Gellix came out of the training room at just past seven in the morning.
He closed the door behind him and stood in the corridor with his data pad and looked at Max and Gwen on the bench and Ted leaning against the wall with a coffee and took in the full picture with those wide independent eyes without saying anything for a moment.
Max looked like he hadn't slept. Because he hadn't.
Gwen looked like she had slept a little, recently, on the bench, which was accurate.
Ted looked at Gellix. "Well?"
Gellix looked at his pad. Then at Max. He had the manner of someone choosing between two ways to say something and picking the more direct one.
"The training is going to take longer than scheduled," he said.
Max straightened. "How much longer?"
"Uncertain. Several more days at minimum." Gellix pulled up a scan on his pad and turned it to face them. A diagram of Ben's body, the Omnitrix at the center, lines running outward through the biology in every direction like roots. "The Omnitrix has locked the majority of the alien forms. Not a malfunction. A decision."
"It made a decision," Gwen said.
"The Omnitrix is not a simple device," Gellix said, with the tone of someone who found that sentence mildly exhausting to have to say. "It monitors the host continuously. Right now it has assessed Ben's biological stability and determined that full roster access would cause more damage than benefit." He tapped the diagram. "His body is still being rebuilt. The Omnitrix is still doing the work it started in that clearing. Pushing through the full roster at this stage would, to use a simple analogy, be like running at full speed on a leg that is still healing."
"So it's protecting him," Gwen said.
"In its way. Yes."
Max looked at the diagram. "Which forms does he have access to?"
"Four aliens. Fourarms, Heatblast, Diamondhead and Stinkfly." Gellix lowered the pad. "Enough to work with. More than enough actually. The goal for the next phase isn't power, it's stability. We train those four forms until the Omnitrix reads the host biology as stable enough to unlock the next set." He paused. "Think of it as the device and the body negotiating. Our job is to support that negotiation."
"And the pain," Max said. His voice was level but the word cost him something.
Gellix looked at him directly. "Will continue for now. I won't tell you otherwise." He held Max's gaze. "But it's productive pain. The Omnitrix causes it because it's working. Every session moves the process forward." A pause. "He's not suffering for nothing, Maxwell."
Max looked at the door across the corridor.
Gellix looked at his pad. "I'm going back in. We have a full day ahead." He turned toward the door then stopped and looked back over his shoulder. "He's doing well. Better than the data suggested he would. I thought you should know that."
He went back inside.
The door closed.
Ted pushed off the wall and looked at Max and Gwen on the bench.
"Okay," he said. "Both of you. Come on."
"I'm fine here," Max said.
"Max."
"I said I'm fine."
Ted looked at him for a moment. He pulled the chair from the small station desk at the end of the corridor, set it in front of the bench, and sat down in it backwards with his arms across the back. He looked at Max with the particular patience of someone who knew this man well enough to know how long this was going to take and had decided to wait it out.
"Four years," Ted said.
Max looked at him. "Don't."
"I'm not starting anything. I'm just saying, four years, no contact, and you came back the same way you always came back from everything. Carrying it by yourself." He kept his voice level. "You've been on that bench since yesterday afternoon. You haven't eaten. You haven't slept." He glanced at Gwen. "She slept about forty minutes on that bench which is not sleep."
Gwen didn't argue with this.
"Gellix just told you the process is working," Ted said. "Ben is doing well. Better than expected." He looked at Max. "You sitting here doesn't change what's happening in that room. You know that."
Max looked at the door.
"If something goes wrong Gellix comes out immediately," Ted said. "That's the protocol. You'll know the second anything changes." He stood up. Picked up the chair and put it back. "Come eat something. Both of you. You're no good to him running on empty."
Max sat for another moment.
Then he stood up.
He looked at the door one more time, long and quiet, the look of someone leaving something they don't want to leave. Then he turned and walked down the corridor.
Gwen got up and followed him.
