The Rust Bucket pulled into the lakeside campground at approximately 2 PM on a Thursday afternoon that, in Max Tennyson's increasingly desperate estimation, had a roughly 15% chance of remaining uneventful.
He'd been wrong about these odds before. He'd been wrong about these odds every single time. But hope was a thing with feathers, and Max Tennyson was a man who had arm-wrestled a Tetramand, so he could certainly wrestle with optimism.
The campground was nice. Genuinely nice. Situated on the shore of a large, deep lake surrounded by pine forests and rocky bluffs, it had the kind of rustic charm that travel magazines put on their covers—wooden docks, rowboats, a small bait-and-tackle shop run by a weathered old man who looked like he'd been carved from the same wood as the dock.
"This is beautiful," Max said, with the forced enthusiasm of a man trying to manifest normalcy through sheer willpower. "Lake swimming, fishing, hiking trails—"
"Does the lake have a good shoreline for Heatblast?" Gwen asked from the dinette table, not looking up from her notebook.
"—maybe some kayaking—"
"Because Heatblast near water is sub-optimal but I've been developing a steam-based propulsion theory that could allow—"
"—and the fishing is supposed to be excellent—"
"Way Big would just stand in the lake. The lake is only eighty feet deep at its center. I'd be twenty feet taller than the lake. I could just stand in it. Ben could sit on my shoulder. Or in my—"
"GWEN."
She looked up. Max was gripping the steering wheel with the intensity of a man who was either parallel parking or having a stroke.
"We are going to have a NORMAL day," he said. "A day with NO transformations. No chest ratings. No—" He gestured vaguely at everything Gwen had become as a concept. "No anything. Just a family. At a lake. Being NORMAL."
"Define 'normal.'"
"No aliens."
"For how long?"
"For ONE DAY, Gwen. Twenty-four hours. You can survive twenty-four hours as a human being."
Gwen's expression suggested that this was, in fact, debatable.
"...Fine," she said, in the tone of a prisoner accepting a plea deal she intended to violate. "One day. No transformations."
"Thank you."
"But I'm still writing in my notebook."
"The notebook is—" Max stopped himself. Chose his battles. The notebook was a symptom, not the disease, and at this point taking it away would be like confiscating a security blanket from a child who also happened to be a potential kaiju.
"The notebook is fine," he sighed.
THE NOTEBOOK
While Ben explored the lakeshore—skipping rocks, poking at things with sticks, generally being a ten-year-old boy in the presence of water and the absence of adult attention—Gwen sat at the campsite's picnic table and wrote.
She'd been writing since they'd left Pennsylvania. The To'kustar transformation—Way Big, she'd named it, because even her obsession had organizational standards—had opened something in her. A new horizon. A new category. She'd thought Heatblast was the pinnacle. She'd been wrong.
She'd been so beautifully, wonderfully, catastrophically wrong.
The notebook was open to a fresh page. The heading, written in careful block letters and underlined three times, read:
ALIEN #5: WAY BIG (To'kustar)
Overall Rating: 1,000,000/10
"One million out of ten," Max read over her shoulder, because he was a grandfather and couldn't help himself. "Gwen, the scale was out of ten."
"The scale was INSUFFICIENT."
"You gave Heatblast a hundred out of ten. You said that was the maximum."
"I was NAIVE, Grandpa. I was a FOOL. I was living in a CAVE and looking at SHADOWS and thinking they were REAL. And then I became Way Big and I saw the SUN."
"That's... Plato's Cave. You're quoting Plato."
"Plato never had a chest that generated its own WEATHER SYSTEMS."
Max walked away. He walked to the lakeshore. He stood at the edge of the water and looked at the horizon and contemplated the vastness of the universe and his own smallness within it.
Then he walked back, because leaving Gwen unsupervised with the notebook was arguably more dangerous than any alien threat.
She was still writing.
Overall Rating: 1,000,000/10 ⭐ × ∞
(I have abandoned the star system. Stars are finite. My feelings about Way Big are INFINITE. I am using the infinity symbol because mathematics has not yet developed notation adequate to express what I experienced yesterday.)
Power: I am—I was—one hundred feet tall. ONE HUNDRED FEET. I could see the CURVATURE OF THE EARTH. I could have STEPPED on the giant frog from the National Mall and not NOTICED. Every other form I have—Heatblast, Four Arms, Diamondhead, XLR8—they're TOYS compared to this. They're ACTION FIGURES. Way Big is the REAL THING.
