It was a sunny day in the city of Kyoto, Japan. The sun was shining, birds were singing, flowers were blooming and the locals were either earning their livelihoods or visiting the various attractions. The resident Youkai were staying hidden from the human population as they went about their own daily lives and the Karasu-Tengu guards made sure none of them had any risk of revealing their world to the humans.
Life was good, especially if you were one of the two people on the roof of the currently closed-off Fushimi Inari Taisha who had finally gotten an opportunity to spend some time together without the older one's duties getting in the way.
The older person was a young woman with long blonde hair and golden eyes. She happened to be rather...well-endowed in certain areas of interest as well. She wore a traditional white and red shrine maiden outfit closed by a red ribbon and had a golden crown atop her head. Oddly enough, she had a pair of furry fox ears atop her head and nine large, fluffy tails swaying behind her. Her name was Yasaka and she was both one of the last two nine-tailed foxes in existence and the leader of all the Youkai within the borders of Kyoto and the immediate surrounding area.
The younger one was a girl around eleven or twelve years old with similar hair and eyes. She wore almost the exact same outfit as Yasaka with the addition of a pair of tall geta on her feet. Also of interest was that she too had nine golden fox tails and sported a pair of matching fox ears. She was Kunou, princess of the Yokai of Kyoto, daughter of Yasaka and the only other nine-tailed fox in existence.
Right now, the mother and daughter were just enjoying each other's company on one of the few days that Yasaka didn't have any work to attend to. On most days Yasaka had various duties to perform as the leader and guardian of every Youkai within one of Japan's most famous and traveled-to cities. That meant lots of work to ensure that their society remained a secret and very little relaxation time for her. So when Yasaka had a chance to spend time with Kunou like this, they would always close off the trail to the Fushimi Inari Taisha and enjoy each other's company at the shrine while doing idle things like talk, eat lunch or just stare at the clouds passing by together in silence.
At the moment the two were lying side by side on the roof of the Fushimi Inari Taisha and watching the clouds go by. Were it any other day, the two would have likely remained there for hours before some Youkai causing trouble or bothersome bodily need like hunger or thirst forced them to leave the area. But not today.
Today was the day that the norm was destroyed and replaced by a shapeshifting alien hero from another dimension.
"Hey mom," Kunou said with curiosity in her voice as she stared at the sky to the west.
"Yes Kunou?" Yasaka asked in a soft voice, not looking away from her spot gazing at the sky in the north.
"Why are the clouds starting to swirl?"
"Are there clouds starting to swirl?" Yasaka asked with curiosity in her voice as she gazed over to the area where Kunou was looking at. The clouds were indeed starting to swirl together like a vortex over the forest next to the Fushimi Inari Taisha. "Oh, that's probably just some mischievous weather Youkai having fun again," Yasaka said, looking back to the clouds in the north.
"Then what's that black thing that they're swirling around?" Kunou pressed on, pointing at said black thing. Yasaka looked back at the vortex and squinted her eyes to get a better look at this 'black thing' that Kunou was talking about.
The clouds were indeed swirling around what looked to be a black sphere. Nothing was getting sucked towards it, but the clouds were drawn around it like planets moving around the sun. Strangely enough, it looked like rain was falling out of the sphere. However, when a gust of wind pushed some of the falling items towards them, it revealed the true identity of the rain to be...
"Pebbles?" asked Kunou, bewildered as she brushed them off of her shrine maiden outfit with a confused look. "Are there any Youkai in Kyoto that can make pebbles rain out of black things?"
Yasaka shook her head, just as confused as Kunou at this new development. She couldn't think of any beings that could make it rain pebbles or create black spheres except the Infinity Dragon God rumored to exist and maybe the Biblical God. However, Yasaka had heard rumors that the Biblical God had died during the Great War between the angels, fallen angels and devils and she was pretty sure that the Infinity Dragon God had better things to do with it's time than make it rain pebbles.
Just as Yasaka was about to tell Kunou to come along with her as she investigated, the black sphere spat out two figures before collapsing in on itself and disappearing from existence, leaving the clouds in a spiral pattern.
