It had been two weeks since the Omnitrix attached itself to Gwen Tennyson's wrist.
Two weeks since a ten-year-old girl with straight A's and a color-coded filing system had been introduced to the concept of being a seven-foot fire alien with proportions that defied the Geneva Convention of physics.
Two weeks since she'd started calling Ben "sweetie."
Two weeks since she'd kissed him.
Things had gotten worse.
Not worse in the way that Max had feared—not worse in the "alien invasion" or "galactic warlord" or "Omnitrix catastrophic malfunction" sense. Those problems, Max could handle. Those were Plumber problems. Problems with protocols, contingency plans, and the comforting certainty that somewhere in the universe, someone had dealt with something similar and written a report about it.
No, things had gotten worse in the Gwen sense. In the deeply personal, profoundly concerning, no-manual-exists-for-this sense.
Gwen Tennyson hated herself.
Not Heatblast-herself. Not XLR8-herself. Not Four Arms-herself or Diamondhead-herself.
Herself-herself. The human one. The original one. The ten-year-old girl with orange hair and green eyes and a body that was small and cold and flat and wrong.
Wrong. That was the word she used now. Not "normal." Not "regular." Not even "boring."
Wrong.
EXHIBIT A: THE MIRROR INCIDENT
Three days after Washington, D.C. The Rust Bucket was parked at a campground in Pennsylvania. Gwen had been human for approximately four hours—the longest stretch since the museum, because she'd been fighting the timeouts harder than ever, sometimes holding a transformation for an extra ten minutes through sheer volcanic stubbornness.
She was standing in the Rust Bucket's tiny bathroom, looking at herself in the mirror.
Ben heard the sound from the bunk area. Not crying—Gwen had moved past crying about it. Something worse. A quiet, controlled, analytical assessment, delivered in a monotone that was somehow more disturbing than any amount of tears.
"Arms: two. Insufficient. Four Arms has four. Even XLR8 has two but they're BETTER arms. These arms can't reach around Ben properly. These arms can't lift anything heavier than a textbook. These arms are USELESS."
A pause.
"Chest: nonexistent. Ten-year-old human female. Nothing there. Nothing to hold Ben against. Nothing to keep him warm. No softness, no depth, no—" Her voice wavered, just slightly. "—nothing. Heatblast has a chest that scored thirteen stars. This has NOTHING."
Another pause.
"Height: four feet, six inches. Heatblast is seven feet. Four Arms is eight. Even XLR8 is six-five. I am four feet, six inches. Ben is the SAME HEIGHT as me. I can't even look DOWN at him. I can't LOOM protectively. I can't TOWER. I'm just—"
She stopped.
"I'm just a girl," she whispered. "I'm just a stupid, small, cold, wrong girl."
Ben lay in his bunk, staring at the ceiling, and felt something in his chest that wasn't comfortable at all.
EXHIBIT B: THE CLOTHING SITUATION
Gwen had stopped caring about her human clothes.
This was, for a girl who had once organized her wardrobe by season, color, and "appropriateness index," a seismic shift. She wore the same blue shirt and white capris every day, not because she liked them, but because they were the clothes that would be destroyed and reconstituted by the Omnitrix anyway, so what was the point.
"What's the point of dressing up a body I'm going to get rid of?" she'd said when Max had suggested she might want to change.
"You're not GETTING RID of your body, Gwen. You're TRANSFORMING. Temporarily. You always come back."
"Unfortunately."
That one word—unfortunately—had kept Max awake for two hours that night.
EXHIBIT C: THE FOOD THING
Gwen ate less as a human now. Not dangerously less—Max was watching too closely for that—but noticeably less. She ate enough to function. Enough to satisfy Max's increasingly worried scrutiny. But without enthusiasm. Without the normal ten-year-old's relationship with food.
"Heatblast doesn't need to eat," she'd explained, when Max had pushed a second helping of pasta toward her. "Heatblast absorbs energy from ambient heat sources. It's efficient. Clean. No mess, no waste, no—no having to sit there with a FORK like some kind of—"
She'd stopped. Looked at the fork in her hand. At her small, human fingers wrapped around it.
