Demons, part two
A black-and-blue blur raced through the streets of Makai's capital city, with the ginger along. Gusts, and motes of dust, were left where it had passed, along with more than the occasional startled demon.
From a bird's-eye view, the figure could be followed with the naked eye. It and its passenger traveled west-ward, generally down a single road but down side-streets in the moments that circumstances demanded such. They zigged and zagged liberally through the cityscape.
From that same aerial vantage point, one could observe their intended destination as well. It laid still a handful dozen blocks ahead, a clearing in the cityscape.
There, suspended above the pavement a bit up in mid-air, hovered a circular portal into the Chaos Dimension, made of white-and-blue energies. This portal was alive with electrical discharge, but by the intent of its conjurer, it was bereft of the potency to endanger any living soul.
The plaza was surrounded by buildings both to the north and the south, leaving only exits from the area to the west and east. Something that many of Makai's residents appreciated was that the exits were wide enough, practically forty metres of open space between both sides of the streets leading up to the portal.
Into the surrounding buildings was built one large shop, which offered virtually anything that the mind could dream as its bartered goods. Mystical artifacts and high-tech gizmos, every sort of strange construction for every potential application. It went without saying that business was booming among demonkind.
The place had been built long ago, many centuries, to capitalize on the fact that this particular region of Makai featured a portal to another realm. It had only been good business sense, thought the Darkstalker who founded the place, and the man had been vindicated in this belief as the years passed and even as he passed with them and as the company passed to his bloodline.
Now, XLR8 and Gwen arrived and slowed to a halt in the plaza.
"Next time," said Gwen, a tad shakily, as she adjusted her wind-swept hair, "we're going with Big Chill..."
The Kineceleran reverted back to his human form, with a distinctive click and an explosion of emerald light and an inflood of Omni-energy into his entire physiology all brought on by a single mental image. The brunet gave a nod in assent to that.
While Gwen walked up to the portal, Ben remained where he stood and cast a glance at the Omnitrix.
The device had grown to cover his forearm, he noted, feeling nostalgic at the thought. Memories from long ago, when it had been smaller, bubbled to the surface of his mind.
From right in front of the swirling maelstrom, Gwen had paused in her walk and was looking his way with a knowing look in her eyes.
Ben raised his bare hand to the dial of the Omnitrix, pushing his finger against the east-facing button. The pressed button sunk in and glowed a bright shade of green. He gripped the ring, taking care to not touch the other buttons, then turned the faceplate around three times, never doing a full rotation.
Accepting the given command code, the Omnitrix began beeping. Then it shone from the inside, becoming coated in emerald light. Its exterior, AKA its chassis, turned predominantly its usual shade of vivid green, with part of its internal circuitry becoming black-colored sections.
The device began to shrink, drawing its extrusions on the immortal boy's forearm back into itself. As well, the reconfiguration withdrew much of the chassis into the Omnitrix dial, and the dial sank deeper into Ben's wrist. Seemingly finished, the light died down, and Ben could now see that only the control dials remained of this casing.
Around the two of them, several merchants were studying the unfolding events, their attentions drawn to the cousins by the light-shows.
"Care to fill me in on why you thought now was a good time to change the chassis?" asked Gwen, her tone half-sardonic.
Ben smirked, without looking in her direction, "Nope."
"First things first," thought Ben, recalling what had happened last time he reconfigured the watch - he'd had to manually unlock his favorites again, because it felt like messing with him. "Check if they're still there."
He turned the ring embedded in his wrist incrementally. The two sections of the hourglass section moved inward, forming a rhombus. The single-shade-of-black icon of Wildvine was presented to Ben. Moving the dial a nudge to the side, he was presented with the icon for his Terraspin body. Another turn, and the Terraspin icon was replaced with that of Big Chill. Turning it further, the Great Young One saw in sequence the icons for Frankenstrike, Blitzwolfer, Snare-oh and Symbion.
He quickly cycled through his entire arsenal. Once the icon for the Wildvine form was back on the screen, he withdrew his hand from the dial. As if in response to that gesture, the display moved the two sections of the rhombus back to their prior positions.
Lowering his Omnitrix arm, Ben began to walk towards the parting of the veil between planes. With his company assured in her mind, the ginger stepped through the portal. They exited the portal not a moment after having entered.
Where they had arrived, was the plane of existence that the one called Shuma-Gorath knew as both his dominion and an extension of his essence, the realm where all the uncountable servants of the Lord of Chaos dwelled - the Chaos Dimension.