I didn't even get to test my powers properly. I was too busy holding Ben. Which is the correct priority. But I FELT power. Cosmic power. The kind of power that comes from being born in a STORM BETWEEN STARS. I could have punched the MOON.
I want to punch the moon.
Not for any reason. Just to see if I can.
∞/10.
Protection Capability: ABSOLUTE. TOTAL. COMPLETE. UNIVERSAL. OMNIDIRECTIONAL.
At one hundred feet tall, the concept of "threat to Ben" becomes THEORETICAL. What is going to threaten him? A building? I'm BIGGER than buildings. An army? I could STEP on an army. A NUCLEAR WEAPON? I would simply STAND OVER HIM and ABSORB IT because To'kustar tissue is resistant to virtually ALL forms of conventional and unconventional damage.
Nothing can hurt Ben when I am Way Big. NOTHING. Not robots, not frogs, not mad scientists, not GRAVITY. I am the safest place in the universe made manifest in physical form.
∞/10.
Warmth: Good but not Heatblast. To'kustar body temperature runs approximately 15 degrees above human baseline, creating a warm but not volcanic holding environment. Inside my chest, Ben reported (through a series of "mmphs" that I have catalogued and decoded) that the temperature was "comfortable."
"Comfortable" is not "perfect." Heatblast is "perfect." But Way Big's warmth is distributed across such an enormous surface area that it creates an IMMERSIVE thermal experience—like being inside a warm building rather than being held against a warm surface. Ben was SURROUNDED by warmth. ENVELOPED. He couldn't have been cold if he TRIED.
9/10. One point deducted because it's not Heatblast and honesty demands acknowledgment of this fact.
Chest:
I need a moment.
Okay.
Okay. I'm ready.
THE CHEST.
Where do I even BEGIN.
Each individual formation was approximately THIRTY FEET across. THIRTY. FEET. That's the length of a SCHOOL BUS. I had two school buses on my chest and they were SOFT and WARM and BEN WAS INSIDE THEM.
Not "pressed against." Not "resting on." INSIDE. He sank INTO my chest like—like a coin dropping into a very warm, very soft, very BIG purse. He DISAPPEARED. His entire body was ABSORBED by the sheer volume of To'kustar tissue and he was SURROUNDED and HELD and CRADLED on ALL SIDES.
I could feel him in there. Even at that scale—even with my body being the size of a BUILDING—I could feel him. His heartbeat. His breathing. Every tiny movement of his tiny perfect body inside my chest. It was like having a warm little star nestled against my heart.
The heartbeat synchronization was the BEST PART. My To'kustar heart beats once every three seconds—a deep, cosmic pulse that I could feel in my BONES. And Ben's heart—his tiny, fast, beautiful human heart—SLOWED DOWN to match mine. His body CHOSE to sync with mine. Without being asked. Without being forced. His heart heard my heart and said "yes."
I am going to cry just writing this.
He said "this one's the best one."
HE SAID IT.
HE SAID THIS ONE IS THE BEST ONE.
I will carry those words with me through every form, every transformation, every timeline, every UNIVERSE. He said this one is the best one. He said it while he was inside my chest. He said it while our hearts were beating together.
Rating: ∞ × ∞ × ∞
The scale is broken. I broke it. I broke mathematics. Way Big's chest broke MATHEMATICS.
I regret nothing.
Max read the entry over her shoulder.
He counted the infinity symbols.
He sat down.
He put his head in his hands.
"Gwen."
"Mm?"
"You wrote 'infinity times infinity times infinity.'"
"Yes."
"For a chest rating."
"It deserved it."
"You said you broke mathematics."
"I did. Mathematics was not prepared for Way Big's chest. Neither was I. We were both overwhelmed. Mathematics and I are in the same support group now."
"Gwen, this is—" He gestured at the notebook. At the pages and pages and pages of increasingly unhinged analysis, the margins filled with diagrams and temperature calculations and what appeared to be architectural blueprints for "optimal Ben-immersion postures." "This is not healthy."
"It's THOROUGH."
"It's an OBSESSION."
"It's a PASSION. There's a difference. Marie Curie was passionate about radium. Nobody called HER obsessed."
"Marie Curie DIED from her passion, Gwen."
"And she won TWO Nobel Prizes. Seems like a fair trade."
Max opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Realized that debating the cost-benefit analysis of scientific obsession with a ten-year-old who rated alien bodies on a system that had transcended numerical notation was not a winnable argument.
He went to make coffee.
THE LAKE
Ben, blissfully unaware of the literary atrocities being committed in his name, had found something interesting.
