ࡱ>   !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~Root Entry( Jre*{MatOST ?>a>MMMN0 & ND ( JrMicrosoft Works MSWorksWPDoc9q Oh+'008@d| The Book of Arcadia: Part 3furry adventureTodd M Little ՜.+,D՜.+,      !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~      !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~S))P &"" ####0=/cd#t%##TArcadia  Now that everyone's safe, I now present to you how their lives change dramatically, how I fit into this story, as well as fill in some of the plot holes. Like before, I'll start with Randy and then bring Jack into it. Christine, Henry, Iran, Jack, Malissa, and Randy Chapter 1: The Meeting Ground Randy Lee III looked over at the office clock on the far wall and then down at his "pet", Malissa. She was lying on his lap, looking at what he wrote on the computer in front of them. He stretched one more time and then went back to writing out the police report. He had saved it for the day it was due at the station and wished he had done it earlier. He had promptly started it the second he got into the office but wasn't that fast of a typist, and so he expected that the report would seem to take him all day to finish. He also expected that trying to explain all that had happened to everyone to Nancy would probably take even longer. "At least there were no more lots taken from me while Gary ran the place... I got rid of the saboteur and its boss, but I still don't know who has my lots now. I'll have to get Robert to do more extensive work on that subject.", Randy said to both himself and Malissa as he typed out another line on the computer. He looked at what he wrote, looked at Malissa, and then pressed the button on the intercom. Nancy walked in, chewing some gum, and asked why he wanted her. Randy looked at the computer one more time and then replied, "This is probably going to take me all day. I need for you to run down to the cafeteria and get me a cappuccino, and Malissa will have a..." "I'll have some hot chocolate, thank you.", Malissa finished, then nodded to Randy, smiling. Nancy turned around, mumbling to herself, and exited the office. Randy watched her leave and then started typing on his computer again. Malissa watched him for about thirty seconds, jumped out of his lap, and walked out of the office. She jumped onto Nancy's chair, looked at the screen on her computer, and then jumped onto the desk. She walked over to and opened the top drawer on the desk, rummaged through the stuff inside, and pulled out the pack of chewing gum with her teeth. She flung it into the waste basket, and then looked for another pack. Nancy hated when she did this, but Malissa hated it even more when she kept on chewing piece after piece all day long. When she was satisfied that there was no more in that drawer, she pulled it in half way, jumped into it, and pulled out the next drawer. After about a minute more, Nancy stepped into the office room and Malissa quickly jumped into the second drawer and pushed the top drawer shut. Nancy walked past her desk, not noticing Malissa, and walked into Randy's officer. Malissa reopened the top drawer, climbed into it, pushed the second drawer shut, jumped onto the desk, and closed the top drawer. She then jumped off the desk and hid behind a nearby potted plant just as Nancy reentered the room. Nancy sat down at her desk, still chew that piece of gum, and when she looked the other way, Malissa darted away from Randy's office door, moved along the walls of the office until she was at the door that Nancy had entered from, and then casually walked back over to Randy's door. Randy was sipping his cappuccino when she walked in and when he saw her, he set the mug on the table and said smugly, "Ah, I see you finally came back. I was beginning to think that you'd ran away from boredom." Malissa ran to his desk, jumped into his lap, and commented, "I'd never leave the one I love." Randy looked at Malissa's hot chocolate and asked, "Would that be me or your drink?" "Well, the drink of course.", Malissa said jokingly. They looked into each other's eye and then broke out in laughter. When they had calmed down, Randy set Malissa on his desk next to her mug and then went back to typing. Malissa drank her cocoa through the straw in the mug and Randy would ever so often stop typing long enough to take a sip of his eternally hot mug of almond flavored liquid. When Malissa had finished off her cup, she jumped down off the desk and walked over to the television. She told it to turn on, what channel to turn to, and the volume it should be heard at. Then she watched it for a couple minutes, yelped, and ran into the bathroom. Randy watched her run off, laughed, set both of their mugs in the top drawer of his desk, and then continued typing, closing the drawer with a brush of his bushy, well-groomed tail. A half hour later, Malissa was watching a new show, Randy was working diligently on his computer, and Robert slowly entered through the office door. Randy looked up to see who it was and then got up out of his seat and stretched. He nodded to the computer and then walked over to Robert, happy to have been disturbed. "I was just thinking about you. What news have you brought me from that warped pile of circuitry you got down there. And I do hope it's good news this time.", Randy said as he put his hands on and dug his claws into the shoulders of Robert's silk shirt, smiling. "Well, um... it's a little bit of both. I scrutinized all the building company computers for our stolen lot numbers, breaking through a lot of security programs and passwords, and I can safely say that I know exactly what company has them. This is probably no surprise to you but it happened to be that brand new Mechtech Constructions. They have every single one of the lots plus a few from other building companies.", Robert explained as he looked up at Randy's muzzle. Randy was now looking straight at the office door and just muttered, "Humph." Robert pulled himself out of Randy's grip, backed away, and then started to exit through the office door. As he stepped towards the door, he said, "Just thought you might want to know." When Robert was at and was starting to open the office door, Randy finally said thoughtfully, backing up towards the front of his desk, "Mechtech? Yeah, I should have known. Probably another one of Deena's companies... If it really is that then I say we're going to have to get over there and do something about it before it takes more from us than just our lots." Robert closed the door, turned towards Randy, and asked ecstatically, "You're kidding, right? You really think any one of the people (namely me or Bob) would want to rampage a company building just because you think its going to up and take over the world? Especially after the hell we had to go through on your 'vacation'? You do remember George and what your exploring did to him, right? If you want to go, it's fine with me, but I value my and everybody else's lives too much to hurl them into another death trap." "Yeah, I guess you're right. It would be barbaric of me to get us involved again... but, if they start attacking us for no apparent reason, don't come crawling back to me because I'll just say, 'I told you so'.", Randy threatened weakly as he started to walk up to Robert again. "Don't worry. I won't.", Robert concluded and then left the office. Randy waved him off angrily, turned back towards his desk, whipping his tail at the door, strutted back to his chair, sat back down at his desk, and looked at the computer screen, muttering to himself as his tail swept the floor behind him. He thought some more about that other company and them possibly getting away with snatching the rest of the lots, and then he finally slammed his stubby finger on the intercom button and told Nancy that he wanted her to get a hold of Craig Uhaul and Iran Thoubal on the double. Nancy at first didn't know whom he was talking about, but after looking up their names and phone numbers, she quickly recognized them as Randy's high school friends and now patsies for hire. She snickered, dialed the telephone, and reached into her desk for another piece of gum. The image of a rugged looking crocodile appeared on the phone's video screen, but by that time, Nancy was scrutinizing the upper drawer of her desk and rummaging through the junk in it. "Hay, Nancy. Long time no see.", the crocodile said to the side of her silky face. Nancy slammed the drawer close, spun in her seat towards the office door, and started to get up and go in there, but then remembered what she was suppose to be doing. She returned her attention to the person on the screen, who had been waiting patiently for her to talk to him, knowing that she was easily distracted and had a one track mind. "Now what was that you were saying?", Nancy asked, as if what she was going to do was real important to the company. "Nothing special... Why did you call, and make it quick. We've got to get back to the investigation of a massive, illegal drug ring.", Craig said in a convincing tone of voice. "Oh, really? Is that on television or just a rental?", Nancy challenged, knowing that he had almost no life outside of Randy's expensive and rare errands, which financed Iran and his junkyard lives until the time of the next errand. "Don't joke, mam. This is FBI business.", a straight-faced raccoon in a black, three piece suit and dark shades said bluntly. He stood in front of the screen for a few more seconds, then turned and walked rigidly out of view, fingering his earphone. Nancy watched him leave and then said to Craig, "I'd almost forgotten about her and if I didn't know you better than that, I really would have believed the both of you. So you two stop fooling around and get yourselves down to Randy's office right now, he's got a real job for you two. By the tone of his voice, it sound like you might be getting your money's worth this time." The raccoon stepped back into view and said, "No joke, mam. He is now working for us and this Randy person will have to... to..." The raccoon saw that Nancy wasn't buying any of this and so he cracked a smile. As Iran morphed, clothes and all, back into her real form, the chameleon said in a combined and echoed voice of everything from the FBI agent's to her own, "to wait for us to get the car warmed up before we can leave, so it'll be about a half hour before we get there." Chapter 2: Double Date "Okay. I'll tell him. Bye.", Nancy said to Iran, flicked her ear, and then hung up the phone. She looked back down at her drawer, got up angrily, and stormed into Randy's office just as two, smartly dressed vixens entered the main office. Nancy walked up to Randy's desk and said outright, "Your mutt stole my chewing gum again." "I'm not a mutt. I'm a purebred Pomeranian. And I didn't steal your gum. I just moved them to a better location.", Malissa said smartly with a smile on her face, briefly looking away from the television. "Where are they. Tell me, or I'll ring your scrawny, little neck.", Nancy said, which prompted Randy to look up at her placidly. "Do that and you're out of another job.", Randy said calmly and then went back to his two-fingered typing. Just as he had started typing again, the two vixens entered the room and started towards his desk. Nancy ignored them and Randy hadn't noticed them yet, but Malissa looked over at them and then ran over beside Randy's desk to see Randy's reaction when he saw them. One wore a violet, wide brimmed hat that was tipped to one side, a white, silk, short sleeve shirt, a long, black, angled skirt that only showed the white of her tail under the trailing part of the skirt, and a pair of white, high heel pumps. The other wore a red, form fitting dress with a hole for her tail, a maroon vest, a pair of red, high heel pumps, and gold earrings and necklace. Both had at least three rings on each of their hands and diamond studded bracelets on their wrists. "I want you to make her tell me where she hid my gum.", Nancy said as they walked by her. "Oh, okay. Malissa give... Wow, aren't you two looking fantastic. Couldn't wait until our dinner date, could you?", Randy asked enthusiastically when he looked up towards where Malissa used to be sitting. "Well, we're on our lunch break and wondered if you'd like to take us out to lunch and dinner, Randy.", the vixen in red said sweetly to Randy, leaning over onto his desk with a dreamy grin. "Um, excuse me. I do believe we were discussing something.", Nancy said, greatly annoyed at this intrusion. "Me take you out to lunch? And I suppose that I'll be also paying for this one, too. I thought that accountants made good money. You are paying her a fair enough amount Alexandria, right?", Randy quizzed accusingly to the vixen in violet, now completely ignoring Nancy. "Oh, yes. Of course. Sarah and I were going to pay for ourselves, but we just thought that you might want to come along with us.", Alexandria said honestly, taking a sideways glance at Sarah. "Hey, why not? I didn't want to spend the entire day inside this tiny room. Let me just save what I wrote and find... oh, there you are. What do you think about dining out for lunch?", Randy said as he looked all around the sides of his desk until he finally found where Malissa was sitting. "Fine with me.", Malissa replied to Randy, forcing a smile. Then she walked back over to the television as she thought, "Just as long as there's another riot, and one of them gets shot. Preferably the boss's plaything." "Great! Will we be taking your car or mine?", Randy asked as he switched everything on his desk off. "You always have the better vehicle, Randy. We'll ride in our car tonight.", Sarah stated as everyone walked out of the office. "No we won't. We're going to rent the longest, shiniest, stretch limousine we can find for our dinner date.", Alexandria planned, slapping Sarah with her tail, as Randy locked up the doors to his office. "Everyone's going to see us for the rich people we really are." "Hey! What about my gum?", Nancy asked angrily as everyone walked towards the door, completely ignoring what had been going on. "I'm not going to let your dog get away with this again." "That's enough, Nancy. I'll reimburse you when I get back. Until then, just get back to you desk and keep an eye out on everybody.", Randy said before the elevator door opened up and everyone but Nancy stepped inside. Nancy mumbled something to herself as she trudged back to her lone desk on the opposite side of the room and sat down in front of her computer and telephone. She started to call someone, anybody, but then decided that she really didn't want to talk to anybody right now. She looked at the blank screen of her computer monitor, got up, kicked the desk a few times, and then walked back over to the elevator. She waited impatiently for the elevator car to arrive, got in it when it did, and rode it down to the company cafeteria to eat lunch. Alexandria, Malissa, Randy, and Sarah were now climbing