Chapter 34: Gwen Tennyson with the Omnitrix
"Hey! Dweeb! This isn't fun!"
Ben Tennyson sat on a mossy tree stump, kicking his legs and laughing uproariously as he watched a tiny, gray-skinned alien sprint for her life ahead of a very determined tabby cat.
Suddenly, a hand reached down. Long fingers gently closed around the scrambling Grey Matter, lifting her completely out of the feline's pouncing range.
Ben stopped laughing. He hopped off the stump, his posture stiffening as he grabbed a heavy branch from the dirt. "Hey! Who are you? Let her go!"
Klein stood there, letting the tiny Grey Matter balance on his open left palm. His right index finger reached over, casually giving the little alien's oversized head a gentle pat.
"Oh? You don't know me?" Klein tilted his head, a flicker of genuine confusion crossing his features.
He had assumed that after his transmigration, the timeline would simply fracture into countless parallel branches, keeping his existence a constant across them. Clearly, that wasn't the case. The underlying mechanics of this multiverse simply could not spontaneously generate an anomaly like him—a being originating from entirely outside its narrative boundaries.
"Of course he doesn't know you. I told you, my friend, you are entirely unique."
A man in a crisp white lab coat stepped out from behind a nearby oak tree. Paradox. To any observant eye, the time-walker looked bizarrely out of place, as if his very art style was drawn with a different set of physical laws than the rest of the world around him.
"However, the one who obtained the Omnitrix in this particular universe isn't Ben Tennyson." Paradox cast a mild glance at Ben's bare left wrist, then shifted his gaze to the tiny Grey Matter standing on Klein's palm. "It is Gwen."
Ben took a step back, raising his makeshift wooden club. "Who exactly are you two?! Gwen! Get over here! They look dangerous!"
Gwen, who had been staring up at Klein's face and getting slightly lost in his calm, handsome features, snapped out of her daze. She shook her oversized head, though her intuition told her this stranger meant no harm.
"Relax, Ben. Don't blow a gasket," Klein said, offering the boy an easy smile. "We aren't the bad guys. Well, at least I'm not."
He lowered his hand, gently setting Grey Matter down on the grass. Without missing a beat, he reached out and tapped the glowing hourglass symbol on her back. A flash of emerald light washed over the clearing, leaving a slightly disoriented Gwen Tennyson sitting in the dirt.
'Can't let her keep getting chased by stray cats, can I?' Klein mused to himself.
"See ya, Ben. Dork," Klein said aloud, waving a hand.
Before the two kids could process the situation, Klein and Paradox turned and strolled casually into the dense foliage. Gwen sat on the grass, her mouth opening and closing as she stared at Klein's retreating back, completely at a loss for words.
The two dimensional travelers wandered aimlessly through the sun-dappled woods, their boots crunching over dry leaves.
"So?" Klein shoved his hands into his pockets, shooting a sideways glare at the time-walker. "Why drag me into this timeline? Let me make one thing perfectly clear—if you try to pull another fast one on me, I will ensure your demise is spectacularly miserable."
Paradox merely smiled. The last time they crossed paths, Klein had retaliated against the professor's cryptic tricks by forcibly altering Paradox's physical art style, leaving him looking like a poorly sketched caricature for an entire week. Given Klein's current, absurdly overpowered state, he could essentially rewrite reality on a whim. He only tagged along because, frankly, whatever Paradox needed him for usually ended up being highly entertaining.
"There is simply a certain individual you need to stop. Nothing more," Paradox replied, entirely unbothered by the death threat.
"Who? Let me guess. Is it a Celestialsapien again?" Klein stopped walking and stared at his companion.
Paradox kept smiling. He said nothing.
Klein's left eye twitched. "Why aren't you speaking?"
"Ah, well... no. At least, not exactly." Paradox cleared his throat, suddenly finding the canopy of leaves above very interesting under Klein's piercing gaze.
"Are you treating me like your personal hired muscle, you old scoundrel?" Klein sighed, looking away.
Honestly, even if it was a Celestialsapien, he didn't care. He wasn't afraid of an entire council of Celestialsapiens, so a single rogue cosmic entity was hardly a threat. A month ago, he might have just vaporized Paradox on principle for the annoyance. Now, however, brawling with a reality-warping god sounded like a rather fun afternoon activity.
"No, no, of course not," Paradox said, shaking his head. "I sought your assistance simply because you are uniquely capable, and, above all, you have an abundance of free time."
"Right. Speaking of which, why drop me here?" Klein gestured vaguely toward the direction they had left the kids. "Wouldn't it be vastly more efficient to just teleport directly to this mysterious guy?"
"I merely calculated that you would be more inclined to help if it involved keeping an eye on your cousins. Wouldn't you agree?" Paradox offered a knowing smile.
Klein just shook his head, a dry chuckle escaping his lips as he kept walking.
Sometime later.
