.

One of the first things Lenny registered was discomfort. Discomfort so great in its scale, it muscled its way past the initial pain of falling a great distance and landing on her tailbone.

It demanded her full and undivided acknowledgement. Like the thin pads of an insect crawling over her skin, disturbing the hairs and alerting the brain to its presence. Like someone took the entirety of her digestive tract, threw all and sundry into a blender and left it to run overnight.

Her stomach turned. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth, dry as a strip of sandpaper. And her butt hurt. It really, really, really hurt.

Another thing Lenny noticed was that she laid on her chest, on the cool surface of an unknown vessel. She stretched a hand over and behind to try and alleviate a bit of her pain, to try and massage what portion of her lower back she could reach while on the floor, and she realized her fingers were no longer covered in scales. That they weren’t elongated with the addition of one too many joints. That they weren’t a deep shade of red and tipped with claws sharp as a blade.

And that when her shoulders bent, they bent as they would when she was in her normal form. Her human form. Without the obstruction of leathery wings reminiscent of a bat’s. Lennox’s eyes surveyed her surroundings, her vision dim and hazy, and she found she no longer possessed an enhanced ability to see in the dark.

She could see, but barely. Using her sense of touch as her sight was currently out for the count, Lennox patted the wrist of her left arm with quick, hurried motions. The sound of skin slapping skin changed when her palm connected with something raised, inorganic. Her lungs flattened with the release of a glorious sigh. It was still there, her watch.

Lenny brought its screen close enough to her eyes that the tip of her nose grazed it, and though the image was black around the edges and filtered through a blurry film, the piercing red glare of the watch’s emblem read well. From her scratchy, dry throat, a groan burst.

In the duration of maybe a few minutes, Lennox had managed to task her watch to the point of it having to time out, to recharge. And until it was done teaching her a lesson, she wouldn’t be able to perform any more transformations, and the wretched red would continue to hold her hostage. Coupled with her visibility compromised and her legs now tubes of paste, she was as vulnerable as she’d ever been.

How icy.

The need to wretch and heave until the end of time passing, Lennox braced her hands beneath her body and pulled herself up to her knees. Dizzy, she lost her balance once, and her forehead dinged onto a panel plated with metal. Blinking, she rubbed her eyes with the sleeve of her jacket while her other hand felt up the wall to which she was pressed.

Yep, that’s metal. The walls of her dad’s toolshed were concrete.

Her ears popped and through a dull ringing, a world of noise invaded her senses. Scuffles of shoes, the palming of a forehead. Unintelligible moans slowly morphing into comprehensible speech. Voices.

Familiar voices.

Lennox wiped her eyes for the last time, and she saw.

The space she—and the three incapacitated teenagers—were in was small and concave. The walls curved inward, a cylindrical shape with a flattened base they stood on. There was a door on one end, one she thought she might find at the entrance of a hospital, only this door was made out of the same material of the walls of the room: metal. Beside it, a keypad.

Save for them, there wasn’t much else in the room. To the left of the door, tucked into a corner, were two backpacks and a dirty pair of men’s trainers. To the right of the door was a parked car.

A green car, with two black lines each the width of her palm running from the tip of the bonnet, up the hood and down to the trunk. Next to the back left tire of the car were the three kids that had appeared in the shed and tried to steal her watch.

Two of them spoke amongst themselves: the girl with fine copper hair tied back in what was once a ponytail, and the boy that had touched an iron rack and had his entire body coated in the stuff like a second skin soon after. They both knelt on the floor, the girl running her trembling hands from her hair to a small device in her hands. Something that caught the glint of the light fixtures in the roof of the room and had a chain that brushed the floor as she held it in her hands.

The red-headed girl shook like a dry leaf in a wind, and her watering green eyes ran over the object clasped between her white knuckles. “Oh God. Oh God. I dropped it. I can’t believe I—I cannot believe I dropped it. Me! I dropped it! Is it broken? Does it look broken, Kevin? Oh God.”

The boy, Kevin, put his hands on the girl’s shoulder and said something to her in a low voice that Lennox couldn’t hear, though his body language indicated it must have been something reassuring. Whatever it was rolled right off the girl, oil on a piece of foil paper. She just stared at the device and shook and cried.

They were busy, Kevin and the girl, and didn’t notice across the room, Lennox was now on her feet. Who did notice, however, was the other boy Kevin had called Ben while they were still in the shed.

Ben, on his hands and knees, rubbed a hand down his face and fought his stomach with all his might to keep the strawberry toast and Mr. Smoothie shake he’d had for brunch earlier in the day from making a sudden appearance outside of his body.

But his gut was strong. And he, after making two multi-dimensional jumps in ten minutes, was thirsty, a little blind, and a lot weak. He feared this was a battle he’d soon lose, and Kevin would genuinely murder him if he projectile vomited on his car. Again.

As he took off his green jacket, intending to press its collar that was drenched in deodorant against his nose to act as a form of smelling salt, his eyes wandered the room in search of a possible threat; a force of habit. Ben looked around the docking area of the Rust Bucket, and he started when he saw a figure standing over the ramp, trying her hardest to phase through the wall she pressed so fiercely against.