into Randy's royal purple, two door, convertible town car with power everything (including electro-tinting glass, auto pilot, bomb-proof emergency force field, and retractable, wire hub wheels for amphibious purposes) and a big, quiet turbine engine under its long, aerodynamic hood. Randy pulled his ring of solid gold keys out of his pants pocket, found the one he wanted, put it into the ignition, and started it up. The antenna slowly stretched up on one side of the hood to match one quarter of the length of the frequency of the station received, an orchestra of sound filled the inside of the car, Randy pressed the button to collapse the roof and put up the gold-colored roll bar as the heat vents outdid the cold air, surrounding them like a sauna, and then they were finally on their way. "See what I'm talking about. There's even fold-out tables for us people in the back seat.", Sarah said esthetically as she climbed into the backseat, as Alexandria took her usual seat up front with Randy and Malissa. "And a satellite, three dimensional television built into the back of the driver's seat. I'd sell my soul to own a car like this." "Yeah, and this is just the one for daily commuting.", Alexandria put in, trying to put her head on Randy's shoulder while trying to avoid crushing Malissa, who insisted on sitting between them. Randy listened to the both of them with a sly smile on his face as he massages Malissa's neck. He had no idea what Malissa thought about his two dates and she had no intention on ever telling him. She saw he was always ecstatic about having them hanging off of him because he was rich, but she also knew that Randy thought of her as his wife, daughter, and steady girlfriend. Since they had been together, he had never gone anywhere without her (the only exception being the CPU building). "How about this place?", Randy asked everyone as he slowed the car down to turn into the parking lot of one of the many fancy, chain restaurants. "It's perfect, and there's not many people here either, Randy. Could this day go any better?", Sarah said enthusiastically as Randy took a parking space almost right next to the entrance. Once the car had stopped, Randy put the roof back up, turned off the car, and said as he opened the car door and Malissa jumped over his lap and out the door, "The day could, but this date is as perfect as it could possibly get. I can't think of anything that could possibly go wrong." Randy quickly ran around the front of his car and opened the passenger door. Alexandria nodded to him, got out, and then stood at his side as the seat slid forward and he took Sarah's hands. He escorted her out of the back seat, they got on either sides of him, and then they walked arm in arm to the restaurant's entrance, their tails waving back and forth in perfect sync. Malissa looked at the happy trio for about a second from the driver's side of the car, a little happy, a little annoyed, and then darted past them, up to the automatic doors of the restaurant. It opened up and everyone went in for their perfect afternoon meal. When they had all exited the car, the passenger seat slid back into its normal position, the doors closed and locked themselves, and the security alarm came on with the radar. Once the doors were closed, several vacuums built into the seats came on and sucked up the fur as the car's computer ran a checklist on each of its controls. After it was done and double checked, it added a little more air to the tires, relaxed the car's shocks so that the car was resting completely on top of the tires, tinted the glass opaque to keep the upholstery in top form, dropped the antenna back into the car, adjusted its external heat sensors, and then turned itself "off" until they came back, making sure that the temperature in the car stayed perfect. Chapter 3: Patriot Games When Randy and Malissa got back to the office, Craig and Iran were already there and talking to Nancy. They seemed to be busily talking to her, but immediately turned around when Randy entered through the door, casually walked up to him, and shook his hand. Malissa looked at them all and then continued towards Randy's office. "Hay, Malissa.", Iran said, noticing her. She then turned into a slime puddle, and then, into the shape of a miniature toy poodle. "How's the weather down here?", she finished with a smile. Malissa smiled back at Iran and said happily, "Marvelous. Its not that often that I get to talk to another animal like myself... well, almost. But life was a whole lot better before Alexandria and Sarah." "He's no longer just yours, right?", Iran jested. Malissa looked over at Randy, who was holding a descriptive conversation with Craig and Nancy, frowned, and then jumped on Iran and started play fighting with her. They rolled around on the floor, pulling on each others ears, and nipping each others tails, until they got tired and just laid there laughing hoarsely. "... and so that is why I want you and Iran to investigate that company.", Randy finally concluded to Craig. "With guns, of course. By what I've heard, without that Rusty fellow, you would have had no choice but to give up and die.", Craig said immediately, which Iran and Nancy obediently nodded to. Iran agree, not because she had heard what Randy had said, but because it was Craig's rule that she always agree with him, or else. Randy growled at him for being so gun-happy and Craig added defensively, "Well, I am right, am I not? Without Rusty's cannon and such, you would eventually have been killed by either your double, Hugo, or that dragon." "I'll give him credit for my double, but it was George who did most of the damage on Hugo, and it was the dragon that killed Rusty. Actually, the only thing that Rusty helped us with on the dragon was keeping its mouth open when it was knocked unconscious.", Randy said sternly. He then turned to Iran and said, "But enough of that. I'd like you two to start the investigation of that company as soon as possible, and yes, you can bring as many guns as you can hide on yourselves. I don't know if they will be expecting you or not, but if they are, it will probably be a lot more hectic than when I was going through the CPU building. Good luck. If I'm right, you're going to need it." Iran turned into her ordinary self, she and Craig saluted Randy, and then they both marched right out of the door. The others watched them leave and then Randy picked Malissa up, stroked her neck, and carried her into his office. Nancy went back to her desk and about a minute later, Randy came out and set a five dollar bill on her desk. "For the gum.", Randy explained and Nancy first looked puzzled, the event came back to her, and she smiled and nodded approvingly. Randy then went back into his office and continued on the police report. His hopes were to finish it before eight o'clock (dinner time). Malissa first hoped that he'd take all night and then, after thinking it over, hoped that something would come up and the vixens would have to call off the dinner. She probably never would tell Randy that she didn't like them, because her main reason really was jealousy. She looked up sadly at Randy typing and then walked back over to the television and sat back down in front of it. Chapter 4: Flashback & Backdraft I91 Iran and Craig's first stop was at one of the local divisions of Michael & Michael Guns. It was out of town, but so was the Mechtech building, and so they got into their "old", electric-powered, dull blue sedan, pulled out of the parking lot, and casually drove across town and then onto the highway. Craig, who was driving the car, got into the normal driving lane and then pressed the auto pilot button. The car sped up until it was going the same speed as and two seconds behind the car in front of it and Craig then told the onboard computer where they were going and laid back in his seat. Craig turned to Iran and said lazily, "Mechtech Construction, huh. I hear they're the up and coming in building efficiency and technology.... actually, if I didn't know Randy better than that, I'd say that he was jealous of their unbeatable competition value and we were sent to sabotage the place before they really start moving." Iran had morphed into Randy's likeness and said disapprovingly in Randy's voice, "How dare you even think that about me like... of course this is because of jealousy, I wouldn't have it any other way. I've dedicating my whole life to creating a monopoly so that when I die, I can give it all to either that dimwitted Pete Recald or that sleazy Greg-" Craig sat up in his seat, glared at Iran disapprovingly, and snapped, "Shut up! If you can't say anything nice, don't play the role of that person. How many times do I have to keep telling you?" Iran was now a five-year-old image of herself and said somewhat sarcastically in her childhood voice, "I'm sorry, Uncle Craig. I was just having a little fun." Craig looked even madder and gave her a stinging backhand across the side of her face. He was then a little bit calmer, so he laid back down in his seat, closed his eyes, and grumbled, "Never make fun of the people who pay you, or their friends. I thought you had finally learned that." "Sorry, Uncle Craig.", Iran repeated, sincerely this time. Craig grumbled something incoherent and then, after a couple more seconds, Iran changed back to her original form. Craig, when he was in his early twenties, had adopted the then four-year-old Iran and had only gone as far as giving her the basic necessities like food and shelter (she made her own clothes using her body). Then from when Iran had turned sixteen to now, Craig has made her get a job and pay rent to him to keep living in his house, but even though his morals were as tough as his thick, leather skin, they never seemed to have rubbed off on Iran, who put fun over all other things. She tried to quit school at least a dozen times, went through jobs like water through a cheese grater, and had never been able to get a driver's license or make it into a college. Craig only let her work with him because of her natural abilities and treated her like scum most of the time when they were not on a case. Iran only ran away once, but returned when she ran out of money and found that she couldn't get a job. Although she didn't like rules and didn't want to go back to living with Craig, she couldn't bring herself to stealing what she needed either. It was the thought of having to steal just to survive that brought her back to Craig's doorstep. Craig decided to take a short nap and Iran took a pair of headphones out of the glove compartment, plugged it into the headphone jack, and listened to the latest song from her favorite pop/ rock group off the radio. The rest of the ride to the gun shop was quiet and peaceful. When they got to the shop, Iran woke Craig up, he parked the car, and they walked up to the door of the shop and stopped. A small scanner popped out of an opening above the door, passed a yellow beam a few times over them, and then zipped back into the opening, which closed up after it. The shop door slid open and they entered. "Welcome.", a male voice said from the other end of the cluttered shop, "Come in, come in. And what would you like? Craig." "Who are you and why are you addressing me in such a rude manner?", Craig asked suspiciously as he tried to make his way to the voice's source, tripping over a couple boxes in the process. "Why.", Craig and Iran quickly turned around and was then looking right into the eyes of a blond furred fruit bat wearing an tight, all black, three piece suit, a pair of shiny, black, dress shoes, and a pair of navy blue tinted, wire frame glasses. This was the same one that had, just a half second ago, been talking to them from another hundred feet away. He continued, "Me of course. Everyone's favorite friend." "Michael James. What a surprise to see you here in one of your lowly distribution shops. I'd think you'd be flying around the world on vacation with the other Michael.", Craig finished enthusiastically. Craig reached over to shake Michael's hand, there was a sudden blur accompanied by a sound like air being released from a vacuum, and Michael was up on one of the ceiling beams high above Craig and Iran, hands on hips, laughing at Craig's attempt. "I see you're as slow as ever. My good friend. Now tell me. What is it this time? That you are going after." "We're checking out a mysterious company for Randy Lee.", Iran piped in. Craig gave her a mean sideways glance and then commented, "Yes. They supposedly have been stealing Randy's, and several other company's, lots for a reason not known yet. We have been sent to investigate it and see if it has any connection with a certain robotic's company that tried to kill Randy." "Bummer. Well. I'll try to make your mission, as easy as possible. Let's see. What about a nice, high powered laser cannon, with dual generator. Of course. And, this nice little, grenade launcher. What about those?", Michael asked as he flew through the clutter at lightning speed. As he picked out his more powerful wares, the air around him was imitating a steam locomotive getting up to speed. Bats were the X-Men of the animal world. You could put two almost identical bats together and still lose in a bet of what natural powers their child would have. The only thing that they all had in common was poor eyesight, excellent hearing/ radar, and flight, but even those fluctuated considerably between individuals. For example, Michael was completely blind but knew the exact size and shape (but not color) of everything within a hundred foot and could tell if something was within a five hundred foot radius of himself. He was also able to do fourth dimensional (time) continuous flight so that no matter how far he flew, it would always take him half a second to get there. The only draw back to that was that the cells in his body were slowly deteriorating, so that every month he had to be treated for cancer of just about everything and that he was chronically short of breath. Craig and Iran looked over their rentals, talked amongst themselves about how they were going to get them into the building unseen, and then Craig walked over to Michael and said, "You still haven't told me why you're here and the regular cashier isn't. And why is this place such a mess?" Michael looked around him, nodded, and then said as he started stacking the boxes and gun racks at lightning speed, "I really don't know. I got a call, from the cashier, that a band of thugs, ransacked the place. I came over as fast as I could, to see exactly what did, happen. The cashier was almost dead, and I sent him, to the hospital. As you know. I couldn't call the, police, and so I decided to, search here myself. So far, I've found nothing." The place wasn't spick and span, but at least everyone could move around a whole lot easier now. By the numerous bullet holes, gun clips, and damaged objects, it looked like this place had turned into a definite