The Rust Bucket lurched over another pothole, and Ben Tennyson's face met the ceiling for the third time that afternoon.
"Grandpa Max, I'm pretty sure this road was condemned," Ben groaned, peeling himself off the vinyl seat cushion that smelled like it had been marinating in old chili and regret since the Nixon administration.
"Nonsense!" Max Tennyson called from the driver's seat, his Hawaiian shirt a crime against color theory that no jury would fail to convict. "This is a shortcut! I used it back in '72 when I was—"
"Doing something you'll vaguely reference but never fully explain?" Gwen Tennyson interrupted from the small dining table, not looking up from her laptop. Her orange hair was pulled back in a blue hairclip, and she had that expression she always wore around Ben—the one that suggested she'd rather be literally anywhere else in the observable universe.
"I was going to say fishing," Max said, a little too quickly.
Ben slumped against the window and stared at the endless parade of pine trees. Summer vacation. The words were supposed to conjure images of pool parties, video games, sleeping until noon, and consuming enough sugar to give a horse diabetes. Instead, his parents had seen fit to ship him off with Grandpa Max and—worse—his cousin Gwen for an entire cross-country road trip in a vehicle that predated the concept of air conditioning.
"This is gonna be the worst summer ever," Ben muttered.
"For once, we agree on something," Gwen said. She typed something aggressively. Knowing her, she was probably updating a spreadsheet ranking her grievances alphabetically.
"Now, come on, you two," Max said cheerfully, as the Rust Bucket crested a hill and a sprawling campground appeared below, nestled against a forest that stretched to the horizon. "This is going to be an adventure! Fresh air, nature, quality family time—"
"Bugs, dirt, no Wi-Fi," Gwen translated.
"Bugs, dirt, no anything," Ben added.
They shared a brief glance of mutual suffering. It was, historically, the only thing they were capable of sharing without it devolving into a screaming match.
Max pulled the Rust Bucket into a campsite with the confidence of a man parallel parking a submarine. The RV shuddered, coughed, and died with a sound like a mechanical death rattle.
"Home sweet home!" Max announced.
Setting up camp was the usual exercise in structured chaos. Max hummed while he deployed awnings and unfolded chairs with military precision. Ben was tasked with gathering firewood, which he accomplished by picking up two sticks and declaring the job done. Gwen organized the cooler by food group, expiration date, and probability of causing food poisoning—a necessary precaution given Grandpa Max's culinary tendencies.
"Dinner's going to be special tonight," Max said, and both kids felt their stomachs preemptively clench. "I picked up some marinated mealworms at that roadside stand in—"
"I'm not hungry," Ben said instantly.
"I ate a big lunch," Gwen lied, having eaten half a granola bar six hours ago.
Max looked mildly disappointed but undeterred. "More for me, then!"
The sun was beginning to set, painting the sky in shades of orange and purple that would have been beautiful if Ben had possessed the attention span to appreciate it. Instead, he was sitting on a log, poking at the nascent campfire with a stick and thinking about all the things he could be doing right now. Playing Sumo Slammers. Riding his bike. Literally watching paint dry, which would at least have the virtue of being indoors.
"I'm going for a walk," he announced, standing up.
"In the woods? At night?" Gwen looked at him with a mixture of concern and condescension that only she could pull off. "Do you want to get eaten by a bear?"
"Bears would take one look at him and lose their appetite," she added under her breath.
"Ha ha, you're hilarious," Ben said flatly. "I'll be fine."
"Don't go too far," Max called. "And if you see any unusual mushrooms, don't touch them! ...Actually, bring some back. I have a recipe."
Ben shuddered and walked into the tree line.
The forest was, Ben had to admit, not terrible. The trees were old and tall, their canopy filtering the last light of day into something almost magical. Crickets were tuning up for their nightly concert. A cool breeze carried the scent of pine and earth. It was peaceful in a way that made Ben slightly uncomfortable, because ten-year-old boys were not supposed to find things peaceful. They were supposed to find things cool or gross or awesome, and nature was stubbornly refusing to be any of those things.
He was about ten minutes into the woods, following a deer trail that wound between massive trunks, when he heard something.
Not a forest sound. Not an animal sound.
A screaming sound. From above.
Ben looked up just in time to see a streak of green light tear across the sky like a luminous wound in the fabric of the evening. It was bright—impossibly bright—trailing sparks and fire as it arced overhead with a sound like reality itself was being torn in half.
