CHAPTER THREE
Quick Author's Note: I'm back! And sorry for any bad spelling or grammar. Long story short, my laptop has a problem with its hard drive, so I' m using my tablet. Chapter One was crap because I used Polaris Office, copied the chapter and had to go through NASTY formatring nonsense. Quickoffice is what I'm using now, and only... around 2 days ago I found out it had spellcheck. So please try to forgive me for that nonsense I did. So, enough rambling, on with the story!
...nobody could believe it. First the Beast, the monster that had been proving itself time and time again to be a deadly creature, had started making its way through Washington. The place was evacuated, and an army sent to bring it down, if not for good, then for some time. Then a completely unexpected twist: an ambush.
Were the creatures smart enough to plan? Was Fuse giving them direct orders? If not, who was the go-between? Nobody knew. But the Wielder of the Omnitrix and Sandra White had gotten through. They may not have been able to kill it, but they could do something, at least. But from that point onward, things turned for the worst.
The sudden facial mutilation and the gory dismemberment... And then an abomination. It didn't even stop at the Beast, it stared draining energy from everything it could find, monster or human.
Eventually, countermeasures were needed. The ultimate Deus Ex Machina. The strongest magic-users they could find were hired. Instructions given: take it DOWN, but don't take it OUT. So they did.
They overwhelmed it and managed to destroy it. Call it murder, call it exorcism; anything you like. But they ended up roasting it to death. The ultimate irony. A dragon dying by fire. That made as much sense as fire demon getting ill with a fever. It was absurd, but it worked (in both cases).
But they found something in the bones. A very small something.
It was where the heart would've been. Suspended by some kind of levitation, an unconscious Ben10, curled into a ball as if he was sleeping... with two trails of tears on his face.
Even the most stone-hearted people had to at least look twice at the scene.
After he'd been hustled down to HQ Medical, it was determined that he wouldn't be waking up anytime soon, though his vital signs were stable. The boy needed sleep. Sleep and light duty for around a month ought to do it. Some people would be fine doing extra work in this kind of situation. Problem was, the boy didn't seem to want to wake up. Not that anyone could blame him.
Planet Fusion, the sewage green planet that had appeared at the horizon over five years ago, was killing the Earth.
The mastermind behind it all, Lord Fuse, had destroyed several galaxies before, gaining power as he conquered planets. But the rogue had recently decided to start on the Milky Way Galaxy. Some alien planets had been decimated, refugees barely managing to escape to other planets while Planet Fusion marched on.
Then they targeted the Solar System. All of the uninhabited planets had been sucked into the large green monstrosity, destroying anything there, whether it be planet rovers or satellites.
Amazingly, the moon had been spared. Though, it soon became obvious that Luna was going to be obliterated as well as the planet she orbited. Everything had been turned upside down when the planet came. The government reacted quickly. All the neighborhood heroes, superheroes and ultra-super heroes had been recruited within the space of two weeks.
They had instantly formed the WPA, short for World Protection Agency. Stupid? Bland? Generic? It may not have been a snazzy name, but it summed it up. From the little sociopath Mandy to the arrogant pride of Ben Tennyson down to the bizarre group of Fosters, people were pulled in, hero and villain alike. From the redundant Mojo Jojo to the melodramtic, horrific being Him, there was help. Everyone had to put their differences aside, no matter what.
You wanted to brutally kill your arch rival? Wanted to break them? Wanted to do the unspeakable to them? Then you'd better cooperate to save the world before Fuse's monsters brutally murdered you both. That was the ultimatum. Everyone agreed, no matter how halfheartedly.
But there had been problems lately. Maybe because the war was getting hopeless. Maybe because of the massive death toll every day. Maybe the desperation that had driven them all together was wearing off. Nobody cared what it was by this point, they just knew that deep down, the WPA was falling apart.
The recruits were becoming lax, dull. Nobody could blame them then the heroes who had inspired them were the ones saying that it was hopeless. The spark of optimism was dying out.
DeeDee may not have been a philosopher, but a simpler version of it was driving her to visit her little brother, Dexter.
Dexter. Dexter Utonium. The same boy who had started turning the tides of weaponry, giving the Earth a chance to defend itself. Creating alien technology in Earth. The Null-Void laser. It disrupted the Fusion matter, killing the monsters. Added to that, he was developing several other weapons.
Some of the smartest minds on Earth and the galaxy at large were gathering on Earth to stop the invasion. Earth's fighters weren't slacking off either. But looking at the present, everything was going downhill. So DeeDee decided to check on Dexter. She had to make sure he was okay. She was one of the few people apart from the Utoniums and some elect individulals who cared about him. But most of them were busy.
