenses within human eyes and aliens would show up in front of chronic squinters who'd been fighting off narcolepsy. And there was no means of bringing a camera into dream. Ben had been through an alien encounter, and... it had taken place in effective solitude. No recordings, no outside witnesses.
Which was why the Plumbers had a sketch artist on call.
It had taken an hour of careful, annoyingly-repeated descriptions before the tall blonde woman had been happy enough with the results to leave Ben and his grandfather in the Rushmore cafeteria. They were now the only people in the too-small room: something which was mostly served by vending machines which held the sort of stuff which kept forever at room temperature and held on for nearly as long in the small intestine.
It also had a functional kitchen and unfortunately, Max Tennyson had taken the chance to use it.
They were sitting on opposite sides of a small table, with the completed color sketch lying flat between them. Ben had been spending a lot of time looking at that image, because it was a lot easier than paying any attention to what was on his grandfather's plate. Because Max had been a Plumber for a long time. Most of the organization's members eventually wound up with a hobby-level interest in some aspect of alien culture and for Ben's grandfather, it had regretfully been cuisine.
It was possible to say, with full accuracy, that Max's cooking was unfit for human consumption. The challenge then turned into identifying the species which any given dish was actually suitable for.
Ben loved his grandfather, tried to honor him in many ways, and steadfastly refused to eat anything which had to be detoxified first. He also wasn't entirely sure that all of the radiation had been removed, and still felt that common courtesy meant that no one should start eating anything until the tips of the not-spaghetti's thin yellow tentacles had stopped wriggling.
The old man slurped down a forkful of twisted writhing severed manipulators, and did so a sugo.
The senior Plumber looked down at the sketch.
"So you feel that's right?" he asked his grandson. "If not, I can call her back in."
"I can't be sure on the colors," Ben reminded him. Pesky couldn't see or imagine red -- but the little alien did have visual access to a portion of the ultraviolet, along with a neural structure which had evolved to process and recall those hues. All things which were lost when the Omnitrix timed out, leaving a human brain to guess at what might have been. "There could be some scarlet, in any of the places where I've got black. Maybe all of them. But otherwise... that's what I saw."
"How large was it?"
"A lot bigger than Pesky." Then again, what wasn't? "At least twice that height. It's hard for Pesky to judge --" Ben blinked. "-- wait a second. I got a good look at the other one before I got pulled back. And we know how big that alien is. So I think if you put them right next to each other..."
He looked closely at the sketch, measured the equine at the shoulder and then moved his left hand to the blank space on the side. A fingernail scored the paper.
His grandfather nodded. "It's a rough guess, but let's call that -- about fourteen hands. Maybe a little more."
Ben blinked. "Fourteen what?"
"It's the way horses get measured." It wasn't a lecturing tone. The old man had a natural cadence to his speech when teaching: something which merely asked for attention because the words were going to be important. Ten-year-olds tended to react to the non-music by mentally going over gaps in their trading card collection. "Bottom of the hooves to the top of the shoulder. And a 'hand' is four inches. So that would put this one at just about the absolute limit for the pony range."
The 'I knew that' nod didn't work this time either.
The old man looked at the sketch again.
"Deadly," the senior Plumber judged.
Almost instantly, with a laughing casualness in his voice that completely ignored the way his heartbeat had just surged, "Oh, come on, Grandpa -- !"
"-- the wings are like a swan's. I'm not sure they're big enough to really get it in the air, but there's at least enough span to give it some gliding potential and longer jumps. And a swan... it can't break your arm with a wing strike, Ben: that's a myth. But swans top out at thirty pounds. This thing is going to be a lot heavier. Stronger."
There was a tap dance sounding against the inside of his rib cage, and Ben was briefly surprised that his grandfather couldn't hear it. "But it's just some kind of alien horse --"
"-- with a horn," the old man carefully interrupted. "A horn with a point. Which it can lower during a charge and if it can get up to speeds like the horses we know, that's a spear. And you saw the hooves. Hooves which were covered in metal. Horses can kill a human, Ben. Even at pony size. All ours need is a solid kick in the right place, and this one has more options available."
He stopped. Lowered his fork, stuck it into the wriggling mass and spun up another helping of nausea.
"But," the grandfather smiled, "you met it in a dream. So it's not as if you have to worry --"
"-- I felt her hoof."
The fork froze. Brown eyes were now fixed on Ben's face.
"I felt it, Grandpa," the teenager stated. "That it was solid, and the metal was cool. And Pesky's garment nearly got snagged on a thorn, and there was humidity. I've never had a dream with that level of detail and I don't think Pesky's been in one that complete. It's always been just sight and sound until now. Phantoms..."
A dream where Pesky could be touched.
His grandfather was still looking at him. It was easy to make out the love and concern on the weathered features. Ben was doing his best to ignore any traces of fear, just in case they turned out to be reflections.
"That may be because of the other alien's presence," Max finally said. "Assuming that was another alien, because there's a chance that we were looking at a secondary personality within the mind. However, since it's apparently operating as something separate, we'll treat it that way for now. But it could also be a product of our visitor's brain structure. We can't know yet."
Ben managed a more neutral sort of nod.
"It spoke to you," his grandfather added. "And you understood it. " With a faint smile, "Which might just answer the translation question for Pesky -- but it could also be something this other alien is doing. What was the voice like?"
Like Gwen if she'd been in an old play and was about to plow into me because I laughed during the kiss in Act Two. "Female. Angry."
"Be careful on gender," the old man reminded him. "Especially if you speak to it again. Let the equine lead the way."
Because what sounded female didn't have to be. That was Pesky -- maybe. And what sounded male...
...fourteen eggs...
"It gave you a name for our visitor," his grandfather reminded him. "Spell that? Your best guess."
Ben tried. Six times.
The senior Plumber frowned.
"It almost sounds familiar," the old man mused. "It's nothing I've seen: I know that. But the name..." The frown lines deepened. "We'll pass that one off to Research. See if they can do better than my memory."
His grandfather was sixty-six. To Ben, that was ancient. And at the same time, it wasn't all that old. Max Tennyson came across as being a lot younger than a movie from ten years back. He was active. He got involved. He certainly wasn't old enough to be forgetting things...
"Are you willing to go back in?" asked the person whom Ben loved so very much. "See what else you can learn? Try to reach our visitor this time, or get the other one to tell you more about why it doesn't want that?"
A dream where Pesky had been touched. A dream in which it might be possible to get hurt. The fragile Nemuina within the place of what had once been ultimate safety and control...
Ben looked down at his grandfather's plate. It gave him an excuse for swallowing, along with gratitude that it had just been saliva.
"Yes."
Those beloved brown eyes were carefully going over his face.
"This could take a few trips to sort out. Repeated transformations."
"I know."
"You have to tell me how you're doing," the old man quietly reminded him. "We have to watch out for a feedback loop."
Ben's mind automatically added a single crucial capital letter.
If I start looping on Pesky...
"I'll be fine."
The senior Plumber kept looking at him. Ben held his place on the uncomfortable plastic bowl seat (because it was a cafeteria and those were more or less mandatory), didn't move.
His grandfather had known Ben since shortly after the moment of birth. So something over sixteen years.
A time delay required for both the acquisition of language and to reach the point where someone else must have broken that vase... it meant Ben had only been lying to him for about fourteen.
Skill versus experience.
"All right," Max Tennyson finally said. "I'm just going to finish my lunch and send these spellings off to Research. And then we'll head back to the cell."
The Omnitrix cooperated again. That's part of why Ben thinks this is going to go wrong.
The device doesn't hate him. (Azmuth said that this one isn't fully sapient, and there's multiple portions of that sentence waiting to bring horror.) But it seems to have a tendency towards -- creating a challenge. If Ben really wants to solve a problem with brute strength, then that's the time when the activation panel is somehow going to come up with Grey Matter and the resulting tiny Galvan will need to think his way out. Ben wanted raw speed? Here's magnetism: now figure out how that's going to substitute. Quickly, because the thing you needed to chase is getting away.
And then there's the alien which Ben has rather accurately named as The Worst. It turns out that an Atrocian can take a beating. Endlessly -- or rather, until the watch times out. There's very little which can truly hurt it. It also has no offensive abilities whatsoever, can't take on a support role, and -- this is the fun part -- still feels pain. The Omnitrix has effectively challenged Ben to solve problems with The Worst several times and so far, the only answer has been to hope that whatever's beating on him expends so much energy as to pass out.
If he's dialing up Pesky and keeps getting the Nemuina, then it suggests the watch feels there's only one way to make this work. A path which leads through the heart of dream.
A dream which Pesky couldn't control.
Can't.
The alien is back in the jungle. The heat is oppressive. Humidity starts at 'sweltering' and gets worse from there. (It turns out that a Nemuina can sweat, although the moisture stops beading up well short of the hands.) And the alien tries to fix that, make the place cooler, dry out the air of a dream -- and once again, nothing happens.
It tries to think about what it's doing wrong. This leads to considering how the dust works (or how it might not) and what might be necessary to get control. It only takes a few seconds of that before the wings feel strange on his back, the dreamworld tilts as the vulnerable limbs buzz out of control, and there's nearly an impact against trees and thorns before the alien manages to smooth the passage through the simple act of panic. Something which has a way of clearing the mind, because then it's not thinking about much of anything at all.
The alien manages to stabilize the hover, allows the sonic antenna to search. Nothing.
It takes flight. Looking, listening to the dreamworld and the ticking of that inner clock. Something which may be inaccurate, because time can become so strange in a dream. It's searching, it needs to find at least one of the two presences, and it's going around vines and...
...the alien just realized something. There's plant life here (and arguably too much of it). But there's no animals. No birds are singing. This can't be South America, not in an alien mind, but it's close enough to expect some macaws. Wind rustles the grasses, makes the leaves shake -- and that's it.
The Nemuina flies. Goes around a too-big tree, ducks beneath a branch which might have broken its skull, wonders whether it should call out again --
-- the dark blue light comes in from the left, surrounds and coats its body, starts to pull.
This time, the alien puts up more of a fight. Struggling against the hold, doing its best to kick through the glow. Fingers which barely exist in three dimensions are simulating claws, and that's comedy --
-- the sparkling glow brings the alien to a stop in a small clearing. Directly in front of the angry intruder, and that point on the lowered horn.
"And she returns," starts with a snarl.
"I'm not --"
"Is there any more damage you would care to do?" the equine demands. "For Ahuizotl remains on alert. Guarding himself, protecting his secrets -- something he would not be doing at his current level of dedication if not for your blundering --"
It's a strange choice of word. It feels older than the alien's grandfather, and it also fully ticks the Nemuina off.
"And how was I supposed to know therrrre was anyone in here?" the alien challenges.
The equine takes a sharp breath. The temperature in the clearing plummets by ten degrees, and several of the stars in the strange mane visibly flare.
Stars within mane and tail. Something which makes the alien think of a Celestialsapien. The equine clearly isn't anywhere near that powerful: it would have simply gotten rid of the Nemuina already, or gained its desire with a thought. But when compared to Bellicus and Serena, it's just as argumentative.
"Young lady --"
"-- I am not a -- !" emerges on a furious trill.
More loudly, "-- and I use any dignity inherent to 'lady' at a considerable distance -- exactly how would you propose that I go about marking my territory --"
The alien's reaction is instinctive.
The equine blinks.
"-- despite your appearance and tonal qualities," it slowly decides, "you are most likely to be an adolescent male."
And now the Nemuina is staring with wonder into dark blue eyes. "Yes! How did you --"
"-- for the most part," the equine tightly says, "there is usually but a single category of supposed sapient which would respond to 'marking my territory' with a snicker and a smirk." With a light touch of mutter, "And it goes a considerable way towards explaining the earlier idiocy. Why are you here?"
To which a rather insulted Pesky responds with "You first."
Four hooves vibrate lightly against the jungle's soil.
"Your pardon?" the equine lies.
"You were herrrrre first!" The Nemuina pulls itself up to its full height and when that accomplishes twenty-two inches worth of nothing, goes for a low-altitude hover: all the better to make eye contact. "You've got to have a rrrreason for being in his dreams! And you'rrrrre from the same place he is, right? I don't know why he's here, and I don't know you! Maybe --" and a lifetime of cartoons offers immediate advice "-- he's a good guy, and he's just trying to get away from you, trying to hunt for something which can stop you! How do I know you'rrrre not evil?"
Dark blue eyes go wide. The silver-clad hooves take half a step back, and the twisting flows of mane and tail briefly freeze. Four knees momentarily tremble, then lock into furious place.
"Yes," the equine half-spits. "A common question and issue for me. Although I did not expect to be dealing with it here. So how would you propose that I prove myself not to be evil? As there is a current lack of small petlike infant creatures to not consume and in any case, as a herbivore --"
"You can starrrrt," the Nemuina cuts her off (and the light flowing from the hover is becoming brighter), "by telling me who you arrrrre. Your name, for starters. Your full name." Because it might be in a Plumber database under alien legends, even if the equine's appearance is not. "Your position." Which is quickly corrected to "Job." And, because the equine sounds like she's used to being in charge, "Any rank, if you have one. Every last title you've got."
The equine's lips twist into something very much like a smile. Only darker.
"Truly?"
"Yes."
"The entirety?"
"YES!" comes across as less of a demand in the Nemuina's voice and more of a hissy fit.
