The drive from the campground to Washington, D.C. was approximately seven hours and forty-three minutes.
Max knew this because he'd driven it before—twice during his Plumber days, once on a family vacation in '94 that had ended with his son Carl getting his head stuck in the Lincoln Memorial gift shop turnstile. It was a straightforward drive. Interstate the whole way. Scenic, even, if you appreciated the gradual flattening of the American landscape as the mountains gave way to rolling hills gave way to the sprawling suburban preamble of the nation's capital.
Seven hours and forty-three minutes.
Gwen screamed at the Omnitrix for every single one of them.
HOUR ONE: THE OPENING ARGUMENTS
The Rust Bucket pulled onto the interstate at 8:17 AM. Max had spent the morning cleaning up the campsite—a process that involved explaining to a park ranger why there was a twenty-two-foot robot carcass in lot 7B ("bear got into the supplies, you know how it is") and quietly activating a Plumber cleanup protocol via his not-a-normal-phone. The robot's remains would be collected by a black-ops team within twelve hours. The trees would take longer.
Ben was in the passenger seat, playing a handheld game with the desperate focus of someone trying to pretend the last three days hadn't happened. Gwen was at the dinette table behind them, and she was staring.
Not at the scenery. Not at a book. Not at her laptop.
At the Omnitrix.
It had timed out after the Diamondhead fight approximately fourteen hours ago. Fourteen hours of enforced humanity. Fourteen hours of being small and cold and soft in all the wrong ways and hard in none of the right ones.
Fourteen hours.
It had recharged six hours ago. At 2 AM. Gwen knew this because she had been awake, staring at it, and she had felt it—that subtle shift in the green pulse, the device exhaling after holding its breath, ready again, available again.
She hadn't transformed. She'd promised Max. She'd promised.
But she hadn't slept either.
Now she sat at the dinette table, the Omnitrix resting on the surface in front of her like a loaded weapon, and she stared at it with the intensity of a hostage negotiator trying to talk someone off a ledge.
Except in this case, she was trying to talk the watch INTO something.
"Okay," she said, addressing the device directly. "Okay. Let's talk about this."
Ben's thumbs paused on his game.
Max's eyes flicked to the rearview mirror.
"I have been very patient with you," Gwen continued, her voice measured and calm in the way that preceded extremely unmeasured and uncalm things. "I have been understanding. You're a piece of alien technology. You have protocols. Procedures. I get that. I'm a procedures person. I respect procedures."
The Omnitrix glowed passively. It did not respond, on account of being a watch.
"But we need to discuss the timeout."
Silence from the watch.
"The timeout," Gwen repeated, as if the device hadn't heard her. "The thing where I'm in the middle of being perfect and you go BEEBEEP and turn me back into—" She gestured at herself with both hands, a sweeping motion of disgust that encompassed her entire ten-year-old body. "—into THIS."
"There's nothing wrong with—" Ben started.
"I wasn't talking to you, Ben."
"You're talking to a WATCH."
"I'm talking to a piece of advanced alien technology that has the POWER to let me be WARM and BIG and STRONG and PERFECT and instead chooses—CHOOSES, because I refuse to believe this isn't deliberate—to RIP IT AWAY from me at the WORST POSSIBLE MOMENTS."
She leaned closer to the Omnitrix. Her reflection stared back at her from the green faceplate—small, orange-haired, furious.
"You timed me out six seconds after Ben touched my leg," she whispered. "Six. Seconds. Do you understand what that meant to me? He touched my leg voluntarily. He REACHED OUT and TOUCHED me because he WANTED to, not because I grabbed him, not because I tricked him, but because he was GRATEFUL and he wanted to EXPRESS that, and you gave me six seconds to experience the most important moment of my life before you turned me back into a stupid normal girl."
"Gwen—" Max began.
"I'm not done."
HOUR TWO: ESCALATION
"Let's look at the NUMBERS," Gwen said, and she had produced a notebook. She had prepared for this. There were columns. There were headers. There was a graph.
Ben turned around in his seat and stared. "Did you make a SPREADSHEET?"
"It's a comparative data analysis. There's a difference." She tapped the notebook with a pen. "Okay. Heatblast transformation number one. Total time: approximately twenty-two minutes before you started beeping. Twenty-two minutes. That's—" She did rapid mental math. "—one thousand three hundred and twenty seconds. Of which I spent approximately four hundred seconds carrying Ben, three hundred seconds fighting you, and the remaining six hundred and twenty seconds in various states of being wonderful."
She flipped a page.