Ted walked beside Max and didn't say anything else and that was the right call.
The days that followed had a rhythm to them.
Morning, Gellix ran Ben through physical conditioning. Not alien forms yet, just the body. The baseline that the Omnitrix was rebuilding needed to be pushed to tell the device what level to rebuild toward. Strength work, endurance work, reaction training. Ben did all of it without complaint and without the particular enthusiasm that would have worried Gellix more than silence. He worked. He was consistent. He didn't need to be told anything twice.
Gellix noted this. Filed it under host psychology, further observation required.
Midday, transformation sessions. One form at a time, controlled conditions, Gellix monitoring from a reinforced observation area behind thick glass with his scanner running constantly. Heatblast first, controlled burns, precision work, learning the difference between ambient heat and directed output. The sessions were loud in the way they had always been loud. The sounds Ben made during transformation still came through the glass clearly. Gellix tracked the Omnitrix readings throughout and noted, session by session, the duration shortening. The peaks lowering. Slowly. Not quickly. But moving in the right direction.
Afternoon, mental work. This was Gellix's own addition to the program, not standard Plumber training protocol. He had Ben sit across from him at a small table and they went through alien species data, tactical scenarios, situational problems with no clean answers. Gellix would describe a situation, three threats, two civilians, limited transformation time, pick a form and explain the reasoning, and Ben would answer. Quietly, directly, with the flat precision that Gellix had started to understand was not coldness exactly but something more like clarity. The rewired mind processing information without the noise that most ten year olds brought to everything.
"Fourarms," Ben said, to the fourth scenario of the afternoon on day two.
"Why not Heatblast?" Gellix said. "Faster resolution."
"Enclosed space. Heatblast takes out the civilians too."
"Diamondhead then. Barriers."
"Takes too long to set up. By the time the barriers are placed the second threat has already moved." Ben looked at the diagram on the table. "Fourarms. Go through the middle. End it before the geometry gets complicated."
Gellix made a note. "You think about geometry."
"Doesn't everyone?"
"Not instinctively. Not at your age." Gellix looked at him. "The Omnitrix is enhancing your processing. I want to be transparent about that. Some of what you're doing isn't purely you."
Ben looked at him. "Some of it is though."
Gellix considered this. "Yes," he said. "Some of it is."
Ben went back to the diagram.
On day three of the extended training Gellix added Stinkfly.
The aerial form was different from the others, not just the biology but the spatial logic of it, the way height changed every calculation. Ben spent the first session barely controlling the flight, the acid spray going in directions that weren't planned, the wings finding air currents and responding in ways that took time to anticipate and work with.
By the second session he was navigating the upper third of the training chamber with reasonable consistency.
By the third session Gellix had him doing precision work, acid spray on specific targets while maintaining altitude while tracking a moving object below. Three things at once. The Stinkfly form handled the mechanics. Ben handled the decisions.
He got it right on the fourth attempt.
Gellix said nothing. Made a note.
Ben landed and stood in the center of the room and the green flash came and he was human again and he stood there breathing for a moment.
"The locked forms," Ben said. "When does the Omnitrix open them."
"When it's ready," Gellix said.
"What does ready look like."
"Stable biological readings across all four active forms for a sustained period. No critical spikes during transformation. Recovery time between sessions under a set threshold." Gellix pulled up the chart on his pad and showed it to Ben. A line graph, Ben's readings across the past several days, gradually moving toward a marked zone. "You're getting closer. Faster than I expected."
Ben looked at the chart for a moment.
"How many more days," he said.
"Two. Maybe three."
Ben nodded once. Turned toward the sleeping area.
"Ben," Gellix said.
He stopped.
"You're doing well," Gellix said. The same words he'd told Max. But differently weighted now, not reassurance for a worried grandfather. Just fact, stated to the person it applied to.
Ben looked at him for a second.
"I know," he said.
He went to sleep.