"WHAT THE—"
The streak curved. Adjusted. Almost like it was... aiming.
It was aiming at him.
"AAAAAHHH!"
Ben threw himself sideways as the object—a meteorite? a satellite? a something—slammed into the earth about fifty feet away with an impact that he felt in his teeth. The ground heaved. Trees splintered. A shockwave of dirt and debris washed over him, and for a few seconds the world was nothing but noise and chaos and the absolute certainty that he was going to die in the woods, and Gwen would put something snarky on his tombstone.
Then silence. Ringing, deafening silence.
Ben lay on the ground, covered in dirt, breathing hard, heart hammering. Slowly, he raised his head.
Where the object had hit, there was a crater. Not a huge one—maybe fifteen feet across—but it was deep, and at the bottom, something was glowing. Green. Pulsing. Like a heartbeat.
"Okay," Ben whispered to himself. "Okay. That's... that's a thing."
Every rational thought in his brain—admittedly not a crowded space—told him to run. To go get Grandpa Max. To call someone. Anyone.
Instead, his feet carried him toward the crater. Because he was ten, and it was glowing, and those two facts together formed an irresistible gravitational pull.
He slid down the edge of the crater, loose dirt cascading around him, and came to a stop at the bottom. The glowing was coming from... a pod. A metal pod, like something out of a sci-fi movie, all smooth curves and alien geometry. It was open—had it opened on impact, or was it designed to open?—and inside, nestled in a depression like an egg in a nest, was—
A watch.
Ben blinked. He tilted his head. He squinted.
It was definitely a watch. Sort of. It was bulky, with a wide black-and-grey band and a faceplate dominated by a strange green hourglass symbol. It looked like something a toy company would make if they were given an unlimited budget and a designer who'd lost their mind.
"A watch," Ben said flatly. "A meteor-watch. Okay."
He reached for it.
"BEN!"
Gwen's voice cut through the forest like a blade. She'd seen the impact—hard to miss, given that it had briefly turned night into day and shaken the Rust Bucket hard enough to rattle every dish in the cabinets. Max had immediately gone into what Gwen privately thought of as "Suspiciously Competent Mode," grabbing a flashlight and telling her to stay put while he checked the perimeter.
Gwen, being Gwen, had ignored this instruction completely. Her dweeb cousin was out there, and while she would never, under threat of death, admit to being worried about him, she also didn't want to have to explain to Aunt Sandra why Ben had been vaporized by a space rock on the first night of summer vacation.
She followed the trail of destruction—broken branches, scattered debris, a faint green glow filtering through the trees—and burst into the clearing just in time to see Ben sliding into a crater.
"BEN! What are you doing?!"
She scrambled to the edge and looked down. Ben was at the bottom, reaching toward some kind of—pod? container?—and something inside was glowing.
"Don't touch it, you doofus!" she shouted.
"I'm not gonna—I'm just looking—"
"You're literally reaching for it right now!"
"That's looking with my hands—"
Gwen was already sliding down into the crater, because if she waited for Ben to exercise good judgment, she'd be waiting until the heat death of the universe. She half-ran, half-stumbled down the slope and crashed into him just as his fingers were inches from the object.
"Move!" she snapped, shoving him sideways.
"Hey! I found it first—"
"And you were about to grab an unidentified alien artifact with your bare hands, which is exactly the kind of decision-making that got you a D in science—"
"It was a D-plus—"
In the process of shoving Ben aside, Gwen's own hand swung forward. Momentum. Physics. The universe's sick sense of humor.
Her fingers brushed the watch.
And the watch moved.
It jumped—Loss literally leaped—off its pedestal and clamped onto her left wrist with a mechanical snap that echoed through the crater like a gunshot. Gwen yelped and stumbled backward, holding up her arm. The device had sealed around her wrist seamlessly, the black band conforming to her skin as if it had been custom-made for her.
"Get it off get it off GET IT OFF—" Gwen shook her arm frantically. The watch didn't budge. It might as well have been welded to her skeleton.
"Dude, it just—it grabbed you!" Ben said, eyes wide, momentarily forgetting to be territorial about his discovery.
"I can see that, Ben!" Gwen grabbed the device with her right hand and pulled. Nothing. She twisted. Nothing. She tried to slide it over her hand, but it had somehow tightened to the exact circumference of her wrist. "What is this thing?!"
