- The following content is not recommended for younger audiences.
- For the archived, incomplete original, see here.
Foreverlasting is the thirty-second episode of Back in Action: Alien Universe.
Story[]
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Part I[]
[Night, Westside Bellwood: Mr. Hook's Candy Emporium, a little corner store. The closed sign on the door twirls. The hours on a Friday night like this are until 7PM. A clock flies off the wall and smacks the front door, reading 7:58. The lights within flicker on and off, stopping as a jar of gumballs spill onto the floor.
Inside, a cross-legged, purple-armored knight levitates. Their hands, the only part uncovered except by black fingerless gloves, are cupped. A bright flash summons a man in a safari suit and thick glasses which have a pearled strap. He even wears a rough and bushy Roosevelt mustache above his lips.
He approaches the concentrated knight only to be whacked from behind by a hard box of candy bars. The safari-suited man collapses to one knee, clenching the back of his head.]
So swiftly does a sword find itself lodged in the stomach of this blathering individual with the box in his hand. He’s a knight like the other, the typical metallic silver being his color, though purple and gold make their way into a draping royal robe behind him.
The silver has been pierced, though, with the blade running from one side to the other. The knight, ostensibly the leader, gasps, looking up to Paradox having vanished. He rips out the weapon to no harm, except through the armor.
He observes the blade itself. While the hilt is standard-issue, a regular gold, everything else is made of something unobservable. It is blue but unstable; shaky and bursting while thin and light.
The purple knight’s head swivels hastily, the leader tracking the movement to find Paradox behind him. He rushes after him, Paradox bursting into more gumballs for the knight to slip on. As the sword falls out of his hand, Paradox aims to catch it, only to have his hand stopped short.
It’s been paralyzed. And with it stuck in place, the rest of Paradox can’t leave.
A box, transparent but for the shimmering white outlines, surrounds Paradox’s hand and extends down his forearm. It’s clear now that the lead knight isn’t doing this but instead his uniquely colored mystical counterpart.
Unable to move himself, he wills the fallen sword from the ground to be hurled at the purple knight.
Panicking, the knight tries to move out of the way, losing their hold on Paradox allowing the armor-piercing weapon to fly through their head, busting the lower half of the helmet to reveal soft, purple lips on a sharp male face. He falls from mid-air to the floor, and just in the middle, as the leader seeks to leap at Paradox again, everything stops in place.
Paradox tips his hat and analyzes the landscape, making sure everything has frozen. Too many times, he’s been tricked into thinking it was. Another version manifests behind him, one in his less spectacular white lab coat, green goggles, and black pants.
His safari-hatted self walks towards the frozen mystic.
The lab coated Paradox nods and dissipates, leaving the other to stand behind the mystic. He grips the gloved hands, balls them into fists and tries to hold them tightly, as if to break them.
In spite of his perception, Paradox wasn’t safe. The mystic moves despite the freeze and locks his head in another paralyzing box. He encapsulates then the rest of Paradox’s body, forcing time to move again. The leader comes forward.
The purple knight with one hand removes his phone from his pocket, presses a button, and replaces it. To the leader’s raised brow, the mystic nods.
The lights all shut off, the front door shuts of its own accord, and the store returns to peace.
[Then, Bellwood High: Auditorium lights dim and curtains rise on a high school play. A musical number ignites as a proud and portly man takes the stage. A trio relaxes center of the front row - a brown-haired guy in the center and a brown-toned twin to each side.]
Ben hushes up, permitting the protagonist to go on about his traditions, mirrored by his singing townsfolk. They frolic then subside to their corners, letting pairs exchange brief banter center stage. The curtains zip shut again within minutes.
Ben’s friends yank him back into his seat.
The girl to his left, Kai, leads with her eyes Ben’s attention to the stage. On it appears a woman, a slightly lighter girl with a more profound nose who stands taller but with otherwise similar features. Kai lets out a light clap as the woman sings.
Kai rolls her eyes as she turns to Ben. Though expecting similar applause from him, she isn’t mildly surprised by having to snag his phone to buy attention. He turns to her with an empty look. “We missed you,” reads the text on his phone. Kai swipes down to a photo of purple and gold blocked into a shield insignia, magically visible over Paradox’s cage.
To no reply, she looks back. His seat’s empty. The far back exit slams shut, lending Kira wince on stage before she carries on.
[Outside, rolling down the streets of Bellwood: Combustiball, a flaming alien made of two thick tires.]
Like someone pulled the handbrake, Combustiball screeches to a halt at the Candy Emporium, styled like an old pirate’s vessel, with buoys and fake wood panels. His tires part, unveiling their axle and two molten rock legs.
Frisbit takes his place. All too familiar with the place’s hours, he knows the doors are sealed. He detaches his multi-tool frisbee to create a lockpick. The first he inserts gets stuck. The gumballs inside glow, hexed symbols appearing on them. His tugs to remove his frisbee are futile. A purple mist emerges from the handle and wraps the frisbee, infecting its Omnitrix’s once-green hourglass with its color.
Magenta sparks fly from it as the mist entraps Frisbit’s whole body. His joined tube eye grows with Frisbit’s gasps, before a flash sends him away.
[A medieval palace interior. Frisbit’s tool returns to his back, as he bewildering twirls around.]
Frisbit turns to the source of the voice, a portly gentleman with silver bushels of hair above his ears and nowhere else. Paradox floats to his side, all but the hat (and with it, his brain) in a glowing white cage.
Frisbit recognizes the speaker. The voice has gone a ways since the last time he saw the shopkeeper, but he knows it was him.
A sudden blow to the back of his head. Heel-toe, and he finds the earlier purple knight, mouthpiece still uncovering the indistinguishable mouth. He swings, just for the man to dissipate and hit him again from behind. Spinning around, neither Mr. Hook, owner of the Emporium, nor the fanciful knight are to be found.
A smack to the back of his head again.
At the end of the hall, the mystic manifests, saluting. Frisbit launches his disc at him, only for the knight to catch it with one hand and snap it with two. Sparks fly again. But with the disc destroyed, Frisbit exerts an ear-ruining shriek. He collapses to the floor, a human again.
Downed, he glances around. Clutching his chest, like his heart was broken again, he crawls a long three inches down the velvet rugs with their well-kempt, like-new golden fringes. The mystic’s long since disappeared from the end of the halls, but Ben can’t even make it that far before dropping his head to the floor.
Rolling over onto his back, he takes in the 20-foot paintings along the walls: knights in sizeable ancient battles, if they’re any more than fiction. Kings feature in some, presumably former tenants of this very House of Uncommons.
After the royal red floor, atop the uneven stone walls, is a ceiling of flaming chandeliers. The mystic waves, dangling from one before his weight snaps the thing down onto the floor. All Ben can will himself to do is cross his arms into a shield. Crash.
Combustiball slides the thing off of him. He pants but rolls up into his tire form and skates down the rug flooring. He turns a corner to find the mystic waving at the end of the next hall, and so he follows. And again around the next, and again.
He unfolds when around one corner, the mystic isn’t in any direction. He hears a *pop* behind him, and finds not only the mystic from where he’d just come but also the peculiar lack of skid marks along the rugs. It looked unharmed, perfectly well-kempt, in spite of the flaming body smearing against it. This time he walks slightly down the hall.
Whack! Again to the back of his head. But nobody behind him, just a large painting depicting-
A long-lost battle against Sii, towering over Bellwood, featuring Gwen, Kevin, Ben, and the late Julie Yamamoto. Reverting to human, he paces to the next frame, holding it closely to read the title. “Ten Plus Twenty,” reads the engraved text below Ben, an Omnitrix-wielding Gwen 20, and her time-traveling daughter from the future Jen.
“Ledger Recon”: Gwen and Chelsey perishing before Dawn. But most significantly, “Unleashed”: Anodite forms of Gwen, Chelsey, and Verdona joined by Charmcaster all struggling to revive Julie. This depiction even appears alive, the shimmer of their mana beaming. The memory is just too vivid.
Whack!
Whack! He angrily flips around to see the mystic sweetly wave before leaping headfirst into the painting next to him. Ben almost walks towards the painting, but shakes his head, wanting to embrace the “Unleashed.” Turning around, he finds the image has shifted to that of a triumphant blond man in gleaming silver knight’s armor, towering with sword held high, over the corpse of a green and black dragon.