"Mom!" Kunou gasped out after she scrutinized the two falling figures. "Those are people!"
Yasaka's eyes darted to and focused on the two figures, confirming Kunou's claim: one was a brown-haired boy around Kunou's age in ragged clothing while the other was a seemingly unrelated man who was tied up in bandages for some unknown reason. Perhaps the weirdest part was that the bandaged man was screaming at the top of his lungs in fear while the child looked...resigned? Wait, no. He looked surprised but exasperated at the same time, like a minor annoyance had just taken place.
Yasaka chalked it up to the boy just being in shock at his new development. She was sure that had she been transported thousands of feet into the air without the ability to use magic, she wouldn't have fared any better than either one of the two.
Thinking fast to try and save the two free fallers, Yasaka closed her eyes and focused on changing herself into her giant nine-tailed fox form while also channeling her Youjutsu around her so that nobody outside of the two falling humans and Youkai could see her. Immediately, she felt her body undergo the transformation, changing itself from her human form to her massive vulpine form. The entire transformation took less than a moment to undergo, but to Yasaka it felt like hours were passing as she watched the two continue to free-fall closer and closer to their imminent doom.
"Kunou!" Yasaka called to her daughter as she tensed in preparation to run and catch the two. "Find the nearest Karasu-Tengu or Kitsune and tell them to bringer a healer to the forest as soon as possible. They might be injured."
Yasaka didn't give her daughter a chance to respond before she started running over the tops of the trees to get to the two as fast as possible while also using her Youjutsu to ensure that the trees weren't affected by her fox form's weight. The closer she got to the two, the faster they seemed to be falling, although Yasaka could tell that it was just her nerves acting up.
As the leader of the Kyoto Youkai ran, her eyes focused in on the young boy. She could only imagine what sort of unimaginable terror must be rushing through his head that could have rendered him unable to even scream in fear.
...
'Well...I guess I should have expected something to go wrong at the last moment like always. I should probably transform myself into something that can fly and let Phil fall. Not something I would normally do, but at least it would give me one less problem for me to deal with in the future.'
Those were Ben's thoughts as the trees below started to rapidly get closer. While most people would start having their lives flash before their eyes or begin praying to whatever deities they worshipped right about now, this was pretty much a typical weekday for Ben, Null Void or not.
Falling from immeasurable distances towards certain doom? Not a problem if you could turn into a anthropomorphic pterosaur with a jetpack or a yellow blob in underwear resistant to most types of physical damage and harm.
On an unrelated note, Ben was surprised that it took so long to go through a black hole. He was sure that death would be immediate, but apparently the multiverse had other plans for him and kept both he & Phil alive. It had taken several minutes for the two of them to travel from one end of the black hole to the other, during which Ben decided that being Jetray no longer had any use and transformed back into a human once he saw that Phil wasn't dead.
Curiously, the rocks that were sucked into the black hole with them were crushed into tiny pieces. Why were they destroyed but not he and Phil? Ben didn't know and, frankly, he didn't care right now. He was just glad to not be dead or in the Null Void anymore, even if he was falling out of the sky at the moment.
Ben took a quick look around at his surroundings. It appeared that he was hurtling towards a lush, green forest that was besides a wooden temple of some sort. Ben could also see a bustling city a little ways off, meaning that he was at least close to people. That was both a good thing and bad thing. Good because he could find out where he was, clean himself off and get his first decent bite of food in two years. Bad because that meant that there was the risk that someone had seen him get spit out of the black hole or could see him transform. However, those were the least of his worries at the moment.
'Oh look, a giant Ninetales running on top of the trees towards me and Bill' Ben thought with a smidge of interest as he spotted what looked like a giant version of the fire-type fox Pokemon running towards them from below. 'Must be Dr. Animo having his fun again. Should've known he wouldn't be satisfied by just resurrecting dinosaurs and making giant, fire bats. Yeah, screw the consequences of people seeing me transform. I'm not about to let myself be eaten by a giant fox after just escaping the Null Void.'