war zone. There were also traces of blood and fur and tiny scraps of clothing laying her and there. As Craig picked up a minute tuff of light gray fur, Michael sighed, "Well. The cashier did, tell me who did it. But, I refused to believe, him. He says that, Jack Marcel, did it, with the help of, Christine and Henry. It sounds ridiculous. Because he had to let, Jack, in manually. He said that the door, wasn't working. Worked fine for you, didn't it?" "But I thought that Jack was in jail and, even if he did escape and came here, the last thing he'd want to do is blow the place up.", Craig said as he looked over the wolf-like fur. He then decided to smell it and when he did, he asked Michael curiously, "I'm taking it that Jack did escape, so when was that and when was the shooting?" There was another blur and one second later, Michael was standing there with a small notepad, which he looked through as he said, "Jack, escaped at about, eleven thirty, last night. No planes were seen on, radar. But he probably would have, and had hired, a spy plane, to be used. The shooting was at about, seven o'clock, this morning. In a spy plane. That would give him... one hour, to do whatever he wanted, off the plane." "But he didn't jump off the plane and wreck the place, did he?", Michael shook his head, "Of course not. Even if there was a car waiting for him at the nearest airport to here, that still knocks off another half hour and in a half hour's time, the last thing on Jack's mind would be to freshen up. Here Michael, and tell me if you see a grain of dirt or grime or smell even a small amount of sweat on this fur. Yes, there's some lint from the floor and the clothing, but no dirt.", Craig preached as the tuff of fur was passed from Craig to Iran to Michael. Michael sniffed the fur, said, "Yes. You're right, that I can't smell any, sweat. But your sense of smell, is probably keener than, mine.", and then handed it back to Iran. She looked it over, nodded in agreement, started to sniff the fur, and then remember that, like all present chameleons, she lacked a sense of smell. She laughed weakly and passed the fur back to Craig. Craig rolled the fur in his hand, smiled triumphantly, and then said to Iran as he let go of the fur and watched it float to the ground, "Well, now that that's over with, I guess it's time we started investigating that Mechtech- {meep, meep, meep} What the hell was that?" All three of them turned towards the door as a tiny, word recognition device, which had been waiting since seven that morning for the right key word and voice pattern, was activated and a force field was emitted over the door. Michael flew over to the door, as eight remote controlled, high pressure tanks of methane gas opened up, and looked at the force field device for any clue of how to deactivate it. The controls were facing the door (of course) and it looked like the only way to turn it off would be to destroy the box. Not being able to smell the gas yet, that was exactly what he intended to do. Michael flew over to the gun rack, grabbed one of the guns, and flew back to the door. Craig, who was standing near one of the tank, saw Michael blur back and forth across the store and yelled, not even waiting the two whole seconds that it took for Michael to complete the investigation and execution (Michael now had the gun pointed at the box), "Don't shoot it! You'll blow us all up!" With his finger still on the trigger, Michael stopped and looked over at Craig, who explained, "I smell gas. I believe it's methane, so until we find its source, I think you should refrain from even flying. The last thing we need is the friction igniting the gas and blowing us all to kingdom come." "But, I could find it, a lot faster than, you.", Michael retaliated, gently laying the gun down on the floor. "But I'd rather not risk the possibility of an explosion.", Craig said reluctantly as the gas kept on coming out, planning to suffocate them all. "Well, I doubt I'll be of any use on finding that source, so I'll just watch.", Iran commented downheartedly, depressed by the remembrance of her only drawback. Craig and Michael walked around the room and found six of the tanks along the outer walls of the shop and located a vent where the gas from one of the remaining tanks was coming out the strongest. Craig took off the grate and tried to reach in to see if he could grab the tank, but found that it was just too far away. He looked at the six tanks which they already had and which Michael was strategically trying to shut off with the help of a hooked up word processor. Craig turned to Iran and commanded, "Go in there and get that other tank. I can't reach it and if it isn't turned off, we're all doomed. I believe Michael almost has the first one turned off." Iran obediently walked over to the vent, felt the gas running out, turned into a puddle of smooth, light green goo, and went into the vent. She traveled down the duct until she thought that she had gone too far and started moving back to the entrance. A couple seconds later though, there was a loud whir and she felt herself being sucked back the other way again. The vacuum increased in power and she found herself sliding down endless amounts of ducts and slamming into endless amounts of corners. Finally she stopped and she found herself in a small, two by two by four foot room with a large fan dominating one of the walls, which also served as the entrance. The fan stopped spinning and by using ultraviolet vision she could now see the duct she had just come out of. There was a tiny speaker built into one of the other walls. It crackled to life and a voice that sounded just like Jack's said informatively, "Hello, Iran... You are now in a tractor trailer sized, 3-D maze. To save your friends, you're going to have to try to find the switch to turn the tanks off, the switch to open the shop door and turn off the force field blocking it, the switch to reopen the duct gate, and the way out, all before the fifteen minute timer goes off and fires up some excitement. The timer will start... now {meep}." Iran morphed into the shape of a twentieth century guinea pig, slipped past the fan blades, and ran as fast as she could down the duct. The first fork went up or to the left and since she didn't want to leave the level she was on now just yet, she turned to the left, walked about a foot, stopped, went back to the fork, morphed her entire right arm into a razor sharp blade, and etched an arrow in the direction that she was going to go in. Then she ran until she got to another fork where she'd decide which way she was going to go, etched an arrow in that direction, and continued on. Using this tactic, Iran was able to locate the first switch in a short time. "Gasss flow terminated. Eight minutesss, forty-five sssecondsss until ssself-dessstruction.", Christine's voice informed when Iran pushed the switch. "Duct gate lock terminated. Four minutesss, twenty-five sssecondsss until ssself-dessstruction.", Christine said when Iran pushed the second switch a little while later. "I'll never make it. The third one could be anywhere,", Iran told herself as she raced down a connecting duct, "but I've got to try." "Forssse field terminated. Door lock terminated. Thirty-four sssecondsss until ssself-dessstruction.", Christine stated menacingly upon the pushing of the last switch. "Good heavens, I'll never be able to get out of here in time. I don't even know if I remember where that gate was. I might as well just stay where I am now and wait it out. There's still a slim chance that I'll survive.", Iran said hopelessly as she stopped in the center of a duct and turned back into a puddle of goo. "Don't just set there, Iran. Do something, or haven't you gotten the point yet.", Henry's voice hinted as Iran sat there fearing for her life. Iran thought about what Henry had said for a few seconds, then formed herself into a stake with a needle-like point and elongated herself until she poked a hole in and ripped through the top of the duct she was in and went into the duct above it. Satisfied that this really was going to work, she ripped through two more ducts and had just made a hole in the roof of the trailer when there was a thunderous roar and a great ball of fire burst out of the front of the shop. Then, along with the sound of exploding weapons, there was a soft hiss underneath her and the next thing she knew, there was another blast and she was entirely engulfed in flames. She was shot up like a firecracker and when she stopped skyrocketing, she quickly turned into a robin, flew over to the other side of the building, and landed safely next to Craig's car. Craig and Michael were sitting there, waiting to see if she had survived. "What happen?", Craig immediately asked when Iran landed and morphed back to her original form. "Whoever planned that senseless shooting in this place has either gotten the help of a dolphin or... well, they must have gotten help from a dolphin because they knew I would be there and be there at that exact time, just like with that voice activated box. They were using Jack, Christine, and Henry's voices and I was sent through this maze with these three switches I had to push before the place blew up. I almost didn't make it out alive, but Henry clued me in on a way out at the last second.", Iran said as she walked to the passenger side of the car, her nerves just a little ruffled. When she got to the passenger door, she found a dead, smoldering jackrabbit with a crowbar in his hand on the ground next to the door. She kicked him out of her way and said to herself, straight-faced, "Dumb bunny. Thought we'd drive into this section of town without a car security system. Very dumb, bunny." "What counts is that you did make it and that you were able to save us, too. It's more than likely that this might have been set up by that Mechtech place... This is definitely going to be much harder than I first thought.", Craig said to Iran, not hearing what she had last said. He then turned to Michael and asked him as he opened the driver side door and got in, "Would you like to come with us, Michael? Your speed could be a great asset to us." Michael smiled, shook his head, then said before he flew off in a blur over the horizon, "Sorry. But, I've really got to get back to the, west coast before something, awful happens back there, too. Goodbye. Good luck." "Didn't even let me try to persuade him. Oh, but at least we still have the guns. Now let's get those heartless crooks.", Craig said angrily as he closed his door, started the car, and drove onto and down the street. Craig once again turned the car onto the highway and set the destination for the next state. Iran turned on the radio, changed it to a soft rock station, and laid back in her seat. Craig thought about all that Randy had told him, about what had just happened in the shop, and how it was highly possible that who or whatever was causing this was waiting for them at the building. He didn't know really what he was going to be up against, but he knew that Randy was counting on him to straighten it all out. After a tense minute, he turned his attention to the song on the radio and relaxed a little. He slid down in his seat and desperately tried to sleep it off, but found it impossible. After several minutes he sat up in his seat, watched the lane lines zip by on both sides of the car, and after a while found himself singing the background vocal to 'Duke of Earl' to himself. Iran glanced over at him and then asked sleepily, "And what do you think your doing?" After a short pause, the question clicked in and Craig responded as if it were perfectly clear, "A rhythm check for our speed." "Oh. Well okay then, but I think the car can do that for itself.", Iran said softly as she turned sideways in her seat and closed her eyes. Craig looked at her and then slid back down in his seat and closed his eyes. Chapter 5: Major Roadkill Jack and the gang had just come onto a real road and now Jack and Deena were watching television as Christine kept Henry company. Dwayne was still driving the rig and they were still trying to make good time to Randy's home state. Jack and Deena were watching an old action movie in 3-D with a lot of classic explosions. The sound was extremely realistic and could be heard all the way back in the bedroom that Henry and Christine were in.. Jack and Deena watched the movie with their arm over each others shoulder. "Nice movie. Could use more blood and guns though.", Jack commented to Deena as he picked up the can of soda that was sitting on the other side of him. "Yeah, but that might take away from the plot.", Deena sighed, laying her head on Jack's other shoulder. "What plot. I'm beginning to think that the person who wrote the script had no idea how it was really going to turn it out. Why do you think there are so many sequels?", Jack said quietly as he gently pushed her head off of his shoulder after putting down the can of soda. "You just can't have enough of a good thing. People like lots of blood and pointless violence and until there's some kind of worldwide peace treaty, that is exactly what's going to bring in the bucks.", Deena replied as she laid her head on the arm of the couch, sliding Jack's arm off of her and putting her white streaked tail on his lap. Jack looked down at her tail, then at her silky, black head, smiled a little, pulled her back up into a sitting position, took her right hand in his left, and turned her body to face his, making her tail wrap around her body. They looked into each other's eyes for a moment and were about to kiss when there was a loud thud and the whole cab shook. Both Jack and Deena looked over at Dwayne and he turned to face them and smiled that wicked smile again. "I think I hit de curb on that turn. Yall just get back ta w'atever yall were do'n and I'll do my best ta make the rest of this trip, nice'n comfy.", Dwayne said as the rig rocked up the on ramp, scraping up along the railing as he talked. Dwayne turned back towards the road, straightened the path of the rig out, and increased its speed dramatically. The weight of the multiple trailers made this all but smooth and everything was tossed about as the rig roared and stuttered. The rig approached the highway and once it got onto the changeover lane, there didn't seem to be any open spaces big enough for it for as far down the highway as they could possibly see. Instead of stopping or driving down the breakdown lane and hope someone would let them in, Dwayne increased the speed even more and bumped his way into the slow lane. From the way it felt from inside the cab, you'd think they were driving over the cars. They only did that to one car and it was just paid for. "What the hell do you think you're doing. I've never seen such bad driving in my life.", Jack yelled at Dwayne as Deena got up, walked over to the kitchen, and opened the refrigerator, not that she wanted to get anything but just to look