The lake was big—several miles across, deep blue, surrounded by forest and rocky bluffs. It was the kind of lake that appeared on postcards and in camping brochures, the kind that promised excellent fishing and peaceful mornings and absolutely no supernatural incidents whatsoever.
The thing Ben had found was on the shore, half-buried in mud and rocks. At first he thought it was a log—a big, weird, barnacle-encrusted log that had washed up during a storm. But logs didn't have scales. And logs didn't have bite marks on them—massive, crescent-shaped indentations that suggested something with a very large mouth had been chewing on it.
"Grandpa!" Ben called. "Come look at this!"
Max came. Looked. His expression did something complicated.
"That's a... that's interesting," he said, in the careful tone he used when something was considerably more than "interesting."
"Is it a bone?"
"It might be."
"From what?"
"...Something big."
"How big?"
Max looked at the lake. The deep, dark, very large lake.
"Let's not worry about it," he said, which was Grandpa Max for "I know exactly what this is and I'm going to worry about it intensely while pretending not to."
CAPTAIN SHAW
They met Captain Shaw at the bait-and-tackle shop that afternoon.
Shaw was—there was no polite way to put it—a lot. He was a big man, barrel-chested, with a face like a catcher's mitt that had been left out in the rain for several decades. He wore a captain's hat that had seen better wars, and his eyes had the permanent squint of someone who'd spent too long staring at water and not long enough staring at anything else.
He was also loudly, aggressively, and persistently wrong about everything.
"Ain't no monster in this lake!" he bellowed, to no one in particular, while slamming a fist on the bait shop counter. The bait shop owner—the weathered old man who looked like carved wood—didn't flinch. He'd clearly heard this speech before. "People come here with their cameras and their stories and their nonsense, but I've been on this lake for THIRTY YEARS and I ain't seen NOTHING!"
"Sir, we're just buying fishing supplies," Max said mildly.
"That's what they ALL say! And then they're out there with their sonar and their underwater cameras, trying to find some kind of—some kind of CREATURE, when what they SHOULD be doing is FISHING, because this lake has the BEST bass fishing in the tri-state area and NOBODY appreciates it because they're too busy looking for MONSTERS!"
"We appreciate bass fishing," Max assured him.
"The monster's FAKE!" Shaw continued, because he was a man who, once started, required no further input to maintain conversational momentum. "Made up! A HOAX! Probably some kids with a rubber suit! I've caught everything in this lake and the biggest thing I ever pulled up was a thirty-seven-pound catfish, and THAT'S the real monster if you ask me!"
Ben, who had been examining a display of fishing lures, looked up. "What kind of monster do people say it is?"
"A KRAKEN!" Shaw spat the word like it tasted bad. "Can you believe it? A KRAKEN! In a FRESHWATER LAKE! Krakens are SALTWATER, everyone knows that! IF they existed! Which they DON'T!"
"Technically, the term 'kraken' has been applied to various cryptids across—" Gwen started, from the doorway of the bait shop, where she'd been standing with her notebook and her Omnitrix and her permanent expression of someone waiting for a bus that would take her away from humanity.
Shaw turned to her. "And what would YOU know about it, little girl?"
Something flickered in Gwen's eyes. Not the Omnitrix. Not the alien-personality shift. Something older. Something Gwen.
Nobody called Gwen Tennyson "little girl" and walked away without emotional bruising.
"I know that cryptozoological classification systems are poorly standardized," she said coolly, "that eyewitness accounts of large aquatic creatures in inland bodies of water are statistically more common than debunkers like to admit, and that a man who's spent thirty years on a lake loudly insisting there's no monster in it is either genuinely ignorant or actively hiding something."
Shaw's face went through several colors, none of them flattering.
"Now listen here—"
"I'm also ten years old, a straight-A student, and currently in possession of the most powerful piece of technology in five galaxies, so I'd suggest adjusting your tone."
She said this last part quietly, almost casually, but her thumb was on the Omnitrix faceplate, and the look in her eyes was the look of someone who had options.
Max intervened before the situation could escalate from "tense" to "international incident."
"We'll take four fishing lures and some line, please," he said firmly, positioning himself between Gwen and Shaw. "And maybe a lake map, if you have one."
They left the bait shop. Shaw glared after them. Gwen glared back, with interest.
THE DISCOVERY
The kraken, as it turned out, was very real.
Ben found it—because of course Ben found it. Ben had a gift for finding things that were dangerous, impossible, and/or likely to result in Gwen transforming and shoving his face into various alien anatomical features.
