After everything that had happened with the alien werewolf, the collapsing cave, and the volcano suddenly deciding that millions of years of inactivity was apparently enough, the sun had already begun to settle down once again.
The entire ordeal had lasted far longer than any of them had expected.
Between chasing an alien werewolf across Canyon de Chelly, getting trapped underground, nearly being buried alive, stopping a volcanic eruption, and somehow discovering that Ben's newest transformation was actually an alien werewolf instead of a Navajo curse, it had been one of the longest days any of them could remember.
Technically speaking, it wasn't even just one day anymore. Most of them had been awake for almost two days straight.
After some time since returning to the village, Gold Ship had stopped talking for more than five consecutive minutes, which was honestly the clearest sign that everyone was exhausted.
Seeing the state they were all in, Wes had invited the Tennysons to stay the night instead of immediately hitting the road again.
Max had happily accepted the offer.
After everything that had happened, sleeping in an actual bed sounded better than sleeping inside the Rust Bucket.
The others didn't argue either.
The group had gathered inside Wes's house while dinner was being prepared. The atmosphere was far calmer than it had been at any point during the previous two days.
"Hey, has anyone seen Evan anywhere?" Ben suddenly asked, finally noticing something that should have been obvious much sooner.
Now that he thought about it, Evan hadn't been with them at all since they returned to the village.
"He is at that junkyard," Orfevre answered without looking up.
She sat nearby with her newly acquired set of clacker balls, absentmindedly spinning them around her fingers as she continued trying to recreate whatever she had accidentally done inside the cave.
Every now and then, a faint golden spark would appear around the weapon before immediately vanishing again. Unfortunately for her, nothing else happened.
"If you don't mind me asking," Kai said, looking slightly confused, "why is he even at that junkyard?"
She genuinely didn't understand.
After everything that had happened, the first thing most people would do was eat something, drink water, and collapse into the nearest bed. Instead, Evan had apparently gone to a scrapyard.
"Oh, Big Bro likes making weird stuff," Gold Ship explained from where she sat on the floor.
She was currently playing with her Rubik's Cube while holding a conversation at the same time.
"His aliens are really smart and can build cool toys."
"Toys?" Kai repeated.
"Mm-hmm." Gold Ship nodded enthusiastically.
"According to him, those are upgrades for his watch." Orfevre said from the side. The clacker balls spun around her wrist again.
Meanwhile, Kai was still stuck on something else.
"And your grandpa isn't worried?" she asked.
There was a slight pause before Kai continued. "I mean, he hasn't eaten anything. He hasn't slept. He probably hasn't even rested since all of this started."
When she put it like that, it actually sounded a little concerning.
"We tried," Gwen said with a sigh.
There was this one time they caught him staying up late at night, building something. Concerned for his health, they try to convince him to go to bed, only for Evan to turn into Pesky Dust and put them all to sleep.
"That idiot isn't a baby that needs to be cared for," Orfevre suddenly said from the side.
Her tone remained completely unbothered as she continued experimenting with her clacker balls. "He'll be fine."
A faint golden spark appeared around the clacker balls again, only to disappear shortly after. Orfevre frowned as she tried again, with nothing happening.
Meanwhile, Kai glanced between Orfevre and the door.
"But you had checked the entrance at least six times in the last thirty minutes." Kai suddenly blurred out.
This caused Orfevre's face to turn into a shade of red as she threw her clacker balls, accidentally activating her aura and destroying the door in the process.
Kai's heart nearly jumped out of her chest as she ducked down just in time for those clacker balls filled with unstable aura to fly past her head and completely demolish her door.
Seeing that everyone was now staring at her, Orfevre coughed awkwardly.
"Besides," Orfevre continued, trying to play it off as if she didn't care, "if he somehow manages to blow himself up, I'll just beat him up after he gets better."
"That's... oddly caring in a very threatening way," Kai said, choosing her words carefully.
...
At the junkyard where Evan had been the entire time everyone else went back to the village to rest, he had stayed behind and kept working without really stopping to think about anything else. After turning into Super Big Chill and flying up to freeze the running magma, he had remembered that Big Chill could eat metal, and since lava was basically just superheated liquid rock and mineral mixed together, his curiosity got the better of him. So, naturally, he started eating part of it.
That decision had led to a problem he had not expected at all.
Because Super Big Chill was not just a stronger form, but an evolved version of Big Chill in what was basically the ideal survival condition for the next thousand years, even the species' reproductive cycle had changed along with it in order to better adapt. In other words, he did not need to wait eighty years anymore. He just needed to consume enough metal to reproduce offspring.
Which was how Evan had accidentally ended up with twenty-one evolved baby Necrofriggians.
After realizing that, he went straight back to the junkyard and started working on a solution. Using Juryrigg, Brainstorm, and Grey Matter, he had put together that housing cube piece by piece, carefully building it until it was stable enough to actually function. Once he was satisfied with it, he let his Another Omnitrix absorb it, giving his children a proper place to stay.