"Very well," the equine decides. "Then --"
It takes a very, very deep breath.
"-- 'Princess Luna' would normally suffice. The use of 'Luna Invictus' is generally limited to those who are attempting to impress with the depths of their dive into history. However, in the full title -- which YOU requested -- that would be Princess Of The Night, Our Lady Of The Evening, Custodian Of The Stars' Memory, The Mare Of Dream, High General Of The Second Army --"
Which is the point when the little alien frantically begins waving thin hands, trying to get the equine's attention because it's just figured out the trap and it wants to get out before the jaws completely close.
The intruder notices. And in doing so, confirms her gender.
There's a certain You Asked For This expression. It crosses species, is instantly recognizable on any configuration of features, and the only requirement for being able to pull it off is that the possessor has to be a bossy girl.
Ben knows someone whom he believed to have perfected that expression and somehow, Gwen turns out to be a rank amateur.
"-- She Who Watches Over The Nightscape --"
This is mastery.
"-- Guardian Of The Moon-Lit Roads --"
The calmly vicious recital might have had a natural end point. The little alien doesn't get to hear it before the Omnitrix times out.
"Ben --" was just about all his grandfather had time to say.
"I'M GOING BACK IN!"
His right hand slammed the interface.
Five seconds passed, with each carefully collecting its fair share of humiliating silence.
"...I'm going to wait until the watch recharges," Ben stated as he looked down at the red glow leaking out from between his half-splayed fingers, "and then I'm going back in."
"All right," Grandpa Max carefully said. "Ben, did something happen --"
"-- and she is TOTALLY a girl!"
The little alien isn't sure whether it managed to put itself into the mare's vicinity, if the equine caught it on the way in, or if it's just the result of something which can't pass for coincidence. What matters is that it arrives in the dreamworld directly in front of her.
She doesn't pull back as the Nemuina appears. Instead, she tilts her head slightly to the left, and smiles again.
"I am choosing to assume that, rather than rudely leaving during the initial percentage of fulfillment for your request, you were simply called away," she tells him. "One of two major possibilities suggested by the beeping coming from your garment for a second time, immediately prior to your vanishing." The smile becomes a little wider. "The other, of course, is that there is a temporal factor limiting your ability to stay within the nightscape, and the sound merely signals that your time is about to run out. Rest assured that I will be measuring the full duration of your appearances from this point on. If only to prevent the presumption of rudeness."
The alien wants to move. To get in the mare's face, to say or yell anything. But it can't. Because she's just worked out that the Omnitrix has a timer -- something which happened based on two meetings -- and that means she's smart. Very likely smarter than he is. Intelligence added to power is one of the most dangerous combinations possible.
But she isn't smarter than Grey Matter --
-- which isn't a factor. Pesky's here now, and the Nemuina can't change.
"So," the mare calmly continues, "I believe the last thing you would have heard was 'Diplomacy's Other Option.'" Thoughtfully, "Which, despite its relatively early place within the full title, is actually the newest addition. Such things are not strictly linear." Rather pleasantly, "Now. Did you wish for me to continue from that point, or is your clockwork counting down?"
The little alien takes a very slow breath.
"That was enough for the title."
She simply nods.
With a purr, trill, and mutter, "And that recital doesn't prrrrove you aren't evil..."
Dark blue lips briefly twitch.
"Why are you here?" the Nemuina asks. And makes itself wait.
She's looking down. The little alien wants to take off again. Hover at eye level. Or get extra altitude and regain the height advantage. It's small and fragile and it can feel soil and grass against bare feet and legs, it can feel and in the wake of that sensation, the fear is close behind.
"Strictly speaking," she begins, "I am not. My physical self remains on my side of the portal. We are making something of an effort to keep it partially open. Sufficiently so to allow the projection of consciousness. But when it comes to my presence within Ahuizotl's dreams -- it is as I told you. To learn why he risked the portal at all."
"Why didn't you just come thrrrrough after him?" feels like the next question to ask. "To try and bring him back?"
She's staring at the little alien. It's a gaze which has weight. Dark blue steals heat from the air.
"When you encounter a portal," she asks the Nemuina, "do you simply blunder through it?"
"I've gone through lots of portals!" Ben's memories protest. "That's how you chase whoever's using them! Portals which cut across space, there were a few which went through ti- --"
"-- I called you an idiot at first sight," the mare harshly reminds the alien. "I would like to apologize for that now."
Luminescent eyes blink. "-- oh. Thank y --"
"-- the proper term would be moron."
There's a comeback for that. There has to be a comeback --
"One who is clearly too lucky for his own good," the mare snaps, and flaring stars lash against the tall grass. "We have a number of portals, small one. Experimenters tend to create them, generally by accident. Some predate us, and a few are simply there. Getting rid of them is somewhat more complicated. But we do our best to keep them closed. Because if we do not, there is some chance that a moron might come through --"
"I'm not a --"
"-- without first testing to see if he can breathe."
The little alien's mouth slams shut.
"Portals can open onto all kinds of places," the mare viciously continues. "With no guarantees of finding certain necessary aspects at the arrival point. Such as a usable atmosphere. One does not simply blunder through a portal without determining what exists on the other side, not if there is any other choice. Because luck runs out."
"But he made it!" emerges as a protest. "If he could --"
"-- no," she immediately says. "Because we know something about this particular portal. We can detect movement on the other side. Enough to be aware that something is alive here, and to recognize that before I met you. But in this case, small one..."
The little alien wants to argue that, and self-awareness won't let it happen.
"...what we truly know about this portal is the passage." Far too calmly, "And if I come through... I will die."
Green eyes stare at her. At the way her body remains completely still.
"How do you know?"
Without a single rise or fall in her voice, "Deduce. How would one normally make such a discovery?"
The little alien is frozen again. The dark blue head slowly shifts, left to right and back again as old-seeming eyes briefly close.
"It was not," the mare wearily says, "a personal test. The sapient who first found this particular portal, for it is not one of our own making... he, shall we say, experimented. Rather often, with many things. But he would not risk passage himself, not until he knew. And his -- 'tests' -- discovered that there was strain upon the body. The inanimate could be pushed through: the living would match their state on arrival. And with that learned, he apparently used the portal for little more than disposal of some failed experiments. We are attempting to find some means of protection. Enough to come through and chase. But we are also aware that without it, those we send -- will die. There is only one way to truly test protection, small one. And..."
The eyes are still closed, and the lids seem too tight.
"...that is an order I am reluctant to give. So we are merely forcing the portal to stay slightly open. Enough that my mind can use the route, try to find him. Determine his motives in making the passage." Slowly, the mare opens her eyes. "And even should we find protection, I would be unlikely to be permitted a chance at the journey. Not as the first. I have certain duties, and so my life is considered to be..."
Her voice is calm. The gaze is pained.
"...important." And for the first time, the mare sighs. "Of course, there is one additional benefit to keeping it open. It creates the possibility of return. We were hoping that the other side might not wish to keep him." With a faint note of hope, "And now that we are speaking, perhaps the topic might turn towards --"
"But he's alive!" the little alien protests. "He's asleep --"
Dryly, "Yes. I would be aware."
"-- he surrrrvived --"
The breeze picks up. Cool air whips off the mare's body, and the sonic antenna picks up a faint growl. It's a good distance out.
"Immortals tend to do that."
Fragile wings buzz, and the Nemuina gains just enough elevation to stare at her properly.
"Immorrrrtal..."
An alien who can't die, I could have someone in the watch who doesn't die...
"There are a few who simply... live without aging," the mare quietly tells him, and there's so much weight in her voice. "Regardless of the price. And then there is Ahuizotl. He... comes somewhat closer to what others see as the definition. He can be killed, small one. But it would take a significant effort. He will regrow limbs, given enough time -- but he is incapable of regenerating from a claw fragment. Total destruction of the body suffices. Damage on a cellular level -- sufficient heat or cold, so that he becomes ash or shatters... that would certainly manage the feat. But for the passage? The strain goes into his body. And where it would kill all others -- he collapses. Falls into a healing sleep."
Immortal.
"How arrrre you keeping the portal open?"
"The same way it would function normally." Her ears flick backwards with irritation. "With magic."
The little alien blinks. "Oh. Magic. Like Charmcaster..."
Immediately, "My sister's newest thaumatologist?"
"Newest whatsist?"
Eventually, the mutual stare breaks.
"A coincidence of names, I am sure," the mare decides. "Small one, I am monitoring Ahuizotl's dreams as much as I can. I thought that I had set up the conditions for a guarded mind to willingly reveal its secrets --" both ears and tail flick "-- and then I had you. Someone with..."
She pauses. The ears come forward, dip.
"...whom I can speak. I -- should have hoped for that from the start. For a chance at communication." More hastily, "He sleeps still, on your side. You can send him back to us, while he remains vulnerable. The passage would strain him a second time. He would arrive unconscious. There is a prison --"
"-- prisons are for criminals," the little alien snaps.
"This one," the mare quickly says, "is for monsters --"
"-- what has he done?"
And all she tells him is "Greed."
It's not an answer. The Nemuina's wings buzz with anger, the light trail is getting brighter, he wants to do something because that's what a hero does, something, no one else will do anything and someone has to step forward when there's no one else, but he doesn't know what he can do and the little alien's body can't do anything except lose in the place which was supposed to be about safety and control --
"He... exists to claim," she says. "Whatever another might value. Anything of value. And if he cannot truly claim it for himself, so that it is his alone, forever... then he might destroy it. To deny all others the right of possession. He can pretend towards cooperation, even civility if it brings what he desires -- but no monster can resist their true nature forever. His is greed. He has done much in the name of claiming, and there is always something else to want. Someone who stands in the way. And if they insist on blocking him... then there is a broken body. Something which, for him, has less value than that which departed at death." With a surge of insistence, "He knew the passage would weaken him. Make him vulnerable. He would not have risked it unless there was something of great value on your side. Something of power, something dangerous. But I do not know what he seeks. Simply that if he was willing to take this level of chance, he must not be allowed to claim it --"
There's a distant sound of wood cracking. It's almost drowned out by the beeping.
"-- NO!" the mare cries out. "If it is a summons, postpone it! I must finish --"
And the world goes white.
Grandfather and grandson were sitting on the cold floor together, in the corridor outside the cell. Behind them, the visitor slept.
"It's an old trick," the younger Tennyson said, and let frustration clench his hands into ineffective fists. "The villain says she's the hero. And tricks everyone into seeing it her way, into giving her what she wants. Which is him."
"Or the criminal runs," the old man said. "Any way he can."
"We don't know."
"No," the senior Plumber agreed. "We don't. And she's clearly not coming through to our side to explain herself in person."
"We could ask her to give us copies of any warrant for his arrest," Ben considered. "Since they can send objects through. But... if she's going all the way with this, then she'd fake those."
"And how would we read it?" The old man chuckled. "I don't think she writes in English, Ben."
The teenager dourly nodded -- then sighed.
"Could a portal do that? Kill someone?"
"Depending on what made it, and if something leaks through subspace?" Max Tennyson considered, "Yes. There's a few teleportation methods which got rejected by various species because the transport was making them sick. This could take it further. But that's with a portal made by science. We'd need help on magic. And no one's saying that theirs is the same as ours. If we asked a caster to use our spells on the portal, without knowing how it works... that's a huge chance. Especially when the area is a weak spot to start with."
I felt that shudder through the wall. He doesn't want to risk Gwen. Neither do I.
"So what do you want to try next?" the old man asked.
And that means he hasn't picked a plan yet.
It was up to Ben.
"She said she's monitoring his dreams, as much as she can," the teenager carefully considered. "And that she has duties. It means she can't be there all the time..."
The little alien understands dreams. A dream is the mind telling itself a story.
You are the star. The lead. The victim. The hero.
Everyone tells themselves stories. The one which happens while you're awake, with other people speaking over your dialogue while insisting that they can override your part and the main character is clearly someone else... that's called life. But in dream...
...this is where the vulnerable little alien is supposed to have control. Safety.
Ben spoke with his grandfather, before they started this stage. About the previous uses of Pesky's abilities. Khyber was the first, and... the senior Plumber checked the records. Zaroffians have no defenses against the Nemuina. It's almost the opposite, because a species so driven is essentially living out a personal dream. With Charles Zenith -- the Pugnavore sold dreams. Both vulnerable.
Perhaps other species are harder.
Or maybe it's the mare.
The little alien has been moving in and out of the visitor's dreamworld. Over and over. The procedure is simple enough: Ben takes Pesky's form -- the Omnitrix is still cooperating, and that's becoming a matter of some concern -- the dust is inhaled, and then the search begins. If the sonic antenna picks up hoofsteps, or alien eyes register dark blue sparkling light --
-- well, the Nemuina doesn't have to stay in the dream. It can get out before the timer goes off. Leave whenever it likes. It has that much freedom, still. That much protection.
So it searches. Because the mare can't always be there. And it means Ben is taking Pesky's form, over and over. About three times per hour. This is more than he's supposed to use any given alien. Any identity.
Ben is effectively begging for a feedback loop. And his grandfather is monitoring him, but... this is the only way.
The visitor may be innocent. Fleeing from the true villain of the story. And a dream is a story you tell yourself. But this one has at least two sides. He needs to hear from the other teller.
They have to know.