He'd been fishing off the dock—actually fishing, with a real rod and reel, because Max had insisted on Normal Activities and fishing was Normal—when something took his line. Not a fish-something. A big something. A something that pulled his rod so hard that he nearly went into the water, and when he braced himself and looked over the edge of the dock, he saw—
Eyes.
Big eyes. Bigger than his head. Luminous green, glowing faintly in the dark water, attached to a shape that was vast and dark and moving.
The kraken surfaced.
Not all of it—just the head, rising from the lake like a submarine breaching. It was massive—the head alone was the size of the Rust Bucket, elongated and serpentine, covered in dark green-black scales that glistened with lake water. Its eyes—those enormous, luminous eyes—fixed on Ben with an expression that was not aggressive.
It was scared.
The creature made a sound—a low, keening wail that vibrated through the dock and into Ben's bones. Not a threatening sound. A pleading sound. The sound of something in pain, something frightened, something asking for help.
"Hey," Ben said softly, because he was Ben, and his first instinct upon encountering a lake monster was apparently to talk to it. "Hey, it's okay. I'm not going to hurt you."
The kraken's massive eye blinked. It made the sound again—that low, sad, vibrating keen.
"What's wrong?" Ben asked. "Are you hurt? Are—"
"THERE IT IS!"
The roar came from behind him. Ben spun around. Captain Shaw was standing on the shore, and he was not alone. He had a boat—a big, reinforced fishing boat with modifications that were definitely not standard recreational equipment. Harpoon launchers. Nets. Something that looked disturbingly like a depth charge.
"I KNEW it!" Shaw bellowed. "Thirty years I've been hunting this thing! Thirty years of everyone calling me CRAZY! But THERE IT IS!"
"Wait—you said there was NO monster!" Ben shouted.
"I lied! I've been TRACKING it! Studying it! And now I'm going to CATCH it and PROVE to the world that Captain Jedidiah Shaw was RIGHT!"
He was already in the boat, gunning the engine, heading for the dock. The kraken—the scared, pleading, very much not aggressive kraken—let out another wail and began to submerge, its massive body rolling beneath the surface.
"No, wait—" Ben reached out, as if he could stop a creature the size of a building from diving. "It's not hurting anyone! It's SCARED!"
"SCARED?" Shaw laughed. "It's a MONSTER, boy! Monsters don't get SCARED! Now get out of the way before—"
"I won't! It needs HELP, not—"
Shaw's boat was closing fast. The harpoon launcher on the bow was swiveling toward the water. Toward the kraken. Toward the spot where Ben was standing on the dock, directly between the hunter and his prey.
"I SAID MOVE, BOY!"
Shaw reached out and shoved Ben.
Hard.
Ben stumbled. His foot caught the edge of the dock. For the second time in a week, he tripped—his arms pinwheeling, his balance gone, the lake rushing up to meet him—
He hit the water.
Cold. Dark. The lake swallowed him, and for a disorienting moment there was nothing but murky green-black water and the pressure of depth and the distant, vibrating wail of the kraken somewhere below.
He surfaced, gasping. The dock was above him. Shaw's boat was roaring past.
And on the shore, approximately two hundred yards away, Gwen Tennyson had just watched a man push her cousin into a lake.
THE MOMENT EVERYTHING CHANGED
There are moments in every story where things pivot. Where the narrative, which has been traveling in one direction, encounters a force so overwhelming that it changes course entirely—not gradually, not gently, but with the sudden, violent immediacy of a train hitting a wall.
This was that moment.
Gwen had been sitting at the picnic table. Writing in her notebook. Rating Way Big. Being, by her current standards, restrained. She'd promised Max: no transformations. One day. Twenty-four hours. She could do this. She was Gwen Tennyson. She had discipline. She had—
She saw Shaw push Ben.
She saw Ben hit the water.
She saw Ben go under.
The notebook fell from her hands.
The pen fell from her fingers.
The carefully maintained fiction that she was capable of being a normal human girl on a normal day at a normal lake fell from her soul and shattered on the ground like glass.
Something inside Gwen Tennyson—something that had been building for two weeks, something that the Omnitrix had amplified but not created, something that was equal parts love and fury and the absolute, diamond-hard, non-negotiable certainty that nothing on this earth was allowed to harm Benjamin Kirby Tennyson—
—went nuclear.
Max saw it happen from inside the Rust Bucket. He was at the window, coffee in hand, and he saw the exact moment Gwen's expression changed.
It didn't go from calm to angry.
It went from human to something else entirely.
Her eyes didn't change color—she was still human, still untransformed—but the intent behind them shifted so completely and so suddenly that Max, a thirty-year veteran of intergalactic peacekeeping who had stared down warlords and war machines without flinching, felt a chill run down his spine.
