Chapter 12: The Animorphs Rip-Off

Ooh, look, a shiny new chapter!

I'm pleased to see that last chapter made a few of you crack up. Then again, I only got one review saying it was funny. *stares at reader pointedly*

"I am not swimming in that." Sam crossed her arms and glared down at the green water in front of her. The Pride had changed into full gear before leaving for Santa Mira for their mission. James had dropped them off at the hatchery a few hours later. After running through the gaping hole in the chain-link fence, they stopped in their tracks when they saw the weather machine. So that was the cause of all the nasty weather!

After a few minutes of contemplating their next course of action, it was decided that they had to go in undetected. That meant swimming in one of the three pools of disgusting green liquid.

"Come on, Sam, we have to finish the mission," Carter pleaded, giving her friend the puppy dog eyes, which was kind of hard to see with the mask on.

That was when Evan plunged into the water headfirst. The splash made the girls look at him, and they watched as he glided through the water easily, with strong, rhythmic strokes. Carter turned to Sam, shrugged, and in one fell move, jumped and rolled into the water. Her head popped out, gasping for air, and Carter was swimming away. Sam groaned and shuddered involuntarily, but jumped in as well.

They didn't see the old fat man running up to the fence.

Evan's head popped up inside the hatchery, gasping. He looked around for any unwelcome hosts as he waited for his friends to show up.

Carter was next, followed by a very angry Sam. "This is disgusting!" she whispered fiercely. "Do you have any idea what kind of chemicals and sludge we've been swimming in?"

"Don't know, don't wanna know," Evan answered curtly as he propelled himself towards the metal ladder. They were in the last part of the Hatchery, where they must have cleaned off the eggs or something. They didn't really know; no one had thought to look this place up.

Evan was the first one to climb onto the metal platform. He cleared the way for Carter and Sam and shook off the extra water droplets. Then he took off his mask, which made a gross sucking sound when he took it off. "We should have taken off the masks before diving," Carter remarked when she joined Evan. She too took of the mask.

Sam was the last one up and, as always, she was complaining. "I never should have agreed to this!" she moaned as she took off her own mask.

That was when they heard footsteps. Startled, the Pride looked up to see a lone DNAlien staring at them. A moment's hesitation and the DNAlien was running towards the side, probably to alert its brethren.

A shot to the head was all it took to take him down. Evan blew off the smoke from the barrel of his gun and sent it back into its charm form.

"You're really getting good at split-second attacks," Carter complimented him as the three of them began to walk towards the body.

"It helps when you have to be sneaky," Evan said as they got a better look at the body. It wasn't dead; its arm was still twitching. Carter summoned her athame, a double-edged blade with a black handle, and slit its throat, or what passed as a throat. After a few moments of watching it twitch and moan, it lay still, permanently this time.

The Pride walked away from the body and stood in the center of the platform. "Sam, can you use your powers?" Evan asked hopefully. She nodded and closed her eyes. In a burst of energy, she sent her firepower as a warm red aura around her, drying her and her friends off and leaving them toasty warm. After five seconds of that, the aura was sucked back into Sam's body. All three of them put their masks back on just in time for Max Tennyson's head to pop out of the water.

Max looked at the three Slayers before him and asked, "Did Cordelia send you?"

"Yeah," Evan answered casually, gesturing to the ladder to Max's left. Max swam towards the ladder and climbed up quickly. The Pride walked over to him, Sam with her hands out. She had a ball of fire in each hand, meant to dry off the old man. Max thanked her gratefully before turning back to Evan.

"What's your mission?" he asked.

"We were sent to destroy all Xenocytes here," Carter said. "How 'bout you?"

"I think my grandson was captured by the DNAliens," Max said, his voice grim. "I'm here to find Ken and hopefully stop the High Breeds from taking over the universe." The Pride looked at each other.

"Our missions are separate. We'll look out for your nephew, but there are no promises," Sam said, now finished with drying off Max. "What does he look like?"