And, after several hours...
...the mare isn't there.
Ben is exhausted. (He doesn't change this much. Not to the same form, over and over.) Going into dream takes a certain amount of strength, and Pesky's weariness eventually reaches the human body. He can't keep going much longer. His grandfather is on the verge of not ordering (only asking) him to take a break, and the adolescent knows it.
It's the last try of the day. And the little alien flies through a jungle which never existed, there's no sound of hoofsteps and the 'hair' can't pick up anything from birds or larger wings, the clock just keeps running and when there's probably only about two minutes left... he sees the visitor. Stalking through a section of tall grass, closing in on the trees.
The Nemuina tries for a burst of speed. Comes in high again. Still out of clawing range.
"Hello?"
The visitor looks up. Something which seems to take far too long, and the neck tilts at such an awkward angle to support the stretched-out head. The eye placement creates multiple problems, and getting an elevated line of sight is one of them.
The huge mouth opens. White incisors glisten.
"I remember you." The voice is... controlled. Polite. It's also lightly accented. Ben's memories insist on placing it south of the border. The owner of a villa sitting by his pool, full glass in hand as he contemplates the day. "The dreamwalker. The other one." He pauses. "A native?"
The little alien, who really can't explain the transformation thing right now, just nods.
"Dreamwalkers on this side," the visitor muses. "Fascinating..." The tail's digits briefly clench. "My body. Where is it?"
"We'rrrre protecting it," the little alien reassures him. "We found it after you came through. Brought you to where you could heal. It's safe."
Slowly, the visitor exhales. Mostly through the mouth.
"That is as it should be."
The clock is ticking.
"Why did you come here?" the little alien asks.
"The hunt," comes promptly. "The quest to correct injustice. The discovery of something which should belong to another."
"I don't underrrrstand --"
"You met her," the visitor says. "She has a great power. She and her sister. Something which allows them to control others, because the world fears what would happen if that power was lost. If they were to be lost, for they do not share it. When it lies with them alone... then they have control. They dominate. If my hunt succeeds... then they can no longer clamp their teeth on the reins." Softly, with devotion, from the heart of dream, "I will separate a world from the alicorns' yoke. And all will be free."
The little alien doesn't know what to say.
"You offered to help me look," the visitor reminds him. "Will you still, when I find the path to waking?"
"I..." is all the Nemuina can initially muster.
Perhaps the half-displayed fangs represented a smile.
"Of course," says the arrival. "Take your time. It's wise, not to trust so quickly."
"What arrrrre you looking for?"
"And I could say the same about fully trusting you," the visitor casually goes on. "That is why I haven't given you all of the mysteries. Not yet. But you seem like a sapient who might be trustworthy. The small often are, for they need large friends. Perhaps..."
It rears up a little, starts to sit on its haunches. The Nemuina goes higher. The arrival doesn't look offended by that.
"A dreamwalker," it muses. "I didn't think that I might find the same magic on this side."
"It's not," more or less just slips out. "Not the same."
"Oh?" Curiosity.
The Nemuina simply taps the hourglass symbol.
"Ah," the visitor breathes. "Yes. I understand."
Time is running out...
"She calls herself a Princess," the near-exhausted alien says. "A leader. Do you lead your people?"
The small eyes are in a strange position. They're also ancient.
"By one definition," the visitor quietly replies. "In that there are no longer any others who might contest for the position."
...no...
"I'm sorrrrry --"
Just about a whisper, "Do not be. It was long ago -- what is that sound?"
The hourglass is flashing black.
"I have to go," the little alien abruptly says.
"You'll come back?" the visitor hopefully inquires. "We'll talk again?"
"Yes."
The world begins to go white --
"A device to let one walk in dreams," the visitor breathes. "Such a treasure..."
He mostly wound up briefing his grandfather during the gaps between the yawns.
They had a little more to work with now: not only a name for the equine (which wasn't bringing anything up from the records), but one for what might have been her species: alicorn. And Ahuizotl had said something regarding his motives, or at least what he wanted Ben to believe they were -- but he still hadn't said enough. And it was going to take more voyages of sailing into dream before they could hope to approach anything even faintly resembling a shore of truth...
It was, perhaps, the fact that Ben's mind could spit out 'shore of truth' without so much as a brief holdup at border inspections to ask what it was planning to do in open air... that was probably the surest sign of just how very tired he truly was. And he was willing to go back in, to try again and keep trying over and over until there was nothing left to give. He'd told himself that was what heroes did, and it wasn't as if a ten-year-old's favorite cartoons had ever steered the teenager wrong before.
He'd been willing to keep trying. His grandfather had taken one look at the restored human body...
An association with the Plumbers could turn words into formal orders. The family connection made it feel more like being treated as if he was still ten. Forever. And either way, the results were the same.
The old man had looked him over, overridden everything, and sent him to bed.
Rushmore had everything. It just didn't possess those qualities in the elaborate versions which had been designed into the larger bases. And it was understood that Plumbers who'd been going for a little too long were going to need a place where they could crash: the human body had a certain need for renewal, and those who'd been working for extended periods without sleep might start to forget exactly which button saved the world.
But for Rushmore, it was the basics. So when it came to providing a place for rest, some of the other bases had full onsite apartments: kitchenettes, personal closets, and a private Internet connection to the outside.
South Dakota offered the equivalent of a hospital's on-call room.
You got a bed. If there was more than one person who needed to rest, then there was probably going to be an argument over who got to claim the top bunk.
There was a bathroom. The shower never ran out of hot water, because it was the group shower. The Plumbers were a little kinder than the average high school about putting up full partitions to create private space, but you still had to take fifteen towel-wrapped dripping steps down the main hallway before reaching the door which led to the actual mattress.
Ben was taking his time about washing up, because Rushmore was close to empty and there was no one else in the shower area. The heat soothed sore muscles, trickled down the pink skin of his back until it reached the place where axilla had recently become strained --
Axilla?
-- he was just tired. Thoughts went strange when he was this tired. It happened.
Ben washed his left arm. He always took a little extra care around the Omnitrix. Azmuth had once mentioned the features which prevented that portion of permanently-covered skin from becoming diseased: Ben had listened, nodded a lot, and then promptly forgotten the details.
The Omnitrix...
It wasn't supposed to be his. (He'd thought about that over the years. More than a few times.)
It had been meant for his grandfather.
...sort of. That certainly hadn't been Azmuth's open intention -- and if the Galvan had somehow set up the dominoes so that they would tumble towards Earth, the self-titled most intelligent being had never admitted it. But there had been a pursuit of the device, those who'd been trying to stay ahead had known it couldn't be claimed by grasping facial tentacles, and... Max Tennyson had a reputation. If anyone had a chance to keep the Omnitrix safe, it was him.
So it had been shot towards Earth, protected in a reentry-proof sphere. Homing in on his grandfather's DNA. But the aim had been slightly off. It had crashed a few hundred yards away from where the Rustbucket had been camping for the night, and... Ben had just sort of gotten in the way.
You couldn't casually remove the Omnitrix. It had bonded to a ten-year-old's arm, when it had been meant for a man of sixty. And... that had started everything.
It had been meant for Max.
And the thing about the Omnitrix was that eventually, there was going to be more of them.
Azmuth had originally intended the device as a means of letting species truly understand one another, through living as each other. So... given enough time, once all of the bugs had been worked out (and every last sapient insect was added to the database, but that was a separate issue)... he would start the production line. Max Tennyson, as Earth's senior Plumber, would have to be among the first to receive the next generation.
His grandfather was sixty-six now. Not old enough to be forgetting things: Ben knew that. But... older. And he'd looked so weary when he'd taken Ben out of the airlock, but it was the teenager who'd been ordered to bed...
Older. Six years since that road trip. They were all older.
Ben wasn't very good at dating: something he would only admit to himself, and solely when in total privacy. He attracted his share of girls (and Kevin insisted it was more than a fair share), but... he usually didn't have much of a clue as to how things were supposed to go from there. And having his infrequent attempts regularly interrupted by alien intrusion had a detrimental effect on his social life.
He was bad at dating. Worse with romantic relationships. The concepts of 'marriage' and 'kids of my own' were harder to reach than the next galaxy. And still... there was something he very much wanted to see some day. The vision of Max Tennyson holding a great-grandchild.
Years away. Years as a minimum.
And humans only lived so long.
(He was running his fingers through his hair. Fingers which had been pressed closely together, so that they operated in pairs. Moving them vertically through the brown stands.)
So... what if his grandfather had a Omnitrix of his own?
An Omnitrix which contained a DNA sample from a species which had been declared as immortal.
There were circumstances under which the watch's normal time limit could be disabled...
What if my Grandpa Max would never die?
There was a price for that, of course, and it started with the sacrifice of the human form. Hugging would become somewhat difficult. There would be no gentle cushioning against the belly. (Ben was becoming increasingly worried about that belly as Max aged. His grandfather had to get into better shape. Also, the old man had been eating alien cuisine for decades. It almost had to be wreaking havoc on his insides, and Ben had come to that conclusion on absolutely no smoothie ingredient awareness whatsoever.) Ahuizotl's sensory range, the way that body interacted with the world... that would be all there was. Possibly forever.
Because the transformations did age. Ben's had been growing up with him. (It had taken some time to reconcile that he'd initially been changing into the Tetramand equivalent of a tween.) And to shift away from the quadruped... it would start the clock running again. Max could return to his own species -- but if he stayed that way for too long, he would die. It was what humans did.
Become whatever Ahuizotl was. Lock the Omnitrix.
The form had grasping digits. Perhaps the tail could cradle a giggling infant against fur.
And the tiny misplaced eyes would still be brown...
Ben turned off the water. Reached into the part of the shower cubicle which was shielded by a waterproof curtain, fetched the towel, wrapped himself, opened the partition's door, walked out of the washing area and into the section with the sinks and mirrors, caught a glimpse of his own reflection and saw that the brown strands of his sonic antenna had been properly groomed to stand straight up.
That was good. It was proper. Any Nemuina had to be capable of hearing danger coming, especially in bulk. You could normally only invade one dream at a time and in any case, there was only so much dust which could produced per --
-- he didn't scream. (Heroes didn't scream.) But he was now leaning his full weight into the sink, both hands clutching at cool porcelain because the sensation of the smooth surface was a lifeline. A path back to reason and sanity and Earth.
Ben. I'm Ben. My name is Benjamin Kirby Tennyson. My grandfather picked out my middle name. It's for a comic book artist. One of the greats. I was tied to heroes on the day I was born. Heroes and aliens. My name is Ben. I'm human...
Every so often, the Omnitrix would unlock a new species. This could happen as a direct response to outside events, trying to find what its bearer might need in order to survive. Azmuth could do it manually, accessing whatever the little Galvan liked -- if the genius decided the occasion was suitable. A few seemed to have been offered up more or less by accident.
And when Ben had been eleven years old, the watch had offered him Feedback.
As a transformation... the Conductoid was a living wavelength shifter: the energy equivalent of a sapient doppler effect. He could pull in just about anything: power blasts, hard radiation, radio frequencies in bulk -- and convert them internally into the electricity needed to survive. The excess was then discharged. (In fact, Feedback had to discharge the excess, and couldn't stop doing so until everything over the 'current meal' level was fully depleted.) Feedback didn't have any internal power resources of his own, but he was happy to take whatever you had and return it to sender.
He was just about perfect for dealing with anything which relied on energy attacks.
He was...
...perfect.
Ben sometimes felt as if each alien came with its own set of personality traits: Upgrade was a little more practical, Fourarms tended to charge in, Grey Matter initially hung back and observed whenever possible. With Ghostfreak, the tendency had been a little too real: the Ectonurite's consciousness was stored within DNA chains, and had eventually rebuilt itself within the watch. Ghostfreak was the source of numerous memories, with most of them bad.
But with Feedback...
The Conductoid loved to live. Life was an ocean, and you had an obligation to find the biggest wave there was and start surfing. Everything was done for the sheer joy of it, because you couldn't be part of existence and not be happy. Just existing was a miracle. And if someone had given you a miracle, then why weren't you enjoying it?
Feedback had resonated with Ben. It hadn't felt like transforming at all. More that there was a best friend living in the watch, and they were so close that every so often, his buddy allowed Ben to borrow his body.
Then they'd become closer than that.
The form was so natural...
Feedback was perfect for dealing with those who wielded energy. Considerably less so for anything else. Well... the watch wanted him to solve problems, right? Why not see what a Conductoid could do against strength and speed and things of the material world? Why not just call upon him over and over, because Feedback was joy and laughter and life and...
...after a while, it had started to feel like the Omnitrix had an extra transformation. One labeled as 'human', and Ben was just waiting out the recharge time until he could get back to his true self...
...his grandfather and cousin had spotted it. Azmuth had been called in, and...
...call it an intervention. The eleven-year-old hadn't known what the word meant, not in that sense. He'd just come into the Rustbucket one day and found them waiting for him. In ambush. Trying to tell him that he had to stop, he had to give up his real body because he was becoming too reliant on himself, he had to use other transformations more and spend extra time as a human and he couldn't be a Conductoid as much any more, he had to be this stupid weak alien thing called a human...
He'd run.
He'd run directly into a fight.
He'd become himself. Why wouldn't he?
And the enemy known as Malware had extracted the Conductoid's DNA from the watch. From Ben.