Searching for the voice’s source, Ben turns to see Paradox, most of his body locked in that time cage. He’s inside the painting the mystic jumped into. Prepared for the worst, he approaches it and reaches a hand in. He sees it move with him, but it doesn’t reach far enough to get a hold of Paradox.
So he jumps in.
[END OF PART]
Part II[]
[Grass, and a sky well-lit by the stars. A stream, and a man lying on his back in the shallowest part. Ben manifests piecemeal as he falls into the painting. At first he runs to Paradox, but he vanishes on approach.
Words flitter in and out in the space around him. They float and have no depth to them. Ben swinging his hands at them only acts like stirring in the water, distorting the text until it dissipates.]
The young man in the water, cape afloat in the water, just lays there. More phrases fly about Ben’s periphery.
The young man raises a finger.
Ben becomes something new, a hurricane contained in tensile glass. His fury cannot be contained. Like a gyre, he wields light gusts to levitate the man out of the water. The young man struggles to sit up straight as he disappears from place.
Tap.
He’d expected the purple knight from before for some reason, but this time found the young man. His knight’s armor becomes apparent to him, but before this hurricane in a bottle can shift focus, the knight is gone again. When he shifts his focus to his personal gyre, he finds Paradox bobbing at the top. He stops and runs to his side.
Shove.
Ben’s hurricane transformation falls face-first into the water. As he gets up, on all fours, his black goggles contort like one side is of an eyebrow raised. He sees his reflection in this stream, and it doesn’t line up - a night-haired man of no less than 30, in ancient Roman coverings. He lifts a hand out of the water to see he himself is still the glass hurricane.
To the corner of his eye, he sees another two reflections, a baby waddling on all fours and a priest.
He scoffs.
Wavelength gets up and turns around, watching the young man walk away as Paradox simply fades away. He rushes after them, shoved past by the mystic who dances over and out of the frame.
He brings his face into his whole palm, buying a *shink* sound as glass touches glass. He rolls the hand down his face, glancing once more the reflection that doesn’t belong to him.
Then, he’s off.
[Someone’s quarters in the House of Uncommons. Wall-mounted torches light the place, and the same rug runs the floor. There is a single window, and on two sides of a gold-accented wood canopy bed, paintings. Wavelength falls out of the one on the left, meeting before him just the caped knight.]
Wavelength turns to grab at the mystic but he’s already gone. The caped knight watches Wavelength, his glass body slowly being consumed by that of the towering, black insectoid centaur form of Dreadsense. He cracks his head back 180 degrees to the knight and on his eight legs makes the infamous clicking of an arachnid in a rush. The caped knight cowers towards the wall behind him, hiding completely in his cape as Dreadsense sinks his claws in.
He lifts the cape up and finds no one within.
Dreadsense turns his head back to the painting he’d walked from.
The words he speaks float across his periphery like before. The next have the question - “Who are you to the Forever Knights?”
The knight Eli nods and trust-falls right into the painting behind him, the one Dreadsense had fallen out of, now labeled “Hurdles.” Depicted are two men on horseback - or rather, one on horseback, and a second, clinging for dear life to the horse running off without him.
Dreadsense, reverting to human, follows.
[Inside the painting, there is depth to the world. Everything still appears drawn, and Ben’s attempts to help the man falling off of his horse only put his intangible hands through the world.]
Ben raises a conflicted brow.
Paradox, caged from chin to toe, appears.
As he speaks, his words float in front of him. To Ben ahead of him, the words are mirrored.
Ben struggles not to react.
The static time cage rises to his nose, stopping his mouth from running.
The world around rises from painting to reality, as Paradox converts to the stallion. He stomps and whinneys in protest.
He smiles awkwardly from ear-to-ear, as Ben panickingly darts his eyes in search of an exit frame.
Ben is silent, but before he can be changed, he becomes Combustiball and races away. Mere meters away, he’s stopped in stasis and reeled back toward Eli.
No response.
He steps up to Ben and presses himself almost right up against his cage.
Combustiball cannot rally his body to move, either to nod or to speak.
Combustiball is converted into Decimus, a robed ancient Roman, and Eli becomes the younger George, the more adept rider on the other horse. By the will of the mystic knight, Ben’s Decimus is transported onto Paradox’s Aeneid, in the exact position as the painting, holding on for dear life. Similarly, Eli’s Georgius is lifted and planted onto his own steed.
The frozen frame unpauses, with Ben’s cage being removed and both horses off to the races.
Ben screams at the very top of his lungs, which coincidentally is exactly what his script calls for. Eli turns his head back to him, per the real events of this time, and shouts.
[END OF PART]
Part III[]
[A treacherous forest: falling leaves wither to ash before they hit the ground, and petulant Venus flytraps, curiously out of place in Rome and more-so here in the capital of nowhere, have the beating white glow of an otherworldly presence. Tree barks’ swirling patterns flow like paths of water.
Here come the horse-riding Forever Knight Eli, in the form of a young Georgius; Paradox, in the form of a second horse; and Ben, in the form of his ancestor Decimus, clinging for dear life to him. As Eli reins in his horse, Paradox sloppily screeches to a stop, hurling Ben a few feet forward.
Eli dismounts daintily and brushes himself off, giving a hand to Ben, who shoves the offer away, clutching the side of his stomach he crushed in his landing.
Ben stretches out a leg before trudging over to Paradox and dropping to his knees beside him. The horse professor is rubbing his hoofs.]
Purple lightning crackles, and the blue skies cascade into thunderous gray clouds. Eli’s partner arrives, hands shaking to keep his hold on the number of active transmogrification and time spells. Eli stares perplexedly at him.
In his head he replays his words.
The royal violet magician nods, as Paradox and Ben look on.
Ben’s lines curl into view in front of him. He drops his head just reading what he has to say.
Aion disappears, Ben having missed the rest of their conversation.
Ben’s eyes nervously dart left and right.
Ben wipes sweat from his forehead.
The world freezes, taking on a blue tint. Ben, Eli, and Paradox’s bodies occasionally glitch between their roles and their actual appearances.
The scene rewinds to their arrival: the horses’ brakes and Ben being launched off his horse.
Eli shrugs. With another clap, the scene advances slightly to Ben petting his horse.
Eli draws a blade and with it parses vines dangling between trees.
[Fifteen minutes elapse. Eli’s still just swinging away with a scared and skeptical Ben in tow. But Eli stops, just short of cutting something else. He bends over and peers through the openings in it.]
Before Ben ruins his line, Eli points to the words running across.
Eli squats with his back to a tree and cups his hands.
Ben eyes the branch not less than both their heights off the ground.
Ben shakes his head as he steps up. He puts the weight of a foot in Eli’s hands.
As soon as he’s upright in Eli’s hands, the two almost lose balance but with one strong lift, Eli sends Ben soaring up into the trees. Airborne, he crosses his arms in an X before him and yells.
But he’s still himself. He tries for the Omnitrix, but his arm is bare. He begins to flail his arms wildly trying to catch the branch before he misses it. He outstretches his arms.
But he misses and falls in an open field, before an otherworldly monster, resembling a bull-sized leech on four legs. Its body is a pale green with patterns swirling about its skin. Ben groans as he gets up, catching its attention. It runs straight at him, aiming to headbutt him in the stomach. He crosses his arms to defend himself.
But the attack never comes. He uncovers himself, finding an army of tentacles extended from its body. It’s frozen in place, but between the headbutt and the tentacles, he was seconds from defeat.
The world rewinds to Ben flying through the air. This time, instead of trying Frisbit, he preps to catch the branch and does just narrowly so. He flounders trying to get up, but in the meantime, Eli runs the sharp angle up the bark of the tree, cleats of mana keeping him stable. As he reaches the height of the branch, the cleats disappear and he moves himself around the tree naturally.
The branch trembles a bit from his added weight, but he provides Ben a hand up. Ben slaps the hand away, almost falling again because of it, then rolls up onto the branch on his back.
Ben gasps for air.
Eli rolls his eyes and shrugs.
Seconds roll back.
Eli grins and extends a helping hand. Ben slaps it away again and gets up on his own. Eli points forward, to a branch thirty feet ahead, but finds Ben distracted by the monster below.
The tail on the monster, with burning red eye of its own, turns to the trees.
The monster below stops in its paces and stares up to the trees. Eli and Ben hold their breaths, with Eli quick to cover Ben’s mouth.
The monster returns to its nibbling at blackened shrubs and broken leaves.
Without a word, Ben crosses his arms and turns around. He can’t help but recall missing the branch they’re on the first time.
Eli takes his head and turns him around.