He'd seen that look before. Once. On a mission to the Null Void, a Plumber had threatened the child of a Tetramand warrior.
That Plumber had never been found.
"GWEN, WAIT—"
She didn't wait.
Her hand slammed down on the Omnitrix with a force that should have cracked the faceplate. The dial didn't pop up gently—it LAUNCHED upward, as if the device itself was responding to the urgency, to the fury, feeding off her emotional state and matching it.
She didn't spin the dial. She didn't select a form. She didn't think.
She just slammed.
The Omnitrix chose for her.
It did not choose Heatblast.
The transformation was instantaneous.
No slow build. No luxurious savoring. No gradual expansion of curves and warmth. The Omnitrix read Gwen's emotional state—THREAT TO BEN, MAXIMUM RESPONSE, NOW—and delivered accordingly.
One frame: Gwen Tennyson, ten years old, four feet six inches, approximately ninety pounds, murderous.
Next frame: something else.
The form the Omnitrix selected was—
Wet.
Blue-green. Sleek. Aquatic. A being built for water the way a torpedo was built for water—streamlined, powerful, covered in scales that gleamed like wet jade. A Piscciss Volann. A deep-sea predator from a world that was entirely ocean. A creature of jaws and claws and speed and the absolute certainty that everything in the water was either a friend or food.
And, because the Omnitrix was the Omnitrix and Gwen was Gwen—
Thick.
Ripjaws-Gwen stood on the lakeshore and she was—different. Different from the other forms. Not worse, not better, just different in a way that registered immediately and viscerally. Where Heatblast was warmth and softness and geological excess, Ripjaws was sleek and dense. An aquatic predator's body, every curve hydrodynamic, every surface designed to cut through water—but the curves themselves were absurd.
Her hips were wide—wide in the way that a submarine was wide, broad and powerful, built to displace water rather than air. Her thighs were thick with the dense, compressed muscle of a deep-sea swimmer—not the soft, yielding thickness of Heatblast or the coiled power of XLR8, but something harder, more functional, each one a propulsion system wrapped in blue-green scales. Her tail—she had a tail, a massive, powerful, fish-like tail that replaced her legs below the knee—was thick and strong and ended in a fin that could propel her through water at terrifying speeds.
Her chest was—present. Unavoidably. The Omnitrix's commitment to excessive proportions remained unshaken by the demands of aquatic aerodynamics. Two formations of scaled, blue-green tissue, smaller than Heatblast's (everything was smaller than Heatblast's) but still dramatically larger than any Piscciss Volann had any biological reason to possess.
But Gwen didn't notice any of this.
Gwen noticed the jaws.
Her mouth was—impressive. Rows of razor-sharp teeth, each one the length of a finger, designed for catching, holding, and not letting go. When she opened her mouth, it opened wide—wider than a human mouth, wider than should have been possible, a maw of serrated destruction that could bite through steel.
She opened her mouth.
She looked at the lake.
She looked at Captain Shaw's boat, which was heading toward the spot where Ben had gone under.
She dove.
What happened next was described by three eyewitnesses, a dock security camera, and one very traumatized fisherman in a rowboat.
Ripjaws-Gwen hit the water like a torpedo made of fury. The surface exploded outward in a ring of displaced water that rocked Shaw's boat and capsized the fisherman's rowboat (the fisherman would later describe the experience as "like being in a washing machine operated by God").
She was FAST in water. Not XLR8 fast—not blur-speed, not physics-breaking. But fast in the way that a shark was fast. The way a predator was fast. Purposeful, powerful, inexorable. Her tail drove her through the water in powerful strokes, her body undulating with a swimmer's grace, her scales cutting through the lake like a knife through dark silk.
She found Ben in four seconds.
He was treading water near the dock, coughing, disoriented, but alive and uninjured. The lake water was cold and dark around him and his legs were kicking at depths he couldn't see.
A hand closed around his wrist.
Blue-green. Scaled. Clawed.
He looked down. Ripjaws-Gwen looked up. Her luminous yellow eyes—predator's eyes, hunter's eyes, Gwen's eyes—met his through the murky water.
She pulled him close. Not against her chest—there wasn't time, and the water was cold, and there was a man on a boat who had pushed him in and that man was currently approximately sixty seconds away from experiencing the worst moment of his entire life.
She surfaced, holding Ben above the water with one arm, his body cradled against her side. He gasped, coughed, blinked lake water from his eyes.
"GW—cough—GWEN?!"