The green hourglass symbol on the faceplate pulsed once. Twice. Then a holographic display flickered to life above it—a circular dial showing a silhouette. Not a human silhouette. Something... else. Something with a head that seemed to be on fire.
"Oh no," Gwen whispered.
"Oh cool," Ben breathed.
"This is not cool! This is the opposite of cool! I have an alien device fused to my wrist!" Gwen's voice had reached a pitch that was making nearby bats change course.
"Try pressing the button," Ben suggested, pointing to the raised faceplate.
"Why would I—that could do anything! It could explode! It could—"
Her thumb, trembling, was already hovering over the faceplate. The green glow was hypnotic. Inviting. Almost warm. And there was something else—a sensation she couldn't quite name, radiating up her arm from the device. Not painful. Not unpleasant. Just... present. Like the watch was introducing itself. Like it was saying hello.
"Don't—" Ben started.
Gwen pressed the faceplate down.
The silhouette of the fiery figure locked into place, and the dial popped up with a mechanical chunk.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then Gwen felt it.
It started in her wrist. A warmth—gentle at first, like holding a mug of hot cocoa on a cold day. It spread up her arm slowly, luxuriously slowly, and Gwen watched with wide eyes as her skin began to change.
It started at her fingertips. The pale, freckled skin of a ten-year-old girl darkened, shifted, became something else entirely. Not skin. Not flesh. Magma. A deep, molten red-orange, traced with veins of brilliant yellow that pulsed with inner light. Her fingers lengthened slightly, and she could feel the heat building in them—not burning, never burning, but glowing. Alive.
"Gwen?!" Ben's voice seemed far away.
"I..." Gwen flexed her changing fingers. The warmth was spreading up her forearm now, her skin cracking and reforming into that beautiful volcanic surface, and it felt... "I feel..."
She should have been screaming. She should have been panicking. Any rational, sensible person—and Gwen Tennyson had built her entire identity around being rational and sensible—would have been losing their mind.
Instead, a small, breathless sound escaped her lips. Almost a sigh.
"...good," she finished. "It feels... really good."
The transformation crawled up past her elbow, and as it went, it didn't just change her skin. Her arm was... shifting. Growing. Not grotesquely, not painfully, but with a slow, deliberate grace that felt less like mutation and more like blossoming. Her forearm thickened with a soft, organic curve, her upper arm gaining a gentle fullness that hadn't been there before. The sleeve of her blue shirt began to strain.
"Gwen, your arm is—you're—" Ben was backing up, his face a war between fascination and terror.
"Shh," Gwen said, and she wasn't sure why she said it, because part of her brain was still screaming that this was wrong and dangerous and she needed to stop it, but that part was getting quieter and quieter, drowned out by the warmth that was now washing across her shoulders and down her torso.
Her shirt didn't stand a chance.
The transformation rolled across her chest and down her stomach like a slow tide of living fire, and as it went, Gwen's body changed. Her frame expanded—upward, outward, in every direction—with a languorous, almost sensual deliberateness that made each second feel like an hour. She felt herself growing taller, her perspective shifting as the ground moved farther away, her spine lengthening, her posture straightening with an unconscious confidence she'd never possessed before.
And then there were the curves.
They came in like the tide—gradually at first, then all at once. Her hips widened with a slow, rolling expansion that shredded the seams of her white capri pants, each inch accompanied by a pulse of warmth that made her toes curl. The magma-skin stretched and flowed to accommodate the new geography of her body, veins of golden light tracing the expanding contours like rivers of molten gold.
Her thighs thickened next—dramatically—each one swelling with a ponderous, heavy fullness that was completely, absurdly, cartoonishly disproportionate to anything resembling normal human anatomy. They pressed together, the inner surfaces meeting and sliding against each other with a sound like shifting tectonic plates, and each point of contact sent sparks—literal sparks—dancing into the air.
"Oh," Gwen breathed, and her voice was different now. Deeper. Richer. Like coals being stirred in a furnace. "Oh my."
Her backside expanded with the same glacial inevitability, each second adding another impossible inch of curvature until it jutted behind her like a geological formation—a mesa, a butte, a natural wonder that would have had its own Wikipedia page. The remains of her pants gave up entirely, disintegrating into ash that floated away on the heat she was radiating.
