Second story! Yay! I still haven't finished the first one, but oh well. I want this one out of my brain. Nobody's voted on my pole so I just picked one.
I am currently eating lemon icebox pie that my grandma made. Life is awesome.
Disclaimer: I don't own Ben 10; just all the characters that aren't in the show.
Star light star bright,
The first star I see tonight,
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have the wish I wish tonight.
~ Nursery Rhyme
They had been riding for hours, on their way back from yet another fight with Dr. Animo. Ben was stretched across the back seat trying to go to sleep when he saw it. He lazily pointed out the window for the benefit of his friends in the front seat and said, "Guys, look, it's a shooting star."
His cousin leaned forward so that she could see out of the front glass. "Uh-huh. It's really bright."
She was right. The falling star was burning blue in the nighttime sky, blotting out the stars in its path.
Kevin leaned to look. "It's getting bigger, too. Looks like it might crash."
"That's what killed the dinosaurs," Ben told him.
"Thank you for your limitless knowledge, Benji. I already knew that," the older teen shot his friend a withering look from the front seat. He was switching his gaze from the road to the star.
"Kev, pull over before you kill us, please," his girlfriend instructed, prodding his bare forearm (he was sporting shorter sleeves for the warmer weather). He ignored her. "It's really unlikely that it'll hit the planet; meteors tend to burn out in the atmosphere."
"But what if it's a star?" Ben sat up in the seat.
"Stars are millions of light-years away. They don't fall, anyway. They turn into black holes when they die," the redhead turned to look at her cousin. He seemed disappointed to learn it was just a hunk of rock.
"Guys," Kevin cut in, "Watch the star-meteor-whatever, it's gonna hit town!" The city of Bellwood was barely visible on the black horizon ahead of them. The star had a flaming blue and yellow trail behind it, and appeared to be headed for town.
"Ooh!" the hero of the universe squealed and bounced in his seat, "Go faster! Go faster! I wanna see where it lands!"
Kevin twisted to look at Ben. "Dude, what are you, like, five?"
"Kevin Levin! Watch the road!" Gwen smacked the back of his gorgeous black head. He sighed and turned back around in his seat.
The brunette in the back watched the blue streak fly towards town. "What if it hits one of our houses?"
"If it hits your house you'll have to be I hobo. If it hits me or Gwen's houses we'll just move in together," the driver grinned maniacally.
Ben began to say something, but never continued. The three of them watched in awe as Gwen was proven epically wrong. Right before their eyes, the meteor hit the ground in a bright blue explosion. For the next two minutes, Kevin broke every speed limit and the sound barrier trying to get to the crash site.
Upon their arrival, they practically leapt out the windows of the moving car in their effort to get to the crater. The ground was scorched, and the roots and branches of the surrounding trees burned brightly where the space rock had hit the ground just outside of Bellwood. The trio stared in shock at the bottom of the small crater.
"It's… gone," Gwen whispered in astonishment.
Gwen had been wrong from the beginning. Not all stars were balls of gas millions of miles away from the Earth. Some stars weren't stars at all, but members of an extremely rare alien species known as the Helios. Every few millennia, one of them lets their guard down and falls to a nearby planet.
The falling star that Ben had spotted was one of these aliens. This one in particular had been floating near Earth since she was very small. If she was asked, she could tell all about Tyrannosaurus Rex and his reptilian friends, who she had watched as a child. After a few million years, she slipped up and began to fall.
Passing through Earth's atmosphere had been frightening; there had been moments when she thought she would die, but crashing had definitely been the worst. If she had had bones they would have shattered on impact. Even with a well-timed tuck-and-roll, she managed to hit hard enough to leave a crater.
The charred hole she had made was surrounded by burning foliage. She sat in the dirt and tried to come up with a plan. What do you do after you fall onto a strange planet? It was an unusual conundrum. She would need a disguise to begin with, but then what? She'd never been on a planet's surface before.
Closing her eyes and concentrating, she managed to change into human form. Her light dimmed, but she still glowed faintly in the darkness. In less than a minute, a blue-haired teenage girl sat in the crater; she had even made jeans, a white t-shirt, and sneakers.
She very slowly stood up and tried to get used to the sensation of having legs. The sound of an approaching car startled her into half-climbing, half-floating up the crater wall. She ran into the trees and hid just as a green-and-black classic car of some sort (she remembered them from the seventies) pulled to the edge of the scorch trail. Three people got out and dashed to the edge of her hole.
She poked her head around the tree trunk and watched the trio. There was a small brunette guy in green, a redheaded girl in a black skirt, and a raven-haired boy in a t-shirt. The taller boy looked her direction, and for a moment she thought he had seen her. She pulled back behind the tree, and then quietly made her escape.
"So what do we do?" Ben looked at his friends.
Kevin wasn't paying any attention to the younger teen. He was looking at the trees on the other side of the crater, where he thought he had seen something blue. "Did you two see that?"
"What?" two sets of green eyes looked up.
"Thought I saw somethin', but I guess not," the blue thing was gone.
"Hmm," Gwen turned back to the crater. "Maybe it burned up on impact."
"The crater wouldn't be so big, though," her cousin was right. Even the Omnitrix had left a small crater.
"Maybe it bounced out?" Kevin offered.
"Not likely," his girlfriend said. "Could it have been stolen?"
"No way," he countered. "We were here right after it crashed. It's more like it just got up and flew away."
"We should call the Plumbers," Ben said. He extended one arm towards the crater wall opposite him, "Because it looks more like it climbed out."
Dun-dun-dun. Cliffhanger!
REVIEW! Chapter two is started in my notebook, so maybe it won't be too long before I update. And I haven't abandoned Donny Dominico! I need to update that one, but I did it last week.
First reviewer gets an internet brownie. Tell me what you guys think of starting each chapter with a rhyme that has to do with the story. 'Cause I'm thinking about doing that with this one.