"I've got you," she said, and her Ripjaws voice was—unsettling. Wet and deep and gurgling, like someone speaking from inside a cave behind a waterfall. Not warm like Heatblast. Not fast like XLR8. Cold. Purposeful. The voice of something that lived in dark water and was very, very good at it.
"Are you hurt?" she asked.
"No—no, I'm fine, I just—he PUSHED me—"
"I know."
Two words. Flat. Calm. The calmest Gwen had ever sounded in any form.
This was not a good sign.
"Gwen, I'm FINE, I just—"
"I know you're fine." She was swimming toward the dock, carrying him effortlessly, her tail driving them through the water with smooth, powerful strokes. "I can see that you're fine. I can HEAR that you're fine—your heartbeat is elevated but within normal parameters for someone who was just PUSHED INTO A LAKE by a GROWN MAN."
She lifted him onto the dock. Gently. Carefully. Set him on the wood like he was made of porcelain. Checked his eyes. Checked his breathing. Pressed one clawed, scaled hand against his chest and felt his heartbeat.
Bu-bum bu-bum bu-bum bu-bum.
Fast. Scared. But steady.
"Stay here," she said.
"Gwen, what are you—"
"STAY. HERE."
She slipped back into the water. Silent. Smooth. Not a ripple.
Ben sat on the dock, dripping wet, and felt the same feeling he'd felt in the Dinosaur Hall when Gwen had looked at the frog with the face of a mother grizzly bear.
Except this time, there was no frog.
There was Captain Shaw.
CAPTAIN SHAW'S VERY BAD DAY
Shaw was approximately two hundred yards from the dock, in his reinforced fishing boat, scanning the water for the kraken. His harpoon launcher was loaded. His nets were deployed. He was a man on a mission—a thirty-year mission, a life's-work mission, a mission that had consumed his career and his marriage and his relationship with his children and basically everything except his boat and his hat.
He did not see the fin.
The fin was subtle. Just a dark, blue-green ridge cutting through the water, moving fast, leaving barely a wake. It circled his boat once. Twice. Three times. Each circle tighter than the last.
Shaw noticed on the fourth pass.
"What the—"
The boat lurched.
Something hit it from below. Not hard—not enough to capsize, not enough to damage. Just enough to lift it. The entire vessel rose three inches out of the water and settled back down with a slap that sent Shaw stumbling into the gunwale.
"WHAT IN THE—"
He grabbed the harpoon launcher. Swung it toward the water. His eyes scanned the surface, looking for—
A face rose from the lake beside his boat.
Not the kraken's face.
Gwen's face.
Ripjaws-Gwen's face, specifically—blue-green, scaled, dripping with lake water, yellow eyes luminous in the afternoon light. Her mouth was closed. For now.
"You pushed him," she said.
Her voice was a gurgling, wet monotone. No warmth. No fire. No crackling, no rumbling. Just the cold, flat statement of a predator identifying a fact.
Shaw stared. His mouth worked. No sound came out.
"You pushed Ben into the water," she continued, treading water beside his boat, her massive tail keeping her perfectly stationary with lazy, powerful strokes. "He could have drowned. He could have been hurt. He could have—"
She stopped. Her jaw tightened. Her lips pulled back—not all the way, not a full display, just enough to reveal the tips of her teeth. The front row. The razor-sharp, finger-length, designed-for-catching-and-not-letting-go front row.
"—he could have died," she finished.
"I—I didn't—he was in the WAY—" Shaw stammered, backing up until he hit the far side of his boat. "It was just a PUSH—he's FINE—"
"He IS fine. He's fine because I was here. He's fine because I will ALWAYS be here. He's fine because there is NOTHING in this lake, on this shore, in this WORLD that can hurt him while I EXIST."
She rose higher out of the water. Her upper body emerged—the scaled, blue-green torso, the Omnitrix-standard proportions, the powerful shoulders and clawed hands. Water cascaded off her in sheets.
"But YOU didn't know that," she said. "YOU pushed a ten-year-old boy into a lake. YOU didn't check if he could swim. YOU didn't care if he was hurt. YOU treated him like an OBSTACLE."
She placed one clawed hand on the side of his boat. The wood groaned. Her claws—long, curved, sharp enough to gut a tuna in a single swipe—sank into the hull like it was cardboard.
"Ben is not an obstacle," she said quietly. "Ben is the most important thing in the universe. Ben is the reason I breathe. Ben is the reason I EXIST. And you PUSHED him."