Feedback had been destroyed.
Leaving an alien in an eleven-year-old's body. One who no longer possessed any means of changing back.
He'd recovered, in time. Azmuth had stayed on Earth for a while, helping him talk it out, and... that was when Ben had started to realize there was something in the old Galvan which cared about the boy. Deep down, buried under layers of anger and sarcasm and frustration at how stupid everyone else was, but... it was there.
He'd also mourned.
And he'd never forgotten about that feedback loop. (His mind still added the capital, here and there.) That you couldn't use any given transformation too frequently, or invest any real part of your identity into the change. Call on any alien over and over, without a break or variety, or just get locked in because the time limit had been temporarily overridden for a crisis, and the traits would begin to overlap. Replace. Dominate... ...too many changes into Pesky in a short time, he was starting to loop but he'd spotted it, he just had to keep an eye on it, stay on top of it and 'axilla' was the wing attachment point... ...he'd been Bullfrag for days... ...and his grandfather would have to be something like Ahuizotl forever.
Maybe he wouldn't change that much. Maybe.
Ben forced his hands to let go of the sink. Raised them to his hair. Rumpled it back into semi-shapelessness, and went to bed.
Ben took the top bunk. Part of that is a preference for the elevated view, and... he's on the short side. Kevin is six-foot-three. Kevin looks down on him in a lot of ways and most of the ones which come from his best friend are just teasing, but the physical aspect is a constant. Ben is so secure with his looks that he regularly changes into things which are much larger and stronger than himself. And Kevin. Because he can. So there.
He also tends to stand on ledges, steps, and anything else which elevates his gaze. And he takes the top bunk.
And he dreams.
All he's doing is moving through the streets of Bellwood, because he often finds himself in his hometown while asleep. (He doesn't get to spend much time there otherwise.) But he transforms in his dreams, does so with more frequency than the Omnitrix will normally allow. The form is fluid, and retains some of that quality even when he inevitably shifts away from Goop. And he usually starts with Heatblast because that was the first and something in him will love the Pyronite forever because of that -- but then it's Ditto, Cannonbolt, he goes to Blitzwolfer because he can and Rath can take that corner...
"I see," the cool voice calmly announces from a place which is a little too close behind him. "A sapient of, shall we say, variable temperament. A changeling of sorts?"
Bellwood vanishes. Rath's claws don't so much shrink as invert into thinning arms as height is lost, and that's a shame because Rath was absolutely about to tell the equine something -- but the body is getting smaller, wings are sprouting from the back, all hair goes straight up and then Pesky is in a forest.
Not the jungle of the visitor's dreams. An ordinary American forest, which has an ancient camper parked at the edge of the clearing.
Ben's memories have recreated this perfectly normal section of forest within dream for years. He knows it by heart, and dearly wishes to never come here again. But he can't control his own dreams, and...
...the little alien turns. Looks at the intruder. And the equine is standing in the place where Feedback died.
The reaction is instinctive.
Get OUT --
Something invisible seems to come off the small body, pushes --
-- her fur ripples. And that's all.
"Hmm," the equine considers. "Some degree of base talent for potential lucidity." Her head slowly shakes, left to right and back again. "But... no experience. You cannot displace me, small one. And I understand the desire, but... I am only present so that we may communicate."
"How did you --" Pesky tries to demand, and it still comes across as a hissy fit.
"We shared a dream," she tells him. "I cannot 'read' your mind, not as you might understand the term -- but I was able to find it. And when I come to you... the time limit becomes that of the dream itself. Which gives us a chance to speak with somewhat less interruption. Again: are you a changeling of sorts? A shapeshifter? With only so much duration in each form, who perhaps requires rest before assuming a new state?"
The little alien doesn't answer. The equine is smart, and -- perhaps she's figured out too much already.
"I saw you as something tiny when I first arrived," the equine quietly says, and trots a little closer. (Pesky is keeping a very close eye on the position of the horn.) "Then there was a form which was somewhat more... 'creepy' might be an appropriate term, although I apologize if it is also an insulting one. And then you were fast, followed by strong. Every shape and size... and now you are this." Nodding down at the Nemuina's diminutive body. "And so you remain. Is it because this is the form you associate with dream? With me?"
The silence maintains, albeit with some effort.
The equine sighs.
"Very well," she decides. "In that case -- it is your turn."
Pesky blinks. "My what?"
"Your turn." Which has more than a hint of order holding the cool words together. "By your own terms. I was to go first. Introducing myself, and explaining why I was within Ahuizotl's nightscape. I believe that I had managed to adequately establish both. And that would mean it is your turn, small one."
She takes another step closer to the fragile body, and Pesky feels its wings starting to buzz. Getting ready to flee, in an environment where the dust means nothing.
But there's nowhere to go. Pesky is.. ...helpless.
"Who are you?" the equine demands -- then adds "The full name, of course." And waits.
The little alien takes a slow breath and, for the first time in its own dream, feels the air enter small lungs.
"Benjamin Kirby Tennyson."
"Benjamin Tennyson," she partially repeats. Dryly, "Even for myself, the constant use of a third name pushes the limits. And for the sake of formality: do you hold any titles?"
Ben's memories review some of the more frequent curses which have been attached to his name, then considers the difficulty of trying to speak Highbreed.
"...no."
Steadily, "And why did you enter Ahuizotl's dream?"
Can she sense lies in a dream? What's safe to say?
Just tell her the truth.
"We didn't know why he came thrrrrough the wormh -- portal. He was unconscious, and... this was the only chance to speak with him. To learn why he was herrrre, and... make sure he would be all right."
She's staring at the little alien.
"You were attempting to ascertain his welfare?"
"He'd collapsed. He only made it a few steps past the portal before he fell. He might have needed help..."
The dark blue head tilts slightly to the left. A cool gaze evaluates the small form.
"You have made no further effort to expel me. Nor are you trying to alter your nightscape, and I sense this is a place which discomforts you. Why not change it?"
Tiny hands ball into fully ineffective fists.
"I can't." Because Pesky is helpless, helpless in the realm of what should have been absolute control.
With far too much calm, "If you simply turn your thoughts towards your surroundings --"
"I CAN'T!" Which now sounds like a tantrum. "I can't think about it! It's all just instinct! Thinking doesn't work --"
"-- and my thanks to you, Rainbow Dash," cuts the words off.
It's the little alien's turn to stare.
"...who?" It sounded like a name --
"You have just told me what you feel yourself to truly be, Benjamin Tennyson," the equine states. "A hero." And before Pesky can say anything, "Also rather frequently known as 'an idiot with power'. Who generally lets that power do the thinking for him --"
"IT DOESN'T WORK IF I THINK!"
And it doesn't matter at all, does it? Because the sleeping body is human and doesn't have any of Pesky's abilities, can't even wake up, Ben is stuck --
Her head tilts again. To the right this time.
"You are new to dreamwalking," the equine quietly says. "Are you not? A few moons at most. No true practice --"
"-- how am I supposed to practice?" And it feels as if there's something liquid on his face, Pesky is small and vulnerable and girly and can't do anything and now Pesky is... "I get ten minutes at a time! Tops --"
-- the little alien has said too much. She knows too much --
-- the equine's ribs shift. In, out.
"-- tell me about yourself."
Pesky blinks. Something wet and cool slides over permanently blushing cheeks.
"...what?"
"I am going to make a decision," she informs the Nemuina. "Something which requires additional information regarding the entity whom the decision concerns. Because you are an adolescent male with power. One who considers himself to be a hero. That is dangerous, Benjamin Tennyson. Because a hero is often one who believes that merely possessing power puts them in the right. In spite of all contrary arguments, evidence, and corpses. Which makes this decision something other than casual. So tell me of yourself, Benjamin Tennyson." Another step closer, as the wings rustle at her sides and a cold breeze whips through the forest pines. "Of your life, your deeds. Of who you truly are. Because I have your home's entire night to listen, if need be. And I will be listening. Closely."
She glances slightly past the little alien, to the left. Luminescent green eyes follow that gaze, and...
...there's a flat-topped rock there now. (There was no such stone in the place where Feedback died.) Just the right height for a Nemuina to sit.
The equine's legs fold, lowering her body until she rests upon the forest floor.
"Heroes," she says, "tend to make the mistake of defining themselves by their power. How did you come by yours? Was it inborn?"
She nods towards the rock. Waits.
Pesky, with no other choice, sits.
"...no. I wasn't born with it." A little bitterly, "Kevin and Gwen were."
"Rivals? Family?"
"Gwen's my cousin. Kevin is..." Pauses. "It's a long storrrry."
"There is no clockwork," she tells the little alien. "Speak."
She's on the other side of a portal. She can't reach Ben.
She's just... in Ben's mind...
...listening.
Waiting in the forest, with that dark body at perfect peace. Waiting for another to speak.
"...I was ten," Pesky finally says. "I don't know how long you live, but... for us, ten is just a kid. I was ten, and this alien device... it did what... it did..."
It feels like Pesky has been speaking for hours.
The equine's asked for a few points of clarification. Once she understood a little of what each transformation did, criticism of Ben's tactics began to turn up. Quite a bit. But for the most part, she's just -- listened.
"Kevin," she finally says. "He essentially went insane, did he not? Because he felt he had no choice but to take in that energy. Even when he knew that doing so would wound his mind."
Pesky has to force the nod. Looks at her, and... there's an odd expression on that strange face.
"Gaining power led to madness," the equine goes on.
It's almost like recognition. Understanding. Self-loathing...
"And you did everything possible to bring him back," she says. "As his friend. Everything, when it would have been so much simpler to seek a -- final solution. The risks found in your answer..."
Her feathers briefly shiver.
"You may cease the recounting of your history, Benjamin Tennyson," the equine tells him. "For now. We might resume this at another time, but -- I have heard enough to reach a decision. Please extend your right arm."
Pesky does so. Thin fingers protectively curl in, force themselves out again.
Dark blue light ignites around the horn, projects forward and coats the weak limb. Careful application of force makes the elbow bend.
"Why did that work?" she asks.
"Because you're telekinetic," Pesky quietly says. "You have magic..."
Ben would love to get a DNA sample of the equine. But she's on the other side of a portal. You can't get the Omnitrix a usable reading from a dream. And... she's a girl. With no males to scan, he would be turning into a girl --
-- maybe he's been turning into girls all along. He keeps coming across species which Azmuth didn't find. Taking single samples. There's enough aliens where it's just about impossible to tell. Snare-Oh could be female and Ben would never know. It feels entirely possible that Thep Khufans might have sex through literally tying the knot and the female is the one whose clothlike tentacle comes in from the left.
He'd need a name for the new transformation, of course. 'Princess Luna' doesn't work.
Telekinetic horse.
Tekequine.
Ben's the best at names --
"-- I have no magic," she quietly tells him. "Not here."
Pesky's staring at her again.
"Or rather," she continues, "I have only the magic which allows me to be present in your dream. I am a projection, Benjamin Tennyson. A rational, self-aware figment. But in the waking world, my corona can move objects. It is knowledge I bring with me into the nightscape. And after so much time... it is also part of my identity. It works because I believe that it should. And my belief in that part of the shared illusion is stronger than yours. You simply lack the ability to say 'no'."
The little alien is breathing too fast. Doing so in a place which should exist without air.
"But that can be learned," she tells the Nemuina, as the coating of light on the thin arm winks out. "It is simply a matter of taking the proper lessons --"
"-- you'd teach me," ripples into the dreamworld on a current of disbelief.
Simply, "Yes. While I can."
"...why?"
"Because I listened," the equine states. "And..." The dark eyes briefly close. "...because there were none to instruct me." Bitterly, "Entirely self-taught, Benjamin Tennyson. Out of necessity. Because there had never been anything like me in the world, and none knew what might help. My dearest friends, my sibling... at first, they could not even find a way for me to stop. Pulled into dreams, over and over. Some of those were the dreams of animals, and that can have a rather unwelcome effect upon rationality. It took years to find full control. Replication of waking abilities in the nightscape was difficult. Self-identity can be one of the hardest things to change --"
"-- you have magic when you're awake," declares a weary helplessness. "All I can do as Pesky is fly a little, make dust, and put people to sleep. What good does that do in a drrrream? Pesky is supposed to have control here, and... I'm just..." The word nearly chokes him. "...vulnerrrrable..."
"Good."
She's smiling.
Pesky blinks a few times. The smile is still there.
"I prefer to teach those who know they are vulnerable," the equine informs him. "It is not a negative trait. Those who truly see themselves as invulnerable tend to let their power think for them. They can be closed off. Inaccessible. And they frequently see no need to learn. For learning is very much about the process of avoiding hurt, and what could ever harm them? But the vulnerable... they can be rather creative. They find ways to compensate. To turn weaknesses into strength, now and again..."
It's still a smile. The next sound, cut off and half-swallowed back, might have almost been the start of a laugh.
"An adolescent male," she says. "I should have given that more consideration. And perhaps those are the same everywhere, across every species. With the majority believing that strength must be the only important thing, and to display any other trait would lessen them. Benjamin Tennyson, as long as it hurts no others, or wounds one's self, then even for one who could become just about anything... there is no wrong way to be a boy."
Pesky can't speak. Ben can't speak. The thoughts won't stop.