through it. "Yall wana get thar fast, don't cha? Well, if I don't push and shove, this old girl ain't go'n now'ar.", Dwayne explained as they started getting dangerously close to a car in front of them. "Might makes right, ya know." The driver of the other car saw them coming, sped up, looked in her rear view mirror again, and then at her first chance, steered into the first available space in the next lane. A half second later, the rig and company roared by with its fifty wheels humming a death song as it passed. The air current it created could alone push away a compact car. Then a few minutes later, it started snowing. "Now, ain't that a beut.", Dwayne commented as the tiny, white flakes whisked off the ultra-smooth windshield and added to the wheels' hum. "Mighty peaceful, ain't it?" "Yeah, but I doubt they'd agree with you on that.", Jack said as he looked at the rear view camera monitor, referring to the drivers of the many cars that were bowled over along the rigs highway route. "Just make sure you don't ruin anybody else's day with your reckless driving now, Dwayne. Or else.", Deena said to Dwayne, as she walked up to and leaned on Jack's side. Dwayne nodded and then Deena looked into Jack's eyes coyly and smiled. Jack smiled back at her, then they walked back to the couch and sat down. The movie was at its last minutes and since they had both seen this movie before, Jack set the television on scan and while they watched little bits and pieces of each channel, the thought of Randy came to their minds. Neither one was thinking the same thing about Randy nor were they thinking the same thing about what they'd do when they saw him again. They sat there quietly on the couch for about a minute and then Jack remembered about the compact disk, pulled it out of his pocket, showed it to Deena, and asked, "Would you like to see a really old documentary I picked up this morning?" "Why not. I doubt there's anything else on anyway.", Deena replied as she looked at her watch. She pressed a small button on the side of it and a small army of Ultimate Soldiers invaded and killed every living person in a nearby car manufacturing plant. Jack looked at the label on the compact disk again, got up, walked to the television, and pushed the compact disk into the slot below the screen. There was a momentary pause and then the title screen was shown. Jack smiled and then went back to Deena's side, but when the documentary actually started, Jack stared at the television screen in disbelief and Deena smiled slily, nodded, and then leaned on Jack's shoulder. "Wow, Jack. That person next to Max twenty looks awfully familiar. How old did you say this disk was?", Deena purred as Jack listened intensely to the voice that was doing most of the speaking. "No way. It can't be. It's... it's...", Jack started, mesmerized by what he was seeing. "Yes, I know. Let's just sit back and find out why.", Deena suggested, while in the master bedroom, Christine and Henry where talking about their new companion. "So, now that things have stopped flying around and I'm finally wide awake, let's talk about this Deena.", Henry said enthusiastically as he turned on his side to face Christine's head. "That ssskunk givesss me the creepsss. She actsss like she likesss Jack, but I think there'sssomething elssse on that evil mind of hersss.", Christine hissed as she looked at the bedroom door. "Oh, come on. Not all skunks are as bad as you may think. Give her some time and you may find that you're wrong about her.", Henry said as he put his hand on Christine's head. "Either way, she seems Jack's type anyway." "Fine, I'll let her have her way for now, but if she ssstartsss trying to kill usss all, don't come crying to me. Ssskunksss are ssskunksss, evil and deviousss. You think they're your friendsss, and then they turn their backsss on you. Everybody knowsss what happensss after that, and until now, I've never ssseen anyone who wasss foolhardy enough to tessst that theory.", Christine said downheartedly. She looked over at Henry, almost as if she was about to cry, and summed it all up with, "I'm jussst trying to look out for him, Henry." "I know, but I think Jack can look out for his own self. He's not the kind to go head over heels over a pretty face. Especially one with such a dangerous body.", Henry said as he put her head on his lap and looked over at the door. "At least, I don't think he is." "Of courssse not. Him and Randy are about the mossst dedicated bachelorsss I've ever ssseen. How sssilly of me to... But what if Deena doesssn't want to be jussst a friend. What if Jack turning her off makesss her angry and she killsss usss all becaussse of that. Oh, now I'm even more afraid, Henry. He'sss playing with fire and if it doesssn't go her way, we'll all be burned.", Christine said as she tried to get all sixty feet of herself onto the bed and around Henry. "Our only hope is that either she's understanding, or that that is not her real intention with getting acquainted with him. But if it's that one, then we're right back where we started from.", Henry said from within her coils, her head facing his. "That's exactly why I hate complicated relationships. No matter which way you go with it, there's always trouble around the corner." "That'sss what I'm talking about. Jack'sss going to get usss killed. I jussst know it.", Christine added fearfully, accidentally making Henry agree with her as he watched her move around him. She noticed his blank expression and then commented before breaking the spell, "Oh, sssorry about that. Forget what I sssaid. I wasss jussst overreacting, that'sss all." Chapter 6: Phantom Merry-go-round {meep, meep, meep}. Craig and Iran quickly woke up as the innocent destination indicator buzzer went off. Paranoid from their last adventure, they looked around themselves, expecting something bad to happen at any second. It took them several more seconds to realize that they were safely at their destination. Craig pulled the car into the building's parking lot, they got out, stretched, and Craig turned on the alarm. They started towards the building and then realized that they had forgotten the weapons. Craig turned the alarm off, they got the weapons out of the trunk, and Craig turned the alarm back on. Craig gave his weapon to Iran and she fashioned a large, rolling, leather (which, for obvious reasons, Craig disliked) suitcase around the weapons. They then nervously walked towards the building's entrance, hoping that they could at least get in without that big of a hassle. Iran and Craig slowly walked past the two, sparkling, white, marble pillars that held up an also white, marble overhang and up to the two gorilla guards on either sides of the main entrance, double doors. The guards momentarily looked down at Craig and Iran and then sidestepped in front of the double doors, blocking their way. Craig and Iran stepped back and the gorilla on the left pointed to the suitcase and said sternly, "Open it up, or else we're going to have to rip you two apart." "That might be just a little bit impossible with me being a chameleon and all.", Iran stated as she let go of the "suitcase's" handle and kicked the suitcase so that it was right in front of the gorilla that had talked. She could feel the kick, but she tried her best not to show that to the guards. The gorilla bent down to open up the suitcase as the other gorilla watched Craig and Iran carefully. Just then the suitcase popped open on its own, both the laser cannon and the grenade launcher fired a shot up at the gorilla's face, there were loud explosion, the flesh on the gorilla's head was ripped and burned away, the protective metal skull was severely mangled, and the gorilla was thrown backwards and up against the double doors. The gorilla stayed in its lifeless, almost headless, sitting position and the other gorilla ran angrily towards the couple. Iran ran to the outer wall of the building, just a little stunned by this discovery, and then she ran back to the first gorilla and checked the almost headless guard's pockets for a keycard or anything else that would be useful. Craig ducked the other gorilla's first punch, picked him up off the ground, and slammed him face first onto the ground. He then jumped on the gorilla's back and got one good strike with his claws at the back of the guard's neck before he threw Craig off. Craig barrel rolled over to the wall, jumped back onto his feet, and then wrestled the gorilla for a couple more minutes. They slammed each other's bodies up against the wall and the pillars and with every blow, the pillars would crack just a little bit more. After a couple more minutes, Craig charged at the gorilla and threw both of their bodies up against the pillar on the right. The pillar started collapsing and Craig dove out of the way just as that pillar shattered, the other one snapped in half, and the thick, marble overhang came crashing down on the two gorillas, Iran, and the guns. The overhang laid almost directly on the ground and it was only after thinking about the condition of the guns did he attempt to move the large, marble slab. After a few seconds, Iran oozed out of the opening made by the remaining, semi-intact pillar and the knocked out gorilla by the door, she resumed her original shape, and Craig looked over at her and then at the slab. "Well? Where's the guns? Don't tell me they were crushed by this crude... pile of rocks.", Craig finally said to Iran as he walked over to the opening that Iran had come out of. "No. I don't think so.", Iran answered placidly, ducked back into the opening, and sighed, "I'll get them." Iran stretched her arm first over to the laser cannon and dragged it back to herself, then gave it to Craig. Craig nodded and Iran reached over to the handle of the grenade launcher, which she then attempted to drag back to within normal reach. The launcher moved about six inches and then became immobilized. Iran tried to free it from whatever had made it stuck and then, when she found that that was not working, she morphed herself into the shape of a snake and slithered over to the launcher. When she got there, she found out that one of the gorillas was holding the barrel of the launcher. Her first thought was to fire the launcher right into the hand, which would get rid of the gorilla and remove the marble blockade, but would probably also ruin the gun and maybe hurt Craig. She could just tell Craig to move to a safer spot but he'd want the gun intact. She then decide to just snip the hand off and have Craig remove the hand himself. Iran slithered over to the gorilla's stubborn hand, morphed her head into the pair of crude pruning shears, clamped her "jaws" on the gorilla's wrist, and bit down hard. The first quarter inch was somewhat easy, but when she got farther than that, it was close to impossible. After a little while longer, Iran gave up and made her way back out of the marble pile. "One of the gorillas is holding onto that gun and there's nothing I can do to make him let go. We're just going to have to carry on with only one gun.", Iran explained downheartedly. "Not on your life, we ain't. Turn into a rope or something, get back down there, and I'll pull that gun out myself.", Craig ordered as he got up off the hood of a nearby car. Iran obediently obeyed and when Iran gave the signal that she was ready, Craig pulled with all his might and slowly, the lump that represented the gorilla's limp body moved towards him. When the launcher and a sizable piece of the gorilla's arm was outside of the pile, Craig stopped pulling and Iran took a break. Craig looked the arm over, got into his knees, took hold of the gun and the upper part of the lower arm, and snapped his jaws shut on the arm. There was a sound of sudden twisting of metal and electrical crackling, and the gun was free from the rest of the gorilla's body but still not the hand. Craig spent a minute spitting out bits and pieces of the gorilla's workings, then ripped the hand off the gun barrel, threw it at the top of the marble pile, and brushed off the grenade launcher. Craig and Iran looked at the crumbled pile of marble that was blocking the entrance, and then turned back towards their car as massive thunder cloud was slowly coming over the horizon at a noticeable speed. They turned around, looked at it curiously, and then looked back at the building. Craig looked at his grenade launcher and then turned to Iran and said, "That's a very fast thunder cloud. There hasn't been a report of a chance of rain in this part of the country for... um... about three month now and I really doubt that that really is a rain cloud. It's probably camouflage for some kind of war machine. If that's what it is then we better get inside and, at the moment, I'd rather face what's inside here than what's inside that." Craig then jumped on top of the rubble and ran to the bottom of a second story window. He first tried to pry the window open manually and then, since that didn't work, backed away and shot a grenade at it. There was a loud explosion but the window survived it, unscathed. Iran took one last look at the cloud and then went to Craig's side. "So now what?", Iran asked Craig solemnly. "We leave.", Craig said angrily as he turned to leave. {meep} Craig and Iran froze in their tracks at the sound of the buzzer. The marble underneath them started to shake and then the center of the pile caved in and disappeared into an unseen void beneath them. Both Craig and Iran were on the building half of the pile, so they had to think fast before they were sucked into a place where they may have no way of getting out of. Iran stretched herself up so that she was holding onto the third story window sill, Craig grabbed hold of her legs, the gap spread all the way to the doors of the building, and Craig could see the huge bomb bay doors that had been cleverly camouflaged under the overhang. Iran stretched her tail over to the doorknob of a nearby car and then pulled herself taunt so that Craig could move himself over to stable ground. Once there, he positioned himself on the asphalt and held Iran's tail as she let go of the window sill and shrunk herself back to normal form. They stood there side by side looking at the giant gap and the impenetrable, double doors for a while, and then Craig said cautiously, "Let's try that again." They stayed still for a minute, waiting and listening for any other gadgets, and then on Craig's word, they dashed towards their car. The wind suddenly picked up to about a hundred miles per hour, the clouds turned to thin, white, contorting ribbons, and the trees and cars in the distance were shot up off the ground and thrown in Craig and Iran's direction. Half blown, half under hope of avoiding whatever was happening, Craig and Iran turned around and ran in the other direction. Iran morphed into the shape of a giant falcon, grabbed Craig, and rocketed them up the side of the building just as cars started slamming and piling up