Her waist, by contrast, pulled in—not painfully, but with a satisfying tightness, like a corset made of warm honey—creating a ratio between her hips and waist that would have made a Renaissance painter weep and a physicist question the structural integrity of the universe.
Her chest surged forward next, and the less said about the specifics the better—except that it was slow, and it was a lot, and with each increment Gwen made a small, pleased sound, like someone sinking into a perfect bath. Her blue shirt had long since been reduced to cinders, and honestly, clothing seemed like an absurd concept for a being made of living magma anyway.
Her face was the last to change. She felt the warmth wash up her neck—which had lengthened elegantly, gaining a swan-like grace—and across her jaw, her cheeks, her forehead. Her hair didn't so much burn away as become fire. It erupted from her scalp in a cascade of yellow-white flame that fell to where her mid-back would have been if her mid-back hadn't been a landscape of volcanic rock and molten rivers. The fire-hair moved like real hair—tossing, swaying, occasionally crackling—but it was flames, dancing and alive and casting warm light across the crater.
Her eyes opened last. They were pure, brilliant yellow-white, like staring into the heart of a star, and they focused on Ben with an intensity that made him take another step back.
The transformation was complete.
Where Gwen Tennyson—ten-year-old girl, straight-A student, Ben's annoying cousin—had stood, there was now... something else. Someone else. She stood nearly seven feet tall on legs that could best be described as "structurally implausible," her entire body a masterwork of volcanic excess. Every surface glowed with inner fire, veins of magma pulsing in slow, rhythmic patterns across a figure so aggressively, absurdly curvaceous that it seemed to be actively mocking the concept of physical plausibility.
She was Heatblast. A female Heatblast. A preposterously, overwhelmingly, reality-defyingly thicc female Heatblast.
And she was looking at Ben like he was the most precious thing in the entire universe.
Ben Tennyson had seen a lot of weird stuff in his ten years of life. He'd seen Grandpa Max eat a live beetle. He'd seen his dad try to assemble IKEA furniture. He'd once watched a kid at school sneeze so hard his retainer flew out and hit the teacher.
None of it—none of it—had prepared him for this.
"...Gwen?" he managed.
The massive, glowing, impossibly proportioned fire-woman tilted her head. The motion sent her mane of fire-hair cascading over one shoulder, individual flames licking at the air. A smile spread across her face—a face that was still recognizably Gwen's in structure, but rendered in magma and light, all sharp angles and warm glow.
"Ben," she said, and her voice was a thing of wonder—deep and warm and resonant, like someone had given a voice to a crackling hearth fire. It echoed slightly, as if coming from inside a furnace, but it was undeniably, impossibly fond. "Oh, Ben."
She took a step toward him. The ground sizzled under her foot—a foot that was, for the record, bare and proportionally enormous, because it had to be, given the engineering challenges presented by the rest of her. The crater floor scorched and cracked with each step, leaving glowing footprints behind her.
"Uh," Ben said. He took a step backward. "You, uh. You look... different."
"Do I?" Gwen—Heatblast—looked down at herself. She seemed to notice her new form for the first time, and rather than the screaming horror that Ben expected, her expression shifted into one of surprised delight. She ran her glowing hands down her sides, tracing the dramatic curvature of her waist and hips with a slow, appreciative motion.
"Oh, wow," she breathed, and small jets of flame puffed from her lips like visible words. "This is... I'm... wow."
"Gwen, you're on fire," Ben pointed out, because someone had to state the obvious.
"I know!" she said brightly. Brightly. Gwen Tennyson—the girl who had spent the entire drive cataloging reasons why this summer was going to be terrible, who hadn't said a single kind word to him in recent memory, who viewed his existence as a personal insult from the universe—was smiling at him like he'd just handed her a puppy wearing a graduation cap.
"Aren't you... freaked out?" Ben asked.
Heatblast-Gwen took another step toward him. Then another. Each footfall was a minor seismic event, given the sheer mass of her lower half. Her thighs rubbed together with each step, producing a sound like boulders grinding and sending tiny sparks cascading to the ground. Her hips swayed with a motion that was less "walking" and more "continental drift."
"Why would I be freaked out?" she asked, and she was close now—close enough that Ben could feel the heat radiating off her like standing next to an open oven. It wasn't unpleasant, actually. It was like being wrapped in a warm blanket. "I feel amazing. I feel powerful. And—"
She reached down toward him, and Ben flinched, expecting to be burned. Instead, her massive, glowing hand cupped the side of his face with a tenderness that was completely, utterly alien to every interaction they'd ever had. Her touch was warm—very warm—but not painful. Like sunlight concentrated into a palm.
