Kenny tries a lot of things. Okay, just a few things. He isn't a total creep after all.

But first, he waits, and though it's a total drag, just resting in the dirt like this, with his hairline perched safely out of sight below the window-sill, there's something exciting about it too, about lying in wait for the moment everything changes. And changes it does, coming in the sound of the door lock clicking open after a few minutes.

And then Kai's suddenly whisking her head out of the window above him in a motion so smooth and abrupt that Kenny almost yelps at the trap she's set. But there's no time to marvel at the fact that her husband's claws are agile enough to twist human keys into their locks, even as part of a deception, and his hand finishes closing into a fist over the watch moments before her eyes rake over his form. With a flash of green light and a whoosh of noise as he displaces the air around him, he starts to shiver as his mother's eyes settle in on the shape ChamAlien presents. Or at least they would, if the purple scales beneath didn't blend into the yellow of the house instinctively.

A few ponderous seconds pass.

And then she tuts. 'Alright kiddo, have it your way.'

Just as abruptly as before, she pulls back and slams down the window with a decisive thud, the force catching on her hair and making it flare out into stray lines rather than the rolling waves it used to glide out into. And Kenny feels a pang at the sight. But there's nothing he can do about it. Yet.

He takes the chance to sigh. And then the front door falls open with a slight squeak.

Kenny blinks. He had been planning on creeping in, past the ankles of whoever pushed it open, but there's no sense of a presence here, just of one creeping away. And if he focuses, he can hear the heavy footsteps containing claws pushing it away from the carpet and shuffling a furred body further inside the house - but the door still continues to hang open in front of him, like an invitation.

Cautiously, he checks the wavering blur of his outlines and bristles at the way they shimmer under the new-found intensity of the hallway light, before he ducks inside. Without waiting, he creeps up, over the stairs, away from the direction those footsteps stomp away into, and peers into the first room he comes across. Unfortunately, it also happens to be the room that she shares with her...with that...fake husband, and even more unfortunately, he cannot find anything out of the ordinary. Their dresser, though a little large for a human and looking as though it should belong to some gloomy gothic castle, does nothing more incriminating than dwarf the window that lets daylight in, cracks of subtle gold escaping through the glass and pouring round the wooden outskirts like a necklace. Their bed on the other hand, is a different story. Large and spacious, the water-bed coasts just above the carpet with odd jugs of motion, the outer edges flicking up to resemble the rim of a dog basket, all in a ghastly crimson.

'She likes red,' comes a low growl of a voice from behind him and Kenny whirls, claws outstretched and ready to fight. But the Loboan simply stares straight through him, no visual recognition on his face. But then he smirks softly, or at least Kenny thinks he does; so much of his mouth is arranged along the shape of his muzzle that it's hard to tell. 'I can smell you, you know. That's how I can tell.'

Kenny suddenly feels very, very stupid.

'I'm sorry,' the Loboan says suddenly. 'You're just a kid; this must be hard for you. But I know my wife and deep down she's a softie, though she doesn't like to show it. She'll come round eventually, but only in her own time. If you force it, she'll just close up like a clam.' He pauses. 'Please. Wait outside, I'll leave some sandwiches...' he pauses again and then amends his statement sheepishly. 'I mean some roughly chopped-up baguettes. Why use knives when you got claws, right? I hope you like ham. But please, for her sake, not mine, be patient.'

Then he leaves.

Kenny is gobsmacked.

But he doesn't give up entirely. The next alien he turns into is Nanomech. And he ends up hovering through the crack of the living room window, just watching as Kai digs out an old photo of Blitzwolver from her phone. She stares down at the static green eyes he inherited from his father, an oddly blank look on her face and Kenny finds himself holding his breath.

'We were so bad and teenage for each other,' she whispers, 'just like Twilight was for my school friends. But if there's a kid that's going to be without his mum...what should I do?'

She reaches up to fiddle with the hilt of Excalibur, a nervous habit that she's tried hard over the years to hide from Kenny and it's that, more than anything else, that makes a lump seize in his tiny throat. And all of a sudden, he can't stand to watch anymore. With a 'whoosh' that barely disturbs the dust hanging from the drapes, he flies out, through the crack and over to the moss that speckles the steps outside the door. And there, on a carefully weathered plate, a roughly fixed baguette is lying in wait.

Kenny stares at the ripped chunks of ham spilling out over its edges and feels like crying.