"LOOK, I'm sorry—I didn't mean—"
"I'm going to do something now," Gwen said, and her voice was so calm, so flat, so utterly devoid of the warm affection and bubbly enthusiasm that characterized her other forms that it was genuinely, bone-deeply frightening. "And you're going to let me. Because the alternative is that I show you what these teeth are for."
She opened her mouth.
All the way.
Shaw saw teeth. Rows and rows and ROWS of teeth, receding into a maw that could have swallowed his head, each tooth gleaming white and sharp and designed for this specific moment in time.
Shaw screamed.
She didn't bite him.
She wanted to. Every molecule of her Piscciss Volann body wanted to. The predator instincts of the species were singing—threat, threat, threat—and the Gwen-obsession that overlaid them was harmonizing—hurt Ben, HURT BEN, PUNISH—and the combination was a symphony of violence that she was conducting with white-knuckled restraint.
She didn't bite him.
She capsized his boat.
One hand under the hull. One push. The reinforced fishing boat—Shaw's pride, his thirty-year companion, his mobile command center in the war against the kraken—flipped like a coin. Shaw, his harpoons, his nets, his depth charges, his maps, his charts, his thirty years of obsessive notes—all of it went into the lake in a cascade of splashing and swearing and the distinctive sound of a life's work being destroyed by a fish-alien with relationship issues.
Shaw surfaced, sputtering, clinging to the overturned hull.
Gwen circled him once. Slowly.
"If you EVER," she said, and her yellow eyes were fixed on his with the unblinking focus of a great white shark deciding if something was food, "touch Ben again. If you EVER push him. If you EVER raise your voice at him. If you EVER so much as LOOK at him in a way that makes him uncomfortable—"
She dove.
Down. Deep. Into the dark water where the light didn't reach and the lake bottom was cold mud and ancient stone.
She came back up.
She was holding a boulder. A big boulder. Probably three hundred pounds. She was holding it one-handed, treading water with the other hand and her tail, and she held it up for Shaw to see.
She bit it.
Her jaws closed on the boulder like it was an apple, and the stone cracked—split, shattered, disintegrated into gravel and dust that rained down on Shaw's upturned face like the world's most threatening snow globe.
She spat out rock fragments. Looked at Shaw. Smiled.
The smile was all teeth.
"Do we understand each other?" she asked.
Shaw, treading water in the wreckage of his life's work, surrounded by floating harpoons and soggy thirty-year-old notes, looked at the teeth. Looked at the eyes. Looked at the remains of the boulder.
"...Yes ma'am," he whispered.
"Good." She turned. Dove. Was gone.
Shaw floated in silence.
A fish bumped against his leg. He screamed so hard he inhaled water.
THE AFTERMATH
Gwen climbed onto the dock where Ben was sitting, wrapped in a towel that Max had brought. She pulled herself out of the water with her upper body strength—considerable, even in this form—and sat on the edge, her tail still dangling in the lake.
She was breathing hard. The predator-fury was fading, leaving behind something else—something shaky and raw and very, very Gwen.
"Is he—did he—" Ben started.
"He's fine. His boat isn't. He won't bother you again."
"What did you DO?"
"I capsized his boat and bit a boulder in front of his face."
"You BIT A BOULDER?"
"It was a small boulder."
"THAT'S STILL A BOULDER!"
"He PUSHED you, Ben." And there it was—the crack in the cold, predatory facade. The raw, desperate, terrified love underneath. "He pushed you into the water and you went UNDER and I couldn't—for two seconds I couldn't SEE you and I didn't know if you were—if something had—"
Her voice broke. Ripjaws' voice didn't crack like Heatblast's—it didn't fracture with light. It just... stopped. Like a song cutting off mid-note. Silence where sound should have been.
"I'm okay," Ben said.
"You went UNDER."
"For like two seconds—"
"Two seconds is FOREVER. Two seconds is enough for—for ANYTHING to happen. The lake is DEEP, Ben. There's a KRAKEN in there. You could have—"
"But I DIDN'T. Because you were there."
She looked at him. Yellow predator eyes, wet and luminous and full of something that was bigger than the lake, bigger than the kraken, bigger than any form the Omnitrix could give her.
"I'm always going to be there," she said. "ALWAYS. In every form. In every body. If you're in danger, I will FIND you and I will GET you and I will DESTROY whatever threatened you. That's not the Omnitrix talking. That's not Heatblast or Ripjaws or Way Big. That's ME. That's GWEN."
Ben looked at her. At this blue-green, scaled, jawed, clawed alien creature sitting on a dock with her tail in the water and tears in her predator eyes and his safety carved into every molecule of her being.
He took her hand.
Clawed. Scaled. Webbed.