"Heatblast transformation number two. Total time: approximately eighteen minutes. EIGHTEEN. That's LESS than the first time. You gave me LESS time. Why did you give me less time? Is this a PUNISHMENT? Are you PUNISHING me for fighting the timeout the first time? Because if you are, that's—that's VINDICTIVE. That's PETTY."
She flipped another page.
"XLR8 transformation. Total time: twenty-three minutes. Slightly longer than Heatblast, which—okay, I'll give you that. But twenty-three minutes at Kineceleran processing speed is approximately NINE HOURS of subjective experience, which means I experienced nine hours of being PERFECT and then you took it away. Nine hours. That's a full WORKDAY of perfection, STOLEN."
She flipped another page.
"Diamondhead transformation. Total time: TWELVE MINUTES. TWELVE! That's the SHORTEST one yet! You're getting WORSE! The trend line is GOING DOWN!" She held up the notebook, which did indeed contain a hand-drawn line graph showing transformation durations over time. The line was descending. Gwen had drawn an angry face at the projected endpoint where the line would theoretically reach zero.
"You're going to time me out INSTANTLY at this rate!" she shouted at the watch. "I'll press the dial and you'll just go BEEP and turn me right back! What's the POINT of having an alien transformation watch if I can't even BE the alien long enough to properly HUG my COUSIN?!"
"I don't WANT to be hugged!" Ben called from the front seat.
"YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU WANT!"
"I know I don't want my face in your LAVA CHEST!"
"EVERYONE wants their face in my lava chest, Ben! It's OBJECTIVELY the best chest! I have a RATING SYSTEM!"
Max turned on the radio. Country music filled the Rust Bucket. He turned it up.
Gwen talked over it.
HOUR THREE: THE PERSONAL ATTACKS
"Who DESIGNED you?" Gwen demanded, leaning so close to the Omnitrix that her nose nearly touched the faceplate. "Who sat down and said, 'You know what this incredibly powerful piece of transformative technology needs? A FUN RUINER built right in!' Was it a committee? It feels like a committee. Only a COMMITTEE could produce something this aggressively MEDIOCRE in its user experience."
The Omnitrix continued to exist passively.
"Your interface is FINE. The dial is intuitive. The holographic display is a nice touch. The transformation itself is—" She paused. Her expression softened momentarily, the way it always did when she thought about the actual moment of transformation. "—the transformation is beautiful. It's the best thing that's ever happened to me. But then—THEN—just when I've settled in, just when I've found Ben and I'm holding him and everything is PERFECT—"
Her voice cracked.
"—you take it away."
She sat back. Stared at the ceiling.
"You're like a restaurant that serves the most incredible meal you've ever tasted and then TAKES THE PLATE AWAY after three bites. You're like a library that lets you read the first chapter of the best book ever written and then LOCKS THE BOOK IN A VAULT. You're like—"
"A watch with a built-in safety feature?" Ben offered.
"A MONSTER is what you are."
"Gwen, it's a MACHINE. It doesn't have FEELINGS."
"Well I have feelings and it keeps HURTING THEM!"
Max turned the radio up further. Garth Brooks was really giving it his all. It wasn't enough.
HOUR FOUR: THE BARGAINING PHASE
"What if I promise to be responsible?" Gwen asked the Omnitrix. Her tone had shifted from anger to something almost pleading. Almost reasonable. It was the voice she used when negotiating for a later bedtime—calm, logical, appealing to authority.
"What if I only transform when there's a genuine need? Genuine threats. Like the robot. If a robot is attacking Ben, I should get to stay transformed as long as it takes to deal with the robot, right? That's just PRACTICAL."
She waited, as if expecting a response.
"And afterward—after the robot is dealt with—I should get a REASONABLE amount of time to confirm Ben's safety. Check him for injuries. Hold him. Make sure he's warm. That's AFTERCARE. That's BASIC AFTERCARE. Any responsible protection system includes aftercare. You can't just—just YANK me back to human the second the danger's over. What kind of protection protocol DOES that?"
Ben had put in earbuds. He could still hear her.
"I'm proposing a MINIMUM of one hour per transformation," Gwen continued, addressing the watch with the formality of someone delivering a business proposal. "One hour is reasonable. One hour gives me time to transform, address any threats, confirm Ben's safety, provide comfort and warmth, and—and maybe play with his hair a little, if he'll let me, which he probably won't because he doesn't understand that his hair is SOFT and WONDERFUL and I've only gotten to touch it ONCE and—"
She caught herself.
"—the point is. One hour. Minimum. That's my offer. That's GENEROUS. I WANTED to say forever. I'm COMPROMISING."
The Omnitrix did not accept the proposal.
"What about forty-five minutes?"
Nothing.