His jacket slipped through his fingers and onto the floor.

The slight sounds of Gwen muttering to herself, and Kevin giving him the side eye in his peripheral vision as he tried to convince Gwen that everything was A-Okay (it wasn’t) stirred together in a clear-as-mud hum. Mixed until his senses dulled and all he had left was the ghostly vision of the girl, Lennox Crash, there. In the Rust Bucket. In their reality.

Paradox had said his pocketwatch would be good for two trips, which they’d already exhausted. The pocketwatch, the Chrono Navigator, which they may or may not have pulverized.

The fact that they had returned and the professor wasn’t there to receive them spoke volumes in and of itself.

He stared. She froze.

Then she moved. Then she was running. But she ran in jerked sprints. Aimless movements from here to there and there to here, with no real sense of direction. Because, honestly, where the heck was she going to go?

Where the scorch was she going to go?

The fog that had settled over her mind when she opened her eyes and saw the strange room had cleared, and in its place, a chilling sharpness pierced through her consciousness into her brain. This room, whatever it was, wasn’t the shed. This room, wherever it was, wasn’t in the backyard of her family’s home in Stanlin City. Was she even still on Earth?

Her dad. He’d told her to waiting for the transport guys, that they were bringing in new shipments from the warehouse in Connecticut. She was supposed to help them unload the stuff and pay them. That was her job.

But she was gone now. She was gone, just like that.

What would he think, her father, when Patrick and Quentin called the Shack and told him what they’d been met with when they had arrived? The uninviting countenance of his wife? That her eyebrows furrowed in a glare, and her forehead glistened with the sweat of the workout they’d just interrupted? That they’d run into her instead of the young girl that always laughed at their clever knock-knock jokes and asked about their wives and kids? Would he scowl at his daughter’s incompetence, as was his wont? Would he worry when the night fell, and she was still nowhere to be found?

Lennox put her head in her hands and bent at the waist, mind racing. In all the months she’d worn the watch, she’d never experienced a problem of this magnitude.

There had been monsters. Monsters who came from the skies and tried to take her watch. Monsters that scurried away with their tails between their legs and never bothered her again. Nothing like these teenagers, and their apparent skills of teleportation. Never anything like this.

They wanted her watch. Maybe she should just give it to them. Maybe they’d let her go then. Or not. Maybe, when she ceased to be of use to them, they’d hurt her.

That boy, Ben, had come at her with an iron pole in the shed, and Kevin’s first impression was one of physical confrontation. She couldn’t take them, not without the watch. It was the only thing she had left now looking after her. It was all she was now.

“I want my dad,” she whispered, and found in the years since after the accident that left him paralyzed and cold and a world away even when they were in the same room, she meant it. Louder, she said, “I want my dad. And I want to go home.”

“Yeah, you and me both.” Kevin stood, a frown dragging his mouth down at the corners. A line settled on his forehead as he put his hand in his pocket, produced a circular device that looked like a wide, flat button, and pressed a finger to it. Lennox recognized the symbol on the button before he turned and tucked it back into his worn jeans. The same one on her watch, but it was green.

Gwen sniffed, using the knuckles on her right hand to wipe at her cheek. She hung the pocketwatch back around her neck and pinched the bridge of her nose when she caught sight of Lennox, still hunched over. Still holding her head as if should she loosen her grip in the slightest, it would explode. “We messed up, guys. We really messed up. The Chrono Navigator might be busted. And, I mean, what are we going to do about her?”

Ben had seen Kevin handle his Plumber’s badge, and crossed his arms over his chest, exhaling through flared nostrils. He prepared himself for a chastising of the highest degree as he replied, “Kevin's called in reinforcements, so we may not have to worry about that. Give him a sec. You know how he likes to make an entrance.”

And with the addition of the new player in the game, one who arrived through the door behind where Kevin, Gwen, and Ben stood in the docking area, the next set of events happened in quick succession.

Azmuth had been seated in the cockpit of the childrens’ ship as they went to acquire a new Omnimatrix, awaiting their arrival with the aim of examining the device from this other reality. He’d received the signal of distress from Kevin Levin’s badge, and expelled a burdensome sigh.

It had been foolish to hope for anything other than mischance from the likes of Ben Tennyson. The boy had the word ‘nincompoop’ branded with a hot iron onto his forehead, knew it, and thought nothing of it.

Pushing a toggle on the dashboard at the pilot’s seat that served as an alternative to typing in the numerical key on the pad, Azmuth strolled into the docking bay, the laser he’d used to stun Benjamin with in his hands. He twisted the dial on the bottom, changing the setting to incapacitate, as he walked.

He’d barely looked the Lennox girl in the eye and heard a syllable of her plea to not hurt her before he shot her in the midsection. Her eyes rolled to the back of her head, her muscles relaxing faster than she could comprehend. She dropped to the ground, unconscious.

Azmuth shuffled over to her as Gwendolyn belted out a half-hearted protest concerning the callous way with which he had dispatched the girl. In a practiced, swift effort, the Galvan tuned out the feckless cacophony of his environment, and focused his attention solely on Lennox Crash’s left arm. On what covered most of it, from wrist to its middle, a marvelously crafted gauntlet of sorts.

