The first thing I did was scoop Gavin up in a hug, needing to feel him alive with my own hands.

After a moment of thankfulness, though…

“Gavin… Micah’s right. Where did your clothes go? And… what is that?”

The blue skin was confusing, but not shocking. He’d been experimenting with decorative changes to his own skin since he picked up the Shapeshift power a few days before. What surprised me was the one thing he was wearing, because it wasn’t any of the clothes he’d left with: a simple metallic circlet rested on his head, partially hidden by his dark curls. It wasn’t golden or silver, but a pale whitish-yellow hue. It bore no gems or ornamentation, just the embossed dots and dashes of the alien alphabet.

I reached for it, intending to pick it up and look more closely, but my fingers passed right through. It was insubstantial, an illusion or a hologram.

Cassie gasped. “Gavin, you are a princess.”

“No! Boys can’t be princesses.”

Cassie patted him gently, a warm smile on her face. “You can be anything you want to be!”

“Well… I don’t want to be a princess.”

Cassie pulled her comforting hand away from Gavin, giving him a look laden with pity and concern. “That is crazy.”

William had hustled from the room after my middle child arrived, and he returned now carrying an adult-sized bathrobe. He held it out to Gavin and I, studiously not looking toward the nude 6-year-old. “Uh, seems like he needs this.”

I accepted it, helping Gavin shrug on the massive garment. “Thanks, William. I can give it back later. I did pack spare clothes. Although… I didn’t bring spare shoes. Actually, I don’t really have spare shoes.”

I frowned at Gavin’s bare feet, distracted. The kids had lost their boots in the trial, and now Gavin had lost his sneakers, too? He had sandals at home, but none here. Fighting monsters in flip-flops seemed like a terrible idea, even if we'd had them. Where was I going to get more children’s shoes?

A problem for later. For now… I checked over Gavin as I belted the oversized robe around his waist. “Are you okay, buddy? You weren’t hurt?” I didn’t see any injuries, but if he’d healed himself, I wanted to remind him to use Cure Disease as well. Even if he was physically fine, I wanted to be there to comfort him after whatever horrors he'd witnessed. Our Challenge had gone amazingly well, after all, but it had still left Micah shaken and in tears.

“Nope!” Gavin’s answer was bright and sunny, easing many of my fears… but also confusing me.

When my son had appeared with blue skin and no clothes, I’d assumed the chances of him having gotten a "good" group for the Challenge had dropped to zero. If he was in such good spirits, how in the heck had he lost all his stuff?

“Gavin, honey, what happened?”

It took a while to get the story out of him. He wasn’t hesitant to talk, but he was still six. I had to ask a lot of questions to tease out details he’d skipped, and his explanation wasn't in anything like chronological order.

Eventually, I got the basic picture. He’d made a friend. Fighting had broken out, but someone with a fog or illusion spell had hidden the central area, probably to make it easier to steal the prizes. I was grateful for their avaricious efforts, since the fog had also hidden most of the details of the violence from my son. After a near-miss from a stray ability, Gavin had lifted both himself and his friend into the vines above the arena.

I’d completely forgotten about the vines, since no one in our arena had made use of them. Gavin’s friend hadn’t wanted to go climbing through the vines, but Gavin had been curious.

Part of me wanted to scold him for going off on his own when he’d made an ally who’d already tried to protect him… but he was right to get out of easy view of the combatants below.

“So… why did you come down from the vines?”

“I didn’t!”

I tapped the circlet on his brow. “What’s this, then? Not one of the prizes?”

Gavin lifted his own hands to the crownlike object, but his fingers slipped through it as well. “What’s what? I don’t have anything on my head.”

Pointy interrupted, projecting an image of Gavin onto William’s wall. “That is factually incorrect. Observe.”

Gavin peered carefully at the picture of himself, hand to his forehead, trying ineffectually to feel the ornament we were telling him was there. “Wait… really? That’s crazy.” He looked around, and spotted his reflection in the glass doors of William’s entertainment center. He crouched down, tilting his head this way and that. “Ohhhh…. That’s why Cassie was calling me a princess. I’m not a princess, Cassie. I’m like… a king!”

“A king?”

“Yeah! You can all be my royal subjects.”

Micah sighed. “Loyal subjects.”

Gavin paused. “No. Kings are royalty, so they have royal subjects.”

“That’s not how it works!”

“Yes. It is.” Gavin extended a hand to Micah and tapped him on the shoulder, then frowned. “Wait, maybe it’s not how it works. It’s not working.”

I cleared my throat, trying to draw his attention back on-topic. “This really seems like one of the prizes, Gavin. Why would you take a risk like that? I told you to stay safe!”

He shrank down guiltily. “I didn’t mean to.”

“What do you mean, you ‘didn’t mean to?’ How would you accidentally claim a prize?”

“Well… someone threw up it! I mean, they threw it up into the vines! I didn’t know what it was. I thought it was a toy or something and I was bored waiting so…”

I winced. Not paying enough attention to know what the prizes looked like, then just assuming some random mystery object was a toy? Yeah, classic Gavin.

“That still doesn’t explain where your clothes and backpack went.”

Gavin looked guilty, not meeting my eyes. “I didn’t mean to take the prize. I kind of dropped it after it lost its colors, and then people got upset and some of them started shooting up where I was. One of them yelled that they could see my red vest, so I took it off. Then I thought… What if they see my other clothes? So I took those off too.”

“Even your underwear?” Micah was disgusted.

“They were bright green, Micah. Green is not blue.” Gavin’s sounded exasperated. “I had already practiced doing alien tiger stripes, so I used my Shapeshift. Then they couldn’t find me. It was a super great idea!”

“You missed your back. I can see the back of your neck is still normal colored,” said Micah.

I interrupted the budding sibling spat. “I wish you’d paid more attention, Gavin. If you hadn't grabbed the prize, people wouldn’t have attacked you.”

“And you’d have your underwear…” Micah muttered.

I ignored my eldest child. “I'm still very proud of you, Gavin. You were absolutely right to abandon your things, and very clever to use Shapeshift that way. I’m glad you practiced with it. Keep that up! Just… try to pay more attention next time.”

And if - God forbid - he qualified for any future Challenges, I’d pack some fidget toys for him.

Gavin beamed under my approving words. “I’ll try!”

“Now, what’s this about being a king?”

“Well, it says ruler, but a ruler is a king, yeah?”

“Sure…”

“I can be a ruler to, um, one-four-four people, which is a lot.”

“I want to be a ruler!” Cassie pouted.

Gavin patted Cassie’s head. “Maybe you can be in my kingdom. Oh! It worked!”

I extended a hand toward him. “Will you put me in your kingdom, too?”

He took my hand, and I waited.

He grabbed my hand with both of his, and he focused on it, frowning, staring at my knuckles like he was trying to see straight through them.

Nothing happened.

“It’s not working. I’m doing just the same thing. I am!”

“That’s weird… Pointy, did anything change on Cassie’s interface when Gavin became her ruler?”

The turtle didn’t answer.

“Pointy?”

I twisted to look at the turtle. She was still here, right? Yeah, there she was, sitting on William’s end table, where she’d been perched to get a good angle for her image projections.

She just wasn’t reacting to my words at all.