"Thirty?"
Nothing.
"TWENTY? Twenty minutes is NOTHING! That's a SITCOM! You can't even tell a STORY in twenty minutes! You definitely can't adequately SNUGGLE someone in twenty minutes, especially when they're being DIFFICULT about it and you have to CHASE them first—"
"You shouldn't have to CHASE me!" Ben shouted from the front seat, pulling out one earbud. "Normal people don't CHASE their cousins for SNUGGLES!"
"Normal people aren't seven-foot FIRE ALIENS with the PERFECT CHEST for—"
"STOP TALKING ABOUT YOUR CHEST!"
"I'll stop talking about my chest when the WATCH stops STEALING IT FROM ME!"
Max turned the radio up to maximum volume. A steel guitar solo filled the Rust Bucket like a sonic weapon.
Gwen talked over that too.
HOUR FIVE: THE EXISTENTIAL CRISIS
The radio had been turned off. Not by Max—it had simply given up and died, the speakers emitting a final crackle of protest before falling silent. Max made a mental note to have them repaired. Or replaced. Or soundproofed.
Gwen had been quiet for seven minutes. This was, by recent standards, an eternity.
Then, softly:
"What if you're right?"
Ben looked up from his game. Max glanced in the mirror.
"What if the timeout is... is there because I'm not supposed to stay transformed?" Gwen was sitting cross-legged on the dinette bench, the Omnitrix resting in her lap, cradled in both hands like a wounded bird. "What if I'm not... meant to be Heatblast? What if I'm meant to be this?"
She looked down at herself. Small hands. Skinny arms. Orange hair. Green eyes. Human.
"What if this is who I really am, and Heatblast is just... a costume? A temporary thing? What if the watch keeps turning me back because this is the real me and everything else is just... pretend?"
The Rust Bucket hummed along the interstate. A truck passed them. Birds flew overhead.
"Because if that's true," Gwen whispered, "then I hate it. I hate it so much."
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
"I don't want to be the real me," she said. "The real me is small and cold and can't protect anyone. The real me spent three years being mean to Ben because I didn't know how to—how to feel things right. The real me got a 98 on a math test and CRIED about it. The real me is—"
"My granddaughter," Max said from the driver's seat. His voice was steady. Warm. Firm. "And she's brilliant, and she's brave, and she punched a giant robot to death yesterday."
"That was Diamondhead."
"Diamondhead is you, Gwen. They're all you. Heatblast is you. XLR8 is you. Diamondhead is you. And the girl sitting in this RV right now is also you. The watch doesn't create someone new—it transforms who's already there."
Gwen stared at the Omnitrix.
"Then why do I feel so different when I'm transformed?" she asked. "Why do I feel so much more?"
Max didn't have an answer for that. Not yet.
"...And why does the timeout have to be so SHORT?" Gwen added, because even in existential crisis, her grudge against the timing function was eternal and unyielding.
"Gwen—"
"I'm JUST SAYING. If all the forms are me, and I'm all the forms, then switching between them shouldn't be a BIG DEAL and the watch should just LET ME STAY—"
"And we're back," Ben muttered, turning his game back on.
HOUR SIX: THE CONSPIRACY THEORIES
"What if the timeout isn't a safety feature?" Gwen said, sitting bolt upright with the energy of someone who'd had a revelation. "What if it's a CONTROL feature? What if whoever made this watch WANTED the user to keep switching back because—because they didn't want anyone to get too COMFORTABLE? Too POWERFUL? Too ATTACHED?"
"Gwen—"
"Think about it, Grandpa! If I could stay Heatblast forever, I'd be UNSTOPPABLE. I'd be a permanent seven-foot fire goddess with the perfect body for protecting Ben. No one could TOUCH him. No one could HURT him. He'd be SAFE. FOREVER. Why would anyone want to PREVENT that?"
"Maybe because 'permanent seven-foot fire goddess' has some practical drawbacks—"
"NAME ONE."
"You'd set the house on fire."
"We'd live OUTSIDE. Next."
"You couldn't go to school."
"I'd be HOMESCHOOLED. By FIRE. Next."
"You couldn't eat normal food."
"I'd eat FIRE FOOD. Fire... food exists, probably. I'll MAKE it exist. Next."
"Gwen—"
"The POINT is, the timeout isn't protecting ME. It's protecting the WATCH from me getting too BONDED to a form. It KNOWS that if I stay Heatblast long enough, I'll never want to come back. And it's RIGHT. I'd NEVER come back. I'd stay Heatblast FOREVER and hold Ben FOREVER and be WARM and BIG and PERFECT forever and the watch CAN'T HAVE THAT because—because—"
She sputtered. Searched for a reason. Failed to find one that wasn't insane.