He held it anyway.
"I know," he said.
The Omnitrix beeped eight minutes later. Gwen fought it. Of course she fought it. She always fought it. But the fight was tired this time—emotionally exhausted, drained by the surge of fury and the terror of those two seconds when Ben was underwater and she couldn't see him.
She reverted. Small. Human. Cold.
Ben didn't let go of her hand.
That night, Gwen added two entries to her notebook.
The first:
ALIEN #6: RIPJAWS (Piscciss Volann)
Overall Rating: 1/10 ⭐
Power: Aquatic. Strong in water, weak on land. Jaws can bite through stone. Claws can shred metal. Built for hunting, chasing, catching. 7/10 for raw capability but the water limitation is CRIPPLING.
Protection Capability: In water: excellent. I found Ben in four seconds. I reached him before Shaw's boat did. I am the apex predator of any body of water I enter. 8/10 in water, 2/10 on land. USELESS on land. Ben doesn't live in the water.
Warmth: NONE. Cold-blooded. COLD. BLOODED. I am a FISH, Grandpa. A fish with curves, but a FISH. My body temperature matches the water around me. When I held Ben, I was COLD. He was shivering. I couldn't warm him up. I MADE him COLDER.
This is the worst thing about this form. 0/10.
Chest: I don't want to talk about it.
It's SCALED. And COLD. And WET. Ben's face cannot go in a COLD WET SCALED chest. That's not a hug, that's a NATURE DOCUMENTARY.
The size is adequate. The Omnitrix's proportional commitment remains operational even in aquatic forms, which I appreciate on principle. But cold + wet + scales = UNACCEPTABLE contact surface for Ben-facial-immersion.
1/10.
Holding Capability: Bad. My hands have CLAWS. Claws are for THREATENING boat captains, not for HOLDING precious boys. I held Ben's hand after detransforming and his palm had tiny red marks from where my scales had pressed against his skin and I wanted to CRY.
2/10.
Jaws: 10/10. Bit a boulder. Would do it again. WILL do it again if anyone touches Ben.
Time Limit: The usual crime against my happiness. -∞/10.
Overall Assessment: 1/10. Hate it. HATE it. The worst form. The ABSOLUTE worst. Cold, wet, scaled, WRONG. The only good thing about Ripjaws is the teeth, and the teeth are only good for threatening people who hurt Ben, and if I were HEATBLAST those people would simply be ON FIRE and the whole problem would be SOLVED.
Never using this form again unless Ben falls in water. If Ben falls in water, I will use it and I will hate every second of it except the seconds where I am BITING THINGS.
The second entry was shorter. Written in different handwriting—smaller, shakier, clearly composed after the anger had faded and the fear had settled in.
NOTE TO SELF:
He went under the water and I couldn't see him.
For two seconds, I didn't know where he was.
For two seconds, the most important thing in the universe was invisible to me.
I have never been more afraid. Not as Gwen. Not as Heatblast. Not as anything.
If something had happened to him—if he had drowned, if the kraken had hurt him, if Shaw had—
I don't know what I would have done.
That's not true.
I know exactly what I would have done.
And it wouldn't have been capsizing a boat.
The Omnitrix gave me Ripjaws because the threat was aquatic. The Omnitrix is smart. It reads the situation and responds. But if it had given me Heatblast—if I had gone into the water as FIRE—
I would have boiled the lake.
The entire lake.
I need to think about what that means. About what I'm becoming. About whether the line between "protecting Ben" and "destroying everything that isn't Ben" is getting thinner.
...
I'll think about it later. Right now he's asleep in the bunk above me and I can hear him breathing and that's enough.
That's always enough.
For now.
Max found the notebook the next morning, open on the dinette table. He read both entries.
He read the last one twice.
He sat in the driver's seat for a very long time, staring at nothing, thinking about a ten-year-old girl who had calmly told him that she would have boiled a lake.
Then he picked up his phone.
"Azmuth," he said, when the line connected to a channel that shouldn't have existed. "We need to talk. About the Omnitrix. About what it's doing to my granddaughter."
A long pause.
"No, I can't wait for a convenient time. She bit a boulder yesterday and told a grown man she would eat him."
A longer pause.
"She's TEN, Azmuth. She's ten years old and she's threatening to boil lakes for a boy and she means it. Every word. She means every word."
The longest pause.
"...Yes. I think it's getting worse. I think it's going to keep getting worse. And I think—"
He looked at the notebook. At the shaky handwriting. At the words "I know exactly what I would have done."
"—I think we need help."
TO BE CONTINUED...