Turning his head towards the still-screaming Phil (how he hadn't gotten any of the falling pebbles in his perpetually open mouth, Ben would never know), Ben briefly debated internally about whether he should to turn into Pesky Dust and knock him out before he deciding against it. The wind would probably blow his sleep dust away before it could even affect Phil and the fox was probably going to eat the corrupt officer anyways, so why even bother?
"Well Bill," Ben said, catching Phil's attention before he gave the ex-Plumber a mock salute and turned the dial of the Omnitrix to the alien he wanted. "It's been nice catching up with you, but now I gotta fly. The Ninetales is all yours. Enjoy the landing!"
"Wait, what?!" Phil asked in confusion that quickly morphed into terror when he figured out that he was being abandoned several thousand feet in the air. He was terrified so much that he didn't even bother to correct Ben that his name was Phil. A green flash enveloped Ben and died down, showing that the hero had been replaced with...a bunch of green slime that was starting to spread apart and scatter like the pebbles because of the wind buffeting it. After taking a moment to process this new development, Phil started screaming once again, still not noticing the nine-tailed fox running towards him over the tops of the trees.
If Phil had bothered to look up from his screaming, he would have noticed a small UFO-like device with a miniature Omnitrix logo on top levitating over a floating ball of that same green slime which was about the size of a basketball. The ball appeared to have two green eyes in the center of it, although it was hard to be sure as those were made out of slime as well.
"Well, shoot," the UFO said in a synthesized voice as the eyes of the slimeball narrowed in annoyance. "There goes most of my body with Bill. I knew I should have chosen Jetray instead of Goop. Great, now I have to go down there and risk an attack from that fox to pick myself up. Or I could try to regenerate, but that'll take a while since I've lost so much of myself."
The UFO seemed to look downwards at the fox and still-falling Phil, who had almost reached the trees by now. Closing it's eyes and releasing an exasperated sigh, the UFO/slime ball started to float downwards after the falling green goo. It would appear that finding out where he was would have to wait for later.
...
Yasaka had seen many things in her long life. She had witnessed kindness that would make angels and saints weep with joy and cruelty that could put the Old Satan Faction to shame any day. She had seen the rise and fall of heroes, heroines and tyrants and even experienced the near extinction of the nine-tailed foxes centuries ago with her now deceased mate. But in all of her near one thousand years of life, she had never seen a human boy become engulfed in a flash of green and become replaced by a mass of green liquid.
If Yasaka had to rank it on a list of the strangest things she had seen throughout her life, she would probably rank it at number three. Seeing the only female leader of the devils cosplaying as a magical girl and that one human man in the lab coat that could seemingly teleport without magic were just still too strange to beat in her mind.
The nine-tailed fox shook her head to clear her mind of any distractions before picking up the pace in her run. Yasaka wasn't sure how that had happened, but she shoved her curiosity to the back of her mind. It was probably too late to save the boy since green liquids weren't generally classified as living things, but Yasaka could still save the bound man.
'Almost there' Yasaka thought to herself as she came within a football field length of the falling man. He still had yet to notice her it seemed, so that at least meant she wouldn't have to immediately deal with him freaking out about a giant fox running towards him to snatch him up.
Once he was about five hundred feet over the trees, Yasaka leaped into the air to catch him in her jaws. To an outsider with no context, this would probably look like a giant fox leaping up to try and eat the unfortunate ex-Plumber. From Ben's perspective overhead, it looked exactly like that (not that she knew he was there). However, from Phil's perspective, it was an unexpected but welcome lifesaver, despite the current look of his rescuer. It also helped that her sharp teeth cut the bandages that he was bound in.
Once Phil had been gently caught in her jaws, Yasaka softly tightened her grip on him for their landing in a small forest clearing barely big enough for her to fit in while in her vulpine form. She ignored the pieces of green goo and pebbles that rained down and onto her fur (although she did briefly feel annoyed at the fact that she would have to wash and brush them out later) as she descended and eventually touched down onto the soft meadow grass.