The branch shakes. As Ben opens his eyes, he sees Eli readying to make the jump himself.
A bushel of the tree’s leaves snap and smack Ben in the face, almost costing him his balance. Ben’s view obfuscated, Eli’s eyes and hands glow a wisping fuschia. A row of platforms appear before him, and it’s his weight removed from the branch that allows Ben to regain composure before falling off. He hops from bough to bough until he’s at the next tree.
Ben brushes through the leaves and sees Eli, hands and eyes just like normal.
Eli motions for Ben to take the leap. The tree quakes again, one of the monsters at the base rumbling it. Frightened for dear life, he bounds. Eli places his hands behind his back as they glow, allowing him to quickly make a bouncing pad that elevates Ben high into the air. Mid-jump, he preps to catch the next branch, but from nowhere, a pure-black rift opens up and catches Ben, whisking him off to who-knows-where.
Among the monsters is one that has scaled Eli’s tree. It jumps off, catches the branch by its teeth, and bites it off. As the knight falls with it, he creates a picture frame with his fingers that when parted draws open a rectangular portal beneath him.
It drops him on the ground, where Ben is held in the captivity of an alien with a wisping tail and a slender body covered in ancient Esoterica garbs - somehow no different from the modern-day.
The alien cups its head where its ears would be. It screeches to the point where even the greenery in the area shivers, and Ben and Eli come close to collapsing. One of the Doormaker’s monsters arrives at its side, and its many tendrils extend towards Ben.
Eli cuts out a portal himself, bringing Ben to his side.
Eli shakes his head but neglects to rewind the program. Instead, he claps, skipping back to his “I need to,” and then once more, to go forward and bear his blade. The tip of it is fuschia. Around him are the bodies of innumerous slain beasts - Lucubra. Just three threaten to take Eli down. He tosses his sword to Ben.
It is this blade alone with which Ben can eliminate the dark mirror of one of his favorite transformations.
He instead cuts through the Lucubra terrorizing Eli and offers him a hand up. His clothing is torn up and his armor scratched. As Eli takes the help, Ben drives the blade into him.
Eli shakes his head, Ben freezing just before the blade makes contact. The world around them glitches. He lets go of Ben’s hand and falls back to the floor, but rather than hit it, he fazes right through.
[END OF PART]
Part IV[]
[The mutilated Lucubra lay. The Doormaker cups his head mid-scream. Ben, resembling his ancient ancestor Decimus, extends a blade. He can’t move. He’s frozen, as is the rest of this blue-tinged world.
He falls forward. Off-balance, he can’t save himself, but a frame opens just where Eli had fallen through. He crashes through the ceiling of the House of Uncommons’ banquet hall, right onto its never-ending table, shattering plates and sending a stuffed turkey flying.
He rolls off the table and groggily lands on the floor. As he gets up, he notices he’s Frisbit, as he’d requested earlier. On the table, he finds Mr. Hook with a duster wiping the table cloth. The turkey is back. Frisbit can’t help but wonder how.
A tap on the shoulder.]
A shrill squeal.
Frisbit turns about-face to find Eli, cupping his probably-broken nose.
Silence.
Frisbit holds his hand out the same as he’d held Decimus’s blade. He approaches Eli and motions driving it into his stomach.
As Eli tosses the balled-up, soaked napkin into a waste basket, Frisbit observes the scenery change. Where he was at the middle of the banquet hall’s table, he’s now at a throne at the head.
Frisbit raises a brow to him. Eli points to behind the throne. A fireplace-
Eli is pointing higher than that. Above the fireplace hangs a portrait of a woman cradling her toddler son. At that distance, the title plaque is blurry to Frisbit, so he mounts his disc and gets a closer look.
Ben places his hands on the portrait. He feels the coarse, dried paint, but doesn’t slip into it.
Ben turns around to a smaller room - the quarters again, with Paradox still in the form of a horse.
Thunder booms, and with the blinding smack of lightning, Paradox becomes an infamous blade with a glistening ruby in its hilt.
Eli nods, ripping the sword out of the ground. It shakes uncontrollably.
He levitates, the sword whisking him off into the painting behind him. Frisbit runs up to it but stops short of jumping in. He sees a tall warrior, in scratched gray armor covering head-to-toe. They are marching through their living room. The title is “Sixun?” Punctuated again.
He shakes his head, turning to an open window. It looks out to a perilous storm at sea. He’s on the highest story of an unthinkably elaborate castle on an island in the middle of nowhere. He taps the Omnitrix.
Frisbit bashes the side of his hand onto the Omnitrix. More laughter.
Maniacal laughter.
Frisbit drops his head and leaps into the portal.
[Song dynasty-era China, Night: into Within this time period, Ben drops into the body of that armored warrior “Sixun.” Simple instructions are etched into reality by Aion. He follows them through the halls of a medieval home, entering into one room where a child lay sleeping. He nods and passes to the next room, where a man in his 20s also rests. He nods again and passes on, but that man in his 20s opens his eyes to the clunky pacing of the armor out of the house.
Ben proceeds to the moon-kissed outside where the walls that surround this city at the very edges are visible. They are towering fortresses that hide distant battles from citizens. Ben’s warrior draws a blade from his side and marches towards the walls.
A tug at his side. A grown man, no doubt a lowly vagabond with his shaggy blonde hair and markedly torn robes of Roman prescription, stands there, just beside the warrior’s house.]
Ben’s character - Sixun - is silent.
He rips out a jug of water and hands it over. Sixun takes it.
Sixun shakes his head, and the vagabond rolls his eyes. He smacks the jug, launching water onto and into Sixun’s helmet. The vagabond hand glows.
The 20-or-so man bursts open the front door and briefly peers out, as if in search of Sixun, but there is now nothing outside. He goes back in.
Where did they go? Around the side of the house, the vagabond has slammed Sixun against the wall and contained him in a bubble of mana. From within, Sixun screams but his voice is unheard.
When he opens the bubble, Sixun lunges at the vagabond, who casts enchanted cuffs around his arms that strap onto the side walls of the home.
He gestures flicking, which slaps the helmet off of Sixun, unveiling tied-back brown hair and a woman’s face.
The vagabond nods, crushing his fists to force her armor to crumble and break off of her, revealing light clothing.
Head down, she says nothing. The vagabond releases the shackles.
Gynura nods and proceeds inside. (An old man, eyes agape, who caught the whole thing looks at his jug of some orange carbonated drink and sets it down, walking away bewildered.) Georgius follows. Inside, the 20-odd man - Gynura’s brother - stands there.
She lifts the hatch, opens it, and proceeds down a ladder, shutting it after herself. Georgius steps up to her reproachful brother.
The brother - Jin - scans Georgius. He shakes his head in disbelief as Gynura’s young son, no more than 10, peaks out.
[Basement: In the sublevel below the house is an armory, the place where her husband keeps his armor and the place where he found that old set. She grabs some tools, and looks around to make sure no one’s around. Then, with the twirl of a finger, she rips open a portal to outside and takes the armor that Georgius had broken. She closes the portal after grabbing piece after piece, then takes tools in preparation for repair.
Another rift opens behind her, and a body on its knees comes in all-red armor. One of the armpieces is missing, and underneath, a ghoulish hand is visible. The helmet, too, is gone. The half-human, half-Doormaker face is monstrous. The human half of the face has tears running down as the rift behind it closes.
Gynura runs over to grab him before he falls.]
He doesn’t utter a word, coughing as she slumps him over her shoulder and walks him to a table across the room. She slides everything off and lays him across it. His inhuman side is oozing some blue liquid.
He shakes his head.
Struggling, he pulls a blade out of the side of his armor.
She holds a ball of magenta energy in her hand and presses it against him, trying to heal.
He coughs up something blue.
He hands her the sword.
He takes her hand with his free one and puts it on the hilt of the blade. She shakes her head furiously.
He gestures her to come closer to him. She puts her ear on his face to listen.
He just pecks her ear.
Gynura shakes her head.
Georgius keeps Heng back and slides down the ladder. He enters the messy room, where Gynura lies on her knees hovered over Sixun’s body on the table.
She shakes her head. Georgius approaches to touch her shoulder, but he stops. Just behind her, he can see the red and blue splats on her hands, the crack in Sixun’s chestpiece and the blade driven through the crack.
She turns back to Sixun’s body. She offers her hand to him and he uses it to help her onto her feet.
She turns around and faces him with a smile.