"Red hair, green eyes, in college…"

"Is he Gwen's older brother?" Evan asked. Max's eyes grew sad. "Yes." Carter was the only one who heard the sharp intake of breath coming from Sam.

"Chances are, he's about to turn into a DNAlien," Evan continued. "If we find him, we'll try to keep him safe. If not, that's your problem." Max smiled bitterly. You don't interfere with our mission, and we don't interfere with yours. He had heard Cordelia say that so many times that it was permanently stuck in his brain. If the Slayers and Plumbers ever met up with one another on a mission, they would just go their separate ways. Slayers often gave little helpful hints, though. If they saw your target, they would say so and maybe even give some information on their whereabouts. They wouldn't physically help you, oh no; Plumbers and Slayers still hated each other. But that didn't mean the two of them couldn't call a temporary truce and help each other out occasionally. They were all part of the same organization, after all.

The Pride stood away from Max and began to walk carefully off the platform. "Good luck!" Carter called out to him before they left the room. Max smiled at the three of them right before he saw the body. His eyes grew wide before he remembered who was just talking to.

After making sure the hallway was empty, Carter turned to Sam. "You okay?"

"Yeah," she said in a small voice.

"It's about Todd, isn't it?" Evan asked, though it sounded more like a statement. Sam didn't say anything.

Carter sighed through her nose. "You can't abandon the mission to look for Gwen's brother. You can't save everybody." She said that last a bit bitterly.

Sam closed her eyes. She knew that, she really did. But that didn't stop Sam from remembering Todd's face when he died in that hospital bed at the young age of thirteen. The official story was that he had died from appendicitis, but the DuBaer family knew better. They didn't know how Todd had died, but whenever Sam or her little brother Charlie tried looking it up, they always got shot down. But Sam really wanted to know. She was the one who had seen Todd die, had heard him scream as whatever he saw frightened him to death.

Sam opened her eyes and narrowed them. "Let's do this."

Gwen felt the tentacles gripping her shoulder before it dragged her down into the green water. She had not seen enough hentai to know what came next, but that didn't stop her from using her powers from blasting the tentacles away from her.

Ben and his team had found the hatchery no problem and had decided to swim in through the moat thingies to get in undetected. That left them open for an undercover attack, which is exactly what happened to Gwen. When she popped up from the water, she shuddered. "Disgusting."

After swimming into the hatchery, Ben noticed the large amount of DNAliens surrounding them. "We are so not stealthy."

"But we kick much butt," Kevin said, grinning. Ben slammed down the dial of the Omnitrix and turned into Big Chill, using his wings to get out of the water. He phased through two DNAliens who were about to spit green slime at them, freezing them from the inside. He phased through two more before joking, "I thought you guys liked it cold."

Kevin swam to the side of the pool and absorbed the metal out of the floor, encasing him in his armor. He punched through two of the freaks before punching a third. Gwen used her powers to create steps to get out of the water and up in the air. She used bursts of energy to shoot DNAliens out of condition from the sky.

But the last alien she hit still looked human, or at least humanoid. She hovered down to examine it, and stared into a pair of green eyes that was so much like her own. "Ken!" she cried. "It's my brother!"

After finishing off the last of the fully-formed DNAliens, Kevin and a now human Ben stood near Gwen and Ken. "We have to help him!" Gwen started running towards her brother, but Ben grabbed her shoulders.

"He was fighting us! Whatever they did to him must have affected his mind."

"What…they…did to me," Ken started to say, "is SET ME FREE!" Ken grabbed an unconscious DNAlien and threw it at his cousins, forcing them to duck to the ground. They stared at their once awesome cousin in shock.

"Let's get him!" Kevin roared, running to attack him.

"No!" Gwen cried, using her powers to stop Ken from hurting anyone else. "He's just sick! That thing on his head, it's making him do this!" Gwen was referring to the DNAlien head that was wrapping itself around Ken's head, forcing the boy to do its will, kind of like the Yeerks in the Animorph book series.