"—and you're here," she finished softly, as if that was the most important thing. As if his presence was the cherry on top of an already perfect sundae.
"Okay, what happened to you?" Ben asked, because this was wrong. This was bizarro world. Gwen didn't talk to him like this. Gwen talked to him like he was something she'd found on the bottom of her shoe. "You hate me."
Heatblast-Gwen's luminous eyes widened, and something that looked disturbingly like hurt flickered across her face.
"Hate you?" she repeated, and her voice cracked—literally cracked, like stone splitting, with a flash of light visible in the fissures. "Ben, I could never hate you. You're—you're everything. You're my favorite person. I—"
She stopped. Blinked. Tilted her massive, flame-haired head.
For just a moment—a fraction of a second—something flickered behind her eyes. Confusion. A remnant of the old Gwen, the real Gwen, surfacing briefly to wonder why she was cradling Ben Tennyson's face and calling him her favorite person. The internal contradiction was visible on her face like a glitch in a computer program.
Then it was gone, smoothed over, and the warmth returned twice as strong.
"Come on," she said, straightening up to her full, towering height. From Ben's perspective, looking up at her was like looking up at a skyscraper made of lava and bad decisions. "We should get back to Grandpa Max. It's dark, and it's cold, and you're not dressed warmly enough." She said this last part with a disapproving frown, as if a ten-year-old in a t-shirt and jeans on a summer night was a grave wardrobe malfunction.
"Gwen, it's June. It's like seventy degrees—"
"You could catch a cold." She said it with absolute, inarguable finality. Then she bent down—a process that involved a truly heroic amount of structural rearrangement, given her proportions—and before Ben could react, scooped him up.
"HEY! Put me—"
She held him against her chest. Which was. Well. Warm. And also extremely soft for something made of volcanic rock, in a way that defied mineralogy. He was cradled against her like a teddy bear, his head resting against a surface that was smooth and heated and gently pulsing with inner light.
"There," she said with satisfaction, as if she'd solved a complex equation. "Now you won't be cold."
"I wasn't cold! I'm being carried by my cousin who's a fire alien! This isn't—Gwen, put me down!"
"No." She said it cheerfully. Decisively. Without a shred of the argumentative energy that usually characterized their interactions. This wasn't Gwen disagreeing with him—this was Gwen making a decision, with the serene confidence of someone who knew they were right about everything, always, forever.
She began walking out of the crater. Each step was an event. The ground shook. Sparks flew. Nearby vegetation had the good sense to combust and get out of the way. Her massive, glowing form moved through the forest like a ship through water—slowly, inevitably, leaving a wake of scorched earth and confused wildlife.
Ben, held firmly in arms that could have crushed granite and were instead cradling him like a baby bird, could do nothing but go along for the ride.
"This is so weird," he muttered.
"What's weird?" Gwen asked innocently. A tree that was too close to their path burst into flames. She didn't notice.
"Everything! You're—you're an alien! You're a fire alien! You're carrying me like—like—"
"Like I care about you?" she finished, and looked down at him with those blazing white eyes, and there was so much genuine, uncomplicated affection in her gaze that Ben felt his brain short-circuit. "Because I do, Ben. I care about you so much. I'm going to take such good care of you this summer. I'm going to keep you safe and warm and—"
"We need to get this watch off you," Ben said firmly.
"What watch?" She glanced at her wrist. The Omnitrix was still there, partially merged with her magma-skin, the green hourglass glowing steadily. "Oh. That. Don't worry about that."
"Don't worry—"
"I'm not letting anything happen to you, Ben. Not ever. I'm going to protect you from—from everything." She tightened her grip on him slightly—still gentle, but with an undertone of immovability, like being hugged by a building. "Nothing is going to hurt you as long as I'm here."
Ben opened his mouth to respond.
That was when the Omnitrix beeped.
The sound was small—a quiet, electronic beebeep that shouldn't have been audible over the crackle of Gwen's body and the ambient sounds of a forest that was actively on fire in several places. But Gwen heard it. And her reaction was immediate.
She stopped walking. Dead stop. The serene, adoring expression on her face vanished, replaced by something that could only be described as furious alarm. She looked down at the Omnitrix on her wrist as if it had personally insulted her.