"Now," the equine gently tells me. "Lucidity and the alteration of the nightscape. Let us begin with something small. The height of your perch."
"I can't do this," gets through the swirling miasma of inner confusion. "I'm not even Pesky rrrright now, in the real world. That's just the Omnitrix --"
"-- and does everything special about you come from something else?" she asks. "You envy your cousin and friend, do you not? For having their power be inborn. Yes, you are using a tool. But you should never fully define yourself by it."
"But --" is all she gives him time for.
"-- are you your brain? Or are you all of your experiences? What are memories, if not tools to avoid future mistakes? Are you everything in your life, and the lessons taken in from all those who love you? Choose your self-definition carefully, in the waking world and the nightscape alike. And when it comes to tools... anyone can pick up a weapon, Benjamin Tennyson. Anyone can inflict harm. But how many would do what you already have, and use it to heal?"
He has no answer.
"Some degree of base talent for potential lucidity," she tells him. "And no experience. That is the judgment of an expert. We begin with altering the height of your perch..."
She brings Pesky to the point of changing both color and material before she lets the little alien rest. It's mostly been to different kinds and slightly shifted shades of rock, but she seems to feel that counts for progress.
Eventually, the little alien speaks.
"When I was talking to him," Pesky reminds her, "you could have just left me therrrre. Using your corrrrona means he knows you're here too."
Her dark head dips. "Your point is taken," the equine dryly says. "Is there anything else?"
The little alien thinks things over, and then makes a decision.
"I managed to speak with him. While you werrrre gone."
"Oh?" Every muscle on the powerful form just went tense. "And what did he say?"
It's... comparing stories. Telling her what Ahuizotl claimed, in order to set tales against each other. Get a comparison going and find out where the holes are. More excellent tactical advice gleaned from afterschool cartoons.
Pesky repeats the visitor's words, as best it can. And when the little alien finishes, the tense equine form is still lying on the forest floor. But she's shivering now. Every feather is twitching, and the tail is lashing.
"That..." she just barely forces out. "That... may be..."
Ben's seen this before, because Ben has been in situations where others were controlled or rebelling and... fighting themselves.
"Prrrrincess?" Pesky hasn't quite worked its way down to 'Luna' yet.
Multiple mane-held stars go supernova, and the dark head snaps up.
"There -- is a device," and every last one of the syllables has nearly been bitten through. "Something believed lost, a long time ago. Or perhaps simply disposed of, especially if he is choosing to seek it here. Given his words to you regarding our supposed yoke, then -- that would seem to be the most likely target of his hunt."
"What does it do?" is a natural question.
This time, a significant fraction of the constellations within the tail explode.
"We believe it was an attempt at constructing an artificial interface," the equine says. "To control Sun."
Pesky heard that capital letter.
"That's impossible," slips out of the alien's delicate mouth.
"I would prefer for it to be impossible," the equine tightly forces out. "Unfortunately, it is merely immensely complicated."
"You can't contrrrrol a star --"
Almost a whisper, "-- every star is, or was, a sun. But not every Sun is a star."
The dark light flows up her horn, projects, twists -- and there's an object floating between them.
It's almost like a cross between a tiara and a coronet. Very basic. For the material... Ben's memories are claiming something along the lines of electrum, and the only decorations are six small opals: three white, three black. There's also a small hole in the metal, which might have been sized for a horn.
That's the bulk of the thick center curve. The sides might display how it's meant to stay on the head, because each flares out, bends back in, and ends in a sharp platinum spike.
"This is the design as I originally beheld it within the notes of the creator," the equine tells him. "And as one of the entities tasked with regulating the movements of Sun and Moon --" there's a brief pause "-- or rather, Moon, but my sister does occasionally require some relief from her duties -- I have an interest in making sure we continue to retain control. Because an improper connection, such as that which was once created by Discord --"
The little alien knows it's a name, and also recognizes that this isn't the time to ask.
"-- can damage them. Wounds which are exceptionally slow to heal. And if the damage is sufficiently severe..."
She shudders.
Pesky, who shares Ben's vivid imagination, is having a hard time narrowing down the disasters enough to have one for shuddering at.
But she isn't necessarily telling the truth. The teaching might have just been done to get Pesky on her side...
"Why would he want to contrrrrol it?"
"So that we did not," she sharply states. "As a matter of ownership. Or perhaps he simply wishes to create extreme global heat. Something he has tried at least once before, as he does seem to prefer warmth. The kind of climate which, spread outside of his usual domain, would extinct multiple species. Or, if he could not manage either... he might simply attempt to extinguish. To keep that power away from all others, as it could not truly be his."
"But that would kill --"
"-- and a true immortal," the equine softly says, "would go on. Especially one who has a portal which can be crossed. Or -- who might be able to make the attempt at control from this side, where we cannot reach him." More quickly, "Benjamin Tennyson, if that device exists on your side, it must be found. He cannot be allowed to claim it. The potential damage, and the risk --"
The grass ripples.
Then everything ripples.
Trees distort. Rocks waver. The world acts as a pond which just took a splash hit from someone skipping a meteor.
"You are waking!" she calls out, and does as the forest stretches, pulling her section of ground off to the right. "Find me in Ahuizotl's dreams, when you can! Search for the device! Finding it could mean the world --"
The small room's light had been turned on. Something which let Ben readily spot his grandfather standing next to the bunk bed.
"Hey, champ," the old man calmly greeted him. "I was trying to let you get some extra rest. But..." Regretfully, "There's only so much I could stall on that. It's time to get some breakfast in you."
Ben immediately resolved to use the vending machines. (His grandpa could make a mean egg: the problem was in knowing what had laid it.) Sat up, rubbed some of the sleep from his eyes (and the edge of the Omnitrix was hitting his brow line), belatedly pulled his undershirt down -- it had somehow gotten bunched up under his shoulders during the night -- and tried to think of what to say first. He had to tell the old man about what the equine had said and done, but...
"Did anything change overnight?" he asked. "Anything new?"
"One thing," Max Tennyson said -- then, a little more quickly, "No, take your time, Ben: it's nothing urgent. Just an update from Research. They didn't find anything on 'alicorn'. But there was a spelling for 'Ahuizotl' which worked."
"What did they find?" Which emerged while he was still trying to figure out the current position of his boxers on tactile sensations alone.
"Myths," the senior Plumber informed him. "Mesoamerican: in this case, Aztec. Having the grasping digits at the end of the tail was what put it past coincidence."
"So they've been here before." How had he managed to kick a sock off in his sleep?
"A long time ago," his grandfather said. "The legends never came this far north -- but there's a lot more than one weak spot in the world." Stopped, took a breath. "They've been blamed for a few --"
Something on the old man's Plumber belt made a high-pitched whistling noise. Aged fingers automatically moved to touch the small box.
"Tennyson," the senior plumber said. "Who is this?"
"Medical," the box half-crackled. "We need you and your grandson at the cells. As fast as you can get there."
"What's going on?"
Ben tried to jump out of the bunk bed. Most of him stuck the landing.
"The alien is showing the first signs of potentially emerging from the regenerative state," the box declared as Ben's lone sock-clad foot came to a sliding stop against the back wall. "We don't know how long we have before it wakes up."
There was a certain quarter-skipping, quarter-hopping movement which was associated with trying to get dressed on the run, and the total on those qualities only added up to half because the remainder was 'nearly falling'. Ben was almost sure that a few more years of bearing the Omnitrix would eventually let him figure out how to manage the non-run with dignity.
It was almost unfair. The watch casually put a degree of clothing on the majority of Ben's transformations. (The exceptions were usually aliens like Goop: that form seeped through just about any kind of cloth, and nothing Earth could bring to bear was capable of getting the stains out.) So in theory, it should be possible for Azmuth to install an almost incidental Get Dressed function. Hit the interface, ready to go.
...then again, the old Galvan would probably say something about risking the possibility of smoothie-based explosions. Plus if you took the watch's sense of 'humor' and applied it to outfits, then Ben was likely to wind up taking on the majority of alien confrontations in a tuxedo.
He was trying to keep pace with his grandfather (because you try to run and put on pants at the same time), heading for the cells. Having to talk on the move wasn't exactly helping. Most of the words were being jarred loose.
"-- and you're getting a brain scan when this is over," the senior Plumber half-snapped. "I want to make sure she wasn't doing anything else in there."
Ben wasn't exactly in a position to argue. Especially when trying to don that one (and still possibly only) jacket had momentarily left that position leaning against a wall.
It's Sunday. This should have just been a lazy Sunday...
(Kevin preferred lazy Saturdays. It was probably something to do with being Jewish.)
"You were going to tell me about Ahuizotl," the teenager reminded his grandfather as a slim arm pushed against the cool ceramic surface and young legs tried to get moving again. "He's been here before?"
"Or he's been using the name of his species," the old man declared. "Or it's a title. But they're old legends, Ben. Centuries. For the Aztecs, the name basically works out to 'spiny aquatic thing'. Or 'water dog', even when this one's a little more like a cat. And they've been blamed for deaths."
Ben blinked, nearly lost sight of the next crucial turn. "They've killed?"
"We don't know," Max sharply stated. "Not with any certainly. Sometimes aliens get blamed for what a human was planning to do anyway. It's a convenient excuse, to use what was seen as a monster to cover up your own actions. But Hernán Cortés -- explorer, Ben: sixteenth century, the reason the Aztecs lost their empire -- claimed that an ahuizotl killed one of his men."
The teenager forced himself toward, got the jacket's left sleeve down. "And he might have done that himself?"
"Hard to say," the old man grimly told him. "He was accused of murdering his first wife and when it comes to conquest, he had at least one massacre on his record. Which makes it a little easier to believe that he'd go for a local excuse. But when it comes to the aliens -- they're supposed to live in deep lakes. And the native legends say that they snatched people from the edge of the water, or out of boats. Looking for precious stones. You could negotiate with them, trade part of a fishing catch for freedom -- but if they didn't like the offering, they would --"
The old man hesitated.
"-- eat the human's eyes." A little more hastily, "Then their fingernails, toenails, and teeth. Nothing else. Which is possibly blaming the effects of a disease on what was seen as a monster. But if they had a corpse, then only a priest was allowed to touch it. Just in case it was a curse." And somewhat more softly, "But it's all legends, Ben. Things become distorted, and it's been centuries since those tales were first told. Words change, and so do people. We can't know for sure. We just have to be careful."
"And ready for a fight," the adolescent decided: this coincided with the moment when his right shoe nearly came off. "But you said Aztecs. That's Central America." He'd been there, although that had been for an issue with a Mayan god. Alien. A sword, and the Forever Knights --
-- Ben's life was complicated.
"Are there multiple portals?" he asked. "Coming in from where they are? Or can this one have the exit moved?"
With just a little bit of open frustration, "We don't know. Hang on..." He reached down to his belt, removed a small box and pushed a button. "Tennyson. I need a search in Storage. We're looking for something. It may be the reason for all of this."
"I can get someone on that," the box crackled. "What's the piece?"
The old man's arm angled back, pointing the box at his grandson. "Ben, describe that item she showed you. As exactly as you can."
He did.
"On it," the box said. "I'll send a rookie down." And crackled into silence.
A coronet which could potentially control a sun...
The implications were incredible. You could make a planet give you whatever you wanted. It was a way to get into a position of power and stay there. The equine and her sibling could have placed a yoke onto an entire world. And if Ahuizotl was truly trying to free everyone...
"We'll know if it's in Rushmore soon enough," Max grimly said. "We've gotten enough pieces of technological flotsam coming out of that wormhole. 'Magical' wouldn't be a surprise."
And the Plumbers kept everything. "Would the records show how old it was?" Immortal...
The old man shook his head. "Carbon-dating doesn't work on most of this stuff. Neither do some of the other tricks. All I can tell you is that once we knew there was a weak spot here, we did some digging. Some of the ejecta was here long enough to be buried."
They were almost at the cells. Ben stopped to adjust a shoelace. You had to be very careful with shoelaces. Anything which was snapping at your heels loved to go for a loose shoelace.
"We're going to have company," the senior Plumber announced. "I've got people with weapons on each side of the door, out of sight. Just in case. Ben --" and the concern took out every other tone "-- are you up to giving me Pesky at least one more time? Because this may be our last chance to figure out his real intentions before he wakes up."
"Yes."
Sharply, "Any signs of looping?"
And then Ben had to make a decision.
"...yes." Followed by, at full vocal speed, "But it's just the first stage. Doing my hair like Pesky's. I spotted it. I'm telling you, so you can spot if it's getting any worse. I'm on top of it, Grandpa. I can do one more change. At least."
There was a moment when the old man stopped moving.
"Thank you for telling me, Ben," was just a little too quiet.
"...you're -- welcome?"
"As your grandfather," Max Tennyson stated, "I don't want you changing into Pesky again. Not for at least two weeks."
Ben froze.
"And a a Plumber who has to head off what might just become a crisis," the senior reluctantly added, "I'm... going to be grateful for having been given the truth. Trust the young man who was willing to tell me that. And keep a very close eye on my grandson. Get the Omnitrix ready. Pesky's going back in."'
There were four armed Plumbers in the hallway outside the cell. Two on the left of the door, two on the right. They looked tense.
Ben checked the viewing panel. The alien was still asleep, with tiny eyes rapidly shifting behind the misplaced closed lids. But the grasping digits kept flexing, the tail was twitching, and the strange quasi-hand which had replaced the tuft was starting to claw at the floor...