"Then let's get it off him." Kevin reached a hand towards the DNAlien head and tried to pull it off, much to the pain and discomfort of Ken.

"Wait, you're hurting him!" Ben physically grabbed Kevin's hand away from Ken, forcing him to let go. That was when the Omnitrix started glowing green and beeping again.

"Severe genetic damage detected," the Omnitrix said in its robotic voice.

"Uh, Omnitrix," Ben said nervously, "is that you?"

"Genetic code splicing error. Shall we attempt a repair?" the Omnitrix said.

"Try to fix Ken?" Ben asked hopefully. "Yeah, let's do it!" Ben grabbed Ken's head, and the Omnitrix began to go crazy.

"What are you doing?" Gwen asked.

"I have no idea," Ben answered as he was sucked into the world of the Omnitrix.

"Holy crap I'm inside the Omnitrix!" was Ben's first reaction. It was black with green swirling around him, with the occasional flash of lightning illuminating the cylinder Ben was floating in. He was soon floating above a giant Ken, which was weird because Ken shouldn't have been inside the Omnitrix. Ben reached over to him and tried to take off the DNAlien stuck to his head, but gray tentacles appeared out of nowhere and wrapped around Ben. Ben had seen enough hentai to know where this was going, and he madly pawed at the Omnitrix. But his left arm was entrapped in tentacles, leaving him defenseless.

Ben screamed before his airway was blocked.

"Ben?" Gwen asked out of concern.

Ben eyes snapped open, and he saw the DNAlien head in his head. He peered over at a totally human Ken, kneeling in exhaustion. Ben threw the head away from him and glared at the Omnitrix. "Remind me to get a manual for you," he told it before checking up on Ken.

"Everything's going to be okay, Ken," Gwen told her brother soothingly as she knelt down beside him.

"No, it's not," he said. "I captured and handed Grandpa Max over to them. I couldn't stop. It was like I was watching someone else do it to them."

Yep, definitely like the Yeerks in Animorphs.

"They have Grandpa Max?" Ben looked over at Gwen.

"That's why they took me," Ken continued. "They knew he'd come for me. They needed him out of the way, there plan, it's... terrible." Ben looked at the top of the room, which held large, pink veins crisscrossing towards the room next door.

"Then let's go find him."

Ken stood up, albeit shakily. "I'm coming with you," he said, desperate to make up for his mistake.

"You wanna help?" Kevin asked, his armor giving away to flesh. "Cool."

When they walked into the room, they saw their grandfather tied up with the pink veins. "Grandpa Max!" Ben cried happily, running towards him. Gwen followed and used her powers to release him. Before Max could stand up, his grandchildren tackled him with hugs. Ken and Kevin walked over slowly, since neither could join in.

Max looked at Ken with a smile. "Glad to see you all right, Kenny."

"I didn't know what I was doing. It was like-" Ken tried to explain himself, but his grandfather stopped him with a hug.

"It's okay," he told him, cheering Ken up immensely. Max turned to Ben with pride written all over his face. "I always knew you could do it," he said, making Ben preen at the praise.

"I'm so proud of you, all of you. Even you, Kevin." Everyone turned to look at the self-proclaimed tough guy. "You've come a long way. I've been watching. You might even earn that Plumbers badge you swiped!" Whatever pride Kevin felt at Max's words quickly fell to embarrassment.

"Though I do wonder how you all easily got along with the Pride," Max thought out loud.

"They came to us first," Ben admitted. "Where are they, anyway? I thought they would have been here ages ago." Ben looked around, as if to check for a sign of Carter or her friends.

As if on some imaginary cue, they could hear the tapping of heels connecting to the metal platform as the Pride ran into the vein room. "I told you not to mess with the explosives!" Sam yelled at Evan as they ran in.

"But I like playing with dynamite!" Evan whined right before they saw Max.

"What are you guys wearing?" Kevin asked, giving them the once over.

"We wear this on Slayer missions," Carter said, taking off her mask. The other two followed suit.