Her eyes glow as she bashes a mana-made jug into Georgius’s forehead, disorienting him. In his disarray, Gynura uses magic to faze Sixun’s armor off of him and onto her. Georgius grabs her by the shoulders but she then bashes the back of her head into his again. He feels the world spin as she runs off, a magic-tipped blade in hand, twirling open a portal and bounding through it.
The world but briefly freezes. Eli, through his guise of Georgius, cups his forehead as Aion manifests to his side.
Aion looks to him, rolling his eyes.
Aion chuckles and dissipates as time continues.
[Beyond the portal Ben’s Gynura had run through is yet another disenchanted forest. As Gynura steps into the battlefield, it is to meet a Doormaker, as well as three men - one in heavier, more glorious armor - and a band of Lucubra.]
Gynura prepares her blade and utters not a word. The man can’t see her under her husband’s helmet.
With the snap of his finger, the Doormaker screams, breaking open rifts around Gynura that drop a bevy of the Lucubra on her. Their tendrils which hunger for her mind are the first pieces she slices off.
One of the other men speaks in some garbled gibberish, igniting more screams from the Doormaker. Instead of the Lucubra however, this man leaps through. He’s gilded in light burgundy armor, like Sixun’s but less protective. When he swings at her, she swipes right at his hilt, knocking the sword out of his hand. She slices at his chest and then cuts at his wrists, chopping off a hand.
She pushes the light-armored man onto the ground and charges after the cocky gilded one. In doing so, she navigates through a field of Sixun’s fallen teammates and Lucubra. Gynura twirls open a portal and bounds through it mid-charge.
He looks around nervously. This man is the General of the Emperor’s army - no doubt - and the man by his side is the last of his infantry, a blonde newcomer who goes by Ying.
Crunch: the sound a blade makes when it breaks right through the belly of a Doormaker. The portal had come and gone from behind him, Gynura baring her weapon for him. She pulls it out and stares at the men in front of her. Ying, terrified, runs through a portal of his own making, and so Gynura is left eyeing the General.
She readies to charge, as Ying manifests behind her and slaps her helmet off.
She holds out her hand and makes a bubble around the General, but Ying grabs her and covers her mouth. As she struggles to free herself, tendrils not unlike the Lucubras’ escape his body and bury into her temples.
A doorway-shaped portal comes alive with Georgius running through it.
Georgius slides to a stop just short of the General. The General points to Gynura, whose struggling has ceased. Ying releases her and stands behind the General, who in turn stands behind her. Her eyes glow a sickly green color as she bares her blade against Georgius.
Georgius utters but a peep.
Ying’s lips curl into a crooked smile.
Georgius drops his blade to the floor.
[Pan to above the battered trees, staring at the moonlit sky. Blood comes spattering in the air.]
[END OF PART]
Part V[]
[Middle of the Disenchanted Forest, tree-top view: The blood that flew from Georgius and Gynura’s last stand is suspended in-air. Time-reverses, the spatter reversing into whomever’s body. Panning down, Gynura holds still with her blade in-hand, right before the blow.]
He poses with arms extended out and falls back into the floor behind him, again falling right through it. Ben’s Gynura, bodies flickering, is unfrozen and left to roam free. A gold frame opens in front of him to escape to the House of Uncommons. He shakes his head and walks opposite it.
Tap.
He flips around to find Aion who shoves Ben forward through another frame. Aion follows him in.
[House of Uncommons, lower level crypt: “Sixun?” hangs, spitting out Ben and Aion before Eli, who brushes dust off himself.
Ben lands on his knees, Eli offering a hand up. Ben slaps it away and gets up with ease. He’s still in Gynura’s form, but before he can mention it, Aion fixes him.]
Eli rests a comforting hand on Ben’s shoulder. Ben eyes it with contempt.
Ben smacks the hand away furiously.
Eli chuckles.
Aion shakes his head.
Aion nods.
Ben rubs his chin.
As Eli points to the painting behind him, Ben notes the scenery has actually stayed the same: a crypt, home to myriad coffins. The one directly in front of him is labeled “The First Gy----” with dust covering the end. As Ben bends over to swipe the plaque clean, the doors open to unveil a skeleton, with battered orange cloth and red gauntlets and armor that covers just the arms.
Tap.
Ben swings around to see Eli gesturing to the painting - “Protector” - which now depicts Ben in the Yamamoto home. Everyone is dressed up, but in black. And Mrs. Yamamoto is held tightly by Mister, the latter mid-scream at Ben.
The casket grabs Ben’s attention, as it shuts itself. He turns back to see a new painting. It’s Gynura’s son Heng - the likeness is uncanny - but he’s decades older now.
Ben transforms into Combustiball. Aion and Eli both take steps away from him, but rather than fight, Combustiball simply leaps into the frame. Eli goes in after.
[A tavern, thirty-one years after Gynura. Heng sits at the counter, jug in hand laughing it up. As Ben’s Combustiball takes control of him, he shakes his head and looks around, his scraggly beard twisting with him.]
Ben’s lines flutter around him. The door to this homely wooden destination jingles open and slams shut. Large footsteps louden.
The man behind the counter lays an open palm out. Heng drops a coin in it, which the man pockets. People, including the bartend, gasp in the background as the footsteps continue, giving Heng a chance to pull his coin back to him with the wave of a hand. Someone murmurs something about a seat.
Heng turns away to his beverage. His ruby gauntlets clink at the touch before he takes a swig.
A tap on the shoulder. Ben, expecting Aion, swings around his barstool with his blade in hand.
A portly man no less than six and a half feet, stomach uncovered by a stained white shirt he has likely owned since childhood, stares into Heng’s eyes one by one.
Heng’s friend pops out of her seat.
Heng sheaths his blade and grabs his drink. Fergus snags him by the throat. All eyes on the encounter, the hum of the lively room stops. Everyone else at the counter leaves their stools.
Fergus picks him up, still at the neck, and stares back into his eyes.
Fergus presses his nose against Heng’s, clutching harder.
He reaches for the hilt of his blade.
Managing a flip, Heng grabs his blade and slashes just through Fergus’s shirt, pushing him to let go. Heng lands on one knee to the ground and recomposes himself a few feet back.
Fergus raises a brow.
For a moment he just eyes Heng from their feet apart.
Fergus marches up to Heng and pushes his blade down like it was paper.
Heng chuckles awkwardly with him.
[But as the minutes go by, those awkward chuckles evolve to the hearty laughter only lifetime friends know. Fergus got his two seats – each with half of his name carved in – and Heng got his – with his butt print enough to mark territory. A ruby helmet is at the foot of his stool.]
Jingle. A bright white light blinds those at the entrance as Ying, mind certainly free of the Diagon, runs in, arms armored and matching silver helmet on.
At the front door, as the shimmering white glow fades, everyone by the entrance can see it has transformed into a portal to an active war front. Soldiers of all sorts are dying. And the uncountable Lucubra are to blame.
He takes in all the rooms air to calm himself. He then downs the gallon of whatever source of delusions he was having, unsheathes his blade and walks to the door.
The perspective of the doorway’s portal becomes a birds-eye view of Georgius, riding in on a stallion and dismounting mid-gallop to swing his blade at a dozen Lucubra, who if not impacted by the mana-infused blade’s impact are launched away by a burst of magic he throws with another hand.
He rolls his eyes.
He leaps into the doorway, Ying going in after him. The forgotten helmet lay under Heng’s stool.
[Untold miles away, the zone just outside the largest known disenchanted forest. Hordes of Lucubra scratch down and overwhelm legions of “General” Georgius’s people. Heng and Ying pop in, with a Lucubra instantly pouncing Ying.]
Heng tries to help, but-
Heng curls his hand into a ball of mana, his eyes glowing, jumping and throwing the ball at the ground. A quake throws off the Lucubra in the area and sends him hundreds of feet in the air. Collapsing his arms to his sides, he reopens them to unveil the gliding wings of a bat. He soars down to Georgius, smacks a few Lucubra off of him, and with that same momentum, shoots back up and knocks out the rest.
He lands at Georgius’s side, collapsing his arms, and removing the wings.
Georgius sighs. He pushes his knuckles together and closes his eyes.
Next to Georgius’s every living follower, a projection of his head in pink floats and utters commands.
Some of those followers murmur in confusion. Heng visibly rolls his eyes.
Heng flicks his boomeranging coin into Georgius’s forehead, disturbing the projection a moment.
Heng makes his own projection. Everyone gasps, as though they were seeing a ghost.