"—because it's MEAN," she finished lamely.
"The watch is mean," Ben repeated.
"It's a MEAN WATCH, Ben!"
"It saved your life. It gave you the power to punch a robot."
"And then it TIMED ME OUT before I could hug you about it! That's like—that's like giving someone a PRESENT and then TAKING IT BACK!"
"The present in this analogy is you shoving my face in your chest."
"It's a GOOD present!"
"IT IS NOT A GOOD PRESENT!"
HOUR SIX AND A HALF: THE OPEN LETTER
"I'm writing a letter," Gwen announced.
"To whom?" Max asked wearily.
"To whoever made the Omnitrix. They need to hear some FEEDBACK."
She produced her notebook. Pen in hand. Expression deadly serious.
"Dear Omnitrix Creator," she dictated aloud as she wrote. "My name is Gwen Tennyson. I am ten years old and a straight-A student. I recently acquired your device, the Omnitrix, through circumstances that were NOT my fault (my cousin Ben was reaching for it like an IDIOT and I was trying to STOP him, because that is what I DO, I PROTECT Ben, which is the WHOLE POINT of this letter)."
Ben slowly turned around in his seat. He watched his cousin write an angry letter to an alien she'd never met about a watch she'd had for four days.
"I am writing to express my EXTREME dissatisfaction with the timeout feature of your device. While I understand that safety protocols are important (I got an A+ in my school's safety module and was appointed Class Safety Monitor for two consecutive years), the current timeout duration is UNACCEPTABLE."
She underlined UNACCEPTABLE three times.
"When I transform into Heatblast—which is my preferred form and the ONLY form that truly matters—I experience a profound sense of purpose, warmth, and love for my cousin Ben that is the most meaningful experience of my life. Your timeout feature interrupts this experience after approximately twelve to twenty-two minutes, which is INSUFFICIENT for the following reasons:"
She started a numbered list.
"ONE: I cannot adequately ensure Ben's safety in under twenty minutes. Threats are UNPREDICTABLE and may require EXTENDED engagement.
TWO: Post-threat comfort requires a MINIMUM of thirty minutes of sustained holding, during which Ben's face should be FULLY immersed in my chest region, which is perfectly sized for this purpose in Heatblast form.
THREE: Ben's hair takes approximately forty-five minutes to properly play with, sort, and appreciate at normal speed (longer as XLR8, due to individual strand counting).
FOUR: I need time to tell Ben I love him. This takes approximately forever, because there are not enough words.
FIVE—"
"Gwen." Max's voice was very quiet. Very calm. "Put the notebook down."
"I'm almost done—"
"Put. It. Down."
She put it down. Reluctantly. Her pen hovered over the page for a long moment before she set it aside.
"...Can I finish it later?"
"We'll see."
"That means no."
"It means we'll see."
HOUR SEVEN: THE EMOTIONAL COLLAPSE
Gwen was crying.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just... crying. Quietly, at the dinette table, tears running down her face, the Omnitrix clutched to her chest like a lifeline.
Ben noticed first. He'd taken out his earbuds to check if she was still ranting and instead heard the soft, hiccupping sound of his cousin trying very hard not to fall apart.
"Gwen?" He turned around fully. "Are you... okay?"
"I'm fine."
She was not fine. She was sitting in a puddle of notebooks and graphs and comparative analyses, surrounded by the detritus of a seven-hour argument with a piece of jewelry, and she was crying.
"I just—" She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. The Omnitrix caught the overhead light, green and steady and ready—recharged, available, one press away from making everything better. "I just want to be her again. I want to be Heatblast and hold you and feel like everything makes sense. When I'm her, everything makes sense. When I'm me—"
She gestured at herself. At the notebooks. At the tear tracks on her face.
"—this doesn't make sense. None of this makes sense. I'm sitting here YELLING at a WATCH for SEVEN HOURS because it won't let me be a FIRE ALIEN who CUDDLES her COUSIN. That's CRAZY. I know it's crazy. I can HEAR how crazy it is. But I can't STOP, Ben. I can't stop wanting it. I can't stop wanting to be her."
Ben looked at Max. Max's knuckles were white on the steering wheel.
"The timeout is the only time I'm forced to be me," Gwen whispered. "And I hate every second of it. I hate being small. I hate being cold. I hate not being able to hear your heartbeat. I hate that my arms are too short to wrap around you properly. I hate that my chest is—" She looked down at herself and laughed, a broken little laugh. "—what chest? I'm TEN. I don't HAVE a chest. But Heatblast does. Heatblast has the PERFECT chest. And when the watch beeps and takes it away, it's like—it's like someone CARVED something out of me. Something important. Something I NEED."