He could have done the easy thing and pulled a "Ben" letting them go free while sometimes later claiming he is a mother and cares for his children, but he had no clue where they were. Or he could totally pull a "Vergil" and disappear into the night, dark shadow left behind.
But that was not really his style.
What Ever Gold valued most was family, and those twenty-one Necrofriggians were his children now, whether he had meant for that to happen or not. He could not just abandon them. The best thing he could do was give them a choice, whether they wanted to stay with him in their new home or go somewhere else out in the cosmos. He would not force them either way.
There was also another reason he had made the Genesis Ark Engine in the first place. If any of his super aliens ever became sentient and decided they wanted him gone, like Ben's Ultimate aliens would later on, then at the very least they would have no reason to complain about their living conditions. The Genesis Ark Engine basically created the best possible environment anyone could ask for, and that made it a lot harder for anyone to say he had treated them poorly.
Still busy in the junkyard, Juryrigg was finishing the last component of the suit-like device he had been assembling. The moment he snapped the final piece into place, he looked at the finished super laptop with a cheerful little grin, clearly proud of himself.
"Hmmm," Juryrigg muttered to himself, scratching his head in confusion. "Juryrigg is super useful. Why does Ben rarely utilize him?"
He remembered how Ben usually treated Juryrigg like one of his weaker aliens and barely used him at all, which only made Evan more confused for a second before he simply shrugged it off.
"Not my problem."
He closed the super laptop, then placed it inside his Another Omnitrix.
By using and combining the intelligence and skills of Juryrigg, Brainstorm, and Grey Matter, Evan had not only nearly cleared the entire junkyard of useful scraps and clutter, but had also upgraded his item storage space, improved his battery, and created several more upgrade modules for his Another Omnitrix.
After that, he tapped the Omnitrix dial and returned to human form.
Evan stood in the now nearly empty junkyard, cracking his neck, then rolling his shoulders and back as he finally let out a breath.
Stretching his legs, Evan tapped his new Air Shoes on the ground, activating them before he started skating away at high speed. It didn't take him more than ten minutes to return to the village.
Stopping just outside of it, Evan turned off his Air Shoes and began walking normally inside to avoid causing panic for the village. As he walked calmly into the village, the light wind caused his white sleeves to wave, revealing a set of new mechanical wristbands attached to his wrists.
...
After bidding farewell to Wes and Kai, the Tennysons return to their cross-country road trip.
Sometime later, on a dark and stormy night in New Mexico, the Rust Bucket was parked beside a small roadside hotel while rain poured steadily from the sky above, turning the entire landscape into a blurred stretch of darkness broken only by the occasional flash of lightning and the distant roll of thunder echoing across the land. Thick clouds had swallowed the moon completely, and every so often the whole world outside the windows would light up for just a second before falling back into shadow again.
After everything they had been through recently, the atmosphere inside the Rust Bucket was almost shockingly calm.
Well... calm by Tennyson standards, anyway.
Max had already retired to the back bunk and was trying to get some much-needed sleep. Unfortunately for him, the younger generation did not seem particularly interested in giving him that kind of mercy.
Ben and Gwen had taken over one side of the Rust Bucket and were locked in a heated Sumo Slammer match on Ben's gaming console, both of them leaning forward with the kind of intensity that suggested they had started this as a joke and had somehow turned it into a matter of personal pride. Neither one of them was willing to admit defeat, which meant the game had already become far more serious than it probably should have been.
Across from them, Evan and Orfevre were sitting together with complete focus on Evan's newly upgraded super laptop, which was currently running something far more ambitious than anything Ben had loaded onto his own machine. Unlike Ben's console, which was just handling a simple game, Evan's device was running a full recreation of Devil May Cry, rebuilt and improved using a combination of his own memories and Brainstorm's enhanced intelligence and electro-neural processing. Evan then relied on his memory to recreate and remake an entire game from scratch and then immediately make it better.
What he had created was a massive remastered collection containing every major storyline and chapter from Devil May Cry 3, Devil May Cry 1, Devil May Cry 2, Devil May Cry 4, and Devil May Cry 5, along with improved combat, expanded story sequences, additional character interactions, refined enemy encounters, rebalanced weapons, and even a fully functional Player versus Player mode.
Which, at the moment, was being used for exactly what everyone expected it to be used for.
Sibling violence.
On the screen, Dante and Vergil were trying very hard to destroy each other, and the same could be said for Evan and Orfevre, who were both sitting far too close to the laptop for the amount of trash talk currently flying between them.
"Look, Big Bro and Big Sis Oru are fighting again, but this time in-game."
Gold Ship giggled as she held up Orfevre's phone so that Dream Journey could see.
On the screen, Dream Journey was video-calling them from somewhere else, her expression calm and patient in the way only an eldest sibling could manage after being exposed to this sort of thing for years.
"It seems some things never change," Dream Journey said with a gentle smile.
She had long since gotten used to the constant fighting between her younger siblings, and at this point, if the two of them were still bickering, competing, or trying to beat each other up over something trivial, then it mostly just meant they were healthy, which was apparently enough reassurance for her.