Georgius and Heng return to their bodies and equip bows made of mana. The arrows they each use are their blades, each tipped. They keep a close eye on the remaining thirteen bodies running from the Lucubra to the Storm.
The first rushing to safety is a boy even younger than Ying when he started. A Lucubra grabs him and gnaws at his ankles. Heng fires his blade-arrow, stabbing the Lucubra who continues to overwhelm the boy. Heng recalls the blade to him. Georgius fires in the meantime, deciding between saving Ying and an older woman to nail three separate Lucubra with one shot to save the woman. As Heng goes on to save him, Ying looks on in disgust, betrayed. Meanwhile, the first boy collapses. Heng hits the Lucubra again for the kill, but the boy visibly begins to change into one of the Doormaker’s kin.
Heng readjusts his bow and pulls it back. Georgius gestures him not to fire, as he opens up a portal under the boy and sends him elsewhere.
Ying reunites with Heng and Georgius.
Ying pouts as Heng and Georgius carefully knock out the remaining resistance. Two more bodies go down who are then ingested by Georgius’s portal.
Georgius points to the center of the forest behind them. Heng shakes his heads.
The remaining nine legions group up at Heng, Georgius, and Ying. All the Lucubra are down, but they refuse to look back to the fallen.
Heng pumps his arm.
He pumps his arm higher. Ying chimes in.
Everyone chimes in.
Heng shakes his head at Georgius, who bows his.
Heng snickers as though he was ever going to give Georgius the chance to lead again. He points into the forest and everyone follows him in, except Georgius who goes last, and Ying who doesn’t go at all.
His eyes cower from contact with Georgius’s.
Georgius resigns from the argument, extending an arm to shake. Ying, reluctantly, returns it, then turns back, mounts his steed and takes off.
Georgius enters the forest.
[An hour later, at the heart of the forest: demented trees have been knocked down left and right. Nine bodies are down. Ten Lucubra are up. As Heng absorbs the destruction, he drops his blade. Georgius sees this and gapes. The Lucubra are swift to take him, but Georgius knocks out all ten. They had gnawed enough at Heng to debilitate him. He rests on a rock.]
As his last breath gives out, his tricky coin slips out of hand. Ben’s Combustiball escapes the body and becomes but a spectator alongside Aion. The two follow Georgius as he approaches a Doormaker who screams as Georgius pierces his chest. The forest loses its transformation and becomes the wasteland it otherwise is. The Doormaker’s final portal called opens behind a boulder. It simply sits there, Georgius unable to close it.
Ben watches from afar as Azmuth arrives and gifts Georgius the tool for victory – Ascalon, fashioned out of the universe’s most fundamental forces.
The portal finally lets out a real dragon, a black deeper than space for the most part but a ghastly green on the torso. Time freezes. Eli almost shouts “cut!” before Combustiball drifts under him, pushes him out of the way, and falls into the invisible exit Aion had set up. Aion leaps in after him. With the two gone, Eli tries to go after, but the frame is closed. Time has continued.
[The Diagon telepathically shares the history – as Georgius dropped his blade, Gynura went in for the kill, but he opened a rift transporting the end of the blade to the General. Just before it reached his chest, Ying – then still part-Doormaker – opened another rift just in front of the General that put the blade into Gynura’s back.]
[Outside the House of Uncommons, cliffside: Combustiball arrives. Aion manifests behind him, through a frame mounted just aside the rear House entrance. Combustiball lunges, grabs him, and holds him just over the edge.
There is very little ocean around the adrift island. Countless pieces of green and blue rocks coasting through the sky. The sky isn’t even blue; it’s just not there. One can see straight out into space from just a few miles out. Combustiball nearly falls off the edge of what must be a remaining piece of a wrecked Earth.]
[Aion points to the frame on the door. It shows Eli’s engagement with the Diagon. The latter saw through the former’s ruse, and Eli attempting not to further alter the timeline didn’t wish to do or say the wrong thing, instead doing nothing.
The Diagon wins. Ying’s battalion comes in the months later and mounts a valiant though unsuccessful effort. The swarm of Doormakers – Marid – go on to world domination, within a few centuries, coating the world with disenchanted forestation. Eli, shipwrecked in the body of Georgius and twisted into an eternal Marid fusion, acts as second-in-command.
The Diagon takes the next step to the planets beyond, asserting dominion over the Solar System and before long venturing out to the local galaxy. With time, Eli – and by extension, Diagon – loses to the strongest imperial force in the universe – Vilgax, in the 1900s. Refusing to relinquish Earth, he takes the world to his grave.
Boom. In pieces, like the one where the House of Uncommons lay, despite its juncture between timelines.]
Aion reverts the frame to the moment they had left and pushes Combustiball in. Aion follows.
[At the moment Aion and Combustiball had left Eli behind, they arrive again. They take Eli with them and revert Paradox, in the form of Ascalon, back to himself, leaving the actual Ascalon to Georgius. All four return through the frame.]
[House of Uncommons, a room with a bevy of armored statues: Eli, Combustiball, and Aion arrive with Paradox back in a static, timeless box.]
[END OF PART]
Part VI[]
[House of Uncommons, in the Hall of the Honored: Combustiball reverts to Ben.]
A faint green glow captures Ben as his skin loses texture and unveils the muscle below. To conceal himself, a shielding of titanium plating, painted black, snaps on from head to toe. The Omnitrix stays on his wrist, but the gauntlet around the trademark insignia dissipates. He grips his claws.
Ben’s titanium-plated transformation grounds himself and curls his arms as though weights are in-hand.
Paradox is released from his stasis. As Ben’s transformation relaxes, Aion transforms Paradox into a gun and launches him into a random painting. The sturdy alien squats again but soon finds himself removed from the ground. Aion contains his legs down in stasis, mere inches in the air.
Through the grates of his plated armor, the titanium transformation squints.
Aion releases the titanium Ben gently onto the floor. He reverts to human to see Eli gesturing to Paradox’s paintings.
Ben stands up, a twinge in his leg as he feels the fading pain of being hurled off of Aeneid relapse. As he approaches the painting, he moves with a small limp, feeling little pricks across his body that remind him of all the Lucubra that had snacked on him as Heng.
He climbs into the painting.
[Somewhere on the Carolinas’ border, 1880s, Night: Before pavement, the valley more traveled between pubs and other buildings was the signature for a road. On this night, it is empty. But one pub’s lights are on. A man, very incapable of walking straight or in any one direction, busts out. He shouts some incomprehensible goodbyes to his friends as he begins his stumble home.
A few blocks down, away from more organized society between some forestation, the man looks across the road to the other bundle of trees. He twirls over to that side, looks back to where he had come from, and dances back over.
He keeps on his one-man performance, swaying from side-to-side. Even as a carriage rolls forward. In front of the carriage, someone tries to pull their horse around him. But the man keeps twirling, just off toward the left as the carriage swings to the right. Mid-sway, the man sees the carriage and stops. The rider brushes their forehead now that the stress is gone.
So the man, covering his eyes, leaps into the carriage’s path. A woman – the rider – shrieks. Her carriage is removed from the ground, caught in a bubble of bright magenta energy. The horse continues to pedal as though it’s making any difference, but in-air it is moved over the man and released back on the floor. The spooked steed stands on two and kicks wildly, running left and right before slipping and collapsing with its rider onto the ground.
The man, meanwhile, has his hands pulled away from his eyes. He sees a being in a long, worn cloak. It’s all that one can make out in this dead of night.]
Mr. Tennyson continues stumbling toward home, swaying lost.
The cloaked being approaches the fallen cart and rider. He offers a hand.
He does, realizing a leg is stuck under the capsized horse. He picks it up by hand with ease, not revealing a spell is doing most of the lifting. She gets out, for a quick second stretching out her leg.
The cloaked man keeps his lips sealed as he begins to trail off into the forest.
His eyes gape at her knowledge. But he shakes his head. She offers up a shrill squeal, at the top of her lungs. The young Mr. Tennyson comes rushing back.
But as she looks to him, there is nobody there. The cloak, however, is still in her hand. She shakes her head and puts it over her shoulders. Mr. Tennyson has somehow already lifted the horse and carriage.
She, with ease, moves him into the back of the carriage, shoving some luggage away.
He moves her hand inches to west.
She mounts up and rides off again. As they make off, the once-cloaked man becomes visible. He watches them, ripping a portal open and walking through.