against the sides of the indestructible structure. Iran flew to the opposite side of the building to avoid the winds and as she flew farther up the building, she noticed that the clouds were starting to swirl around the building, bathing it in ribbons of fog. The black part of the cloud had not gotten there yet, but it would be soon and they still didn't want to be outside when it got there. "Air's getting thin. I don't know how much farther I can go, this fog is almost pea soup, and if I hit anything... well, as you know, it's a long way down.", Iran yelled to Craig. "Yeah, well I don't want to find out just how far so keep on climbing and hopefully we'll find a crevice or something.", Craig shouted back as the fog turned from gray to inky black and spun counterclockwise around the building at increasing speed, blocking all view of anything five feet from the building. The vertical shaft of smoke quickly reached its max of a hundred fifty plus miles per hour and both Craig and Iran were sucked into it. The air inside the tornado was somewhere below freezing so Craig was thrown into a state of sub-hibernation and Iran was just thrown up against the building. She'd fall a couple hundred feet, be sucked in, then be thrown out again until she finally hit the ground and morphed back into her original form, dazed from the fall. The smoke shaft had risen up about a hundred feet, so Iran now only felt a small updraft, but was too dazed to do anything about Craig. The thunderous spiral then squeezed on the building, messing with the foundation, and the building very gradually started to turn around until it was finally uprooted by the tornado and Iran was knocked onto a nearby car by a passing sun room. She watched dizzily from on top of the car's roof as the building spun about a yard off the ground and the tornado was "sucked" into the bottom of the building, Craig nowhere in sight. After the last of the smoke was gone, the building fell and tunneled itself one story into the ground. Once it had completely stopped, a section of the wall facing her opened up into a double doorway, a couple gorilla guards walked out, locked the doors, and then stationed themselves on both sides of it. Iran opened her mouth to say something, couldn't think of the proper phrase to describe how she felt, and so she just shrugged, reformed herself into a falcon, and started once again to find another, less guarded way into the building. She had lost track of the weapons' locations, and so was not really sure what she would do if she was able to get in. She looked once more at the stationed guards, then at Craig's car, then at the top of the building, and finally took off. Chapter 7: Trucks, Planes, and Automobiles Jack and Deena continued watching Max 20's home video on the laboratory assisted "Satan's Bomb" as the rig slowed down to a crawl. Deena looked at the television curiously and then turned her head and looked out the windshield. She looked at the television again, got up, and walked over to Dwayne. "Traffic jam, huh? Well. Forget what I told you. Turn on the force field battering ram and get us out of this mess.", Deena said quietly to Dwayne. She then walked over to the refrigerator and got herself a soda. Then she went back to the couch and put her arm over Jack's shoulder. "What did you tell him?" Jack asked as he watched the documentary. "Oh, nothing really. Just correcting a small error, that's all.", Deena answered with a sly smile. Jack reached over and grabbed Deena's hand and pulled her back onto the couch. He then turned to her and commented, "The way this documentary goes, it reminds me of a children's book I once read back there in prison." "A children's book? You look a lot smarter than that, but I'll save you from explaining yourself and just ask, what was its title?", Deena said, holding back the urge to laugh at him. "Very Ditzy.", Jack stated as seriously as he could muster. "Oh, really. Sounds like a interesting book.", Deena said, trying her best not to sound sarcastic. "Believe me. It was.", Jack finished off and they went back to watching the documentary, leaning on each other. "And now that I've seen this, I'm kind of glad that I was so nice to that Worker. It even gives me another reason to continue in my line of work." Dwayne reached down and pressed a button on the keyboard beside him without looking at it. There was a slight pause and then the keyboard corrected Dwaynes command and pulled down the correct key. The front bumper jutted out into a wide wedge, it was bathed in a faint green light, and the truck impatiently roared forward and smoothly knocked away the car in front of them. Dwayne looked angrily at the dashboard, hit it, and then pressed his foot on the gas peddle. The truck surged forward and in a few seconds, cars were flying left and right. Deena nuzzled Jack as they watched the television, and then Deena heard a soft beeping. She looked all around herself and then put her hand up to her left ear and touched her concealed earpiece. She frowned, turned to Jack, who was now looking at her curiously, and smiled a little. "I'll be right back, so keep my spot warm for me.", Deena said coyly and then quickly walked into the bathroom and closed the door. Christine was looking out the open bedroom door and saw Deena slip into the bathroom. She waited until the bathroom door closed and then slithered up to the door, Henry followed her head, and they both put their heads up against the door and listened. Deena pressed the button on her earpiece and said quietly, "Yes. What is it?" "It's Stoker. He's made his way into the building and I do believe he has help from Randy. Now, I know your probably having a great time with Jack, but we need you over here. Fast.", an ordinary company pager explained as calmly as she could muster. "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll be there in a few minutes. Bye.", Deena said and removed the earpiece. She threw it into the sink, turned to the door, took a small remote out of her pocket, and pressed the button as she said, "Come in." The door quickly swung open and Henry stumbled forwards into the room before getting his footing. Deena smiled slyly, flicked her tail, and then said softly, "Hear enough." The hallway entrance into the kitchen silently closed up and then there was a faint hissing sound as sleeping gas was injected into their section. "I'd spray you, but I want you out of the way only temporarily. Good night.", Deena said happily, unaffected by the gas. "Oh, no you don't.", Christine said as she tried to hypnotize Deena. Deena started feeling a little dizzy, but snapped her fingers and the gas started pouring in at full force. Christine and Jack fell to the floor and Deena looked at them dizzily, snapped her fingers again, and laughed. A vacuum then started up, sucking all the gas outside, and then the hallway opened up again. Deena looked at the two sleeping bodies and then she said to the walls, "Roadkill, can you please show our guests back to their room." The floor started rippling and Christine and Jack were pushed back to the master bedroom by the waves and the door closed behind them. As this happened, Deena walked into her own bedroom, took something out of her suitcase, and went back into the hallway. "Thank you very much. Now, we're in kind of a hurry. Do you think you could change yourself into something faster, like a passenger jet?", Deena said as she walked back to the couch. Jack looked up at her and she explained with open arms, "Roadkill. The most surreal of my toys. It's any and every vehicle I'd ever need and since my business is in trouble, this here will not do. But while the room isn't moving, I'd be very happy if you'd except this as a token of our friendship." Deena then took a gold watch out of her pocket and handed it over to Jack, who looked it over, remember the one he had before the police took it away from him, smiled, and put it on his wrist. Then he dusted off Deena's part of the couch with his tail and offered her to sit down, which she happily did before kissing him. On a long straight-away, Roadkill welded all the trailers and the cab into one object and then stretching itself until it was a multi-wheeled fuselage and tail. Then it punched away the cars beside it to make its wings and multi-directional turbine engines. Last of all, it raised its body off the ground and replaced its fifty truck wheels with ten airplane wheels. The engines roared to life, it turned them down towards the ground, and in a matter of seconds it was soaring through the air. Dwayne was in the cockpit checking all the instruments, Deena and Jack were in the business class part of the plane watching everything morph from one object to another (the fridge stayed a fridge but it did move around a bit, trying to find a place that it would fit in) as if it was an interactive movie, Christine and Henry were snoozing in economy class, and there was a whole mess of objects in the other half of the modernized 727. "TA-DA", flashed Roadkill on the overhead monitor. Jack looked around him with amazement and then suddenly stopped smiling. He turned to face Deena and asked her seriously, "What did you say you and your company does again?" "Technology?", Deena answered innocently. "Technology. As in killer cyborgs and artificial people made out of slime? The type that might be used to take out a regular army and maybe the entire animal race.", Jack hinted angrily as he stepped away from Deena. "Well, yeah. We make every robotic and machine based contraption on this planet. I, myself, have gotten this far to a complete technological monopoly, so yes I probably did.", Deena explained triumphantly as she made as wide a gap as possible between her stubby thumb and pointer finger. "And did you give them to the police to keep inmates from escaping?", Jack asked, noticeably offended. "Well, of course. With inmates like you, regular people just didn't cut it. It takes fearless warriors with bodies of reinforced steel to take you and your gang on. If you got hurt on the way out, don't blame me. You're suppose to stay in there, and if I didn't like you as much as I do, I would have had every police, living or nonliving, on your tail every step of the way out with cross-hairs targeted, and would have set you up with a much more dedicated Worker. I would have given you two days to be hamburger.... Now, let's leave the past to the great Arcadia, and this Max 20, and enjoy Roadkill's wider screened television, okay?", Deena advised Jack as she flicked her tail, much more offended. "Okay. Okay. But I can't forgive you for what Betty and Oli did to us, or how your hundred or so clones are taking jobs from all the unqualified people that should be in their place.", Jack stated as he sat down in the seat he had been standing next to, fingering his new watch. "Nor me you, for destroying Betty and greatly damaging Oli. Do you know how long it took and all the components that were required to put those two together so that they'd be the perfect weapons against you and your friends? Huh, do you?", Deena queried as she walked to the window seat of the row in front of Jack's, hopped over the seat, and then sat down next to Jack and put her arm over Jack's shoulder. "Well, no I don't, and I'm not about to guess either. Betty deserved to be blown up into tiny, little pieces, and as for Oli. Well, he backed out before finishing his mission. They're life like all right, but they're definitely not perfect. All of your machines deserve to be scrapped, but anyway, here's a question for you. Where's Christine and Henry?", Jack asked as he removed her hand from on his left shoulder and then took off the watch. "Sleeping in economy class if I guess right." "Dead?" "No, no, no. I wouldn't do that to them, yet. No, they're just sleeping. If you want, you can check on them for yourself.", Deena said, pointing out the door without turning away from the screen. "Well, you've been quite honest with me so far, so if you say they're sleeping, I guess they're sleeping... Now, about Dwayne.", Jack prompted. "Oh, he's real. Not ever my clones are that clueless.", Deena said with a smile as she took the watch from out of Jack's hands and started putting it back on his wrist. "You have nothing to worry about. It's only an ordinary timepiece. No tricks, extra gadgets, or mind control devices. You have your friend in there to do that for you, if she were awake." "Right. Then how'd you do it, and why?... If he was a robot, I was thinking that he was maybe the prototype model for all the others and as some kind of a memento, you just kept him around because you wanted something that would annoy you every now and then.", Jack said, finally putting his left arm back over Deena's shoulder and looking into her eyes, the watch now strapped tight on his wrist. "No. That's why I have you. And as me as your girlfriend, you shall never be arrested again.", Deena said slyly, playfully squeezing Jack's nose. "Catchy, but who said I wanted a girlfriend? You're just the entertainment, girlie.", Jack said joking, ruffling the fur on top of Deena's head. "Oh really. For that remark, I'm not going to answer your questions. You'll just have to keep on guessing.", Deena said, arms crossed, as she looked cheerlessly at the screen. "And hope that the same doesn't happen to you." Jack then suddenly grabbed Deena at the waist, lifted her over his head, and plunked her down in the aisle. She stood there for a second and then stuck her tongue out at him, flicked her tail, and then strutted away. Jack got up, she started running, he chased her up the aisle, and got hold of her by her hips before she could get to the door. She slapped him with her tail, he let go of her, faking a drunken state, she turned, bowed, jumped at him, he willfully fell backwards onto the floor, and then they tumbled back down the aisle, laughing all the way. When they finally stopped, they laid where they were, panting, and Jack asked, slightly out of breath, "By the way. Who's this Arcadia fellow?" "Oh, just a friend of mine.", Deena answered as she stared up at the ceiling and reviewed in her head everything that I had 'told' her early that morning. "Just a close and caring friend of mine." Chapter 8: The Specialists Two shadowy characters parked their town car in front of the Focse Building, got out, one grabbed a suitcase out of the back seat, the doors locked themselves, and the two walked into the building's lobby, the car's powerful engine still running outside. As they strolled towards the elevator, many people and security cameras watched them suspiciously. The two knew they were being watched but calmly stepped into the elevator, turned around, and watched the doors close in front of them. One of the characters casually pressed one of the buttons on the suitcase's handle and the hidden elevator camera was immediately jammed. With that, that character nodded to the other one and they both smiled