Upon their landing, Phil gave out a heavy sigh of relief from her maw. While he had probably been in the air for about a minute and fifteen seconds, to the ex-Plumber it had felt like hours of torture through multiple near-heart attacks. Heck, he'd probably be having nightmares about this event for years to come.
Satisfied that she had saved at least one of the two and assured by herself that the boy couldn't have been saved even if she had run faster due to him having transformed too high for her to jump, Yasaka gently set Phil down on the luscious grass and released him before transforming back into her human form, not bothering to try and hide her fox ears and nine tails. Her face gave a smile of amusement when she saw Phil's eyes bulge as the giant fox that had been his savior transform into a beautiful woman in front of him.
Maybe he was dead and this was his Heaven.
Or maybe he had just hit his head really hard during the fight against Ben.
Either one was possible.
"Are you an angel?" Phil asked somewhat dumbly as he fell to his knees before Yasaka, ignoring the small bits of green goo that had dripped off of her shrine maiden outfit and onto the ground he was kneeling on. The blonde woman giggled in humor at his question before shaking her head.
"No, I'm afraid I'm from an entirely different pantheon. Guess again."
"Okay, not an angel. You aren't a devil are you? If so, then maybe Hell isn't as bad as people make it out to be."
Yasaka laughed out loud and clutched her stomach at that one. It looked like the human was trying to flirt with her. He wasn't the worst at it, but her husband had been much better and more subtle about it when he was still alive. In comparison, this human was like a clumsy kit admitting their crush on an older role model of the opposite gender: cute in a way but, as humans said, 'not gonna happen'.
"That's still the same pantheon," she replied as she regained control and wiped a tear from her eye. "No, I'm not a demon either. I'm a ni…."
"OH BIIIIIIIIIIIIILL! ARE YOU STILL ALIVE OR DID THE FOX EAT YOU? IF THE FOX ATE YOU, CAN I HAVE YOUR GUN AND KNIFE? AND SPEAKING OF THE FOX, DOES IT HAVE THE REST OF MY BODY? I CAN'T FIND MY LEFT LEG ANYWHERE!"
Phil grimaced in both fear and annoyance and Yasaka blinked at the watery-sounding voice. While she was no stranger to unique-sounding voices, she couldn't say that she had ever heard a voice quite like that one before. It gave off the impression that somebody was speaking through a bubble of water while still on land if that made any sense.
If the voice had been confusing, that was nothing when compared to who it belonged to. What resembled a UFO that had a green hourglass symbol on top of it flew out from the forest with a mass of the green goo with what appeared to be eyes floating underneath it. The strangest part came when it saw the similar green goo on the ground before Phil and Yasaka. With a (joyful?) look at the slime on the floor, the UFO-slime being hovered over to it and pulled the slime on the floor into the rest of the floating slime mass.
"Ah, much better!" the UFO said as the slime morphed into a humanoid body that had toeless feet and four-fingered hands, further confusing the Nine-Tailed Fox. "I know that Goop can just regenerate body parts, but it just feels so much better when I reabsorb and reform them instead. It's like I'm getting a good stretch."
The slime being looked like it was about to continue talking when it saw Yasaka staring at it with a simultaneously curious and confused expression on her face. The two stood there for a moment as they observed one another before the slime creature broke the silence.
"..."
"..."
"...uh, hi. My name is Ben, although you can call me Goop in this form. Say, have you happened to see a giant fox anywhere around here? It just rescued my would-be murderer."
An awkward silence reigned over the clearing as Yasaka processed Goop's words. As this happened, Phil had been slowly but surely walking backwards towards the trees as soon as Goop had arrived, hoping to not be noticed. While he was immensely thankful that this woman had just saved his life, he would rather not have to defend himself from an alien shapeshifter that was more than likely furious at him for destroying his Portal Generator. He would also like to escape having to explain himself to a woman who could turn herself into a giant fox if at all possible.