The area of the realm where they had made their arrival was a meadowy region. Beneath their feet was unkempt emerald grass, above their heads was a violet-hued cloud-free sky and a sun so far up that it resembled little more than a dot on a canvas.
However, that was not all there was in the area. A stone's throw to the west, across an open meadow, dwelled a lone house. Shaped like a dome and colored faded-white, it had both windows and a front door. The two of them knew it best as home.
Almost as soon as Ben and Gwen had arrived in this world, they began trudging towards that building. After the passage of a fleeting moment, they had stepped into the house and Ben had closed the door after them.
An imaginary camera began to observe the room for an imaginary audience.
The interior of the house mirrored the shape of the exterior, save for (self-evidently) its smaller size. The living room had only a single wall to divide everything within from everything beyond. This inwards-curving wall was bare of things other than windows, a partial consequence of the shape. Rays of sunlight came in through a few of the windows, working alongside the electrical lighting to keep the living room bright.
Around the room were various pieces of furniture and assorted objects which the residents of the house had collected. At the room's floor's center, there was an opening in the floor almost twelve metres in diameter, and in that hole, a spiral staircase led down.
On a couch near the staircase, there sat a young-looking and moderately beautiful homo sapien woman (or something very similar) with long blonde hair from her head and a moderately figure-hugging dark-hued suit over everything below her neck. Her attention was on the metal arm lying on the table (as well, various components laid scattered about, on that same table) before her. The arrivals of Ben and Gwen escaped her notice.
The cousins took notice of what Winry was occupied with. With a brief look, as well as Gwen pointing to the blonde then moving the extended finger before her closed mouth, they agreed to not disturb her. Tiptoeing around, they leisurely approached the mechanic. Quietly, they sat down on the same couch. This elicited no observable reaction from the blonde.
The ginger of the pair wondered if Winry had noticed them; with how engrossed she occasionally got in this stuff, it was a real possibility she hadn't.
The blonde reached for the table, picking up a piece of orange cable. "Hey, guys," she greeted, off-hand, and stuck the one end of the cable (upon which was a triangular tip) into a slot surrounded by a veritable web of yellow wiring. The blonde noted briefly that Ben had changed the Omnitrix's design again, deciding it less than commentworthy.
"Whatcha doing?" sing-sang Ben.
"Just working on another Automail arm," disclosed Winry.
Ben shrugged, not finding it all that fascinating. An leisurely quietude quickly took hold, giving the trio ample opportunity to relax and Winry to tinker. It lasted about eight minutes, or thereabouts, before anyone spoke.
"Guys?" came Winry's voice, low and unreadable. The blonde had halted her work on the arm. "We're never going to ever be done, are we?"
They understood immediately what she meant. "Sure, yeah, of course we are," replied Ben, a dim smirk on his face. They had all eternity to do it, and he liked to think they had made good progress in it over all the past years.
Winry was not convinced, and sported a glum expression. How fast were new universes created via spacetime processes, pondered the blonde. One per second, or was it faster and/or more? There simply wasn't an answer, it was a blank variable in the equation. Second, how many universes were there out there already? A billion, or a trillion, or a quintillion, of them? Another blank variable, and an equally important one.
She knew they had made progress over the centuries, but what guarantee was there that it wouldn't be negated soon, or that it hadn't already been?
"I mean, we know how time works out there in the omniverse, right?" reminded the humanoid nanite swarm. "Time branches and splits, well, all the time if that makes sense, and it probably doesn't... alternate pasts and futures, that kind of thing. How do we know that for every universe that we put down, that a crapload of new planes doesn't take its place?"
It was a reasonable worry, thought Gwen, even as she regarded the blonde with a deadpan look. Ben looked almost bored; he recalled last time, barely two months ago by Karma, that one of them expressed this kind of sentiment.
"If we have to do this forever, then we'll just have to," replied the wielder of the Omnitrix, matter-of-factly. The brunet added, "Besides, there's nobody else anywhere this would be more fun with."
A mild smile flowered on the blonde's face, quickly rising in intensity. "Thanks, Ben."
What followed was a pleasant silence between the three of them; the younger duo relaxed in their seats while Winry began to resume her work.
On the existential plane that Shuma-Gorath had once governed his empire of many universes from, there was today a city. More than a city, incidentally - a megalopolis in the word's truest meaning.
Of the city that ran in nearly every direction beyond the mountain where the Great Young Ones had made their home and base, the Infinite City as it had been named in almost every language spoken by its citizenry, one might speak at length, but only one word was required to describe the infrastructure in full - inconstant.
In that society's every corner, nook and cranny, there was something always new and different to see. From a bird's eye view of it, one might catch glimpses of virtually every kind of construction in every shape or color that the mind might be able to dream up.