On the laptop screen, Vergil's Yamato clashed against Dante's Rebellion, and at nearly the exact same moment Orfevre kicked Evan in the side in real life, just enough to throw off his timing so that he missed his Royal Guard and got hit by a Judgement Cut.
"Ha." Orfevre smirked. "Got ya!"
"Hey!" Evan snapped, elbowing her back while trying to keep Dante from getting caught by Vergil's Mirage Edge.
Orfevre immediately stepped on his foot, breaking his combo chain before he could recover.
Dream Journey sighed from the phone screen, though she was clearly fighting back a smile of her own. "Yep. Definitely healthy."
Gold Ship nodded with great seriousness. "Very healthy."
After talking for a few more minutes, Dream Journey glanced toward something off-screen, and her expression shifted into something more relaxed and familiar.
"Alright. I'll see you guys in a month and a half."
"Right, see you in a month and a half," Gold Ship replied with a bright smile, waving enthusiastically at the phone.
"Love you, goodbye."
"Love you too."
The call ended shortly after that.
Once the screen went dark, Gold Ship immediately went to steal her Big Bro's snacks again, now that he is distracted.
Beside them, a sudden cheer broke out from the other side of the Rust Bucket.
"Oh yeah! Top score for the Gwen Warrior!" Gwen threw both arms into the air triumphantly, nearly knocking the gaming console off-balance in the process.
On Ben's gaming console, the scoreboard proudly displayed her latest score.
GWEN WARRIOR - 83,255,890 POINTS
Directly beneath it sat Ben's score.
57,302 POINTS
The difference was so ridiculous that everyone nearby noticed it immediately.
Ben stared at the screen in silence for a moment, and then, with the solemn expression of someone entering the first stage of grief, he gave a dismissive huff and crossed his arms.
"Beginner's luck."
Gwen nearly choked. "Beginner's luck?!"
"Absolutely," Ben said with complete confidence, as if saying it louder would somehow make it true. "Now let me show you how a real Sumo Slammer Samurai handles this."
He immediately pushed his joystick forward and sent his avatar charging toward a treasure chest.
The second his character reached it, a giant purple samurai suddenly appeared out of nowhere and promptly smacked Ben's avatar across the screen, sending it flying as the game registered another loss of life.
Gwen slowly turned toward him with one eyebrow raised. "Getting his butt kicked by Kenko the Shapeshifter?"
She leaned back slightly, looking far too pleased with herself. "Careful, you only have two lives left."
Ben narrowed his eyes at her, and the moment Gwen realized what that look meant, she already knew something stupid was about to happen.
Without warning, Ben reached over and grabbed her controller.
"BEN!"
Gwen's character immediately walked off a cliff.
The avatar screamed all the way down before disappearing off-screen.
Gwen stared at the console in stunned silence, then slowly turned toward her cousin with an expression that was somewhere between outrage and disbelief.
"Ben, no fair!"
Ben pointed dramatically at the screen. "Careful, you only have one life left."
"That is not how that works!"
The argument escalated immediately, as it usually did whenever the two of them got too competitive, and Max's patience finally snapped from the back bunk.
"Guys, please!" he shouted. "I'm trying to grab some shut-eye here!"
"Sorry, Grandpa!" Gwen called back.
For roughly seven seconds, peace returned.
Then Ben got an idea, and it was the kind of idea that only Ben Tennyson could possibly consider clever. While Gwen and the others were still distracted, he quietly stood up, tapped the Omnitrix dial down, and let the green light flood the Rust Bucket in an instant.
A moment later, Upgrade was standing where Ben had been, and without hesitation the techno-organic alien merged with the console, taking control of the machine and changing things faster than anyone could react.
The screen flickered, and the scoreboard refreshed. Gwen looked over just in time for her smile to vanish completely as she watched her high score disappear right in front of her eyes.
"Benjamin Kirby Tennyson!" she shouted, grabbing the console and shaking it in frustration. "You are such a cheater!"
The commotion finally dragged the Gold siblings' attention away from their own game. The sudden shout caused Gold Ship to jump and accidentally get trapped inside the fridge again.
Before the argument could continue much further, a bright flash of lightning suddenly lit up the entire night sky outside, turning the rain and darkness into a blinding white blur for a split second, and the thunder arrived almost immediately afterward with a deep crack that rattled the Rust Bucket itself. A massive bolt struck somewhere nearby, and then another came slamming directly into the vehicle's antennas.
Electricity surged through the metal frame, raced through the power lines, traveled up the outlet cords, and shot straight into the laptop and console all at once.
Light erupted everywhere, and the screens flashed violently.
For a brief instant, the entire Rust Bucket was filled with glowing color and crackling energy, and then, in the next instant, the group vanished.
And the Rust Bucket fell completely silent.
A few seconds later, Max shifted slightly in his bunk. Without opening his eyes, he let out a long, exhausted sigh and rolled over.
"Oh, finally," he muttered sleepily. "A little peace and quiet."