"—like some kind of person," she'd finished quietly, and the way she'd said person had made it sound like a diagnosis.
EXHIBIT D: THE BEN THING
The Ben thing had gotten—
Complicated.
Since the kiss (kisses, technically, because there had been two, and Ben had allowed the second one, a fact that haunted his waking hours like a persistent ghost with warm lips), the dynamic between them had shifted into uncharted territory.
When Gwen was transformed, everything was the same—the adoration, the protectiveness, the chest, the grabbing, the whole volcanic package. If anything, it was more intense. Since the kiss, Heatblast-Gwen had added a new behavior to her repertoire: she would periodically (approximately every seven minutes, Ben had timed it) lean down and press her lips to the top of his head, his forehead, his cheek, or—if she thought she could get away with it—his mouth. Each kiss was gentle, warm, precisely 78 degrees.
Ben had stopped protesting the head-kisses. He still protested the mouth-kisses. His protests were getting less convincing. He knew it. Gwen knew it. Max knew it. The Omnitrix probably knew it.
But when Gwen was human—
When Gwen was human, the wanting was worse than the having.
She would look at Ben with those green, human eyes, and the longing in them was painful. She wanted to hold him but her arms were too short. She wanted to warm him but her skin was room temperature. She wanted to kiss him but her lips were just lips—no volcanic softness, no perfect temperature calibration, no magma-pulse heartbeat transmitted through the contact.
She was a girl in love with a boy she could only properly love in a body that wasn't hers.
And it was eating her alive.
THE INTERVENTION
Max planned it for a Tuesday morning.
He'd spent three days preparing. He'd consulted his Plumber contacts—discreetly, without revealing Gwen's identity—about the psychological effects of prolonged Omnitrix use. He'd read every available paper on body dysmorphia, identity dissociation, and the documented (classified) cases of other species' interactions with transformation technology. He'd even called his ex-wife Verdona, which was an act of desperation that spoke volumes about how seriously he was taking this.
Verdona had laughed for forty-five seconds and said, "Oh, Max. She takes after me more than you know."
This had not been helpful.
Still, Max had a plan. A gentle, compassionate, carefully structured plan to help his granddaughter reconnect with her human identity and establish a healthier relationship with the Omnitrix.
He gathered the kids at the picnic table after breakfast.
"Family meeting," he announced.
Ben, who had learned to dread these words, sat down with the expression of a man reporting for jury duty. Gwen sat across from him, her left hand resting on the Omnitrix, her right hand poking at the remains of a breakfast she'd barely touched.
"Gwen," Max began, and his voice was the voice he used for important things—steady, warm, full of a grandfather's love and a Plumber's unshakeable calm. "I want to talk about how you're feeling."
"I'm feeling like the Omnitrix should recharge faster."
"About your human self, Gwen."
Silence. Her jaw tightened.
"I want to talk about what you said in the bathroom three days ago."
Gwen's head snapped up. Her eyes were sharp. "You HEARD that?"
"Ben heard it. Ben told me."
Gwen's gaze shifted to Ben. Not angry—hurt. The specific, personal hurt of someone whose private pain had been shared without permission.
"You TOLD him?" she said.
"I was worried about you," Ben said, and he meant it. Under all the confusion and the face-redness and the complicated feelings about warm lips and volcanic chests, he was worried. Genuinely, deeply worried about his cousin. "Gwen, you were standing in the bathroom calling yourself wrong. That's not—that's not okay."
"I AM wrong. This body IS wrong. It's small and weak and—"
"It's YOUR body, Gwen," Max said firmly. "It's the body you were born with. It's the body that's gotten you straight A's and won you science fairs and made you the smartest kid I know."
"The smartest kid you know is FOUR FEET SIX INCHES and has a CHEST LIKE AN IRONING BOARD."