It was, however, not to be thought that Shuma-Gorath's realm was purely infrastructure, for in many places across the continents that the Infinite City reached across, the urban jungles came to a close, and the wilderness of all things nature took over. In those places, of pure and savage nature, there was much to speak of - lush forests and arid deserts, vast lakes and volcanoes that were resting but very much alive, the occasional mountain that reached up higher than even the clouds could follow, yadda yadda yadda.
Equally as widely varied as the terrains of this universe were the thousands of species who inhabited this plane of existence, alien lifeforms from the uncountable planets and universes that the Lord of Chaos had visited and brought upheaval to in his current quest which he had forcibly relocated to this realm (regardless of what they felt or thought about it) over the many years he had been a cosmic douchebag.
It might be a surprise, or perhaps not (in fact, it probably wouldn't be...), that this world was not perfect and eternally peaceful - As with most other places across the here and there of the omniverse, it needed heroes to defend the innocent, and to step in during occasions of strife and conflict to be the ones to save us all.
That was precisely what this realm had been given by its Lord of Chaos, in two groups as a matter of fact - The Justice League of Avengers, a coalition of twelve post-humans whose members possessed the gamut of superhuman abilities, and the Great Young Ones, a more-or-less arbitrary group of beings gathered from the furthest reaches of all reality to aid the evil god himself in his latest endeavor.
Nothing in that whole tirade, though, really related at the business at hand.
Said business was being conducted on the roof floor food court in a cafe that was shaped like a pyramid. There, around a hexagonal table and under a green sky, were Ben the shapeshifter, Gwen the magician, Vel'koz and Karma seated; the three of them who could eat were almost finished.
"It must suck to get old," voiced Ben to his tablemates.
Karma looked half-disapprovingly at him. "We are not unaging simply because we are immortal, Benjamin," stated the chocolate-skinned woman. "Our spirits age and mature as much and as fast as those of mortal beings. We are old women and men, even if we wear youthful bodies."
Ben shrugged his shoulders. "Never thought about it like that."
It didn't surprise Karma, not in light of who Ben was. A momentary silence lingered about the quartet, during which a five-feet tall spider-like creature with green fur approached their table. Coming to a halt beside Vel'koz, he waited a moment for the customer to pick the metal plate off his back.
"Thank you," the violet-garbed Ionian told the spider-thing, calmly taking the plate onto their table. On said plate were dining utensils and a blue rectangular fruit that was larger than her head. Happy with the compliment, the waiter departed their table with a skip in his eight-legged steps, to serve others attending.
"So, where are you planning to venture next?" inquired the tentacled behemoth who towered over them, to the Tennyson cousins. His voice was a distinctive gargle that sounded somewhat like metallic scraping. The slit iris of his largest eye glowed dimly.
It was Gwen who answered, and promptly. "I was thinking about going out north," the ginger snuck a split-second glance at the brunet, then looked back to Vel'koz.
Ben frowned pensively, straightening up in his sitting stance. He recalled faintly various places from northward - Hulks Valley, the Jungle of Great Insects, the race tracks, the Ring Library's northern section - that they had been to recently. Then, a smirk grew onto his face and his eyes went bright. "I'm so in."
The slit iris narrowed even thinner. Where, wondered the eldritch terror from an interstitial plane, in all infinity was Gwen planning to foray? "Are you intending any particular destination for this little sojourn of yours?"
Gwen shrugged her shoulders. "Not this time, just back on the road with us," the ginger rose from her seat, pushing her chair back with that same gesture. The other preteen stood up as well, quickly picking up his hoverboard.
"If you'll excuse me," said Gwen, to the Eye of the Void and Karma, "I'll grab Ben, and we'll be on our way."
Karma sighed mentally, face an unwavering deadpan, without moving from her chair. "Do as you see fit to. I will remind you, however, to avoid Hulks Valley," the Ionian knew that it might have been an unnecessary warning, for none went there without having a death-wish. Knowing them, and how brash they could be at times, though, it hardly hurt.
The children didn't answer, but went on their respective hoverboard. Karma and Vel'koz, and various other guests dining there, watched on as the cousins took off into the sky and towards the northern lands of the Infinite City.
In moments, they were beyond the sub-urban cityscape - mostly oval buildings - that surrounded the pyramidal restaurant. After a few further moments, they were dark specks against the bright canvas of the horizon. Once a full minute had elapsed, they were so far gone that neither one of them could see them anymore.
Karma then casually broke the silence that had ensued. "How has your month been, Vel'koz?"