The sharp sound of shattering crystal and grinding metal echoed through a clearing. Gwen, currently transformed into the crystalline humanoid Diamondhead, was locked in a fierce battle with a massive, heavily armed mechanical drone.
A few yards away, Klein and Paradox crouched low behind a thick cluster of berry bushes.
"Why exactly are we hiding in the shrubbery?" Klein deadpanned, staring flatly at the time-walker. "Paradox, do you have some sort of voyeuristic fetish I should know about?"
"Don't you think this makes us appear incredibly mysterious?" Paradox whispered back, adjusting his goggles as if this were the most logical tactical position in the universe.
"So this is exactly what you were doing the first time you met me, isn't it?" Klein groaned, rubbing his temples. "No wonder I always felt like some creep was peeking at me back then."
He decided he and Paradox were fundamentally on different wavelengths. At the very least, Klein wasn't this weird.
Through the leaves, he watched the mechanical monster land a heavy blow, sending Gwen skidding backward across the dirt. Klein's muscles tensed. He prepared to stand up, fully intending to walk out there and reduce the oversized toaster to scrap metal.
But just as his knee left the dirt, Gwen shifted her stance. She raised her crystalline arms, catching the monster's high-intensity laser blast and using the precise angles of her Diamondhead body to refract the beam right back into the machine's central core.
The robot exploded in a shower of sparks and shrapnel.
Seeing the smoking crater, Klein quietly squatted back down into the bushes.
The scene shifted to a quiet park bench by a suburban roadside. Klein and Paradox sat side-by-side, each holding a brightly colored, oversized slushie cup with a plastic straw.
Klein took a loud slurp, then glared at his cup. "We have been sitting here for two days! My pocket money is practically gone funding your snack habits, and Gwen hasn't encountered a single actual threat. Paradox, tell me the truth. Are you just mooching off me because you went broke?"
"Of course not," Paradox replied smoothly, taking a polite sip of his blue raspberry drink. "To be perfectly honest, I do not actually require sustenance to survive. And the danger to Gwen and her companions is arriving very soon."
"You don't even need to eat?!" Klein nearly crushed his cup. "Then why didn't you say anything before I bought these?! And I don't buy this danger is coming soon garbage for a second."
"Just because I do not need to eat does not mean I cannot enjoy the act of eating, does it?" Paradox shrugged, looking entirely innocent.
Klein opened his mouth to deliver a scathing retort.
Boom.
The ground violently shuddered. A deafening crash shattered the peaceful afternoon as a massive, spiked meteor hammer slammed out of the sky, completely obliterating half of a nearby sports stadium in a cloud of pulverized concrete and dust.
"Vilgax!" Klein immediately recognized the overly dramatic, property-destroying mode of arrival.
"You see?" Paradox smiled triumphantly, brushing a speck of dust from his white coat. He turned to Klein, offering him the floor. "What shall we do next?"
Klein crushed his empty slushie cup and tossed it into a nearby bin. "First, we figure out a ridiculously cool way to make our entrance."
"Agreed," Paradox nodded, his expression completely serious.
Back at the ruins of the stadium, the dust began to settle.
"Vilgax!" Ben yelled, his voice cracking in panic as the towering, cybernetically enhanced warlord stepped from the rubble.
"Hand over the Omnitrix!" Vilgax's deep, mechanical voice boomed with absolute arrogance.
"Who is he?! What alien should I use?!" Gwen asked, frantically twisting the dial on her wrist.
"The watch is out of juice! We have to wait for it to recharge!" Ben yelled, stepping back as Vilgax's massive shadow fell over them.
"What?!" Gwen's eyes went wide with terror.
Just as the two cousins braced for the end, a calm, slightly amused voice echoed from above.
"Hey! Need some help?"
Ben, Gwen, and Vilgax all snapped their heads upward toward the source of the voice.
High above them, perched on the jagged edge of the stadium's surviving roof, sat Klein. His right foot was planted firmly on the concrete, his right arm resting lazily across his knee. His left leg dangled casually over the sheer drop, swinging slightly in the breeze. He had his left hand raised in a relaxed, two-finger greeting, his elbow resting perfectly level with his shoulder.
Standing naturally right beside him was Paradox. The time-walker had one hand resting elegantly behind his back. In his other hand, he held a pocket watch, snapping it open at the exact millisecond the trio below looked up, pretending to casually check the time. A faint, knowing smile played on his lips as his crisp white lab coat fluttered dramatically in the wind.
The morning sun had just crested the horizon, positioning itself directly behind the two figures, casting them in a blinding, epic silhouette against the golden sky.
For a long moment, Ben, Gwen, and even Vilgax were completely stunned into silence.
Looking down at their dumbfounded expressions, Klein and Paradox felt a deep sense of satisfaction. They had spent a good five minutes calculating this exact angle just to show off. The positioning with the sun at their backs was absolute perfection.
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