But Kenneth Tennyson is a determined boy, even when he nearly feels like crying, and hours later, he ends up crouched down in the middle of a forest, begging into a ramshackle radio that sparks and hisses in his hands. 'Uncle Argit, pleeease...!'

Uncle Argit doesn't reply, and Kenny grimaces as static flares out from the old orange speaker he has in his hands. Further down, electricity spits and frays from the broken spillage of copper wires at his feet, the quick crackle of light twisting free from the still prone Techadon robot that lays across the clearing, frying a few pine cones in the process. It's a cheap and nasty setup, without even a visual screen to help him gauge the set of Argit's expression, but it's the best he can manage with only Grey Matter and Frankenstrike at his disposal. Oh, as well as the dehydrated Techadon cube he'd confiscated from the past long ago, something that he'd had the foresight to slip into his pocket before leaving on his find-Mum mission.

Because quick fun fact; as long as you don't swallow it, you can harvest as little or as many soldiers as you need based upon on the number of water droplets you sprinkle on it's surface. In this case: one.

Besides, even if he could see Argit's face, it'll probably just be rearranged into something stubborn.

'Kenny, you know I love ya, right? But what you're asking me to do is...well, I kinda like my quills where they are, thanks. And your mum, she looks like she'd be real good at shearing things off without any sort of pain medication.'

Kenny swallows. 'Please,' he says. 'I'll never ask you for anything ever again.'

There's a pause then. And then Argit's voice falls out of the phone, uncharacteristically soft and heavy. 'Hey, what's wrong boyo? Do you need Uncle Argit to throw out some Techadon flunkies for you?'

Kenny laughs. 'Nah, I can fight my own battles.' He glances down, tracing a finger through the earth beside him as he sighs and thuds his back against a pine tree. He can feel the grooves pressing into his t-shirt in a harsh reminder that's he's far from the comfort of home. 'But if anyone can get the Orb of Pooma Poonkoo-'

Argit bursts out laughing the way his Dad always does whenever his Mum stresses it's full name.

'Don't laugh! It means a lot to Mum! Anyway if anyone can get it from storage, it's you. You're the President of Earth. If anyone can find someone who can hack into Dad's security system and teleport it outta there, it's you.'

'Why can't you just transform into-'

'I've tried,' grouses Kenny, feeling a sulk come on just by thinking about it. 'But Dad tried harder. And he can fuse his aliens together in a way I can't. He's made it Grey Matter-proof, Brainstorm-proof, even Frankenstrike-proof. Or as he likes to say 'Kenny-proof.' Like I'm five or something.'

He hunches down, now in fully-lowered-shoulders sulk-mode until Argit delicately clears his throat, the same way he's heard him do in live negotiations whenever an Appolexian president gets a little too excited. Kenny sighs.

'I was kinda in a hurry and forgot to take it with me, ' he hastens to explain sheepishly. 'And I swear this old Omnitrix of Dad's is as buggy as that camera coverage of you during the mass stampede last week.' He ignores Argit's nervous laughter at that. 'You're the only one I can think of who could manage such a feat! Seriously! No one else would be brave enough or bold enough to-'

'Alright, alright,' snaps out Argit, who, despite his harsh tone, is actually sounding very, very flattered. 'I guess I could give it a go, stretch out the old criminal-brain muscles...but you'd better not tell anyone!'

Kenny smiles. 'You have my word.'

There's a slight buzz, an odd clank on the line, and he can hear the worry stirring Argit's voice when he asks: 'Hey what kind of crappy- I mean, boring technology are you using to call me anyway?'

'I'm fourteen Argit, it's okay to swear in front of me now,' Kenny remarks dryly. Before he hesitates. 'As long as Mum and Dad aren't there that is...'

'Kenneth.'

Kenny yelps a little, his hand rushing up to cover his mouth as he does so. He forgets sometimes, that Argit is the man who babysat him that time he was going through a 'my parents can't tell me what to do phrase' and never, ever, has he quite forgotten the near-whispering brush of icing-covered spikes quivering inches from his mouth after Argit had cheerfully offered him a cupcake and bopped the underside of the sponge only seconds before Kenny stuffed it into his mouth.

'That's for being a brat, Kenneth,' Argit had told him happily at the time, like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. 'Now eat your goddamn vegetables.'

And 'Kenneth' had.

'Heh, sorry,' the Kenny of now scrambles to say. 'Just caught up in thought, you know how it is.'

'Mmm-hmm.' Argit doesn't sound convinced. 'I'll see what I can do.' Then he hangs up.