"Gwen—"
"Heatblast is SEVEN FEET and has a chest that scored THIRTEEN STARS and can keep Ben at EXACTLY seventy-eight degrees and—"
"Gwen, LISTEN to me." Max reached across the table and took her hand. The one without the Omnitrix. Her small, human hand. "The alien forms are tools. They're incredible, powerful, useful tools. But they're not you. You—this you, the one I'm holding hands with right now—are my granddaughter. And I'm worried about you."
"Don't be. I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You're barely eating. You're not sleeping. You described your own body as 'wrong' and 'useless.' You told Ben that being human was 'unfortunate.' Those aren't the words of someone who's fine."
Gwen's jaw worked. Her eyes were bright—not with tears, with something harder. Something that looked like defiance and felt like pain.
"What do you want me to say, Grandpa? That I LOVE being this?" She gestured at herself with her free hand—a sharp, dismissive sweep that encompassed her entire human form. "That I LOVE being small and cold and POWERLESS? That I LOVE having arms that can't reach around Ben and a chest that can't—"
"I want you to say that you're worth something outside of the Omnitrix," Max said quietly. "I want you to say that Gwen Tennyson—human Gwen Tennyson—matters. Because she does. She matters to me. She matters to Ben."
"She matters MORE as Heatblast."
"No, she doesn't."
"YES, she DOES!" Gwen was on her feet, her hand pulling free from Max's grip. "As Heatblast I'm STRONG! I'm WARM! I can PROTECT Ben! I can hold him and keep him safe and—and LOVE him the way he DESERVES to be loved! As THIS—" She slapped her own chest, her flat, ten-year-old chest. "—as THIS I'm NOTHING! I can't do ANYTHING! I can't even HUG him properly!"
"You hugged me yesterday," Ben said quietly. "When you were you. In the Rust Bucket. Before bed. You hugged me and it was—"
He stopped.
"It was what?" Gwen demanded.
"...It was fine."
"FINE. It was FINE. Heatblast hugs are PERFECT. Human hugs are FINE. Do you hear the DIFFERENCE?"
"Gwen, I didn't mean—"
"FINE is what you say about WEATHER, Ben! FINE is what you say about HOMEWORK! I don't want to be FINE! I want to be PERFECT! I want to be the thing that makes you feel SAFE and WARM and—"
"You DO," Ben said, and he said it loud enough to cut through her spiral, and the rawness in his voice surprised all three of them. "You DO make me feel safe. Even when you're—even as—" He gestured at her. At her small, human, wrong body. "—as THIS. You make me feel safe as THIS, Gwen. You punched a robot. You suplexed a FROG. You threw a BEE three miles. You do that stuff because you're YOU. Not because you're Heatblast or Four Arms or—the watch doesn't make you CARE about me. You already cared. You've always cared. You were just really bad at SHOWING it."
Silence.
Gwen stared at him.
Ben's face was red. Again. Still. Forever.
"So—so stop calling yourself WRONG," he finished, mumbling now, looking at the ground. "Because you're not wrong. You're just... loud. And scary. And you keep shoving my face in things. But you're not wrong."
Another silence. Longer this time.
Gwen sat back down. Slowly. Her expression was—
Complicated. Layers of emotion, stacked on top of each other like geological strata. Pain. Gratitude. Love. Frustration. The desperate, aching, unresolvable tension between what she wanted to be and what she was.
"That was a nice speech, Ben," she said quietly.
"It wasn't a SPEECH—"
"But I'm still transforming."
"Gwen—" Max started.
"I HEAR you. Both of you. I hear you and I—" She swallowed. "I appreciate it. I do. But hearing that I'm 'not wrong' doesn't change how I FEEL. And I feel WRONG. Every second I'm human. Every second I'm small and cold and can't hear Ben's heartbeat. I feel WRONG."
She looked at the Omnitrix.
"And I know how to feel RIGHT."
Her thumb was on the faceplate.
"Gwen, we're having an INTERVENTION," Max said, and there was an edge in his voice now—the edge of a man watching his carefully planned therapeutic approach derail in real time. "The whole POINT of this conversation is to help you develop a healthier relationship with the Omni—"
Click.
"Gwen, DON'T—"
Slam.
"GWEN—"
The transformation began.
But something was different.