His cousin and his friend little more than mumbles to his left as they debated what to do about Professor Paradox’s pocketwatch, Ben ignored their attempts to involve him in their conversation. Alternatively, he hovered over Azmuth’s shoulder and watched the alien work.

Azmuth poked and prodded at the watch with quick, almost tentative jabs. He worked in silence, twisting this knob, swiping a finger over the screen, and bending low to level his bulging eyes with the twin straps attaching it to Lennox. He did all this and more, but the now red Omnitrix symbol never moved. Never twitched.

Seemingly out of other options, Azmuth leaped across Lennox’s waist to the other side of her body, where he grabbed her right hand. He took her index and middle finger as he jumped back to where her Omnitrix rested on her hand near her face; her shoulders shifted, but barely. Her eyes remained closed. Her Omnitrix remained unchanged.

At least until Azmuth tried to swipe the fingers of her right hand across the wide screen, tried to call up the aliens available. Nothing happened for five seconds. Soon after his attempt, though, the red emblem bled a pallid grey, and Azmuth sat back on his haunches. He said nothing. Did nothing.

Ben lowered himself to a knee beside him. “How’s it looking?”

Lennox slept silently and slept deeply, and it was easy to forget her state of slumber was artificially induced. Azmuth had been quiet for so long, Ben almost repeated his question for fear he’d whispered too low in an unconscious endeavor to not wake the sleeping girl.

“I cannot…” the alien ground out the words slowly, with a struggle. “Its artificial intelligence has barricaded itself and prevented me from accessing its systems. I cannot seem to access the Master Control. In fact, I find it difficult to successfully determine that it has a Master Control function to begin with.”

“Yikes.”

“Oh, yes. Its operating system is…advanced. Its energy core is unlike any I have come across over countless universes. The limits to its abilities, I cannot gauge. The watch…the watch has locked me out and refused to disengage from its wearer. I wager it remains in a state of ‘inaction’ to protect both itself and the girl, so a transformation cannot be forced. Incredible.”

“So.” Ben wondered, thoughtlessly. Stupidly. “Alternate reality Azmuth is basically smarter than you?”

The Galvan rose to a stand, hands fisted by his sides and horizontal eyelids narrowed to slits. Ben put his hands up, palms up, and smiled. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding. You can’t get into the watch right now. Okay, yeah. What does that mean for us?”

“It means it will remain on the arm of whomever it has latched itself onto now and forever more! It means that, once again and not for the first time, you have failed and failed miserably, Benjamin Tennyson. The fate of the galaxy, the fate of the universe as we know it, rests at the feet of Aggregor.” Azmuth threw his hands up and took off into a pace, his arms clasped behind his back. “It means that by bringing this child of a girl back here with you, you have doomed her along with us. You have ruined everything, Benjamin. Everything. And I cannot see a way this wrong can be righted.”

The smile wiped off his mouth and his face, a spectral, pale white, Ben sat on the floor and looked from Azmuth to Lennox. To her eyes unmoving behind their lids, to her slightly parted mouth and the rise and fall of her chest, to the watch around her wrist.

His memory wrestled to connect the image of the girl in the shed, the one that had turned into Jetray and faced them head-on in a fight, to the girl that skittered around the docking bay and, cowed, called for her father. Asked to go home. The girl that chose flight.

They’d messed up the Chrono Navigator. They’d messed up the plan to get a new Omnitrix. They’d messed up Lennox Crash’s life. He’d messed up Lennox Crash’s life.

A weight settled on his shoulder, and Ben glanced up into the red, puffy eyes of his cousin, Gwen. Gwen was a solid block of quartz, Ben thought, and she’d been that way since they were kids. Since they’d started on the road of heroics six years ago, when they were little more than toddlers at the age of ten. Tough, annoying. Smart where Ben was foolhardy. Unshakeable when Ben was petrified. And he was petrified now, but he saw in the emerald pools of her eyes, so was she.

The hand she’d put on his shoulder shifted up the back of his neck to rest in his hair. She patted him on the head once, her gaze moving to Kevin bending to put an arm under Lennox’s knees and another under her back, and hefting her into his arms. Kevin walked across the room toward his car. Ben watched him pull open the door to the backseat and start trying to figure out a way to maneuver Lennox in without bumping her head or knocking her foot.

Gwen hugged Ben close to her chest, breathing into his hair while Azmuth trotted over to demand Kevin lower the ramp so he could leave the ship. She said to him, “C’mon, Ben. We’ve gotta go.”

“Go where?” He whispered. His voice, a piece of ceramic china shattered on tile floors.

“Home. It’s past our curfew."

"What about...what about her?"

Gwen sighed. Heavy. Tired. Scared. "Kevin’s gonna take Lennox to his house for the night, and tomorrow, we’ll figure all of this out. Everything’s gonna be okay. I promise."

"How do you know, though? How can you possibly know that everything is gonna be okay?"

"I just do. I know. I'll fix this. We'll fix this. We'll be okay, I promise."

Ben closed his eyes and couldn't see how Gwen's words could be anything but a lie.