Kenny sighs as a speck of water falls down to press itself against the line of his arm. Another falls on his face. And then another and another.

Above him, the sky stretches out from branch to branch in thick, wavy lines of grey, these breaking into blurred wisps like candyfloss. Rain-clouds, a lot of them. But before they can fully open up to drench him, an umbrella, it's colour as round and flesh-toned as a peach, whips out above his head. And Kenny leans back to see his mum staring down at him.

'Hey,' she says, 'so I was a little abrupt with you before...'

For the first time in a long time, Kenny feels himself give her a glare. He's always sort of put her up on a pedestal it's true, but that doesn't give her the right to throw him down away from her door like a rag-doll. And perhaps reading his thoughts, she shuffles a little.

'And err, I remembered putting up a few leylines with Excalibur, tracing out a few minor ones to disrupt certain communication devices...'

Her eyes flicker along the Omnitrix wrapped around his wrist and Kenny feels his interest stir in spite of himself.

Then she sighs. 'Come on, I'll make you some fry-bread.' She sticks her tongue out. 'Or as your Father likes to call it, the bastardised taco.'

Kenny looks at her, hope in her eyes. She's referring to Dad in the present tense. That has to mean something, right?


'So,' says Kai, watching with a quirk in her smile, as Kenny dumps yet another dollop of peach-flavoured marmalade onto the doughy sweetness of his fry-bread. 'You want the Orb of Pooma Poonkoo?'

Kenny nods enthusiastically, then forces himself to swallow. 'Yeah, see it once contained the key to time and I figured it's got to have some trace or residue of chrono energy or whatever in there. Like...the way you scratch over a notepad with a pencil to see what someone's written on the piece of paper that used to be above it? I thought I could have one of my smart aliens use it somehow.'

Kai rolls her eyes. 'Yeah, I know the theory to the 'key of time.' I spent years researching it after your father helped lose it.'

Kenny hesitates, spoon halfway to his mouth. That's not the way he remembers it.

'I thought Subdora stole it. Her and her lug-head of a boyfriend.'

Kai sniffs. 'Sure. And Ben said he would get it back for me one day. Never did.' She smiles slyly. 'So, after years of practise I decided to see if I could visit it somehow. I don't want to disrupt the time-stream or anything, but the orb was important to me. Still is. But Excalibur can slice through anything almost, so I figured why not time?' She glances over her shoulder fondly. 'And sure enough, after many, many consultations with someone who claimed to be the Lady of the Lake, I sort of learned to...fence with time.' She blushes and ducks her head under Kenny's disbelieving stare. 'It's true! Watch!'

She gets up and slides her sword out. But she doesn't brandish it in front of her face the way his mother would. No, in a movement more reminiscent of ballet, she stretches it out, her toes tipped elegantly upwards beneath the shadow of its length, before she slides it down. Then up, spinning with the movement to loop it back over her shoulders, arms and elbows twisting to hold it steady. Then down again, thrusting in a way that isn't brash, or bold, but sly, at a sideways angle, curving it round as though to flick a page over with just its tip before it hits the floor.

The kitchen blurs. The tiles vanish. The kettle flickers in and out of existence with a shine that shimmers and darts away like the play of light on water. And Kenny's head spins with it. He sees grass beneath their feet, then sand and pebbles, the heavy rubble of ash clouds as they fall over the world in a blanket so thick, that it's like the sky has become an ocean instead. And then they clear, and something else falls in the distance, a leg, the muscle strong and thick, before others fall into place alongside them, revealing joints that sweep up into the body of a dinosaur. And then it shrinks, bones rolling back and away from its slumped-over carcass into a tiny egg that swirls back the sweep of the sea, the waves bubbling instead of breaking open, all of it so red and choked full of steam that it resembles the heavy spill of lava from a volcano.

Is this really...can this really be the Earth? Or perhaps it might be better to ask...'was'?

Kai spins to a halt, her sword raised like a rapier rather than the broadsword it is, and the walls around them solidify.

'Sorry,' she says, hardly sounding sorry at all. 'I just wanted to show off.'

Kenny swallows. 'When you...when you do that, can you stay in the time you go back to?'

Kai snorts. 'What, weren't you listening earlier? I said I go to check out the orb, just to remember what it looked like properly. It doesn't last for long, but yeah, I time-travel.'

Kenny breaths. 'Awesome,' he whispers.

Finally, for once today, something is going right.


Notes: Oh Kenny...don't count your chickens before they hatch.