"Last report from Medical said it's still in REM sleep," the tallest of the reinforcements told his grandfather. "But the brainwaves are shifting, and there's increased activity in multiple control centers."
"So it could be waking up." Aged fingers were already starting to work the controls. "And Pesky can keep it under, but not for long."
Ben wasn't sure. Multiple doses...
"Which means this is probably our last chance to talk," the old man told them all, "before we get our first chance to talk. Let's try to see if we can get this one to wake up in a good mood. Ben?" (Who nodded, waiting.) "I'm opening our side of the airlock. Ready?"
There was only one possible response.
"Yes."
(It didn't have to be the truth. It just had to be said.)
The outer door opened. Ben went in, quickly sat on the cold floor. Pushed back the battered jacket's left sleeve, exposing the Omnitrix.
The alien's movements were quickening. More than that: they had spread out to the entire body. A low, constant vibration. As if it was shivering.
Another look at the Omnitrix. The interface panel, and the display of a fragile silhouette.
You've been cooperating this whole time. Not one mischange. So you still think this is important. For as much as you think at all. I've got to trust you.
He briefly thought about adjusting the position of his sonic antenna. Just in case --
-- I'm Ben. I'm human.
Something which would only be true for another second.
His right hand moved...
The little alien who was sitting on the too-cold floor wasn't entirely sure about where it was most hoping to appear. Next to the visitor? In front of the equine? In a place of solitude, because control had been lost and safety felt like a joke? Any of the three would create immediate issues, and with the first two...
Figure out some way of dealing with the hero. Or the villain.
The roles had yet to be fully assigned.
Ben had seen the possibilities in the control of a sun: the ability to exploit all those who lived on the planet which relied on that radiance. It was... a terrifying power. The sort of thing which had to be in the right hands, and there was no way to be sure that it was currently being pressed between the proper hooves.
Because Ben had been at this for a while. He was very familiar with those who tried to get close to him, pretended to be allies and partners and so much else because the Omnitrix and its bearer were something which could be exploited.
(Kevin tried to exploit Ben, almost from the very start. Almost. It could be argued that the two youths had been bonding before Kevin had learned about the Omnitrix.) (Kevin, who had already been absorbing energy because that was how the runaway survived.) (Had already been going insane.)
That the equine taught him... that was no guarantee of her true intentions, much less her real personality.
Especially with someone who basically said that it's common for others to assume she's evil.
Ben did believe her about a few things. One of them is what the coronet was meant to do. As lies go, that one would be a little too far up the significance scale for ready believability. And when she talked about the moon being controlled, and another dealing with the sun... yes. He felt that wherever she's from, whatever kind of world it is -- that is exactly what's happening. In a way, he had seen a little too much to not take that seriously.
Normally, there would be a chance that she was only talking about another's ability and was seeking the coronet for herself, hoping to usurp --but the visitor's words offered confirmation. It's her. Somehow, she's moving a moon. Her sister deals with a sun. And there are times when they might switch roles for a while. Or one could take both, to give the other some time off.
This might explain why she wasn't able to maintain a constant presence in the visitor's dream. It may not just be a need to rest, or even do something so basic as get a meal or hit the bathroom. (Ben wasn't quite able to picture a equine bathroom, and Pesky hadn't been doing much better.) It was possible that taking care of a moon's orbit required all of her concentration, and did so at a given time on every night. Whenever her night is.
She controlled her world's moon. The little alien agreed with Ben: that was exactly what was going on. But it didn't mean she was in the right. The other one could be the ultimate freedom fighter, trying to depose a pair of tyrants by stripping them of exclusive control. And even if that's the truth of the matter -- the coronet may not work. If the system is damaged to the point where no one has control any more, then an entire planet might --
-- would --
-- who's the hero? Who's the villain? And was it even that simple?
There were times when Ben had wished the cartoons had gone into a lot more detail, because afterschool animation didn't seem to have left him completely prepared for the hero's life. But Ben... wasn't quite present just then. Because memories were retained, and Pesky couldn't imagine what Azmuth had to do in order to manage that -- but the brain's structure had been changed. When it comes to personality, outlook, and everything else which goes into sapience -- biology did have a say.
Humans could be viewed as an apex predator. A Nemuina was closer to a prey species which got evolutionarily lucky.
Small. Fragile. Vulnerable.
The little alien released the yellow dust, watched it cycle through the small sampling chamber. Waited to be pulled into the one place where it once had control --
-- the jungle is empty.
The Nemuina could say it's been like that all along. It's the equine, or the sapient whose dreamworld this is -- well, the version which the equine has altered -- but nothing else. There's heat and humidity and breezes -- given the humidity, there just isn't enough of that last, although there's a cool one now -- and plants move along with all of it. But when it comes to animal life... nothing.
No equine. No visitor. No sign of either one. And the little alien is hovering above the tall grass, with only so much time to work with in a place where even time itself becomes uncertain, while the visitor comes ever closer to waking.
It needs to find at least one of them. (The equine had said to find her, but... how much can the Nemuina trust her? How far?) Searching is going to consume duration, and the Omnitrix is forever counting down.
At least there's a cool breeze ripping through the grass.
...the grass is rippling.
The air is rippling.
The little alien can see it now. Outbound waves of disturbance. And where they pass, the rosewood trees subtly warp.
...Ben saw this, didn't he? When he pushed. Trying to get the equine out of his dream. It produced a ripple across the fur, and nothing more. And when he was starting to wake up, the entire dreamworld...
The effect isn't that strong. Not yet, and the Nemuina doesn't feel as if waking is an immediate threat. But the ripples are familiar. And they're cool. The little alien is very attuned to what happens within dream and it's noticed that when the equine is upset, the ambient temperature tends to drop. It's guessing this is something she can do in the real world. Another facet of her magic, being imposed here.
The ripples are moving outwards. So if Pesky moves towards their presumed source...
A guess. But it's all the Nemuina has to work with. A guess, and very little time in which to use it.
The little alien starts to fly. The glowing trail shows where it's been, and there's nothing to be done about that. A problem for a prey species, when the best means of escape told the predator exactly which direction its meal had gone. It's part of why Nemuina are meant to move in groups. Criss-cross the trails, cover for each other.
But this one is alone.
It exists for only a few minutes at a time. It is Ben, and yet it is not. And when it comes into the world, into the place where there is no control... it dearly wishes that it had more friends.
The ripples are becoming more closely-spaced. The sonic antenna is starting to pick up sounds from up ahead. Growls and snorts. Nothing which can be recognized as words. But emotion can be assigned to those noises, and it's so easy to hear the rage.
The wind is getting colder. Then it becomes colder than that. ...air -- isn't supposed to be this cold...
The Nemuina didn't evolve from an insect base -- but there's a certain similarity in the structure of fey wings. It's something which suggests a warm climate, with very little need to add body mass and extra blood flow as insulators against a world where what Ben knows as a true winter only appears near the poles.
The chill is starting to go deep. There isn't much muscle mass to block it from the bones, and as for the skin... that's always been a fully ineffective armor.
If the garment is a dress, then it could at least be an insulative --
Wings are starting to ache. The flight slows. What had been a flow of light is now emerging in clumps.
It's not real. None of this is real.
It doesn't change anything. Pesky doesn't have control.
The noises are becoming more intense, as growls and snorts turn primal. It almost has to be a fight. But... the further the little alien goes, the colder it becomes. And it has no defenses against that biting, gnawing chill. Vulnerable to so many things...
...the Omnitrix is counting down. Their visitor is on the verge of waking, and there's no guarantee that the translators will work. This may be the last chance.
Stiffening wings are forced to flap. The Nemuina pushes on. And the sonic antenna begins to lock in place as strands freeze to each other, eyelids are harder to open after every blink, the spots on cheeks and chin are turning black and it just keeps pushing because that's all it knows how to do --
(How long has it been searching?) (It's trying to count. And even that is being consumed by the cold.)
-- there are trees ahead of it, blocking the view. Icicles hanging down from branches. It tries to push a few of them out of the way, and the wood shatters. Thin fingers feel as if they'll be next.
Then there's a clearing, one too small to contain the twinned shout of rage and conflict. And the little alien sees them. Sees the battle.
(Maybe he hunted for her. Perhaps she sought him at the last.) (It doesn't matter.)
Ben's grandfather told him that a horse could kill. This one, put up against a human, would have already managed the feat a hundred times over.
Silver-clad forehooves are striking whenever they can, and that turns out to be just about anywhere because the wings can get the equine in the air. It allows her to pick up extra speed, choose approach angles and try to swoop in for horn strikes. Metal and keratin and something not quite bone are all being brought to bear against the other alien and while that's happening, every last part of the mare is bringing death to the mere concept of warmth. The grass is frozen. It breaks every time either of them moves against it. Stones crack. Something radiates from her, and molecules pause to pay attention.
And the other is... ignoring it.
Or trying to.
He's trying to hit her. The forward claws, that tail-ending fist. Fangs snap at what isn't a fully tangible mane. And for the most part, she's staying out of the way: she can move in the air, dodge in additional dimensions. But it keeps trying, and... the cold doesn't seem to reach him. Everything except him. The air is almost cracking in half and the large quadruped (and he's larger than she is, considerably larger and when put against Pesky, he becomes a giant) is moving with the warmth of life.
The visitor growls. Constantly. And at this distance, it's just possible for a fast-freezing antenna to make out the words.
"No-no-no-no-no..."
And the equine's fur ripples. Over and over, as if being struck at close range by repeated gusts of strong wind.
He's trying to treat her as a figment. Rejecting what she brings to the dream. And he can't quite manage to expel her -- but at the same time, the cold hasn't reached him.
The Nemuina doesn't quite know what the plummeting temperatures are meant to do. Trick the body in some way, make it believe that there's a new injury and the healing sleep must continue? Or is it possible to do real harm in a dream?
It must be, because the little alien's wings are about to crack.
It tries to flap them. To move into a position of safety from which it can observe, and -- make a decision. Because there's a battle, and Pesky doesn't know which of the two needs to win --
-- but its wings will not move.
The joints refuse to shift. The axilla feel as if they've completely hardened.
The Nemuina, chilled to the point where it feels as if its very organs are covered in frost, cannot fly.
It falls.
The small body drops into the grass, just barely manages to hit in a way which prevents wings from breaking. And the impact makes a little mouth open, so that the frozen air can be broken by a trill of pain.
The equine's dark gaze immediately shifts to the left --
-- she sees the small body. Sees the pain and the cold working its way ever-deeper.
And the chill vanishes.
It happens all at once. The icicles flash-melt, grass begins to shift normally, the fragile wings feel normal again, eyelids are no longer threatening to freeze together and the Nemuina can move.
So can the quadruped. And with the cold gone, the visitor has one less thing to deny.
It leaps. A paw swipe catches the equine's left wing, bends it in an unnatural manner. The mare begins to plummet towards the ground, and the leap begins to shift course. It's turning into more of a pounce. He's going to come down on top of her, and the too-long mouth is baring white fangs --
-- Pesky's wings can move again.
The Nemuina can fly. It can get away. It has no control here. It can't be part of this fight. Except that's not who Pesky is.
The fey wings buzz. The little alien gets between the plummeting giant and the equine --
-- the quadruped's hind paws slam into the jungle's soil. The fore, which end in grasping digits, seize the small body. Pull it close to eyes and tiny nose and those white, sharp teeth.
"Stay out of this, dreamwalker," those fangs growl. "You should not be part of this conflict. You don't understand --"
The equine is trying to recover, but she's going to need at least a few more seconds and the quadruped is denying everything she does as he draws Pesky closer to that huge mouth, the Nemuina is struggling and thin limbs don't have enough strength to escape because the little alien is weak and helpless and vulnerable and that's a really good way to have the enemy bring you in close.
Pesky's hands and wings generate a sort of chemical dust. A substance which, when it appears in dream, can't exactly put anyone to sleep.
Ahuizotl knows what one dreamwalker is capable of, stands ready to deny anything the mare could do. The little alien is hoping that he can't fight off two. And a tripled blast of dust particles, aimed directly at tiny misplaced eyes from point-blank range, is still something of an impediment to sight.
When you're vulnerable, you have to be creative.
The glowing yellow substance goes directly into the tiny face, into the eyes, and the quadruped screams in pain. Recoils, stumbles backwards as its foreleg grasping digits let go of the Nemuina. This also means it's staggering in reverse while balanced on its back legs, and that isn't a state which can be maintained for long.
Ahuizotl falls over. The equine is getting up.
"We may discuss your timing later," she tells Pesky. "For now..."
The horn goes down. Forehooves scrape at the dirt. Getting ready to charge --
"-- NO!"
It's not exactly a hissy fit, and it doesn't emerge as a tantrum either. More of a demand.
Pesky flies. Gets between them, and the mare's head snaps up. Bringing the horn out of charge alignment, as the little alien desperately turns towards Ahuizotl. The quadruped is writhing on the ground, pawing at tiny eyes as the mouth endlessly roars in pain.
"We can talk about this!" the Nemuina cries out. "Therrrrre has to be some way! And --"
Pesky just had a thought. An inspiration. And the little alien knows Ben would approve.