She pressed the Omnitrix against her sternum. Over her heart.
"I need it, Ben. I need to be her. I need to be the version of me that loves you the right way. Because this version—" Her voice dropped to almost nothing. "—this version doesn't know how."
The Rust Bucket was silent except for the hum of the engine and the sound of tires on asphalt.
Ben sat in the passenger seat, his game forgotten in his lap, staring at his cousin. His annoying, brilliant, type-A, straight-A, infuriating, impossible cousin, who was crying because a magic watch wouldn't let her love him hard enough.
He didn't know what to say.
He never knew what to say.
So he did the only thing he could think of.
He got up from the passenger seat, walked the three steps to the dinette, and sat down across from her. He reached across the table. And he took her hand.
Not because the Omnitrix made him. Not because Heatblast's personality was influencing him. Not because of alien technology or transformed neurochemistry or any of the complicated, inexplicable things that had been happening since a pod fell from the sky.
Because she was his cousin. And she was crying. And even though she'd spent three years being mean to him and four days being terrifyingly affectionate, she was still Gwen. His Gwen. The only cousin he had.
Gwen's fingers tightened around his. Hard. Desperate. Human-strong, not alien-strong, which meant it actually kind of hurt, but he didn't pull away.
"You don't need to be a fire alien to hold my hand," he said. And then, quieter, like the words cost him something: "This version of you is fine."
Gwen stared at him. Tears on her face. Eyes wide. Mouth slightly open.
"...Fine?" she repeated.
"Don't push it."
"You said I'm FINE."
"I said this version of you is fine. Don't make it—"
"You LIKE this version of me."
"I said FINE, not LIKE. Those are VERY different—"
"You're holding my hand AND you said I'm fine. That's basically a MARRIAGE PROPOSAL—"
"IT IS NOT—"
"Wait until I tell Heatblast-me about this. She's going to be SO happy. She's going to hold you SO hard—"
"I REGRET EVERYTHING."
"—and put your face RIGHT in the chest—"
"I TAKE IT BACK. I TAKE ALL OF IT BACK."
"TOO LATE! No take-backs! This is CANON now!"
From the driver's seat, Max Tennyson listened to his grandchildren bicker—actually bicker, the way they used to, with heat but without venom, with annoyance but without cruelty—and felt something in his chest loosen just slightly.
Then Gwen said: "But seriously, the timeout is BULLSHIT."
"LANGUAGE, Gwen!"
"The timeout is MALARKEY, then. The timeout is HOKUM. The timeout is a TRAVESTY OF ALIEN ENGINEERING and I will NOT rest until—"
"We're here," Max announced, pulling the Rust Bucket off the interstate and onto the exit ramp. Through the windshield, the distant silhouette of the Washington Monument rose against the evening sky.
"—until I have written a STRONGLY WORDED letter to EVERY alien civilization in the GALAXY about the UNCONSCIONABLE limitations of—"
"Gwen. We're here."
She stopped. Looked out the window. Blinked.
"Oh," she said. "Washington. Right."
She looked down at the Omnitrix. Then at Ben's hand, still in hers. Then at the Omnitrix again.
"...The timeout is still bullshit, though."
"GWEN!"
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL
(Found later, tucked into the back of Gwen's notebook, written in increasingly unhinged handwriting:)
THINGS THE OMNITRIX TIMEOUT HAS RUINED: A COMPREHENSIVE LIST
Holding Ben (4 times)Being warm (4 times)Having a chest (4 times)Playing with Ben's hair (1 time, XLR8 form, was at strand #47,000 out of estimated 100,000+, INCOMPLETE DATA SET)Processing the leg touch (1 time, Diamondhead form, needed MINIMUM 1 hour, got 6 SECONDS)Being tall (4 times)Being strong (4 times)Being perfect (4 times)My relationship with my cousin (ongoing, CONTINUOUS damage)My faith in alien technology (DESTROYED)My emotional stability (see: this list)The concept of happiness itself (RUINED, TIMEOUT-RELATED)
THINGS THE OMNITRIX TIMEOUT HAS IMPROVED:
(The space after "1." was blank. Then, in different ink, added later:)
I guess Ben held my hand during the drive because I was crying about it so... technically the timeout indirectly led to hand-holding... which is...
(A long pause in the writing, visible in the way the ink pooled where the pen rested.)
...okay FINE. One point for the timeout. ONE. Don't let it go to your head.
HEATBLAST IS STILL BETTER.
TO BE CONTINUED...