Max didn't seem surprised. "I figured Cordelia would send you for this job."

"Not like we wanted to," Evan said, shrugging his shoulders. "But we can't get Cordelia angry." The Pride and Max shuddered at the thought, leaving the rest wondering exactly how scary this Cordelia person was.

That was when a creepy broadcast sounded in the room, forcing the conversation to stop. "Attention, all personnel," the creepy voice said. "Initiate Project DNA now." Ben ran over to the window nearest them and looked at all the DNAliens in their blue hover vehicles hovering over the green water outside the hatchery. The water was drained out of the moats, revealing pods of Xenocytes.

"We swam in that?" Sam seethed under her breath.

The DNAliens hovered over the pods and quickly collected them, sucking them into special holes under the vehicles. They transported the pods to other DNAliens, where they had a special metal full of pod-shaped holes waiting for them. After inserting the pods, the DNAliens moved the metal to a truck, where other pods were already situated there. And there were hundreds of trucks outside the hatchery.

"What are they doing?" Ben asked to whoever had the answer.

"They're shipping those Xenocytes all over the country, making their own DNAlien army," Max answered before the trucks started exploding.

It happened in succession, with the first one exploding, then the one next to it, like a chain reaction. Every single truck exploded, making the hatchery tremble at the sheer power. Evan caught Gwen and Ken to stop them from falling, while Sam quickly led Kevin to the wall to sit down. Carter staggered towards the window and was nearly blinded by the light shining through. Maybe that was why Max and Ben were huddling away from the window.

When the explosions and trembling finally stopped, there was only silence, punctured by Evan's victorious, "Not anymore!"

"Where did you get the explosives to do that?" Max asked. He hadn't seen anything like that on the kids when he saw them earlier.

"Slayer technology upgraded since you were in the field," Sam said, finally taking off her wig. Evan did the same and got out a hair band to tie up his hair.

Ken looked at Evan in shock. "You-"

Ben held up a hand. "Long story."

Carter and Sam high-fived each other. "Mission accomplished," Carter said happily. She spoke too soon. DNAliens must have heard them, because they were starting to file into the vein room. They were not happy.

"You ruined everything!" one of them cried.

The ones with powers began to fight, but Gwen beat them to it. "You kidnapped my brother, turned him into a monster, and you kidnapped my grandfather. I HAVE HAD IT!" With an incredible burst of power, she zapped the aliens away, throwing them to the floor, against the vein-y walls, and out the door.

Sam marveled at the destruction Gwen caused as she finally calmed down. "I think it'll be fun arguing with you." Sam smiled, making the others think she was crazy, which probably wasn't that far from the truth.

Ben turned to his Grandpa, only to see him gone. "Where's Grandpa Max?" he asked. Lights flashed towards the right, and the heroes ran towards it. But before they could Max, they found a giant pile of eggs nestled in a crater in the floor. They were being expunged from a red vein at the top.

"Worst road trip ever," Kevin said.

"I don't think we have enough dynamite for this," Carter said worriedly.

"Its fine, I can just burn them," Sam said, already throwing great balls of fire at the pile. The hatchlings, still unborn, did not make a single sound. The smell was awful though.

Crinkling her nose, Carter willed a giant ice mallet to form in her hands. She smashed the burning eggs in one fell swoop, creating a yellowish goop to overflow out of the crater. The mallet disappeared back into Carter's body, and Kevin was about to ask how she did all that when bright flashes of light came from the room before them. The heroes instantly ran into it, shielding their eyes from the glare.

When the lights faded away, they saw Grandpa Max duking it out with a furious High Breed. Max was whacking the High Breed with a red pipe thing, but he was hardly doing any damage. The High Breed snatched the pipe from Max's hands and tossed it aside. Then it slammed a palm down on him, entrapping him.

"Let him go!" Ken ordered, pointing at the alien. Like that would help.

"Stay back," the High Breed said, "or this one breathes no more." He held up Grandpa Max in his hand.