"-- you don't have to be alone! Not any more, not as the last! I have something which might be able to brrrring back your species!"
It's within the realm of theory. More than that: possibility. The Omnitrix can get a DNA sample. From there, you move to cloning --
-- the roars stop.
"But then," the pained quadruped gasps, as words emerge without thought to block them, "there would once again be others sharing in the treasure. My treasure, of strength and speed and time. None were worthy --"
And then Pesky understands why there is no life in this jungle.
The true alien writhes. Twists in a way which lets it regain footing, gets up and begins to run. Moving away from the dreamwalkers, retreating into the trees as a new ripple starts to enter the world, everything starting to shake and vibrate in concert, everything except Nemuina and equine --
"He wakes!" the mare tells Pesky. "I can try to keep him asleep, but it will not hold for long: not after he has already been in the nightscape for so much time! A minute, perhaps, no more --"
Which is when the beeping starts.
There have been times when Ben was almost impressed by Azmuth's exact choice of alarm tones. The beeping of the Omnitrix approaching timeout is a sonic incarnation of existential dread.
"-- you can pick up on movement near the portal?"
"Yes!"
"Get to it! Be rrrready to open it all the way! I'll do what I can!"
The dark eyes are staring at him, and do so even as the dreamworld begins to crumble.
Softly, "...why? I felt you had doubts about me, even after..." She stops, and those dark eyes close. "Why?"
There's no time to explain. Not now. But... ...she spotted Pesky, and did so in the middle of the battle. Her first instinct was to help. You have to trust your friends.
The world goes white --
-- it felt as if his legs were half-asleep. The other half consisted of 'frozen', and it was all giving Ben some trouble in getting up.
"BEN!" Coming from his grandfather, it was a cry of relief. "What happened? I almost went in there! Pesky was shaking --"
"-- get the door open, Grandpa!"
The old man stopped talking, briskly nodded. Buttons were pushed, and the outer barricade began to slip into the wall.
Ben glanced back. Looked at Ahuizol, and the way every limb was moving now. The cessation of movement behind the tiny eyelids, as all of the legs began to subconsciously ready for a push.
We don't have much time...
The teenager scrambled into the hallway, stopped while still in front of the open door and immediately focused all of his attention on the senior Plumber.
"We're sending him back," he told the old man. "She's got a prison waiting on the other side, and the trip will knock him out again. He can't stay here."
There was a certain advantage to having a family member within the government bureaucracy. Some base leaders probably would have wasted several hours on getting the full reason before postponing any final decision via triplicate. Max Tennyson simply nodded.
"So how do we start?" his grandfather asked. "Because he's waking up. Fast."
"Just keep him in the cell," Ben decided. "Once the watch recharges, I can --"
Which was when everyone heard the pounding footsteps coming towards them.
A very young adult, so fresh to the Plumber uniform as to have portions of it still trying to decide what they were supposed to fit, came running around the corner. The object in his right hand swung back and forth with his movements, and the lower end came close to ripping the fabric.
"Mr. Tennyson!" the rookie gasped -- then looked at Ben. "Mister... Tennysons? Is this it?"
He held out the item and Ben, acting on reflex alone, grasped it by a platinum spike.
The metal was warm to the touch. A little too much so. Six opals turned the base's lighting into inner rainbows.
"I think so," Ben breathed. "I think..."
And then they all heard the growl.
Slowly, Ben turned. Looked through the viewing panel, directly into the cell, and did so as the frightened courier backed away. Leaving him as the only living thing within the alien's view.
Oh. Yeah. Definitely bigger than Wildmutt.
The tiny misplaced eyes were staring at him with open, naked greed.
"Grandpa," Ben mouthed, trying to keep his lip movements minimal, "can you please put him to sleep for a while?"
Under different circumstances, "How?" would have felt like a reasonable question.
"I don't know. He's immortal. Maybe just flood the room."
"Water dog," the old man reminded him. "The medics didn't tell me if his lungs could process liquid, but... Ben, he's in the cell --"
A cell which, like the hallways, was mostly made from a ceramic composite. Something stronger than just about anything on the planet. Just about the best science had to offer.
Ahuizotl reared up, and the height difference with Wildmutt became that much more extreme. Claws slashed. Claws which had a different kind of power behind them. The inner door broke.
Pieces rained into the airlock space. Fragments skittered into the hallway. Several of the smaller bits came to a stop against Ben's shoes.
"Oh," the teenager softly said. "Magic sucks..."
The growling alien took a single step forward. Nothing about the furious rumble came across as words.
The tiny eyes were staring at Ben.
My sleeve slid down my arm when I got up. The Omnitrix is covered. He can't see the symbol. So he doesn't know who I am. He's got no reason to single me out and attack -- -- oh. Right.
The alien took another step. The tiny gaze had focused down and to one very specific side.
I'm the one with the coronet.
"New guy?" Ben whispered.
"...what?" drifted in from the side.
Ben's left arm slowly reached out. "Pass me your squawkbox." A small rectangle was pressed against his palm, and half-numb fingers closed. "Thanks. So anyway... I'm gonna run now."
You picked up a lot of odd skills, when you were trying to be a hero. Getting dressed while on the move was still a work in progress. Spinning on one heel to make a break for it without falling over -- that had been mastered before his eleventh birthday.
Ben was on the short side. Slim. Right now, it was that much less mass which had to overcome inertia.
He ran. He ran knowing that the alien would have to chase him, was fixated on the treasure, and he heard claws moving against ceramic, struggling for purchase as Ahuizotl roared, a sound which required no translation at all, and almost lost in that was the tiny hum of Plumber weapons which had just seen their safeties switched off --
"HOLD YOUR FIRE!"
Max Tennyson's order didn't quite come in time. Ben heard two of the beam blasters go off. There was a twinned sizzle, and -- that was all.
They hit him. It didn't do anything. And now he's told them to stop shooting because those guns are still going to do something to me. ...and they can't try to shoot him with anything else, as long as there's a chance that they might hit me.
He could hear the big body picking up speed. Getting closer, and he didn't dare look back because that was going to cost time --
-- Ben was on the small side for his age. Somewhat skinny. Factors which meant he had less mass to get moving when starting a run, and just as little to redirect when making an emergency left turn into the first available hallway. Ahuizotl, who had a few hundred extra pounds contesting with inertia, skidded past the intersection.
There were twenty blessed seconds when the only thing following Ben was the roar. Twenty more seconds for the Omnitrix to work its own sort of magic.
"Come on," Ben panted. "Recharge, recharge..."
He raised his right hand, and the dangling coronet spike nearly cut his thigh --
-- easier to shake the left arm. He didn't have to do that much of it before he spotted the interface. It was still glowing red.
"Recharge...!"
It was amazing, really. Ben wouldn't have thought it was possible to pack smug sadism into a hue, and yet the proof was right there.
Something smooth-edged and heavy slammed into the corridor, about twenty feet behind him. Ben grinned.
They're dropping the blast doors. Blocking him in.
He kept running anyway. He'd been a hero for several years, and part of maintaining that state was knowing that --
Several seconds passed, and then the echoes of crashing ceramic fragments caught up to him.
-- and he's also getting through the blast doors.
Blockades didn't always work.
He raised the squawk box to his mouth, pressed a button and hoped. "It's Ben! Who have I got?"
"It's your grandfather," the reassuring crackle told him. "What's the plan, Ben?"
"I'm trying to buy time! Stay ahead! Once I get a recharge, I'll knock him out myself!" He took another corner, changed direction again as he heard claws and roars closing in. There was also some stranger sounds mixed in: high-pitched whines and abrupt sonic burrs. None of them seemed to be doing anything. "Just try to slow him down for me!"
This particular "How?" was definitely looking for suggestions.
"I don't know! Use the base defenses! There's some weapons in the walls, right? Maybe a few of them will work!" It was hard to talk while running at this speed, but at least his shoes were in no danger of coming off. "Set them to target any non-human DNA and autofire!"
With the odd calm which could only be found in the heart of terror, "We have been trying to shoot him, while you've got some distance. We're producing some burns, but that's been it. We need stronger weapons. Things we can't necessarily use in the base. And when it comes to targeting non-human DNA -- what happens after you transform?"
Oh. Right. I really do get in the way sometimes.
Another direction change. He had to stay in the hallways, because the doors were made of the same material as the walls. If he wound up being cornered...
"Start using the base's environmental controls!" Ben panted. "She was using cold against him! He's from the jungle: he likes it hot! Cold might slow him down!"
"On it!" the box told him. "But it'll take a couple of minutes before you feel a difference!"
Every bit helps. And he was still running, he saw a young woman starting to come out of a side door and then go diving back in, but he had to stay in the corridors, he was running and he wasn't used to distance sprints, the sound of claws was getting closer and there was a flash of red in the wall up ahead on his left, something embedded in a small alcove --
-- fire extinguisher!
Ben went directly for the cylinder, shifted the coronet's left spike so that it was held by his waistband, pressed between belt and boxers. (Putting it down the front of his pants had been right out.) Anchored the squawkbox in a jacket pocket, grabbed for cool metal --
-- and he had it.
It didn't weigh very much. There were a lot of words written along one panel, and something made of clear plastic was hanging from the side. Ben ignored all of it, turned to face the direction from which he'd come and saw the alien charging towards him.
The muscular shoulders were very wide, especially when compared to the narrow waist. There was something clear dripping from the fangs. And it kept shifting its head, checking the sides because it had almost no peripheral vision, and yet it was still completely focused on Ben and the coronet --
"You don't like cold?" Ben yelled, and aimed what didn't feel so much like a nozzle as the business end of a flexible desk lamp. "Try this!"
He squeezed the trigger.
A yellowish beam of light coated the air. Saturated the atmosphere, then dripped down the walls.
The quadruped skidded to a stop. Tilted its overlong head slightly to the left, almost peacefully sat back on its haunches, and just looked at Ben. It was the look that a flyswatter gave any insect which had given it the courtesy of not moving.
"...oh," Ben said. "No cold foam. Technology, right?"
The alien stood up. Took another step forward, took a breath --
-- the huge mouth opened all the way. Gulped at the air, over and over. Then it tried again, as the dark body began to slump to one side --
Oh. It's doing something to the air. Because fire can't burn without oxygen, so if you negate that for a while --
The alien's ribs were desperately heaving. It couldn't find anything in the atmosphere which its lungs could use, and without that --
Ben grinned.
Then he noticed that he couldn't breathe very well.
...oh. Green eyes went down, and fuzzy vision found dangling plastic. So that's an oxygen mask hanging off the side. This is probably in the protocol book. Somewhere. I've really got to read that thing.
He made a vow to do so as he reached for the air supply, and forgot about all fifteen hundred pages of the results before the first blast of oxygen hit his lungs. And the alien was slumping, coming closer to total collapse, a few more seconds and --
-- the fire extinguisher made a small, shrill sound.
The yellow light went out.
Ahuizotl gasped. Huge lungs pulled in new air.
Ben looked at the expended cylinder.
"Technology, right?" he told the alien. "Grandpa said it marches on. Then it hits the end of the block and turns around --"
He threw the empty canister at Ahuizotl, grabbed a coronet spike, and was running before he got to see that the toss had come up seven feet short --
-- more turns, but the claws were still too close behind, he'd found a staircase and was trying to work his way up, but -- no matter what he did, the alien remained on his trail. He was starting to wonder if Ahuizotl could smell the coronet.
How much time...
There were things Ben kept meaning to do in his life. Read the protocol book (eventually). Finding a way of riding in Kevin's car without messing anything up. Having a good date. And maybe getting a digital assistant. It wouldn't have to do much. Just notice when the Omnitrix had timed out, and then count off the time until recharge. If the watch happened to get some power back early, it could tell him about that. Sure, it was something of a specialty market because he was going to be the only user, but when the programmer considered the importance --
-- he was trying to take the steps two at a time because his legs weren't long enough for three, he didn't know how much time had passed and the alien was still too close behind him, he could feel the air getting colder now but it wasn't stopping his lungs from burning and there was a landing up ahead, a landing and then the ascending stairs went back the other way --
-- he thought of something.
Or perhaps it was instinct.
Ben reached the landing. Made the turn, hit the next set of stairs, and ran up four of them.
Then he waited, watched, and at the instant dark fur came into sight, vaulted the railing, dropped onto Ahuizotl's back, and rammed the lower platinum spike into alien flesh.
The metal sunk in, and did so with very little resistance. Something reddish-brown and faintly acrid spurted from the fresh wound.
The alien roared. And somewhere in the middle of the sound, it turned into an anguished scream.
"So maybe it's magic that hurts you!" Ben triumphantly panted from his place on the quadruped's back. "Stuff from your own world! Or maybe we just needed knives all along!" He pulled out the spike, lined the coronet up for another shot --
--- he'd been anticipating some trouble in staying on, because that was something which took raw strength and Kevin was the one who thought mechanical bull riding was a good idea. It was why he'd aimed for the narrow waist during the jump, had done his best to wrap his stupid not-as-long legs into a secure position. So he was ready when Ahuizotl reared up, tried to buck him off, clung to the fur with his one free hand and didn't get tossed, tried to use the coronet to gouge a second point, and altogether considered himself to be doing famously right up until the point when the tail arched over the alien's back and that hand grabbed Ben's jacket.
"Oh sh --"
The front of the alien went down. The back end reared up. The hand pulled, then threw.