ever so slightly. "{bing} What floors would you like to go to?", the elevator's computer asked them a couple seconds after the doors closed. "The twenty-sixth floor, please", both characters answered in unison. There was a couple seconds pause as the voice recognition unit analyzed their voices and then the speakers came on again. "Please state purpose of visit, Jack Marcel, and, Henry O'Reely." "We're just here for a friendly visit, that's all.", the one who had spoken in Henry's voice said and then, after a short pause, the elevator started moving up. "The scanner is malfunctioning at this time. Your presents has been forwarded to your destination. Have a nice day.", the computer finished off informally and then all was quiet. The elevator door slid open on the twenty-sixth floor and the two characters casually walked out. One of the characters then turned back towards the elevator and stated, "Stay right here. We won't be long." They then walked up to Nancy's desk, she glanced up momentarily at the two figures standing before her, then at the information from the elevator, then back up at them. She shook her head, got up, and commented, "Hi, how you doing? The elevator's computer is on the fritz again, so before I can let you through those doors, I'm going to have to grill you endlessly on why you have come to see Randy without filing a reservation. Okay?" The two, mysterious characters looked at each other, smiled slyly, and the one on the right was just about to reach for his gun when their earpiece pagers suddenly gave them the message, "Don't even think about it. Said I'd handle it. If you want, take her with you. She might come in handy. A.F." With that, they again looked at each other, nodded, turned their attention back to Nancy, and the rhino on the left answered in his own deep, gravely voice, "That's perfectly fine with me." A few seconds later, Nancy's desk intercom buzzed to life and Randy's voice was heard saying, "Oh yeah, Nancy. I forgot to tell you that I'll be expecting two, rough-looking rhinos by the names of Mack and Steve. If you see them, please send them in immediately." The two rhinos smiled in a way that might suggest that they had just thought up yet another way to make her have a slow and painful death and stepped towards Randy's office's electronically locked door. "Not so fast, you two. Show me some identification first.", Nancy commanded from behind her desk, which was immediately followed by their pagers saying, "Check your lower left pocket. A.F." In synchronized fashion, the two rhinos turned around, reached into their pockets, and presented their business cards to Nancy. Impressed by their act, Nancy took both business cards, looked them over, nodded, handed them back, and then tapped her finger on a one inch button on the side of her desk. The button took a tedious (a little over one second) DNA scan of the skin on her finger, her exact heart rate, analyzed the recorded conversation, and then sent a message to the door to open up. The rhinos nodded at the door, thanked Nancy, and then stepped into Randy's office. Randy and Malissa immediately looked at them, Randy got up out of his chair, and asked angrily from behind his desk, "How did you guys get in here? Nancy, get in here, now!" The two, very confident, rhino henchmen stopped halfway across the room and stood there peacefully as Nancy tromped into the room, looked Randy square in the eyes, and demanded, "What the hell are you yelling at me for? Just a second ago, you said to let these guys in, so I let them in. If you can't remember that far back then..... Uh, well, maybe you've been hanging around Pete to long, but I distinctly remember you telling me that if these guys came around, to let them in. It's even recorded on the computer. Okay?" Randy was silent for a moment, wondering what was going on, and then finally said to Nancy, "Alright. After I find out what these guys are doing in my office, I'll check the records, and-" "No you won't.", Mack blurted as he set the suitcase on the floor. "- we'll see... what did you say?", Randy asked the henchman angrily. Mack turned his head towards Nancy and the office's door, it slammed shut and locked itself, then he looked back at Randy, and said calmly, "No, you won't. You're both coming with us." "Over my dead body.", Nancy said as she ran towards, flipped over, and positioned herself behind the bar with a bottle in hand. Both rhinos simultaneously took out their phasers and aimed them at their designated targets. Nancy threw the wine bottle, Steve, who was facing her, shot the bottle so that it shattered almost right in her face, shot the security gun aimed at him which was just about to fire, and then at the bottle on the counter above where Nancy was now hiding. Nancy rolled out from behind the bar, Steve shot at her, she deflected it with a tray she was now holding, he shot at both spots that she gripping the tray, she let go, and then he immediately shot it again so that it hit her hard from under her muzzle. She knocked her head against the back wall and momentarily sat there dazed as he changed the setting, stunned her, and watched her slide down on her side, in a light coma. At the same time that that was happening, Mack, who was facing Randy and Malissa, shot the two security guns located in hidden areas above Randy's desk, then at the one in the far corner of the room, switched the setting on his phaser, and knocked Malissa unconscious, who had just come at him from under the desk. Malissa rolled lifelessly back under the desk and in that time, Randy got his pistol from out of the middle drawer and aimed it at the rhino. Randy shot Mack before he could counterattack and it got him just above the left eye. Sparks flew from the metal on metal contact as the rhino redid the setting on the gun and shot Randy's gun out of his hand. The pistol flew over his shoulder and he ducked just as another shot went for his head and scorched a hole in the wall behind him. Another shot, Randy's computer exploded, and he rolled out from behind the desk. Mack shot several more, high intensity, laser beams, but Randy jumped, dove, and rolled out of their paths as they blew holes in the wall. Then after a short while, the rhino quickly reset the phaser, aimed at the spot predicted, fired, and Randy was thrown backwards, against the side of his desk. His monocle flew over the desk and bounced softly onto the cushion of his chair, where it would lay for some time undisturbed. Randy lifelessly fell forward, the rhino reached under the desk, pulled out Malissa with one hand, then grabbed Randy by the collar with the other, and moved then both next to Nancy just as a vortex opened up above the pile, sucked them in, and then closed up before anything else could follow them. Mack took something out of the top drawer of Randy's desk, put it in his pocket, picked up the suitcase as the office doors opened up, and they both walked casually back into the elevator. "How was your visit, Jack and Henry?", the elevator asked as it closed the doors. "Oh, just dandy. Everything went just as expected... just as he said it would.", Mack said in Jack's voice, with an evil smile on his thick face as he touched the spot that Randy had hit him on the camouflaged metal plate around his eye. Once they had reached the ground floor, Mack pressed another button on the suitcase's handle, set the suitcase in the center of the elevator, they stepped out of the elevator, and then walked towards the front doors as the elevator's doors closed. The elevator's computer started experiencing static interference, and so, by instruction of the suitcase's computer, it went down into the basement as all its memory circuits started frying. Once there, the suitcase's timer went off, the elevator blew up, and the words "Temporarily Out of Order" softly blinked above all of its sound-proof entrance ways. Chapter 9: Corporate Hazing Craig slowly opened his eyes and found, not much to his surprise, that he was lying face up in a dense, black fog. He pulled himself onto his feet and groaned as he found that he was still unable to see much of anything. Then, deciding that he wasn't going to get anywhere by just standing where he was, he reached his hands out in front of him and started walking forwards. As he moved about, the fog danced around his body in its own gentle breeze, and then after a short time, started getting denser and a lot darker. Craig stopped moving and found that the fog was rapidly moving to in front of him and was spinning its dark, dense smoke into a spinning vertical column with the sound of a soft, jet-like whine. "Iran?", Craig asked stupidly as the now smoke encased, liquefied column doubled its speed, almost trying to suck Craig into its vibrating center. "You will find me a lot more versatile than that inferior chameleon.", a mechanical voice intoned from within the widening column. A few seconds later, the smoke finished collecting into a three foot thick, eight foot high, soft clay column, and than a few seconds after that, it formed itself into a still, not-so-lifelike shape of a crow. "And a whole lot harder to defeat. For I am Stoker, the all mighty angel of death." Craig looked disgustedly at the pitch black creature and asked sternly, "What have you done with Iran?" "If you are talking of that puny chameleon, I have spared her life, for now. And, as you can see, I have also spared your own, for you just may have the extra, raw power I need to forever rid this earth of these vile creations", Stoker intoned, waving its wings around him and creating small wisps of smog in the process, "Creatures that I created and will now destroy for ignoring me." "And if I refuse to be told what to do by a walking bio-hazard?", Craig asked as he spun around and hit Stoker hard with the side of his powerful tail, shattering Stoker into irregular fragments. Stoker quickly reformed itself, slid in front of Craig, formed its wings into long, sharp, chromatic blades, and replied mechanically, as a small cloud of dark, poisonous gas came out of its mouth with every syllable, "Don't worry. You will find out the answer to your foolish question soon enough." Craig, feeling light headed, staggered backward away from his new "ally" and leaned up against the nearest wall as he tried to regain full consciousness. After Stoker thought Craig had spent long enough clearing his head, it slid back over to in front of him, checked him over, changed its wings back to normal, grabbed his arm, and lead him over to the nearest door. "You have wasted enough time with your mortal flaws. They have had plenty of time to prepare for us, but this time I am ready", Stoker said once they had gotten to the door. It then blew a thick cloud of almost opaque smoke onto the door. When the smoke cleared, the now pitch black door started smoking and bubbling, and in a little over a minutes the door and its frame were completely eaten away. "Now, follow me so that we can destroy these mechanical impurities." "This anger of yours wouldn't happen to be from a certain battle with a certain skunk named Deena, would it?", Craig asked, hesitating to follow Stoker through the smoking hole in the wall. Stoker immediately turned around and demanded as a stream of foul smoke puffed out of its mouth and its wingtips stretched into ax blades, "How did you hear of that humiliating battle? Tell me now or I'll suffocate you where you stand and then hack out what little life you may have left. No, you will tell me no matter what. I will gouge out your eyes, cut off each finger one by one, burn holes through your body, and then disembowel you until to tell me where you got your information." To strengthen Stoker's threat, smoke started coming off of it like vapor off an ice cube and slowly spun around Craig's legs as Stoker turned into a jackal with long, blade-like fingers dripping with black acid that sizzled when it touched the ground. Craig tried to get out from the middle of the fog, but with every step backwards, his shoes became more like Velcro on the floor. Pretty soon he'd be completely stuck and that's when he figured that Stoker would start its operation on him. He forced one more step backwards and then decided to tell Stoker what it wanted to know, hoping he'd have another chance to get away from it later. "Randy told me, but before you take your anger out on me, let me tell you why I'm here. Despite how it seemed at the time, Deena and Randy were not allies. I don't know what previous grudge you held with my friend, but he sent me here to take out another company owned by her... oh, and if it will help any, Deena and her dragon were later killed by Randy and his friends.", Craig said as the now chest high, fog swirl threateningly around him and his shoes became one with the floor. "Interesting, but it does not change anything. You will still do as I say or else you will die with all the other mortals of this building. Now come, death awaits", Stoker said as the fog receded, Craig undid and stepped out of his shoes, its fingers shrunk back to normal, and the smoke from its mouth slowed down to small wisps. "Did you at least keep my weapons?", Craig asked as he stepped ahead of Stoker through the hole in the wall. "I have melted them both into their more useful compounds. If you are as dedicated to the disposal of this building as you make yourself sound, you will get a chance to earn the use of the greatest weapon in this building", Stoker said as it slid through its dark, dense trail of fog that dissipated several feet behind it. There was just the slightest bit of a reddish glow in its eyes as it watched Craig walk cautiously down the dim lit hallway. There were several, thick, metal doors up and down the hallway they were currently in, but each of them were bolted shut and Stoker didn't want to waste any more of its powers, so they just kept on walking straight. When they finally reached a connecting hallway, they both decided (Craig just happened to be thinking of the same direction as Stoker so there were no deadly arguments) to go left. Halfway down the hall, one of the doors in front of them opened up and an elephant wearing a navy blue, three piece suit and carrying a brown briefcase walked out of it. When he saw them, the elephant stopped dead in his tracks, clutched the briefcase with both hands, "broke" it in half, and the two pieces transformed into twin, leather covered, laser pistols. Craig instinctively reached to his sides for his guns, found that, of course, they weren't there, and so went to his second reaction of diving to the floor. The elephant, whose name was Murphy, fired the lasers at Stoker just as it raised both arms over its head and a wall of dense smoke shot up around it. The smoke screen weakened the lasers a little, but they still were able to pierce Stoker's body and when it did, there was a sound like that of a blazing fire. Stoker then pointed at Murphy with both hands, a thick blast