[30 minutes later, a small Victorian home: Mattie grabs some of her things from the back of the carriage, by some miracle not bothering the fast-asleep Jorgy, and rushes into her new residence. She pecks an uncle on the cheek and races up to a spacious attic to drop off her stuff. A wide-open window catches her eye. She walks up to it and glances at the third-story view of the land around, clutching the cloak over her shoulders.]
The once-cloaked man lunges at her for the cloak, but she dances away, nearly causing him to fall out of the window.
Outside, Jorgy has somewhat woken up, catching a glimpse of this man dangling partly out. He opens the cart door and looks up, rubbing his eyes only to find him gone.
In the attic, Mattie is alone, darting left and right but backing up against the wall. She slaps away a lone hand that pops through a small rift in front of her.
A rift opens by her legs, the being kicking them out to make her fall flat. He appears in front of her, arm outstretched.
She sighs, tossing the cloak at his face and pulling herself up.
She sees Jorgy out there, who waves to him. She waves back. She turns back around, arms crossed and face flat.
Mattie turns back to Jorgy and waves to her.
No response. She turns back to the attic to see it empty.
[In the days that follow, Mattie and Jorgy take on the days and nights together. She finds her first stateside friends in his mates at the pub where they are headed tonight. A sign outside the pub reads “Forever Pirates, by Barry Reuter – this Friday!”
Inside the pub and seated in good company, Jorgy displays his pistol, a polished .44-caliber derringer that resembles a pocket shotgun.]
Jorgy throws some napkins into the third mate’s face.
Mattie, panning around the room, spies what she’s been searching for for weeks: the navy blue ripped cloak over the shaggy, graying blonde hair on Georgius’s head.
The fourth in the group, a face hiding under raggedy blond, maintains his silence. Jorgy rips the gun out of his hand.
Amid some continued arguing, she looks to Georgius again. He stays at a counter and turns to eye Jorgy, but upon making eye contact with Mattie, swiftly turns back. She focuses back on the events at her table, with Georgius watching her reflection at the side of his cup. He puts it down and ogles her for a moment, drawn after a moment to the quiet man at Jorgy’s table, just as vigilantly watching Jorgy’s derringer as Georgius with Mattie and Jorgy.
[An hour on, the couple laughs on their journey a block out to Mattie’s carriage.]
Jorgy cautiously turns around to find the fourth man from his table.
They back up as the man gets closer.
He keeps Mattie back as he walks up and hands the man the derringer.
Jorgy puts his hand on the weapon.
The man puts pressure on the trigger. Mattie watches Georgius come up behind him. The hammer kicks and the ignition clicks. Empty. Georgius goes to kick out the legs from under the man but he leaps, expecting this, at the same time elbowing Georgius in the chest.
He lunges at the thief, holding his arms back and bashing the body into Georgius.
Georgius alters his face, donning a mask made of fiery mana. Its horns and crooked smile are topped off by thick, beaty brows of darker flames. Only the thief witnesses this face, but it’s enough to get him to elbow Jorgy into Georgius. With his tail between his legs and the men jumbled up, the thief scurries off.
Jorgy pushes Mattie to stay back and begins to chase the thief, who at a distance, raises his derringer hand to Jorgy. He stops, the thief briefly turning around and taking aim. Jorgy braces himself, protecting his face by turning his head away and crossing his arms in front of him. The thief briefly eyes Mattie, who shakes her head profusely. And Georgius, regaining posture, makes a difficult choice.
At the moment a bullet fires, a wall of mana is placed before Jorgy. He can tell this isn’t strong enough. Georgius has never witnessed a bullet, nor anything that speed, but he knows what it could do. In the milliseconds of travel time, he reinforces the wall with layer upon layer until the defense is half-a-meter thick. The bullet fractures it still, boring almost all the way through the wall as Georgius begins placing more towards the back.
Centimeters away from Jorgy’s face, the bullet stops. Jorgy uncovers his face to see the wall, just before it shatters. The bullet plops down to the floor before the thief can be spotted scurrying to his horse and riding off.
Heel-toe, Jorgy eyes Georgius, but he’s fallen unconscious and into Mattie’s custody.
Jorgy turns to the direction the thief had gone.
[Mattie’s home, later in the night: Mattie and Jorgy burst in through the front door with Georgius carried between them, each of his arms over one of their shoulders. Just one look into her uncle’s eyes gets the portly fellow to drop his evening read and motion everyone to the upstairs bathroom.
Once up, the uncle takes custody of Georgius and motions their departure.
Mattie and Jorgy wait in her attic bedroom. As Mattie paces, Jorgy seats himself in a corner, jabbers a bit, and not long after finds himself counting sheep. But Mattie still paces.]
[2AM: Mattie taps her fingers to the clicking of the downstairs grandfather clock. With the gong of a new hour comes creaking from the wood in the hallway. Her uncle heavily hobbles into the doorway and with a glance assures her that he’s awake.
She dashes to the bathroom, almost barging in before her uncle stops her to knock.]
Mattie’s uncle nods and steps away as she enters the room. A bath towel shades Georgius’s whole body, which is hard enough to track as he digs through the room.
They both stop searching and look dead into each others’ eyes. Georgius holds up one finger, which he closes into his fist. Instantly, she knocks the candle, with its light on the room, onto the floor. He catches it in a bubble of mana, inside which the flame quickly dies without air. He holds the bubble in his hands and gently lays it back on the sink sill.
The door slams shut. He restores light to the room with a small, mystical flame above his open palm. Mattie is nowhere to be found.
Tap.
He spins around to see her face, maybe centimeters apart, with a coin in her hand separating them.
Mattie pulls his and her hand into her hair.
In his moment of bewilderment, guard down, she snatches a kiss.
The world stops spinning. Eli, body glitching as it does, departs from Georgius’s form. Aion pops into reality.
Aion nods.
He shakes his head.
Aion produces a menagerie of sparklers out of his violet-tinged mana, with which he writes out the message, “No.”
Aion points to the still-floating sparkling message.
Aion shakes his head.
Aion nods.
Aion, again, nods.
Aion nods.
Aion puts a finger up to stop Eli, then shoves him into the still-kissing Georgius and disappears as time carries on.
Mattie pulls away from him, releasing the coin to his custody.
[END OF PART]
Part VII[]
[A stunned Georgius. Within, Eli understands his cover’s been blown. Mattie wraps her arm around him and walks to the bedroom, where Jorgy is at this point snoring.]
Eli, in Georgius’s body, stands there, scratching at his neck. She walks over to and circles him, causing him to sweat.
She steps over to a small picture frame. On it, a sharply-mustached man of no more than 30 hugs his darling daughter, her one-eyed teddy bear in hand.
Georgius swallows.
She shifts over to Jorgy, frame still in hand.
Mattie claps her hands loudly adjacent Jorgy, pushes his shoulders, and even jostles him.
Kneeling, she lays her head on Jorgy’s shoulder. She taps her fingers to the beat of his heart then stands up.
Georgius follows. He steps up to Jorgy, and in front of him, draws open a portal. On the other side is a bed. Georgius picks Jorgy up and lays him in that bed then walks back through the rift, shutting it.
She marches over to Georgius, who backpedals a bit. A quick skip closes the gap, Mattie dropping into a hug with him and gazing straight at him.
Georgius swallows.
[The next morning: something shakes the bedroom. Mattie, laying in bed, groans and turns over, staring up to the ceiling. Every couple of seconds, a scratching sound comes from the window. She sits up straight and sees the very top edge of something wooden out the window. She gasps and shakes the other in the bed.]
Georgius sits up to the next sound of scratching.
Mattie stays mum.
Outside, Jorgy marches up the ladder, with a double-barreled shotgun strapped across his back.
Georgius swings his hand, slamming with it the window.
The scratching continues, one scratch every time the ladder shakes from Jorgy moving up a step.
Georgius closes his eyes and pumps his two fists in front of him. Shutting his eyes, he conjures a spell that completely hides the window, blending it into the wooden structure of the attic just before Jorgy reaches it.
Perplexed, Jorgy slides down the ladder and knocks on the front door.
The knocking escalates to furious banging.
[Downstairs, minutes later: Mattie flings the door open, Jorgy still banging at nothing for a moment after.]
Jorgy shoves past her, tearing his weapon from his back and stomping up the stairs. One extra flight of flimsy stairs up, he bashes into the attic bedroom aiming in. Mattie comes strolling up behind him, who’s puzzled by the return of the wide-open window and the loneliness of the room – not a body in sight.
He shakes his head, stands up straight and eyes her.
Achoo, from a different voice than theirs.
