From the Bank to the Brink
"We're live on the scene, reporting on the ongoing bank robbery here in the heart of downtown. The infamous Circus Freak Trio are holding a reported 20 civilian hostages inside. Police are on the scene, attempting to negotiate the release of the frightened families. We expect-"
Click
Ben shuts off the radio sitting on the Rustbucket's table, climbing out of his seat as he flicks the off switch.
"Alright, I've heard enough, time to go kick some big-top butt!" Ben trumpets as he bolts from the vinyl bench like a slingshot. Scrambling to the door of the RV, he enthuses, "I'll have this done so fast, those funfair freaks won't know what hit 'em!" His uncontained enjoyment draws a groan from Gwen, who simply rolls her eyes at his antics.
Throwing open the door and launching out of the vehicle, Ben slaps down on the Omnitrix as he lands with a theatric green flash of light.
"Wildvine?! Come on, does this thing ever listen to me? I was trying to go XLR8!" he bemoans, as the light fades from his transformation. "I can't make it to the bank in time like this!"
"Come on, chlorophyll-cranium, get back in here! Next time, try looking at the watch when you're using it instead of prancing around," Gwen snarks out from the inside of the RV. Standing in the doorway, she crosses her arms over her chest, and clicks her tongue.
Ben yells towards the driver's seat, "Hey! Grandpa, Gwen called me a clorfa-, a cholorfu-, she called me something weird!" as he points accusingly at his cousin. Gwen snickers at him, mouthing "Moron" under her breath.
The aging plumber at the wheel gives a calm response, "Gwen, don't call your cousin names. Ben, climb aboard and buckle in. We need to head out right away if we plan on putting a stop to that robbery." Grandpa Max starts the engine as Ben ropes himself back in the Rustbucket. "And turn on that radio again, we didn't catch which bank they were talking about."
"Yeah, yeah," Ben hoarses out with his alien vocals. Flipping the switch back on with one of his vines, he continues, "I woulda found it on my own." Slouching down, Ben lets his vines drape across the floor. "Dumb Omnitrix…"
"Hey, keep your green bits on your side of the table, mega-dweeb. I'm sitting at this table too, you know!" Gwen hisses, raising her legs to keep Ben's gangly lower half away.
"It's not my fault! These vines gotta go somewhere!"
"Yeah, on YOUR side!"
"There's not enough room!"
"Enough, you two!" Max calls out from the front, keeping his eyes on the road. "Ben, stop slouching and give Gwen some leg room. Gwen, please be understanding, Ben's got a lot more legs than the rest of us right now." Max pauses his lecture as he navigates towards the bank, now well informed of the specifics by the radio reporter. "You two can't be fighting like this when we've got people who need our help, and fast." He makes another quick turn that most RVs couldn't perform. "So keep it down back there."
"Aww, mannn…" the two young heroes whine in unison, unhappy that neither got their way.
The Rustbucket screeches to a quick halt nearby the bank, as the general area has been blocked off by police. Sirens blare across the area, as police and other emergency responders bark out orders and guide civilians away from the disaster zone. Firefighters put out the flames on the buildings surrounding the bank proper, while others rescue people from the blaze. In the center of the whole mess, the bank remains comparatively intact, albeit with a large hole melted in the side. Acidbreath clearly worked his grotesque wonder clearing a path to the vault for his fellow criminals. The bank has been barricaded from the inside, and any hint of what is going on in its confines is left to what little can be heard from within.
Filing out of the RV, Ben as Wildvine, Gwen wearing her lucky girl getup, and Grandpa Max simply wearing his Hawaiian shirt finally get a good look at the danger before them. The trio quickly assess the situation, or rather, Gwen and Grandpa Max assess, while Ben charges recklessly onwards.
"Wait! Hold your horses a moment, you heard they have hostages inside, we need to-"
Ben cuts him off, asserting, "Already on it," and points at his tendrils, now burrowed into the ground. Their eyes follow the spidering cracks in the pavement as they head towards the entrance, and through the bank floor. Crashing through the tiles, the vines remove the blockage from the front door, before darting back into the building.
Barreling out of the now unblocked front door, and sweeping aside the assembled police, Thumbskull roars out, "You's stop messing with our robbery!" and shoulder-checks Ben sending him across the street. The two remaining members of the Circus Freaks stay inside, focused on their task at hand.
"Ow! Alright, tough guy, you wanna face the green, mean, fighting machine? Come get some!" Ben goads the burly brute. His vines splinter off, some traversing the
"What're you doing, Ben?" Gwen starts, before a flicker of recognition sparks in her eyes. "I'll distract the goons, you focus on getting the hostages out of there."
Ben looks back at her, with a look of confusion. "Wait, what? That wasn't my plan." Despite his protesting, Ben's vines slow their progression towards the criminals, and start slithering to the captured families.
"It is now!" Gwen cries out, as she opens her spellbook. Gwen holds her hand out, directing her magic to the Freaks, and intones her chosen spell. "Aquata Risa Spackwata!" she calls out, as a deluge of water fires up from underneath the circus felon, suspending him in air. Taking in the results of her magic, Gwen gives a satisfied "hmph" and nods her head. "Good luck getting out of that one!" she taunts.
"Waaaaaaahh! Get me down! Now!" The hulking horror glares down at the magic wielder below him, thrashing wildly.
"Happy to oblige!" Gwen smiles, shutting off the geyser, dropping the fool down to the hard pavement, knocking him unconscious. "Shoulda asked nicely," she says in a singsong tone, waggling her finger at the unresponsive strongman.