Gwen had slammed the dial without looking. Without spinning. Without selecting. She'd just hit it—poured every ounce of her frustration, her pain, her desperate need to be more into the device and let the Omnitrix decide.
And the Omnitrix decided.
The silhouette that locked into place on the dial was not Heatblast. Not XLR8. Not Four Arms. Not Diamondhead. Not any of the aliens Gwen had used before.
It was something new.
Something big.
The first sign that something was different was the speed.
Not the speed of the transformation—that was slow, as usual, Gwen's body refusing to rush the process regardless of which form it was taking. The speed of the growth.
Gwen rose from the picnic bench as the transformation began, her skin starting its familiar shift—but the color was wrong. Not red-orange magma, not blue scales, not crimson muscle, not green crystal. White. A pale, almost luminous white, spreading from her wrist up her arm like frost made of starlight.
And she was growing.
Not the usual seven-foot, eight-foot growth of her standard forms. Not the gradual, stop-at-some-point expansion that ended with her being merely very tall.
She was growing and not stopping.
"Uh," Ben said.
Five feet. Six feet. Seven feet—her usual stopping point for Heatblast. She kept going. Eight feet. Nine feet. The picnic table cracked as her expanding hip hit the edge. Ten feet. She was hunching, her head pressing against the Rust Bucket's awning. Eleven feet. The awning tore free.
"Uh," Ben repeated, with more emphasis.
Twelve feet. Thirteen. Fourteen. She was above the tree line now, her upper body rising into the open sky, her white skin gleaming in the morning sun. Fifteen feet. The campsite was becoming small beneath her. Twenty feet. The Rust Bucket was a toy.
"GWEN?!" Max was on his feet, backing away, his head craned upward as his granddaughter ascended like a living skyscraper.
Thirty feet. Forty. Fifty.
The transformation continued its leisurely pace, painting her body in white and red—a To'kustar, the largest sentient species in the known galaxy, beings that were born in cosmic storms and grew to the size of buildings. Her frame expanded in every direction, her shoulders broadening to the width of a house, her torso lengthening into a column of white and red that blocked out the morning sun.
And—inevitably, inescapably, in what was rapidly becoming the Omnitrix's most consistent design feature—the curves.
If Heatblast's proportions had been "architecturally ambitious" and Four Arms' had been "structurally aggressive," then To'kustar-Gwen's proportions were "urban planning."
Her hips expanded at the sixty-foot mark, and they expanded with the slow, world-altering inevitability of continental drift. Each hip extended outward from her narrowing waist like a geographical feature—not a hill, not a mountain, a plateau. A mesa of white-and-red alien tissue that cast its own shadow on the campground below. The campsite was IN her shadow. The entire campground was IN her shadow. She was reshaping the LOCAL WEATHER PATTERNS with her hip displacement.
Her thighs followed. At this scale, each thigh was the width of a multi-story building. They were columns—vast, impossible columns of dense To'kustar tissue that tapered from the incomprehensible expanse of her hips down to knees that were level with the tallest trees. When they pressed together—and they did press together, because the Omnitrix's commitment to thigh contact was apparently scale-invariant—the sound was not the grinding of tectonic plates that Heatblast produced. It was something deeper. Something that registered on seismographs. Something that nearby towns would later report as "unusual geological activity."
Her backside expanded with the same geological patience, each second adding another impossible cubic yard of To'kustar anatomy until it jutted behind her like—there was no terrestrial comparison. It was its own landmark. It could have been assigned a zip code. It was visible from LOW EARTH ORBIT.
Her chest came next, and the word "chest" was inadequate in the same way that "puddle" was inadequate for the Pacific Ocean. Two formations of To'kustar tissue, each one the size of a large building, expanded from her upper torso with the slow, majestic, gravitationally significant presence of moons forming around a planet. They were enormous. They were beyond enormous. They existed in a category of size that English hadn't developed vocabulary for because English had never needed to describe this because THIS HAD NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE.
Seventy feet. Eighty. Ninety.
Her head crested the hundred-foot mark, and the transformation was complete.
She stood.