Jorgy readies his weapon again.
Achoo!
Jorgy leaps over to a corner of the room.
Jorgy closes in on that corner and stands.
He leans in and cups his hear.
He clicks the handle, Mattie falling onto him to knock them both to the floor.
They look up. Holes in the wooden floor are visible, as well as a few shells. A glistening wall, like the same used to block the fire from the derringer’s thief only completely unscathed, has also been erected. The wall blinks away, with Georgius appearing as he peels his cloak off.
He picks himself up, mounting the shotgun on his back, and dusting his shirt off.
He walks to the window and looks out to his ladder.
He steps out of the window and onto the top rung of the ladder, staring to Mattie.
He leaves sight, climbing down once more.
Before she climbs out, he runs over and takes her wrist.
She analyzes him. He’s now wearing all-white garbs.
Mattie grins. She re-enters the room, where Georgius uses a spell first that clings her bedspread around her tightly, then another to straighten the wrinkled and overflowing pieces out, and finally a pair of magical scissors to cut the excess and form-fit every piece. The end-result: a top, mostly hidden under overalls made of the same wool even sporting some false, sewn-in rivets.
She gazes out the window.
They rush down the ladder and detach their carriage from their horse and speed off, Mattie driving and Georgius keeping a tight grip on the shell.
[Ten minutes later: They have been chasing Jorgy for close to five, but there’s simply no way to catch up. Their extra weight, combined with Jorgy’s all-around more agile steed, is holding them back.]
Intense winds began to shake up both parties. They can barely hold onto their rides, let alone keep steering straight. In the midst of an open field, Jorgy’s horse kicks up on its hind legs, dropping Jorgy off. It runs off, leaving Mattie and Georgius to catch up to him, lest they fall off at high speeds and injure themselves. The loud and powerful winds keep billowing, however.
The winds fade as abruptly as they came.
Mattie and Georgius taking advantage of this time to run up to his side and helping him up.
Jorgy again slides the weapon off his back and directs it at them, dashing over to steal their horse. Georgius’s eyes and hands taking on a bright magenta glow in response.
Time stops, excluding Georgius and Jorgy. Ben stretches his neck.
Time keeps ticking.
Georgius, with Mattie behind her, backpedals a little away from the horse.
Georgius and Mattie both slip, landing, as if there had been a playground slide behind them, at an incline. As they get up, they find nothing there.
Atop the incline, perhaps fifteen feet in the air, a gateway peers open. Blinding lights gape through until they fade, turning into a regular doorway into an irregular interior. Standing at the door is a turquoise humanoid, in head-to-toe dated Plumber garb – a bulkier, navy blue variant of the shielding Earth’s astronauts would employ close to a century later.
The woman walks out, with each footstep, lighting up a step on the invisible pathway up to the door. Jorgy cocks his weapon at her, and Georgius keeps his glowing guard up. She proceeds down to them.
She turns to Georgius, as do Jorgy and Mattie.
The woman taps a button on her shoulder. Out from the gateway comes another being, a Galvan who takes a minute working his way down to everybody. The woman raises him onto her shoulder.
The turquoise woman, the Magistrata, and the Galvan eye each other.
The Magistrata turns to her Galvan companion and murmurs something.
She whispers something to the Galvan, who with the press of a button, spawns a horse clad in chainmail armor.
Georgius slaps tape, made of mana, over Jorgy’s mouth.
Jorgy screams, muffled by the tape.
Georgius eyes Jorgy, then relieves the mouth covering.
Mattie sighs to the insult, as Jorgy takes the Magistrata’s hand and they shake, the towering turquoise figure shuddering at this confusing gesture.
[Fifteen minutes later, the two Plumbers return to their ship and the door shuts. By the intense winds, they’d clearly taken off once more, none the wiser to the invisible otherworldly presence.
Jorgy mounts Viper, and before Mattie and Georgius can even reach theirs, he’s gone. Georgius grabs the dropped casings again, and the two take off in his direction.]
[That night, at the pub: Jorgy strolls into the pub and slumps into a seat with his mates.]
Jorgy shakes his head and sweeps himself off the table. With intent to storm off, he spies the stage, where staff are setting up for the show. One of the people seated closest to the stage is Georgius. For once, he’s well-kempt – hair trimmed well, and the white makeshift outfit from earlier is now complemented by a belt, an array of buttons, and a medal of dubious worth. Mattie arrives and Georgius embraces her.
Infuriated by this innocent display, he steps off to the other side of the room, well out of view of their table, at a counter with other folks alone tonight. Also present: a man wiping down glasses, who asks if Jorgy wants anything. He shrugs and waves him off.
He turns to the person seated next to him, a man draped in a pirate’s façade, from skull-and-crossbones tricorn to a peg leg, which may or may not serve as an actual prosthetic.
Jorgy balls his hands into fists and holds a low growl.
Jorgy picks Barry up by his shirt. Inches apart, he notes a strange texture to his skin.
At this point, Mattie steps away from Georgius, who peers over to his protectee: Jorgy. His eyes flash magenta for a quick moment, reading the mana signature on Barry.
The candle lights across the room with one flourish go off, except for those keeping attention on the stage. Everyone attending claps, thinking this marvel worth it. Georgius is forced to knock out his glowing eyes, raising too much attention in this darkness.
Curtains reel back to unveil Mattie, atop a well-built ship prop on a painted sea backdrop.
Meanwhile, Georgius tries to glance Barry and Jorgy, but he can neither see them nor try to track their movements without his eyes glowing.
He gets out of his seat and marches to the door, but there stands Jorgy, with an arm wrapped about his neck. Georgius follows the arm to the body of Barry, whose other hand is on the derringer held to Jorgy’s temple.
Georgius clenches his fist, Barry clicking the hammer on the back of the derringer.
Jorgy’s eyes, ostensibly Ben’s, are gaping, pointed left towards the weapon just out of his periphery.
Barry begins to shove forward toward the stage, with Georgius in front and unable to raise a finger. They all shove onto the ship. The audience gasps at the weapon, with scattered clapping believing it to be just a very realistic recreation.
The curtains shut swiftly.
The backdrop fades into reality, and the drawn rear of the ship becomes reality, combining with the prop to produce a true pirate’s vessel.
Georgius and Jorgy eye each other.
Her eyes and hands come alight – magenta just like Georgius as the planks making up the ship are partly used in covering Jorgy’s entire body. More planks so fly through the curtain ahead.
Barry shakes his hat off, revealing skin with the swirling grooves of tree bark, as Jorgy keeps getting covered up.
Georgius’s eyes and hands flare up.
Georgius lunges at the so-called Jolly Roger, the curtains immediately flipping open. The whole room is plated in the woodwork of Mattie’s ship, all of them standing and idly staring at Georgius.
He encases the four of them in a box, separating Jorgy from Barry in the meantime, and then teleports the four of them back to the site of the Magistrata’s ship. All the while “Jolly Roger” remains perfectly still, if anything checking the status of her nails.
Georgius falls onto one knee.
The bright ship door opens, the rest of it invisible as always. The Magistrata steps out in some form of alien night gown.
Time pauses. Eli is able to move freely but as he approaches Jorgy, Ben doesn’t so much as blink. His body isn’t even visible. Continue.
The Magistrata takes tired, heavy steps down toward Jorgy.
The Magistrata taps Jorgy’s wooden form and gasps.
Beneath the façade of Georgius, Eli swallows.
At once, Jolly Roger’s eyes glow, and Jorgy’s wooden plating falls off. The Magistrata misses this, still just eyeing JR.
Georgius walks over and pats Jorgy on the shoulder, as the Magistrata energy-cuffs Barry Reuter and escorts his unflinching body up into the ship.
Georgius shakes his head and begins to walk off.
He merely bats his eyes before heading off.
Time stops. A picture frame gapes open with Aion standing adjacent. Ben walks toward it, but notices Eli staying behind. He waves them off, as Aion pushes Ben in and follows.
[House of Uncommons: a sprawling little chapel room, fitted with hallmark stained glass art of those who sacrificed and saved long ago. The frame Aion and Ben fall out of is mounted over a window, where it couldn’t otherwise go. By the time they’re out, it’s solid again: a painting of Eli’s Georgius walking away.]
Aion shakes his head and points. The painting has changed now to Jorgy and Mattie’s ceremonious matrimony.
Again, the time traveler shakes. Now the painting depicts Aion, a year on, arriving at Mattie’s door.
Eli comes barreling out of the photo.