He didn't have time to twist. To roll. He just hit the wall above the landing, with his left shoulder going into it first.
The pain jolted his entire body, nearly doubled as he fell to the floor. And the alien was closing in again, the fangs were bared and dripping, but -- it was moving more slowly. The cold, perhaps, combined with the fresh wounds. But those tiny misplaced eyes were still fixed on the coronet, Ben was on the floor and he just needed a few seconds to get up, he just needed to think of something and if the still-turning head got any closer, he could try to get a spike into it again, but Ahuizotl would be watching for that and --
-- there was a sound.
It was a little on the high-pitched side. Something meant to draw attention. That was followed by three tones with some degree of overlap, accompanied by a momentary soft green glow near Ben's left wrist.
It was exultation as electronic symphony.
Ben grinned.
"You've been really good this weekend, Omnitrix," he painfully whispered as Ahuizotl's head arched forward and the clear fluid began to drip onto Ben's hands. "Tell you what. You call it."
He flipped the coronet, let his left hand grip the spike. The right pushed back the sleeve and, in the split-second after Ben saw those tiny eyes widen with shock and fresh want, slammed the interface --
-- there was a flash of light.
Ahuizotl blinked. Stared. And before it could reconcile what had happened, an alien hand came up.
It came in from the right. It was at least twice the size of a human hand, had three fingers and a thumb, and the red skin rasped against fur like low-grade sandpaper as it grabbed one side of Ahuizotl's narrow face.
"Got your three!" the alien called out in a voice which seemed to emerge from an underwater gravel pit, and did so just before the left hand came in from the other side. "Got your nine!"
A quartet of green eyes seemed to glow with joyful malice. And then the other right hand came up.
Well... technically, it was still a hand. But the proper description would have been 'fist'.
"HI, NOON!" Fourarms bellowed, and punched Ahuizotl dead on.
The quadruped's body jerked. But it didn't wind up being punched down the stairs, because the upper right and left hands were holding its head, keeping it lined for for the next punch from the lower right arm. The lower left was busy securing the coronet.
"Can't really see anything to the sides, can you?" Fourarms half-burbled. "It's why you keep turning your head all the time! To check on what's coming --"
Another dead-on smash, and then the Tetramand let go of the intruder's left side, anchoring the long head on the right and with a freshly-added chin grab. It gave him some freedom to launch the left hook.
Two of the smaller fangs broke. The larger alien started to stand up, dragging Ahuizotl into the vertical as it did so.
"-- and if I just keep you still enough --"
The quadruped jerked. The tail twisted, came forward, and that hand tried to claw -- but it didn't have the strength or the leverage to work with, Fourarms landed another punch --
-- the dark blue neck, whose powerful muscles had to support the weight of that head, jerked back with all its strength, and Fourarms lost the grip. A trio of arms immediately tried to find new places to grab, while the fourth played keep-away with the treasure --
-- but that wasn't what the intruder currently wanted.
The tiny eyes focused on the hourglass symbol: something which, on a Tertamand, appeared at the center of the belt. The head lunged, and fangs snapped --
"-- NO!"
The Omnitrix couldn't be conventionally removed. It could be cut away or gouged out of flesh, and Fourarms knew it. So did a number of enemies, and that was why the reaction was immediate: because Ahuizotl hadn't been the first to try that trick.
Three fists came crashing down on various parts of the long head, and the intruder's chin slammed into the floor. Ceramics cracked.
"You've got three graspers there!" the Tertamand rasped. "I guess the Omnitrix decided to one-up you! But you aren't doing much with fists! Here, I'll demonstrate --"
He got the intruder up with the free left arm, and then both of the rights came swinging in at the same time. The results went for a short flight.
After a few seconds, the Tertramand decided to just jump down to the lower landing. Looked at the red-brown acrid fluid, judged the state of the closed eyes and slow-heaving ribs, then picked up the quadruped with both right arms and held it against his broad chest.
Part of the intruder touched the belt, and the hourglass flashed yellow. Fourarms barely noticed.
"CLEAR THE WAY!"
They were opening doors for him. Vacating staircases. Making sure every passageway was empty, because there was a Tetramand with a burden and while the weight wasn't a problem, the Omnitrix was. Fourarms was only going to be capable of carrying his opponent for so long, and then Ben was going to be half-buried under reeking fur. And the red alien could keep giving Ahuizotl punches while on the run to keep him under, jumping down staircases was faster than any other method, but the clock was ticking and Fourarms didn't have a lot of speed. Being significantly taller than a human gave him a longer stride, and powerful muscles meant he could try to cover ground in a series of bounding mid-range leaps, but -- that was it.
XLR8 would have been there by now.
Fourarms possessed a series of slightly-blurred memories from the time when a malfunctioning Omnitrix had started to play mix-and-match with forms. He'd wound up with a Lepidopterran's body odor and wings too small to get him off the ground. Apparently a true combination of strength and speed had just been too much to ask for.
But the Plumbers were clearing his path. And he vaulted stairs, bounded down hallways and there was the front exit, he was out at ground level and racing past pines as his burden made enough of a rumbling sound to justify another jaw crack, broad feet kept pushing --
-- Ben had actually looked it up once: how the primary contact points for a human foot when running were the heel and two of the toes. Tetramand evolution had just trimmed away the non-essentials.
There was a squawk box on Fourarms' waist, and it was giving him directions as he charged forward under a still-rising sun. Sending him to a clearing about six hundred yards west of the Presidential Trail --
-- he saw it, in the center of it all. Surrounded by pines whose branches bowed inwards as the wormhole opened wider, with something on the other side perfectly aware of all the movement. The center glowed slightly, and around that... the entire world rippled. As if the park was nothing more than a dream, with the sleeper about to wake.
Which reminded him to give Ahuizotl another punch. One for the road.
The Tetramand reached the weak spot. Pushed the intruder against the portal, saw the long head distort, start to vanish as stray pine needles were picked up by the ripples and began to go along for the ride, the neck was gone now, he'd pushed it in all the way to the narrow waist and that was when the beeping started.
Fourarms immediately put a quartet of shoulders into it. Shoved.
There was a flash.
The last thing Ben saw before the wormhole closed, staring up as a worn-out human body collapsed to its knees... was a rippling, quavery tail-mounted distorted hand fading out of existence. And but for the way every digit had gone limp, it almost could have been waving goodbye.
The medical team had treated his shoulder. (Fourarms had been able to ignore the pain. Ben was at the maximum dosage and waiting for his next pills.)
He was sitting with his grandfather in the Rushmore cafeteria. Ben had a microwave burger, which qualified as edible on technicality. It was still better than sharing whatever Max was having for lunch, especially since the burger had stopped moving. However, none of the vending machines could manage a decent smoothie.
"I checked the records," the old man finally said. "The coronet was about eight inches underground when we started checking the spot. It's safe to assume it was sitting there for a while." He put the fork down, and several of the items on his plate instinctively squirmed away from it. "There's still the question of why it got here. Disposing of it because it might not work is one option, but..."
Ben slowly nodded.
"If the portal's exit could be moved," he considered, "then maybe... they were trying to keep it away from him. One of his own people. They saw a South Dakota winter, and shoved it through."
"Or it was a mistake," the senior Plumber considered. "An accident. Just... not their problem any more. It's not as if we can ask."
Because the wormhole had closed.
What's that world like? How many new species are on the other side? There's at least two. It could be a lot more. What sort of things can they do?
Ben might never know.
"I want to keep you here overnight, " his grandfather told him. "You were exposed to that blood, and we had a lot of people around when containment was breached. Medical thinks you'll all be fine, but I'd like to make sure."
The grandson nodded. It was the safest thing to do.
"We'll get you to school on time for Monday," Max added.
Ben took a breath.
"Grandpa?"
"Right here, Ben."
"I'm staying in school."
"Oh?"
"I -- think I've still got stuff to learn."
Each took a drink.
"Good work," the old man smiled.
"Thanks."
And for a few minutes and too many disconcerting bites, that was enough.
"You went off for a while after your shoulder got wrapped," Max eventually noted. "Any reason?"
Honesty seemed best. "I contacted Azmuth."
The brown eyes looked him over. Very slowly.
"Because the Omnitrix acquired new DNA?"
"That's part of it." He'd checked. Ahuizotl's silhouette was available from the interface. But...
...no. Not without a lot of research.
He didn't want to lose his grandfather. That was natural. But there were times when personality traits came with a change, and... he wasn't going to use the quadruped unless it was absolutely necessary. He certainly wasn't about to propose that Max Tennyson become the creature, not unless he was completely sure that it wouldn't touch the core. Because he loved his grandparent, and that meant wanting to keep the most precious aspects of the man safe.
The humanity.
"But it's mostly because he's coming in three weeks," Ben continued.
Max nodded. "Running scheduled maintenance. You think the Omnitrix was damaged in the fight?"
It was Ben's turn to shake his head. "No. I asked him for an unlock."
"A new alien?" The old man looked vaguely intrigued. "Which one?"
"Nothing new," the teenager said. "I asked him if he would unlock for the species I've already got."
"How could he --"
"All of the female forms."
The brown eyes blinked.
"...why?" the old man carefully asked.
"Because there are girls who can do things boys can't," Ben rationally explained. "You see it all the time in nature. Especially with alien biology. Just for starters, female Tetramands? They're stronger. That fight would have been a lot shorter if I'd been hitting harder. And with the others... I could find new whole sets of powers. Stuff I don't have now." He took a sip of fully disappointing water, swallowed. "I don't want to miss any possibilities, Grandpa."
In full neutrality, "And what did Azmuth say?"
"That he'd think about it." Ben lightly shrugged. "And when he doesn't call a request stupid or say I'm an idiot for making it, that usually means yes. So... three weeks." Paused. "What do you think?"
Several bites went by.
"I think," Max Tennyson eventually said, "that I would have felt a lot better about that fight if it had lasted half the time. We'll see what Azmuth does when he gets here. And after that... I guess we'll just see what they can do."
The grandson exhaled.
There was nothing wrong with it, after all. There was a good chance that he'd been changing into girls the whole time. (Pesky, if female, was an exceptionally tough and courageous one.) Getting new powers, or enhanced versions of the old ones -- that would be a bonus. Explore all of the possibilities.
And he was absolutely not going to change into a girl in private just so he could feel himself up. Most of his aliens didn't even have breasts. Except for the ones that did. Like Tetramands. ...although the blouse would probably stay on. Pulling down Fourarms' pants had been bad enough. Anyway, the Omnitrix was ultimately supposed to be about understanding other species through living as them. Any tactile exploration was therefore just about understanding the form. So there.
The little alien is sitting on a schoolyard swing.
Ben likes this swing. Not that he got to use it much. Cash and J.T... well, a lot of people wind up with bullies when they're growing up. Ben got pushed off swings a lot, in the days before the watch. But his bullies grew up, and... they're better than they used to be.
A ten-year-old used to ride this swing when the bullies weren't looking. And pretended he could fly.
Pesky can fly. But in some ways, the pretending was just as good --
-- the Nemuina slowly becomes aware of its position. Of the thin fingers grasping the swing's chains, and that's followed by the inarguable fact that it's not supposed to be here --
"We have placed him in the cell," the cool voice says from behind the Nemuina. "To that extent, it is over. The state of the coronet?"
Slowly, the little alien turns on the seat. Looks directly into dark eyes.
"The coronet?" the equine repeats. "It is a necessary detail."
"The... porrrrtal closed," Pesky slowly trills.
"Yes," the mare agrees. "And then I opened it again, very slightly. To check on you." With a soft sigh, "I intend to monitor you every now and again, Benjamin Tennyson. And to continue your instruction in dreamwalking, as it is a poor teacher who abandons her student after a single session. And..." Her wings twitch, and the ribs shift in and out. "...because heroes need guidance."
"I sorrrrt of felt like..." The little alien pauses, weighs the words. "...you didn't like heroes."
"There are times when they are necessary," she tells him, and takes a step closer to the swing. "It is why we have several of our own. I simply wish that they were generally smarter. And, if at all possible, less destructive. But you acted, Benjamin Tennyson. Where I could not." Another step. "And you... chose me."
"Someone had to do something."
"Yes."
Closer still. She leans in, and the cool horn gently rubs against the little alien's thin shoulder.
"I would wish for them to be smarter," she semi-repeats. "But with those who know they may be hurt, and act regardless -- I will not say 'gone'. The coronet?"
"It's still with us. Under heavy guard." The rookie, who simply hadn't thought to not bring a requested item to the boss, had suffered no true penalty. "No one's going to try and use it. And if you need it, for an emergency... we can send it through."
The mare nods.
"What happened during the battle?" she asks. "You might imagine that he was reluctant to provide details."
The little alien tells her --
-- she's staring at the Nemuina. The left forehoof scrapes against the playground's foam mat.
"Prrrrincess?"
It was not the last time Ben met the equine within what she insisted on calling a 'nightscape', and perhaps he would have given up a weekend and half a summer for it to have been so. Because she would return to his dreams again and again, forever listening.
"You possess access to a form --"
Forever critical.
"-- which could have put him to sleep instantly -- and you chose to trust random fortune. Followed by repeated physical impacts, when you could not be sure whether that would work."
And no matter what the species... a bossy girl was exactly that.