of pitch black smoke shot over Craig's body, clustered into a small meteorite, and zoomed towards the professional looking elephant with a smoke trail marking its path. Murphy effortlessly destroyed the rock with one punch and shot at Stoker again with the laser guns. Stoker then shot a stream of stone spikes at Murphy, which were all shot down, and then getting low on natural resources, created and pushed a large, acidic cloud towards Murphy. In response, Murphy pointed his trunk at Stoker and its cloud and the powerful blast of air he blew from it pushed Stoker's cloud back in the other direction. Murphy's view of him now momentarily blocked by the cloud, Craig decide that this was the moment to launch his own attack. He quickly pushed himself from laying on the ground, dove through the cloud, being careful to close his eyes and not to breathe any of it in, and landed hard with the tip of his snout just inches from Murphy's polished, black, dress shoes. As he grabbed Murphy's ankles and yanked him off the ground, Craig could feel the lasers scorching his tail. Murphy slammed backwards onto the ground with a resounding crash and the guns flew out of his hands and down the hall, stopping a couple feet in front of Stoker. Then a couple clicks like a briefcase being opened up were hear by Craig coming from Murphy's shoes and he pulled himself out of Craig's grip, his shoes and half of his lower legs still in Craig's grasp. A new pair of shoes popped out from inside Murphy's pant's legs, and when they did, he casually got backed up and brushed himself off. It took Craig a couple more seconds to realize what happened, and that was just long enough for him to get kicked in the face by the elephant. Craig let go of the detached shoes, pushed himself onto his knees, jumped to his feet, spun around, and whipped Murphy against the wall with his tail. Then Craig uppercut him, took a couple steps backwards, and said as he stayed poise for any counterattacks, "That's a neat trick you have there, but even if I have to whittle you down to a laser shooting, eight-legged eye, I will destroy you," "I know you'd love to do that, but for now you'll just have to settle for one of the legs you already got from me.", Murphy said as he quickly bent down and picked up one of the dismembered, quarter legs. The leg transformed itself into a weirdly colored rifle and once finished, was aimed at Craig's chest. Though he tried to dodge it while he turned for another attack with his tail, the bullet hit its mark, exploded, and Craig was thrown backwards several feet. The next bullet flew at Stoker, who now was holding the guns and waiting for a good shot, and he got a quick burst of laser fire out of his guns before the bullet hit him and blew bits of him all over the hall. Craig barrel rolled over to where Stoker was standing, found one of the guns, pointed it at Murphy's hand, and started heating up his rifle. Murphy dropped the gun, knowing that if he were to fire it now, it would blow up in his face, and picked up the other leg, holding it at his side with the sole pointed behind him. Craig, thinking it was just another gun, shot at it and so was ill prepared for its sudden rocket boost out of Murphy's hand and straight for his face. Once again, Craig was brought to the ground momentarily, but this time, when he got up again, he and Murphy were waist high in an inky black fog. Craig dove back down into the fog and felt around at his end for the laser gun, suddenly getting an idea, as Murphy picked up the now safe to use rifle and tried to scan through the heated fog for Craig's cold blooded body. Once Craig found the laser gun, he whispered to Stoker, "Surround him as tightly as you can and I'll light you off. I know this doesn't hurt you and as long as I'm not in it, it hopefully won't hurt me either. With a mechanical laugh, Stoker gladly did as Craig requested and as Murphy floundered around, trying to get out of Stoker and at Craig, Craig got up and shot a low setting blast at the fog. It immediately ignited and once Stoker was gone, Murphy was still standing there, his synthetic flesh burning with a toxic smoke. Stoker whipped around him, taking in the fumes and then threw itself at and into the burning body. Murphy danced around, slamming into walls and spreading the fire even more, then all of a sudden, he stopped in the middle of the hallway and looked directly at Craig with an evil grin on his face. Murphy moved his neck around for a little while like he was trying to get out a cramp and then slowly started turning his head to the side. Once it had gone as far as his skin would allow it to go, the burning skin on his neck stretched and silently ripped in half and the his head kept on going. Once his head finally had made a full circle, it stopped and Craig could see that his eye's were now glassy and glowing a soft shade of red. Murphy mechanically pointed his trunk straight out, it clicked into place, and his head spun around once more, this time with an audible whine. It didn't stop this time and each time it came around, it would go a little faster until it sounded like a turbine-powered helicopter rotor. The next think it did was start shoot off a blast of liquid nitrogen (the tanks in his chest were now clearly visible since all his skin was now completely burned away), which froze everything in contact with it and put Craig in deep hibernation. After Murphy thought that Craig had been thoroughly chilled, he detached his still spinning head, launching it at Craig, who was thrown down the hall and out of sight by the extreme force of contact. With Craig now gone and as his neck slowed down to a dead stop, a motion camera with an inferred lens and microphone came up out of Murphy's metallic chest and took the place of his head. It surveyed the area around him for any sign of Stoker, found none, his right forearm split open, the hand rotated into the arm at the wrist, and in its place was a powerful electromagnet. The forearm closed up, Murphy raised the magnet over his head, turned it on, and bit by bit, Stoker's particles started collecting on it. When all of Stoker that the magnet could collect was on the magnet, a door opened up in Murphy's left forearm, a vacuum nozzle inched its way out, Murphy set the magnet close to the nozzle, turned on the vacuum and turned off the magnet, and Stoker's collected pieces were sucked into an airtight container in his chest. Once finished the nozzle went back in, the door closed, and Murphy held the magnet up again to collect more of the rapidly heating Stoker. One more full collection and then Stoker said in stereo from all over the hallway, "Ha ha ha ha ha. You are a fool if you think that I'll be defeated by that trick again. Let me show you what I do to incompetents who try to bottle me up." The hallway was first filled with rising vapor, then with a light gray mist, and then finally with a swirling, dense, black fog. Murphy's camera head looked all around him, then he looked up, a laser pointer connected to the camera blinked out a code, and a round door slid open above him. The floor below him then shot him and itself into the hole, the door closed up tight, and Stoker was left all alone. "You will pay yet for your feeble attack on me. I will crush you and all that oppose me and then, and only then, will I be satisfied... now to find that insignificant crocodile.", Stoker stated to the out of earshot enemy as it reformed itself into a jackal and started walking down the hallway to where it thought Craig would have wound up. "I am weak. The life force I have is of no use to me anymore. It is the perfect time to make the crocodile my slave." Stoker found Craig's still ice cold, but relaxed body quite a ways down the other end of the hallway. It slid up to him, looked angrily at his sleeping body, and then turned into a dark, dense cloud. "You freeze. I burn. Oh, this is perfect, my incompetent friend. Now, I will truly be unstoppable.", Stoker stated as it swirled around him for a minute or two, heating his body up to room temperature, and then finally flew towards his face and started flowing through his nose and mouth and down his throat. Craig quickly started warming up completely as Stoker filled his lungs and digestive system, he coughed, gasped for air, and rolled around on the ground, but all was of no use, and soon enough, Stoker had gotten into his blood stream and had thoroughly taken over his body. Then the Stoker possessed Craig slowly got up off the floor, brushed himself off, and blew out a long stream of ashes from trees, plant life, and small, aquatic animals robbed of all their life force. Craig then intoned as black wisps of smoke streamed out of his mouth and nostrils, "So vibrant and willing. Yes, with this powerful body and my powerful soul to prevent our only flaws and to draw all my resources from, I am now truly unstoppable. Now it is time to take revenge on Arcadia, Randy, and everyone else who oppose me and my mission. I made them and now the time is right break them all." Craig first looked down the hall where he had just come from, then looked farther down the hall he was in now, and finally decided to go on farther down. He had just taken his first step when the floor and right wall swung sideways, and he found himself in a huge, pitch black room with nothing in it. His eyes glowed with a continuous, inferred light and with it, he scanned the room for any life forms or any signs of movement. After several seconds of dead silence, there was then a sudden rumbling as the ground beneath him started vibrating until he finally lost his balance and fell over. Chapter 10: The Subterranean Battleground "I'll be right back. I'm just going to make sure that my friends are still okay.", Jack told Deena as they closed in on the Mechtech office building, which was now in Dwaynes sight, but still just another block on the horizon. "Fine with me. Wait, I think I'll go with you, just in case.", Deena responded as Jack got out of his seat. Jack turned back towards her, thought about this, and then helped her up. She smiled at this and said, nodding to him, "Why, thank you. Your blind confidence in me is quite flattering." "Not quite. If they really were in some kind of danger and were just being used as bait for my demise, then if you were kept close to me, I couldn't be trapped and I'd also have a better chance of rubbing you out after I found out about it.", Jack explained as they both walked arm in arm to the rear door. Deena laughed at this and said with a sly smile, "True. Very true. But you've forgotten that number one, I could gas us all and there'd be nothing you could do since I wouldn't be affected, and number two, you'd not only have me to deal with, but the whole entire plane. It could just open up a hole in the floor and that would be that. But of course I love you too much to do any of those things to you, so you have nothing to worry about. They, on the other hand, only have you for security." Once Deena was finished talking, the door opened up before them, and the lights came on to reveal a mid-sized bedroom with a queen sized bed on both sides of the room. Henry was laying face up in one bed and Christine was curled up like a pile of rope on the other. Henry was covered up to his neck in a navy blue comforter, which was slightly wrinkled and misplaced by him tossing and turning in his sleep. Jack looked from one bed to the other, then at a picture on the far end of the room. Between the two beds was a small night stand with a eleven by fourteen, framed photograph hanging over it. Jack walked over to the night stand, listened to the sounds of his friends gentle breathing, and stood there for a while looking at the holographic picture of him and Randy posed on the deck of one of Randy's smaller yachts. After spending a minute or so reliving that point in time, Jack turned to Deena and said, "Well, everything seems fine here... by the way, when are they going to wake up?" "When we're finally at our destination, but then you and your friends here will have to deal with Dwayne,", Deena answered as she walked up to Jack, who gave her a curious look, "but don't worry, none of it will take long. Oh, and if you're thinking about it, I wouldn't recommend that you kill him now, unless you want to die a fiery death." "What do you mean by me having to fight Dwayne later? How do you know all this?", Jack riddled Deena as she stood before him. "Wait and see, and my friend is a psychic.", Deena answered respectively, smiling slyly at the last one. At that moment, a hidden speaker crackled to life and Dwayne came on saying, "Retan ta yer seats, cause we're come'n down an go'n unda." "Now what?", Jack asked rhetorically as Deena lead him to a pair of seats in the middle aisle. "NOW CLEARING RUNWAY", read the monitor above the television screen. This was followed by the forming of a missile hatch on the underside of the plane, the whistle of launching missiles, and the explosion of several buildings. Once the retracted wheels touched the ground, the engines rotated and the plane stopped a couple feet from an intact office building and a couple hundred, bewildered people. "NOW CONVERTING INTO GROUNDER MODE", the monitor read as the cabin space caved in on itself until it was only the pilot and copilot's seats and sixteen passenger seats. Roadkill split into six separate grounders (the last five being radio controlled, cargo grounders) with each of them sporting four sets of tracks ( two sets on top and two on the bottom) and a giant drill bit in front. The lead grounder raised its body to a convenient angle, started up the drill, and bore a giant hole in the ground and the first floor of the building. After the lead grounder had disappeared and paved the walls of the tunnel with the gravel it made, the other grounders followed through, their drills spinning just in case of a cave in. "Where are you taking us? Tell me now or I'll breaking your neck.", Jack growled to Deena, realizing the possibilities of this detour. "I mean it." "There's no reason to get angry at me. I said I was going to get you back with Randy, and so far everything is going towards that idea. Just sit tight, we can watch another movie, and in no time at all you two will be trading some very interesting stories.", Deena replied with a sly smile as a big screen television grew out of the ceiling and started flipping through its channels. "You still haven't answered my question.", Jack growled again at her, getting up out of his seat. "Where are you taking me and why are we getting there from under the ground?" "Honest?... We're going to Mechtech Constructions, a rival company which is holding him hostage, and we're getting there like this to get a jump on the enemy.", Deena explained calmly, looking into Jack's eyes. "And who, pray tell, is the enemy?", Jack asked angrily, a little bit calmer. "A mad scientist by the name of Stoker who, if you ask Randy, attacked