She pirouetted through the blast doors that separated the lab from the rest of the world with ease, as usual, managing to avoid setting off the alarms. She looked around the laboratory for her redheaded genius little brother, humming a little as she did so. True to form, she found him fiddling with some controls. It was a control board for something, but she didn't know what. Another robot, maybe? A laser?
"Hi, Dexter," she chirped, standing behind him.
"What-" the boy genius turned around, surprised, then saw his visitor.
"Hello to you too, DeeDee," he drawled in his psuedo-Russian accent.
"Whatcha doin'?" she asked, her eyes darting around, looking at all the buttons, dials and switches.
"Working on an important project."
"Ooh, goody!" she pranced through the laboratory, barely missing containers of various chemicals and paperwork.
"What's it about? Lasers or robots or something else?"
"Lasers. And stop dancing around! You could knock something over!" DeeDee obliged, walking instead of dancing. Her ballet flats gave those strange squishing sounds that Dexter hd unwillingly grown familiar with during his childhood. He wondered about them briefly, then turned back to his work.
"It's a super-big laser, right? What's it for?" And his effort was truncated.
"Yes, it is large. And its purpose is to defend this planet from Fuse."
"So, where is it? You're working on the control panel thing. Where is it?"
Dexter didn't answer. The laser was in the laboratory, but the last thing he needed was to have DeeDee prance around to look at it. Mostly because she would manage to put it on. The things in this laboratory were too expensive to vaporize.
"Where is it?"
"That is none of your business, DeeDee."
That did not deter her. She merely looked at the control panel more closely, looking for something. Now, DeeDee was no hawk. The incident when she mistook a baby turtle for a baby bird still in its shell proved that. Not mentioning that she mistook a hawk for a baby turtle when it landed with a crushed trash can on its back by the end of the day.
Her vision may have been 20/20, but her imagination could really obscure things. And she was no scientist. However, whenever she applied herself, she could observe things quite well. She did so now, scanning the control panel for something familiar...
Dexter sighed, he ignored his sister as best as he could, even though experience told him that she would continue being a pest until he gave her attention. Hopefully this might be one of the rare times she left him alone. It was not to be...
"Ooh, what does this button do?" Her hand rested over a big red button. Her index finger was pointed straight at it.
Now, common sense would tell anyone to run away from those kinds of buttons. DeeDee, despite Dexter's insinuations to the contrary, knew it was a bad idea. But there was a reason for it. A very good reason.
"DeeDee! Get away from that!" And so the chase began. DeeDee pretended to want to look at and hold several things (coincidentally, the most dangerous or expensive things) while Dexter yelled at her to Stop.
At the end of it all, DeeDee left, giggling, as her little brother chased her out. It always ended that way. Both siblings may not have gotten along, but that old routine was something they could still depend on, even in this war.
Dexter muttered something mean-spirited under his breath as the last of the pink tutu disappeared. He didn't mean it, however. That one chase did not end in any harm to his projects, but it put a sense of normalcy into him. A sense of normalcy that was desperately needed.
It may have been a relic from their childhood that was rarely exploited nowadays, but it was a bit of a welcome change to all of the pressure he had been facing. Sometimes he wondered if the army thought he was a machine. Yes, he developed weapons. No, he couldn't just spawn weapons at random. He had to develop them, fine tune them and before he could put them into production.
He had a sneaking suspicion that the Army was turning into Dexlab-weapon hoarders, with the way they were pressuring him these days. Genius or no, he was still thirteen years old.
Thirteen. It was absurd. The main financial backing for the war was a company started up by a thirteen year old. The best technology you could find on the market was made by a thirteen year old. One of the targets Fuse wanted to eliminate first was a thirteen year old. Thirteen years old, and he was the prime target of a potentially psychopathic warlord who had no idea of what failure was. Thirteen, and he had to deal with a perverse version of himself...
He shuddered, quicky derailing that train of thought. At least something was normal, in the midst of all of the abnormal things. That was one thing DeeDee was good for. He walked back to his work, one of the other things that was normal.
After all, when one of your very few friends- your best friend at any rate -turned into an otherworldly entity and destroyed everything within its grasp for two weeks, then was forcefully shut down, it tended to jar one. And there was foreboding that this was the tip of the iceberg.
The fabric of unity was getting frayed in the WPA day by day. That Incident added a large cut in it. Even Dexter saw it, and seeing how socially awkward he was, that was saying something. Everyone was on edge, daring the next calamity to happen. Watching and waiting...
He hoped that things would resolve themselves soon, and fast. Without the fabric of unity holding the defense together, the Earth would be conquered easily. Then again, if whishes were horses, beggars would ride.
He went back to his work. None of that was his business. The weapons would not go and develop themselves, now would they?