A hundred feet of To'kustar. A hundred feet of white-and-red alien colossus, proportioned with the Omnitrix's signature insanity, her shadow covering the campground like an eclipse. Her head—crowned with a massive fin-like crest of red—was above the clouds. Well, not clouds. But it felt like she was above the clouds. She was certainly above the birds, several of which had been displaced from their flight paths and were filing complaints with the local branch of the Audubon Society.
She looked down.
Down.
The campground was a model village. The Rust Bucket was a Matchbox car. The trees were broccoli. And Ben—
Ben was approximately the size of her thumbnail.
"Oh," Gwen said, and her voice was a phenomenon. A weather event. A rolling thunder of sound that vibrated the ground and rattled every window within a mile. Cars in the campground parking lot rocked on their suspensions. A nearby lake developed actual waves. Birds that had been considering returning changed their minds permanently.
"Oh my GOD," she said, and the ground shook with each syllable.
She looked down at herself. At the landscape of herself. At the impossible, absurd, continent-scale topography of her new form, stretching out in every direction like a world unto itself.
Her hands—each one the size of a sedan—came up and pressed against her face.
"Oh my God," she repeated, quieter this time (which still rattled dishes in campgrounds three miles away). "Oh my God. Oh my God. I'm SO BIG."
One hundred feet below, Ben Tennyson stood in the shadow of his cousin and experienced a revelation.
The revelation was: there was no amount of mental preparation that could ready a person for looking up at a hundred-foot-tall version of their cousin and seeing proportions that redefined the word "proportion."
He couldn't even see all of her. His field of vision, looking straight up, encompassed approximately her shins and the lower portion of her thighs. Everything above that was—up. Way up. In a different area code of "up."
The thighs alone were—
He stopped that thought. Backed it up. Parked it. Locked it. Set it on fire. Buried the ashes.
"GWEN?" he shouted.
A hundred feet above, a head the size of a house looked down. White eyes the size of satellite dishes focused on him—and the expression in them was the same expression that appeared in every form, in every size, at every scale.
Ben.
"BEN!" Her voice was a thunderclap of joy. The ground vibrated. Several car alarms went off. "OH, BEN! I CAN SEE YOU! YOU'RE SO TINY! YOU'RE SO—OH MY GOSH, YOU'RE SO SMALL AND CUTE AND TINY!"
"I'M THE SAME SIZE I'VE ALWAYS BEEN! YOU'RE THE ONE WHO'S—YOU'RE A HUNDRED FEET TALL!"
"I KNOW!" She clapped her hands together. The sonic boom knocked Ben off his feet.
"GWEN!"
"SORRY! I forgot about the—the physics. Everything is—" She looked at her hands. Each finger was longer than Ben was tall. "—everything is SO BIG. I'm so big. I'm the biggest I've EVER been. This is the BEST FORM. This is BETTER THAN HEATBLAST."
Even from a hundred feet up, the words carried the weight of religious conversion.
"Better than HEATBLAST?" Ben yelled. "You gave Heatblast a HUNDRED OUT OF TEN!"
"This is a THOUSAND out of ten! A MILLION! I am a HUNDRED FEET TALL, Ben! I can protect you from EVERYTHING! From EVERY DIRECTION! From things in OTHER TIME ZONES! Nothing can POSSIBLY hurt you because I am LITERALLY the size of a BUILDING!"
Max had backed the Rust Bucket up approximately two hundred yards and was standing on the roof with binoculars. Even through high-powered optics, he could only see her from the waist up. The waist down was hidden behind a section of forest that her lower body was in the process of inadvertently destroying simply by existing near it.
"I'm calling this one in," Max muttered, reaching for his phone.
Gwen knelt down.
The process of kneeling, at her current scale, was an undertaking that would later be described by the U.S. Geological Survey as "a localized seismic event of unknown origin, magnitude 3.2." Her knees—each one the size of a car—sank into the earth, the ground cratering under the focused weight. Trees that had survived her initial growth were gently (relatively) pushed aside by the sweeping motion of her titanic thighs, their root systems no match for the casual displacement of several thousand tons of To'kustar.