Ben, now having located the prisoners inside the building, starts his progress of getting them to safety. Wrapped in vines, the civilians are raised in the air and sent out of the building three at a time. Ben, straining his ability to control his vines with little visual awareness inside the building, manages hands them off to officers. They are quickly sent away from the crime at hand for their safety.
"I've freed all of them! Time to get back to the real action!" Receding his vines out from below the pavement, Ben flings himself through the front door towards the main vault to get at the remaining two enemies.
Creeping steadily through the building, Ben looks around from side to side, in search of his foes. "Where oh where are you…" he says, as menacingly as he can. "Give it up, and I might let you out without beating your butts too hard!"
Suddenly aloft, Wildvine finds the two criminals. However, they found him first. Looking back down where he was just standing, Frightwig and Acidbreath were right behind him, holding large bags of money. Held high in the air by Frightwig's hair, Ben complains, "Hey, I'm the one who's supposed to do the wrapping! No fair!" He struggles roughly, gritting his teeth. Wincing, the bindings dig into his body, like a boa constrictor would its next meal.
"Life's never fair, kid," Acidbreath coughs out, his corrosive gas stinging away at the bound hero. Ben recoils from the wave of fumes, crying out in pain. "Aargh!"
Ben wasn't alone in his suffering, as Frightwig swats her companion on the back of the head. "Watch the hair!" she barks.
"Maybe you should cut it short!" Ben groans, the constriction making it hard to speak. Following his quip, he pierces through the hair ropes with a blast of thorns.
"Argh!" Frightwig releases her captive, dropping him to the floor. Taking a step back and clutching her head, rubbing the roots of her hair. "You little stinkweed!" she growls out, her eyes darkening in anger.
"I'm no stinkweed," Ben starts, sending out his arms to surround the two house of horror rejects, "I'm a Wildvine!" He punctuates his statement by swinging them into the air and back down on the ground, hard.
"Uuurgh," groaning from the concussive force, Acidbreath crawls to his feet, before collapsing back down. Frightwig remained down from the hit and didn't even try to get up.
Ben cheers his success, pumping a fist in the air, "Now that's what I call a beat down! All in a day's work. Now, time to get these guys to justice."
He drags the two foiled robbers out of the building and hefts them towards a couple of the assembled police cars.
"They're all yours, officers." Ben says as he puffs out his chest. As he does, the Omnitrix symbol on his chest starts blinking red. Looking down at the red symbol, he quickly excuses himself, "Uh oh, I better split. Uh, bye!" He dashes off back towards the RV, before transforming back into Ben Tennyson proper in an adjacent alleyway. He runs a hand across his forehead, huffing out, "Just in time, phew!"
Climbing back into the RV, Ben is greeted with a warm welcome from Grandpa Max. "Good job, kiddos, you two made a good team out there. To celebrate a job well done, I figured we should have something special for dinner."
Ben looks up at him with a quizzical look. "You mean eating out, or some of your cooking?"
"Now Ben, it wouldn't be a special dinner if we didn't make it ourselves. Now come on, we've got to make it to the international foods market before it closes. I've heard they have pig's snout, and that it's the best around!" Max pumps his arm with a gung-ho attitude, clearly oblivious to his niece and nephew's abject terror for what they'll be subject to for supper.
"I think I'm turning green again, and not because I'm going hero this time." Clutching his stomach, Ben slumps down in the seat across from Gwen, who nods grimly.
Gwen half jokes, half prays to her cousin, "Do you think his taste buds will suddenly fix themselves someday?"
Looking back at her solemnly, he sighs, "God, I hope so."
"Hm, the selection here isn't as wide as I was led to believe…" Max frowns, looking across the shelves of exotic and obscure foods. Taking a can of brined duck neck, he gestures to it with his other hand, stating, "You can get this stuff almost anywhere. I'll have to go ask if they have the more exotic stuff in the back."
Gwen looks on with a dropped jaw, at a loss for words, while Ben simply pukes in his mouth.
"You can't be serious Grandpa, I mean, I've never even heard of any of these things! Like, What even IS a troubled oyster? Did it have a bad day?" lifts a jar of the item in question, as Max's face lights up.
"Ah, thank you Ben! I was wondering where they had those." He promptly takes the jar from Ben's hand and places it in the cart. "Now we can really get started on planning dinner tonight."
Ben looks at his hand in shock, while Gwen folds her arms looking semi-distraught. "Nice going dweeb, what are you going to hand him next? Pickled horse tails? Dung beetles?"
Max laughs it off. "Nonsense, Gwen. Dung beetles aren't even in season. And you don't pickle horse tails, you fry them," he says as if it were common knowledge. "I'll try to find some closer to the end of summer for you two to try. I'm sure you'll get a kick out of them."
"Yeah, a kick in the teeth," Ben grumbles.
"What was that, Ben?" Grandpa Max asks kindly.
"I said it would be a kick in the-" Ben is cut off by a loud crash as someone behind them tips over a display of plantains.
"What the, who's," Ben starts, before he sees who it is.
Before them, struggling to stand upright, is a young woman with silver hair, frazzled and frayed. Her eyes are unfocused, and deep bags under them reveal she must not have slept in days. Her hands look thin, and her whole body is trembling severely.
"P-p, please, h-help… Me…" She barely manages to get the words out before she collapses on the ground in a heap of her violet coat, having fainted from whatever ailment she's afflicted with.
Gwen is the first to respond, startled as she was. Taking one step back, she decries who they've found in a shrill tone, her shock at the forefront of her voice.
"Charmcaster?"