Gellix worked for another two hours after Ben went down. Data review, readings analysis, notes on the day's sessions. The training room was quiet around him except for the low hum of the equipment.
At some point the hum was the only sound and Gellix's own eyes began losing the argument with the hour. He set his pad down on the desk, folded his arms, and let his eyes close.
Four hours. That was all he needed.
He was asleep in under a minute.
Ben's eyes opened at just past two in the morning.
He lay still for a moment, looking at the ceiling of the small sleeping area, listening to the facility around him. Gellix's breathing from the desk, slow and even. The equipment hum. Nothing else.
He got up quietly.
He walked out of the sleeping area and into the main training room and stood in the center of it. The lights were on their night setting, low and blue-white, casting the room in something that wasn't quite dark and wasn't quite light. The floor was cool under his feet.
He stood there.
Still. Completely still, the way only he was still, not waiting for something, not thinking about anything in particular. Just present in the space. The Omnitrix glowed faint green on his chest.
He closed his eyes.
The green light came, not a flash, not the explosive burst of a deliberate transformation. Something quieter. Rising from the Omnitrix like something breathing out.
Heatblast arrived first.
White-blue plasma and dark volcanic skin, the heat of a body built on fire standing in the cool blue-white of the empty training room. Two seconds of it. Then, without the green flash, without the return to human form, without anything so simple as stopping,
Diamondhead.
The fire didn't go out so much as it became something else. The volcanic skin hardened and changed, blue crystal pushing through and replacing it, the heat becoming the cold geometry of mineral structure. Still. Silent. The room catching his edges in fragments of refracted light.
Two seconds.
XLR8.
The crystal didn't shatter. It simply wasn't there anymore and something fast and low and coiled with potential was in its place, the air in the room registering as thick and slow from inside the form, everything too static, waiting.
Two seconds.
Fourarms.
Four arms hanging at his sides, four eyes open in the low light, the mass of the form settling into the room.
Wildmutt. The sensory world opening like a door kicked off its hinges, every surface and shadow suddenly loud with information.
Ghostfreak. The shadows leaning in, the cold arriving, the wrongness of it sitting in the room like a second presence.
Upgrade. The equipment readable, its architecture transparent, everything with a circuit suddenly visible and known.
Ripjaws. The dry wrongness of air instead of water pressure, the jaw, the dark.
Cannonbolt. Dense and low, the shell settling like something final.
Stinkfly. Wings folding out, the compound eyes breaking the room into facets, the aerial pull immediate.
The locked ones.
Each one reached for rather than accepted, each one a door that opened into a room not yet used. But they opened. Form to form to form, no human baseline in between, just Ben moving through everything he carried like someone walking through rooms in a house they are learning is larger than they knew.
The last form faded.
He was standing in the center of the training room. Human. Bare feet on the cool floor. The Omnitrix dark for just a moment before its glow returned, slow and green.
Something moved across his face.
A smile. Slight and sharp and wicked, the smile of something that has looked at everything it is in the dark and found it not frightening but interesting. Found it good.
Three seconds.
Then his eyes closed and his legs went and he hit the floor and didn't move.
The Omnitrix pulsed once on his chest. Steady green. Keeping time.
At the desk Gellix's eyes opened. Just slightly. Lids barely parted, enough to see the shape of Ben on the floor without moving his head.
He didn't move.
He looked at the scanner on the desk beside him. The screen showed two lines running across the graph now.
The first line was going low, at steady rate.
The second line told a different story.
It spiked up minutes before Ben woke up and went down as he hit the ground unconscious.
The two lines were converging.
Gellix looked at where they met on the graph.
His expression did something it very rarely did.
He looked at Ben on the floor for a long moment. Then at the scanner. Then at Ben again.
He reached over slowly and turned the screen away from the door.
He settled back in his chair. Closed his eyes almost all the way. His breathing returned to its slow even rhythm.
But his pad was in his hand now.
And in the dark, very quietly, he was writing.