Even kneeling, she towered over everything. Her head was at approximately fifty feet—still above the trees, still casting a shadow that could be measured in acres. But her hands were closer to the ground now. Closer to him.
She reached down.
Her hand descended from above like a benevolent UFO—a vast, pale, five-fingered platform that blocked out the sky as it approached. The displacement of air alone was enough to ruffle Ben's hair and clothes, a warm downdraft that smelled faintly of ozone and something else. Something that was uniquely Gwen, regardless of the form—a warm, clean scent that existed across every transformation, a constant in a sea of impossible variables.
Her hand settled on the ground in front of him, palm up, fingers open. A landing pad. An invitation.
"Get on," she said, and her voice was gentle—which, at her current volume, meant it was merely "very loud" instead of "car-alarm-triggering." "Please."
Ben looked at the hand. It was the size of a swimming pool. Her fingers were longer than he was tall. The lines on her palm were like shallow trenches, each one wide enough for him to lie down in.
"You want me to stand on your HAND?"
"I want you to stand on my hand so I can pick you up so I can put you—" She paused. Glanced down at her own torso. At the topography below her chin that was, at this scale, not so much a chest as a continent.
"—somewhere safe," she finished.
"SOMEWHERE SAFE LIKE WHERE, GWEN?"
"...You know where."
"SAY IT."
"...My chest."
"YOUR CHEST THAT IS THE SIZE OF A BUILDING."
"My chest that is PERFECTLY sized for keeping you safe and warm and protected from EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD because I am currently the LARGEST LIVING THING ON THIS CONTINENT and my chest is the SAFEST PLACE IN EXISTENCE."
Ben looked at the hand. He looked up—way, way, WAY up—at the chest region in question. It was so far above him that it had its own weather patterns. Small wisps of cloud were forming around the upper curvature where the temperature differential between her body heat and the ambient air was creating localized convection currents.
Her chest was literally generating clouds.
"Gwen, your CHEST has WEATHER."
"All the more reason for you to be INSIDE it! It's climate-controlled!"
"THAT'S NOT HOW CLIMATE CONTROL WORKS!"
"GET ON THE HAND, BEN."
He got on the hand.
He didn't know why. He'd stopped being able to explain his own decisions approximately three days ago, around the time he'd voluntarily allowed his volcanic cousin to kiss him on the mouth for the second time. The part of his brain responsible for self-preservation had been filing formal complaints that were being systematically ignored by the part of his brain that remembered how warm her lips were.
He stepped onto her palm. The surface was warm—even in this form, even at this impossible scale, there was warmth. Not Heatblast warmth, not the perfect 78-degree calibration, but a gentle, ambient warmth that radiated from her To'kustar skin like sunlight from very, very pale stone.
Her fingers curled around him. Not closing—framing. Creating walls on either side, turning her palm into a shallow bowl with him at the center. He was standing in a room made of fingers. Each fingertip rose above him like a pillar, twice his height.
"Hold on," she said.
"To WHAT?"
"To me."
She lifted.
The ground fell away. Fast. Not violently—her hand was steady, preternaturally steady, the kind of steady that came from a being so massive that small movements required enormous deliberate effort. But the ground was receding at an alarming rate—ten feet, twenty, thirty, forty—the campground shrinking below him like a Google Earth zoom-out. The Rust Bucket became a toy. The trees became shrubs. The lake in the distance became a puddle.
Fifty feet. Sixty. Seventy.
He was level with her stomach now, and looking up, the view was—
He stopped looking up. He looked forward instead. At the horizon. At the Pennsylvania countryside spread out before him, green and golden in the morning light, beautiful and normal and not shaped like his cousin.
"Don't look down," Gwen said helpfully.
"I wasn't looking DOWN. I was looking UP. And then I stopped looking up because—because—"
"Because of the chest?"
"BECAUSE OF THE VIEW. The LANDSCAPE view. The NORMAL view."
"Mm-hmm."
Her hand continued to rise. Eighty feet. Ninety.
And then she brought him in.