A third time, the painting changes: a family painting this time, of Jorgy standing over a seated Mattie, with a toddler in hand. To their sides are four other children, all with Jorgy’s hallmark brown cowlick. Just one of them – the toddler – is covered by a single blonde lock.
Eli recuperates, standing up and watching, as it changes once more. Mattie is consoled by Jorgy, a decade on, with their nine-year-old, full-headed blonde son standing there in his little suit and bowtie. They stand before a mass tombstone with four illegible names.
Ben shakes his head and looks down to the ground.
Eli glances to Aion. The three are whisked into a frame that takes them back to the moment the Magistrata gifted Viper to Jorgy, but time remains halted. On Eli’s, Ben’s, Georgius’s, Jorgy’s, and Mattie’s bodies, strange glyphs, all glowing pink, manifest.
He pulls Booth’s derringer out from his pocket.
He nods to Aion, who bends his hands to revert the derringer to the human form of Paradox, who is quick to stretch.
Paradox stops and simply eyes Eli, then Ben again.
He walks over to Viper, on which Jorgy’s perched.
Eli grins. He then tears an unseen Any Cloak off of the horse, unveiling a Vulpimancer, clad in pitch black high-tech armor.
Ben swallows.
Ben is silent. The room around them becomes pitch black.
[When the lights flicker back on, they’re in Mr. Hook’s Candy Emporium.]
Ben nods. The lights flicker off.
[Bellwood High Auditorium: Ben steps in and reclaims his seat by the Kennedy sisters.]
[A cantina deep in the cosmos, surrounded by no local sun, planet, or satellite in this pitch black abyss. The sign on it is a horizontal, boxed-in “Space” styled like a keyboard’s space bar – if not, completely because the place’s full name is “The Space Bar.”
Inside is the familiar site that Kevin and Gwen have been to countless times before. Even now, Kevin is seated at the bar with a green slimy drink in a looping and spinning container. A familiar man takes his side, purple-lipped and otherwise gilded in knight’s armor.]
He slides it over to the time-traveling knight.
Aion shrugs.
Aion points to the half-empty Splatter container in Kevin’s hand.
He toasts with Aion without any permission, almost knocking the knight’s drink over.
Instead of anger, though, he merely chuckles and toasts Kevin back.
[END OF EPISODE]
Synopsis[]
A new age of Forever Knights arrives in Bellwood.
Major Events[]
- The new Forever Knights, consisting of Eli and Aion, debut and explore Sir George's and the Tennyson family history.
- Ben is revealed to be a descendent of Sir George, Eli a distant cousin, and the actual Tennyson lineage cut off several generations ago.
- The Forever Knights form the new Second Gynurans and set up shop in Bellwood.
- How splinter factions of the Forever Knights began is shown, starting with Ying's branch.
- The origin of the Plumbers on Earth is detailed, including its dark past with the Vulpimancers.
Minor Events[]
- The name of Streak's species is revealed to be the Marid, a concoction of the Diagon. It's not revealed how a variant hails from the Null Void world of Amevo.
- Kevin incidentally meets Aion.
Assault Omnitrix Alien Debuts[]
Characters[]
- Ben Tennyson
- Professor Paradox
- Eli
- Aion
- Mr. Hook
- Kai Kennedy
- Kara Kennedy
- Kira Kennedy (brief)
- Kevin Levin (Endgame only)
- Space Bar Barkeep (Endgame only)
Flashback Characters[]
- Georgius (all) (Eli)
Decimus[]
- Decimus (Ben)
- Doormaker
Gynura[]
- Gynura (Ben)
- Sixun
- Jin
- Heng (young)
- Diagon
- Ying (brainwashed)
- General Fei (brainwashed)
- Doormaker
- Lucubra
Heng[]
- Gynurans
- Heng (Ben)
- Ying
- Fergus
- Aengus
- Girl
Jorgy[]
- George "Jorgy" Tennyson (Ben)
- Forever Pirates
- Matilda "Jolly Roger" Tennyson
- Barry Reuter
- Matilda's uncle
- P.L.U.M.B.I.N.G.
- Magistrata
- Galvan (unnamed)
- Jorgy's Mates
- Mike
Aliens Used (by Ben)[]
- Frisbit (x3)
- Wavelength
- Combustiball (x5)
- Titanium Alien
Allusions[]
- All of George Tennyson's bloodborn children passing away at varying points in their early life, from weakness or natural causes, is like the fate of Abraham Lincoln's kids, though George's family name is survived by the one-off child of Georgius and Matilda.
Trivia[]
- Foreverlasting is the first episode after a five-year hiatus.
- Kira's acting was first mentioned in Meet the Replacements.
- This episode is intended as the kickoff for "Season 2b."
- This was the last of 4 episodes to be released altogether as opposed to piecemeal.
- This is the only episode to have been rewritten after parts had been released.
- The difficulty in creating this episode is what caused the series to be put on hiatus. Years were spent writing and rewriting sometimes full versions of the episode that never met Color's quality and entertainment standards.
Comparisons to the first run version[]
- The first run version, originally planned in 2014, refers to the unreleased version that stopped production on the series.
- In this version, the episode was planned as a filler solely to have the Forever Knights involved in an episode, but while devising the second run plans, it became a key turning point in the series.
- Additionally, this version of Eli, who was a Forever King solely set on revealing his relationship to Ben, was to be arrested by the Plumbers at the end of the episode and not seen again.
- Eli's name was probably not the same in the original.
- In this version, rather than an overarching story revolving around the Diagon that connected to the rest of the franchise, each individual Tennyson story fought different foes.
- George's story always involved the formation of the Plumbers.
- The first Middle Ages Tennyson was named Calign. Calign Tenebrosi's father would invade Earth at this time and go on to name Calign after the valiant fight he puts up.
- The second Middle Ages Tennyson always died fighting the Diagon after forming the precursor to the Forever Knights.
- Decimus and George are the only ones that kept their original names; Decimus's story remained largely unchanged, though he mostly fought Lucubra and during said story, we would watch Georgius's power origin unfold differently.
- Like the 2018 version, all of the stories were told simply in flashbacks, as Aion was not present in the story. The flashbacks were told in a different location, in Eli's castle which Ben would storm.
Comparisons to the 2018 version[]
- Though the original returned to the part-by-part release cycle employed prior to Madame Regle, the re-release continued the full-episode releases.
- Decimus's original story was referenced heavily, suggesting the events were the same.
- Gynura's story remained nominally the same on the surface, with the events compressed into a shorter in-universe time span.
- General Fei's name is never explicitly stated but he is credited under his original name.
| Created by COLOR | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Alien Universe (BTAU - BiA - SiC) - Clad in Darkness - Benjection - DC's Hero of Heroes | |||
| Unique Aliens in Back in Action: Alien Universe | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| First used by Super Ben (Assault Omnitrix) | Obsorber - Nigester - Plastikitee - Anos - Streak - Bugbite - Muckslide - Autosassin - Ultimate Upchuck - Clinger - Healding - Alkamine - Brawnoceros - Combustiball - Cardstruct - Dreadsense - Frisbit - Koldiak - Plasmodic - Seismix - Wavelength - Warrock - Fetterwing - Suctionrupt | ||
| Majestic Forms | TBD | ||
| First used by Dawn (Alphaline Omnitrix) | Vertigo - Starhavoc - Slyt - Blankslate | ||
| First used by Future Ben | Atomhammer - Ultimate Brainstorm | ||
| Characters in Back in Action: Alien Universe | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 Squad | Ben Tennyson - Gwen Tennyson - Kevin Levin - Julie Yamamoto - Chelsey Tennyson - Max Tennyson - Cooper Daniels - Ken | ||
| Villains | Future Ben - Thep Khufan Commander - Scarogus - Dawn - Vilgax - Albedo - Malevolence - Darkstar - Sii - Elena Validus - Dr. Animo - Cyanne - Mistress - Hurricane Vance - Project Inferno - Nightcaster II - Clancy - Metalink | ||
| Supporting Characters | Professor Paradox - Azmuth - Charmcaster - Eunice - Verdona - Rex - Sir George | ||
| Other Timelines/Possible Futures | Gwen 20 - Upgrade Ben - Altrazon - Jennifer-Mercedes Tennyson | ||
| Groups | Second Gynurans (Eli Griswold - Aion) - Omega Squad - Plumbers (Karin Frikton - Io) - Thep Khufan Armada - Board of Galvan | ||
| Others | Chili - Moira Yourouguaduan | ||