"Give up!" Ben yelled at the alien. "We've beaten you! We've destroyed all your trucks and your eggs! It's over!"

"You fools," the High Breed sneered. "More trucks can be here in a matter of hours and my DNAlien hordes-" the High Breed gestured to the large army of aliens from the window.

"Are already here," Evan finished for the High Breed. "Well that's a kick in the pants."

"It ends now, Plumber," the High Breed said to Max. "There's nowhere left to run."

Max smirked. "I wasn't running, chief. I was looking for the egg machine." Max reached into his green bag-where'd that come from? -and got out a Null Void projector.

"You think you can imprison us all in the Null Void?" the High Breed asked.

"No, but without the focus lens-" Max took off the focus lens, making the rest of the device short-circuit- "this will make a pretty good imitation of a hand grenade. I figure it'll take out half a mile."

"You wouldn't dare!" the High Breed scoffed. "You'll be destroyed, and your offspring!" There was no time to tell the monster that half of the kids weren't even related to Max.

"Gwen," Max ordered, "throw up an energy field around you and the others and hold on tight. And be a good girl."

"Grandpa Max, no! Please!" Ben pleaded desperately, trying to get to his grandfather. Ken and Kevin held him off, trying to make him stop struggling.

"Sorry, Ben, but it's the only way to make sure they can't control the rest of the world like how they controlled Ken," Grandpa Max said solemnly. "You'll have to take it from here. I know you can do it. I believe in you, in all of you."

Max's eyes swept over the young team, from his own flesh and blood to the Kevin and the Slayers. Cordelia would have made sure the Pride could handle whatever was thrown at them. As for Kevin, Ben, and Gwen, Max knew they could figure it out. His grand kids had already proven themselves when Ben had to go to Azmuth to stop the Omnitrix from detonating and blowing up the universe back when he was ten. Ben and Gwen hadn't needed their grandfather to hold their hands and lead them to victory. They could do it on their own.

They could save the world without him.

Max winked for the last time before pressing the detonator button on his bomb. "NOOOO!" Ben cried as Gwen threw up an energy shield. The explosion was even bigger than the explosions the Pride had created. They could hear the hatchery blowing up around them, fire and smoke billowing about and debris falling from the sky. And then it was gone, along with Max Tennyson.

It was a while before Gwen could let go of the shield. "That…was pretty hardcore," Kevin said slowly, shocked over what just happened.

"He-he saved the whole world," Gwen stuttered.

"Yeah," Ben said, "for now. But I don't think those things are giving up anytime soon."

"What are you saying?" Gwen asked him sharply. Ben looked at her seriously.

"I'm saying it's up to someone else to protect this planet. And like it or not, I think it's up to us."

Cordelia watched the scene unfold on the plasma TV in Isaac's study. Isaac was standing, leaning slightly on a black cane. On the desk, a bottle of red wine lay in a bucket of ice with two wine glasses next to it.

Cordelia closed her eyes and saw Max's death replay in her mind. She didn't cry; she had lived far too long to cry over a single teammate. Besides, she knew about Max's self-sacrificing attitude. To save the world, he would gladly give up his own life. Cordelia always knew that was what would kill him in the end, and she was right.

Sometimes, Cordelia hated being right.

Isaac popped open the wine bottle and began to pour wine into the glasses. Cordelia stood up and waited patiently for Isaac to finish. She set his cane against the desk he always sat behind to make sure it didn't fall.

Isaac held out a wine glass to his wife. She took it and he offered a toast. "Let possibly the most courageous man the world will never know rest in peace." As the two of them drank, Cordelia prayed to whatever god was listening that Ben didn't go out in a blazing glory just like his grandfather.

...And according to the show, Ken never shows up again, not even for summer vacation. Hell, I don't think he's ever mentioned again.

I hope I did Max's death scene justice. Man of Action did a pretty good job of it, considering it's a kids' show.

Review, people! They motivate me to work of the story. *hint hint*