If being placed in Heatblast's chest was like being pressed into a warm, soft pillow the size of a car, then being placed in To'kustar-Gwen's chest was like being lowered into a warm, soft valley.
She tilted her hand, gently, carefully—so carefully that he barely felt the angle change—and slid him forward, off her palm, and into the space between the two continent-sized formations that constituted her chest at this scale.
He didn't hit a surface. He sank into one.
The tissue of a To'kustar was unlike anything he'd experienced in her other forms. Not the impossible volcanic softness of Heatblast. Not the firm density of Four Arms. Not the smooth scales of XLR8. It was something unique—yielding and warm and vast, like sinking into a heated waterbed the size of a house. The surface gave way around him, conforming to his shape, cradling every inch of his body in gentle, encompassing pressure.
He sank until he was fully immersed. Surrounded on all sides by warm, white To'kustar tissue that pulsed with a slow, deep heartbeat—not the bu-bum, bu-bum of Heatblast, but something bigger. Something that felt less like a heart and more like the tide. A cosmic rhythm, slow and vast and ancient, the heartbeat of a being born in the storms between stars.
BUUUUUM... BUUUUUM... BUUUUUM...
Each beat was a full-body experience. Not a sound—a sensation. A slow, deep pressure wave that rolled through the tissue surrounding him, through his bones, through his cells. It was like being inside a drum the size of a building. It was like being cradled in the center of a very slow, very warm earthquake.
It was—
Ben's brain ran through its usual checklist.
Is this weird? Yes.
Is this inappropriate? Probably.
Is this happening inside your giant alien cousin's chest? Absolutely.
Is this the most comfortable you've ever been in your entire life?
...
Is this the most comfortable you've ever been in your entire life?
...He didn't answer that one.
From the outside, the image was—well, it was going to be on the news. There was no avoiding it. A hundred-foot-tall white-and-red alien colossus, proportioned like something from a mythology that hadn't been invented yet, standing in a Pennsylvania campground, both hands pressed gently against her own chest, cradling something—someone—invisible in the space between.
Her expression was seraphic. Peaceful. Complete. The face of a hundred-foot woman who had found exactly what she was looking for and was holding it against her heart.
"There," she rumbled, and the word rolled across the countryside like distant thunder. "There. That's right. That's perfect."
Inside the chest: "Mmph."
"Are you comfortable?"
Inside the chest: "Mmmmph."
"I can adjust the pressure. Or the temperature. Or the angle. Tell me what you need, Ben. I'll give you anything. I'll give you EVERYTHING."
Inside the chest: "...mmph."
"That sounds like 'this is perfect and I love you and I never want to leave.'"
Inside the chest: "THAT IS NOT WHAT MMPH MEANS."
"Shh. Let the heartbeat hold you."
BUUUUUM... BUUUUUM... BUUUUUM...
Inside the chest, Ben felt the tide-pulse roll through him again, and something in his body—something deep and involuntary and completely beyond his control—relaxed.
Not just relaxed. Surrendered. His muscles went loose. His breathing slowed. His heartbeat—his small, human, stubborn heartbeat—began, without his permission, to synchronize with the vast cosmic rhythm surrounding him.
BUUUUUM... bu-bum... BUUUUUM... bu-bum...
His heart beat once for every beat of hers, even though hers was the heartbeat of a creature the size of a building, even though each of her heartbeats lasted three full seconds, even though matching it meant slowing his own heart to a rate that was technically inadvisable.
He didn't care.
He was warm. He was held. He was surrounded on all sides by the physical manifestation of someone who would destroy anything in the universe that tried to hurt him.
He was home.
"Gwen," he said, and his voice was very small, and very quiet, and very much not protesting.
"Yes, Ben?"
"...This one's the best one."
From somewhere above—from the vast, luminous, weather-system-generating surface of a chest that could be seen from space—came a sound.
A giggle.
A hundred-foot giggle.
A giggle that was picked up by weather satellites and that two separate meteorological stations would later classify as "anomalous atmospheric vibration."
"I know," she said. "I know, sweetie."