Just as Phil about five feet away from the trees, a green flash blinded both him and Yasaka. When the light died down, Yasaka's eyes widened at the creature that had replaced the slime being. In it's place stood a humanoid, rodent-like being with grey fur, black quills that took the place of hair and a pink, rat-like tail. Sharp teeth could be seen in the being's smiling mouth as it's yellow eyes narrowed in anticipation. The being wore an orange zip-up jacket and jeans with the Omnitrix dial was located on his chest beneath the jacket.
"Porkuprick!" the new creature announced with a sadistic spark in his eyes as he looked at Phil. Phil only had time to run a few more steps towards the forest before he felt a pricking sensation in his neck. The next step that Phil took ended with him face planting into the ground as paralysis took hold of his body and quickly rendering him unconscious. As this happened, the new being dubbed Porkuprick started clutching his knees and laughing.
"Hahaha, take that Bill!" Porkuprick said, pointing at Phil. "That's what you get for destroying my fucking portal generator and trying to stab and shoot me! Man, never thought I'd say this, but I'm so glad that I met Argit."
Turning his gaze back at Yasaka as soon as he finished laughing, the nine-tailed fox coated her hands with foxfire. Magical, blue flames covered her fists as she prepared to face off against this new creature. While Porkuprick arched an eyebrow up in interest, he made no move to do anything. A tense staring standoff briefly occured before Porkuprick ruined the tense atmosphere.
"So..." he drawled out. "You use magic? That's cool. Say, you wouldn't happen to be related to anybody named Charmcaster or Hex, would you?"
"No," Yasaka answered calmly, not relaxing or letting up on her stance. It would take more than a friendly question to calm her down it seemed, so Porkuprick decided to just cut to the chase.
"Any chance you can get rid of your fire there? I doubt that your fire is as hot as Heatblast's but I'd rather not be given the chance to find out."
"Heatblast?" Yasaka asked with an arched eyebrow, flaring up the flames in her hands slightly. "You know what, never mind. Where's Goop?"
"Goop and I are the same people," Porkuprick said as he unzipped his jacket and lifted up his white T-shirt up to show off the Omnitrix dial. "This thing on my chest lets me turn into different kinds of aliens."
"Uh-huh," Yasaka said dully, visibly unimpressed. "Aliens. Do I look like I was born yesterday?"
"I'm serious!" Porkuprick defended heatedly, getting unusually worked up about this. "This form and Goop are just alien transformations!"
"If those are just transformations, then show me your real form," Yasaka commanded, flaring the blue foxfire in her hands to seem more intimidating. While Yasaka was generally a benevolent and kind person, she also knew better than to blindly trust people. The death of her mate at the hands of a so called 'hero' twelve years ago proved that it could lead to disastrous consequences.
"Alright, alright!" Porkuprick said tensely, waving his hands around to get her to stop flaring the magic fire. "Sheesh, calm down! You quillshot one guy into unconsciousness and suddenly you're the bad guy."
Yasaka watched as Porkuprick slammed down on his chest dial before being forced to close her eyes as a green flash went off again. When she opened her eyes, they widened at the fact that the being that called itself Porkuprick had been replaced by the boy that she had failed to save from earlier.
Ben scratched the back of his head nervously as Yasaka stared at him. Staring was normal while Ben was in his alien forms but it was kind of making him uncomfortable when someone continued to stare at him while he was a human. The woman in front of him just watched with widened eyes, the blue fire in her hands disappearing just from the shock.
The leader of all the Youkai in Kyoto probably would have kept gapping at the shapeshifter before her for another few minutes if not for the sound of two gasps at the edge of the clearing, prompting both the queen of Kyoto and the heroic changeling from another dimension to break off their staring. They were greeted by the sight of Kunou and a kitsune medic both staring at Ben with widened eyes.
While Yasaka was trying to process all the developments going on, Kunou was internally bouncing in excitement at the thought of meeting an alien shapeshifter and the medic was trying to fathom how what Ben said could be possible, our hero had only one thought.
'Well shit. There goes my secret identity.'
If only Ben knew that keeping a secret identity was going to be the least of his troubles in the future.