"No," she said.
Beebeep.
The green hourglass was flashing. Green. Yellow. Green. Yellow. A steady, insistent rhythm that Ben recognized instinctively as a countdown, even though he had no frame of reference for what it was counting down to.
"No," Gwen said again, more forcefully. Her body flickered—just for an instant, her magma-skin paled, cooled slightly at the edges, and the veins of light dimmed. The transformation was trying to reverse itself. She was trying to turn back.
And Gwen—Heatblast Gwen—was fighting it.
"Don't you dare," she snarled at the watch, and there was a sound from deep inside her—a geological sound, like magma churning in the throat of a volcano. Her entire body flared brighter, hotter, the flames on her head roaring up in a bonfire of defiance. The air around her shimmered and distorted with heat haze. Ben felt the temperature spike and yelped.
"Gwen—ow, hot—"
Instantly, the heat around Ben dropped. Even in her rage at the watch, she maintained a cocoon of bearable temperature around him, because of course she did. Her fury was directed entirely at the small device on her wrist that was trying to take this away from her.
Beebeep. Beebeep.
The flashing was faster now. Her right hand—massive, glowing, dripping with small drops of liquid rock—came up and clamped over the Omnitrix, pressing down on the faceplate as if she could physically hold the transformation in place.
"I'm. Not. Changing. Back." Each word was punctuated by a pulse of heat that made the surrounding air ripple. Her body was at war with itself—patches of cooled, darkened rock appearing across her surface only to be immediately re-ignited by sheer force of will. Her flames guttered and surged, guttered and surged, like a candle in a hurricane that was simply too angry to go out.
BEEBEEP. BEEBEEP. BEEBEEP.
"SHUT UP!" Gwen roared at the watch, and a geyser of fire erupted from her free hand, shooting thirty feet into the air and turning the canopy above them into a brief, spectacular chandelier of burning pine needles. Somewhere in the distance, a park ranger was going to have a very bad night.
The Omnitrix flashed one final time—red, this time, an angry, insistent red—and Gwen screamed. Not in pain. In defiance. In absolute, unbridled refusal to comply. She was a being of living fire, of geological power, of curves that laughed in the face of physics, and she was NOT going to be told what to do by a piece of jewelry.
Her body blazed white-hot. The ground beneath her feet melted, her massive form sinking an inch into liquefied rock. Her fire-hair became a pillar of flame that reached for the stars. The heat was extraordinary—Ben had to shield his eyes, even in the protective bubble she maintained around him.
And then—
The beeping stopped.
The red light faded. The green hourglass resumed its steady, passive glow.
Gwen stood there, panting—could a fire alien pant?—her entire body flickering with residual fury. Slowly, the white-hot blaze subsided back to her normal red-orange. The flames on her head settled from "volcanic eruption" back to "really aggressive campfire." The ground around her began to cool, though it would bear scorch marks for years.
She had won. Through sheer stubbornness—the one trait that had carried over from human Gwen completely intact—she had overridden the Omnitrix's timeout function.
"...Gwen?" Ben ventured, from the safety of her arms.
She looked down at him. The fury drained from her face like water from a tub, replaced instantly by that warm, doting, completely uncharacteristic adoration.
"Sorry about that, sweetie," she said, and kissed the top of his head. A small, careful kiss that left a faintly warm spot in his hair. "The silly watch was trying to ruin everything. But it's okay now. Everything's okay."
"Did you just call me sweetie?!"
"Would you prefer 'honey'? 'Sweetheart'? 'Pumpkin'?"
"I'd prefer BEN! My name! Because I'm your COUSIN!"
"You're my favorite cousin," she corrected, with the tone of someone bestowing a great honor.
"I'm your only cousin!"
"Which makes you extra special." She beamed at him. Sparks literally flew from her smile.
Ben dropped his face into his hands. "I want to go home."
"You are home," Gwen said sweetly, holding him a little tighter. "Home is wherever we're together."
And she resumed walking through the forest, a seven-foot-tall, impossibly proportioned fire alien carrying a deeply traumatized ten-year-old boy toward a campsite where a retired... plumber was probably wondering why the sky was on fire.
Behind them, the crater glowed faintly in the darkness. The pod sat empty. And the forest, slowly, began the long process of putting itself out.
Summer vacation had officially begun.
TO BE CONTINUED...