He didn't correct her.
Max stood on the roof of the Rust Bucket, binoculars raised, watching his hundred-foot granddaughter cradle his other grandchild in her chest and sway gently—each sway rocking the entire campground like a boat on gentle waves.
He lowered the binoculars.
He sat down on the roof.
He took off his hat.
He looked at his hat.
He put his hat back on.
He pulled out his phone.
He stared at it.
He put it away.
He pulled it back out.
"Phil," he said, when the line connected. "It's Max."
"Max, I already told you, the golf condos in Florida start at—"
"She's a hundred feet tall, Phil."
Silence.
"My granddaughter is a hundred feet tall and she's holding my grandson in her chest and he's not fighting it and I planned an intervention today and this is how it went."
Longer silence.
"I think the intervention made it worse, Phil."
"...How could it possibly be worse?"
"She was seventy feet shorter when I started the intervention."
"...Max—"
"I just want to know one thing, Phil. One thing."
"What?"
"At what point in my Plumber career did I make the specific decision that led to this exact moment? Because I want to go back in time and unmake it."
"Max, you can't—"
"I'm AWARE I can't, Phil. I'm EXPRESSING A SENTIMENT."
"...The condos have a pool."
"I'll take two."
The Omnitrix beeped forty-five minutes later.
The timeout fight at To'kustar scale was—
It was visible from space.
The hundred-foot woman blazed with light—her entire body flashing between white and red and blinding gold as she fought the detransformation with every molecule of her colossal form. The energy output alone was enough to trigger alerts at three separate military installations. The seismic activity from her stamping her feet in frustration registered as a 4.1 on the Richter scale.
"NO! NOT NOW! HE SAID THIS ONE IS THE BEST! HE SAID IT! HE ADMITTED IT! I NEED MORE TIME! I NEED—"
BEEBEEP. BEEBEEP.
"HE'S IN MY CHEST AND HE'S HAPPY AND HIS HEART IS BEATING WITH MINE AND THIS IS THE MOST PERFECT MOMENT IN THE HISTORY OF ALL MOMENTS AND YOU WANT TO—"
BEEBEEP. BEEBEEP. BEEBEEP.
"I'LL—I'LL SMASH YOU! I'LL—YOU CAN'T TIME OUT A HUNDRED-FOOT—I'M TOO BIG TO TIME OUT! THE MATH DOESN'T WORK! YOU CAN'T COMPRESS A HUNDRED FEET OF PERFECTION INTO—"
Flash.
The Omnitrix, it turned out, absolutely could.
One frame: hundred-foot alien colossus.
Next frame: ten-year-old girl.
Gwen and Ben were suddenly on the ground—in the crater that her kneeling had created earlier, a twenty-foot depression in the earth. Gwen was sitting in the dirt, human-sized, human-shaped, human-everything. Ben was in her lap—her small, human, pathetically inadequate lap—blinking in the sudden daylight, his body still vibrating with the ghost of a cosmic heartbeat.
BUUUUUM... buuuum... buum... bum... bu-bum... bu-bum...
His heart rate returned to normal. The warmth faded. The vast, encompassing, building-sized embrace was gone, replaced by the thin, short, cold arms of a ten-year-old girl.
Gwen looked down at herself.
At her body.
The body that was wrong.
"...I hate this," she whispered.
But Ben was still in her lap. He hadn't moved. Hadn't pulled away. Was sitting there, in her small, human, inadequate lap, leaning against her small, human, inadequate chest, his eyes half-closed.
"Stay," he mumbled. "Just... stay for a minute."
Gwen blinked.
"...Okay," she said.
She stayed.
She held him with her two arms—just two, always just two, never enough. She held him against her flat, cold, wrong chest. She held him and she was four feet six inches and she was not warm and she was not big and she was not perfect.
But she was here.
And he was staying.
And maybe—
—maybe—
—that was enough.
(It wasn't. She was absolutely going to transform again the second the Omnitrix recharged. But for right now, sitting in a crater, holding her cousin, being small and wrong and here—
—it was almost enough.)
TO BE CONTINUED...