him and almost killed him and two of his friends. Randy called on my services and I was able to defeat Stoker, but not kill him. My pet slash battleship, Fear, was later taken down and in the crash, Stoker's body was brought back to life by the smoke and oil, and then strengthened further by his combining with a sulfuric acid pond and the life around it. Randy and a couple others near to him were captured, and now Stoker's going to try to kill him, his friends, my friends, and if we try to kill him again, us too.", Deena explained as Jack slowly sat back down. Jack studied her face for a moment and then blurted, "Over my dead body." Deena looked at Jack thoughtfully when he said that and he immediately corrected himself, "I mean over your dead body." Deena laughed happily and put her arm around Jack's shoulders as "LAST TWO GROUNDERS BEING DETOURED" was on the monitor for a few seconds. Jack noticed it, thought about what it meant, and then continued looking at the television. Deena gave a quick look at Dwayne, then at Jack, who looked back at her, and then she smiled slyly at how well she had gotten complete control over both of them, one a lot better than the other. She was also smiling at the thought of where those grounders were really going. Jack saw her and asked, "Now what are you thinking about?" "Just about Randy's expression when he sees me. He thinks that I died in the crash.", Deena explained, maintaining her sly smile. "Interesting. It must have been some crash.", Jack said distantly as they both brought their attention back to the movie playing on the television before them. A couple of minutes later, "NEXT STOP, MECHTECH BASEMENT" flashed on the monitor as the grounder began to climb until it was at a sixty degree angle. "ALL PASSENGERS FASTEN THEIR SEATBELTS" and "PREPARE FOR LANDING" alternated with each other for a little while a few moments later. "What about Christine and Henry?", Jack asked, remembering their current state all of a sudden. "Don't worry. They're resting and safely buckled up in a couple of very comfortable seats in the back room. They won't feel a thing until we've come to a complete stop.", Deena promised, giving a momentary, evil glance at Dwayne while she said this. Jack sat back in his seat, preparing for the worst, and after about fifteen second, the grounder ripped through and shot up out of the floor of the room Stoker was now in. The grounder hovered in midair for about half a second, its drill fiercely whipping up the air, and then it came crashing down onto the floor, creating a shock wave that if Stoker had still been standing, would have then and there brought him to the ground. It's wheels now on solid ground again, the grounder lurched forward, getting out of the way of the next grounder to come, which would repeat the same act. Pretty soon all four grounders were side by side on the other side of the room of Stoker and once more, the massive room was quiet. After a slight and careful hesitation, Jack unbuckled his restraint, got up and looked around. Deena copied what Jack did, saw Dwayne slumped over the console, and followed Jack, who walked to the back of the room to see how well his friends had survived the landing. Once at the door, Deena said that she would just wait there, Jack said it was fine with him, and he walked through alone. As Jack walked into the back room, his two friends groaned as they recovered from their rude awakening. Henry, who had been set tightly in a safety restraint, had gotten a slight whiplash and rubbed the back of his neck as he looked around the room. Christine was left completely unaided and so found herself sprawled over several seat and with a slight headache. Since Christine's head was the closest, Jack decided to check on her first. "Hey, Christine. Are you all right?", Jack asked her as she turned her head sideways to look at him. "Yesss. Ecsssept for a little disssynesss, I feel jussst fine.", Christine hissed out as she moved her head aimlessly around with half opened eyes. "I ssseem to be waking up like thisss a lot lately." "Yeah, I know, and hopefully this is the last time. Get all of your body back on the floor and stay here. If I really need your help, I'll give you a yell.", Jack said and then walked to Henry's side. Henry had gotten the restraint off and was angrily looking around him. "And how are you feeling?" "Where are we? Where's that skunk?", Henry said angrily, getting up out of his seat. "Don't worry, we're all okay. She didn't kill either of you and although I don't exactly know where we are now, I know we're on a rescue mission to save Randy.", Jack said as he blocked Henry's path. "Rescue Randy? We're in one of that skunk's companies, so the only one's that need rescuing is us. She's got you so wound up around her finger that you'll believe any and every lie she throws at you. Now get that mother fucking skunk in here now before she finds some other sucker to fight your friends with.", Jack angrily commanded, getting ready to punch Jack out at any second. "Oh, that's unnecessary. All you had to do was ask.", Deena responded confidently right before she strutted into the room, "Now, what seems to be the problem here?" "You, are the problem here. I don't know what your game is but-", Henry started before Deena's watch's (she had slipped it on while she waited for her cue) alarm went off. Deena turned it off and when she did, the announcer's voice quickly cut in from a hidden loud speaker, "Sorry, time's up. Thank you for playing the home game. Your cooperation's been greatly appreciated, but it looks like you've run out of time. Now, our contestants never go home empty handed, no sirry. You have a consolation prize waiting right outside that door. What is it, you ask. It's a fight with your old friend, John Lerth. Let us say good bye, and good luck, and best wishes to your victory." As the announcer was talking, a hole opened up behind Deena, she stepped backwards into it, and the hole closed up, leaving the three, dumbfounded animals looking around themselves and then at the door Deena and Jack had come from. About fifteen seconds after the announcer had finished, Dwayne marched angrily into the room, looked angrily around it, momentarily ignoring the three of them, and then looked Jack straight in the eyes and shouted, no longer having a southern drawl, "What'd you do with her!" "Nothing, she escaped on her own. You want her, you go outside and get her.", Jack said, not knowing it there was a real way to get out of Roadkill. "Liar!", Dwayne/ John yelled just before his left eye started firing off a wide, green, pulsating light. With what sounded exactly like a clap of thunder, John and everything around him seemed to ripple and twirl as Christine, Henry, and Jack fell under the effects of John's vertigo ray. The room seemed to spiral, shrink and grow, and vibrate and all the while, John stood by the door and laughed psychotically. Finding it quite impossible to stop falling, no matter if he looked at John or not, Jack decided to close his eyes and use his other senses to get him. When he did this, he found that there was still a slight disorientation, but that at lease he could now stand up. He then felt his way to the aisle in the middle of the room and faced towards John. He sniffed the air to judge the distance, got ready to jump, decided that he was too far for it to be effective, got on all fours, and ran towards him. When Jack thought that the time was right, he jumped at John, John bent over backwards onto his hands, got Jack's stomach with the soles of his boots, and then pushed up so that Jack went sailing down the aisle of the next room and landed near the console. Jack's eyes were now open and he ran at full speed back at John's unprotected back, but John spun around and hit Jack with the vertigo again, and Jack stumbled and fell over a couple of the seats. Momentarily free from John's ray, Henry and Christine immediately decided to now begin their attack. Henry rolled sideways into the aisle as Christine slithered under the seats so that she was right next to the door. John saw Henry, fired his eye at him, turned to make sure that Jack was still down, he wasn't, so John ran back into the other room, and pressed the button to close the door. The door didn't close and Christine whipped her tail into the aisle, wrapped it around his ankles, and yanked him off the ground. John scratched at her with his claws and tried to wiggle his way out off her grip, but she would just tighten her hold on him and then, as Henry and Jack walked cautiously up to him, she wrapped up his entire body, leaving his arms and head free. "Now what should we do with you?", Jack asked as John continued struggling and then managed to zap Henry with the ray. Henry stiffened up momentarily and Jack smiled as he said, "Well, first of all. We're going to have to separate you from that little toy of yours. Now, this might hurt just a little bit." With that, Christine set John's body on the ground and Jack reached over to pull out John's eye, but he grabbed Jack's arm and wrestled with it until Henry came over and restrained John's hands. With that last defense now taken care of, Jack got the eye between the claws of his thumb and pointer and middle fingers, Christine turned her head away so she wouldn't have to witness it, and Jack slowly pulled the eye out of its socket as John screamed with pain. The artificial optic nerve ripped out with the eye and a few seconds later, the cavity was filling up with blood. Jack looked the eye over and then tossed it across the room. Roadkill opened up a small hole in the wall, which the eye rolled into, and then it was passed to the grounder next to it. "Now that that's done, why don't you tell us how a respectable and bright boss like you got doped into being that skunk's patsy.", Henry suggested once John stopped screaming. "Fuck, you.", John wheezed out and then dropped his head back on the floor and closed his eye. "I don't even know why I even thought about having you on my team. Only an idiot would allow himself to get hypnotized by a dame. Especially if you had a weapon mounted into one of your eyes.", Jack accused as he looked into the next room at the console, and then slammed his fist down on the top of his muzzle, which shattered that part of his skull and a couple ribs, and ripped his spinal cord. "You'd be better off dead. Hey, that's right. That's another five million dollars for me and my company. I'll just have to get you to the police station without them arresting me again." "That'sss easssy, Jack. Jussst have sssomeone they don't know about yet take thisssorry wreck in for you." Christine suggested before looking at John one more time. She started feeling queasy from looking at the blood run out of his eye socket and down his face, wrapped a few more of her coils around his head and arms, and then squeezed him until all of his bones stopped cracking under the pressure. She uncoiled herself and said to Jack solemnly, "Ssso, how do we get out of thisss death trap, anywaysss?" "ENEMY DESTROYED?" and "YOU ASK FOR A DOOR" alternately were shone on a monitor that had just formed itself over the door to the other room. "Okay then. Will the ship please make a door for us.", Henry said, amusing himself. "NOT THE SHIP" and "ROADKILL" were then alternated on the monitor. "Yes, I can see where it could have gotten that name. Roadkill, will you give us an exit, please.", Jack said, getting just a little annoyed with the computer. "COMPLIANCE", the monitor blinked happily as a hatchway formed and opened up in the back of the room. As Roadkill morphed an incinerator around John's body, Christine, Henry, and Jack walked down the aisle to the back of the room. They then exited through the door, walked down a narrow hallway, went through another door, and then finally stepped down out of the back of the grounder, where Jack literally ran into Craig. As if sensing the awkwardness of the situation, several lights above them all slowly turned on to bathe their area in a dim light where everything outside of the lights range was just dim shadows. Craig narrowed his glowing red eyes and let a slow stream of smoke seep out the sides of his mouth as he stared angrily at Jack's muzzle. Chapter 11: Death Rock On the second to last floor of the building, Iran finally found a small, wooden balcony which was set up precariously before a tinted, sliding glass door. She gently landed on the balcony, flapping her wings softly so that just in case it did break, she'd be ready, and then finally trusting the strength of the creaking wood, morphed herself back into her original shape. Then she put her face up to the door, tried to see inside, couldn't, and so backed up and started thinking of how she was going to get in there. First, she tried prying it open, but it was firmly locked. Then, she turned into a puddle and tried seeping in through a crack, but couldn't find one. Next, she formed the tip of her tail into the head of a sledge hammer and tried bashing the door in, but that didn't work, though the vibrations came very close to shattering the balcony. Last, she formed her right hand into a drill and tried making a hole in the glass, but she couldn't even scratch it, so she gave up. Feeling that she had failed Craig in his hour of need, she sat down on the edge of the balcony and started sulking. As she was doing this, she happened to look at a part of the railing right in front of her and saw etched in letters so small that she would have had to have gotten as close as she was now just to notice them: A message here from your friend, Fate of how to get in the office gate You'll find the door frames made of bricks one of which I had to fix so that if pressed it will now slide to reveal the keyhole it did hide the key to this is on the roof so fight the keeper and do not goof for if you do, to your heart's dread Randy and all will wind up DEAD "Let's see if what this says is true.", Iran said to herself after she had read it over a couple times. She got up, turned to the sliding glass door, morphed into the shape of an octopus, and started pushing on each of the bricks around the door eight at a time. She started on the right, worked her way over the top of the doors, and then started going down the left side. Upon pushing on the third brick down, it effortlessly slid into the wall, flipped over, and slid back into its original place, now with a metallic key slot in its center. "I guess this Fate character didn't expect a chameleon to find this secret entrance or he or she wouldn't have made it so easy.", Iran said with a smile as she stuck the tip of one of her tentacles into the slot, forming it into the shape of the required key. There was a soft click and then she was able to turn the mechanism. "So much for that fight with the 'keeper' on the roof.", she giggled as she changed back into her original form and waited for the door to open.. Instead of the sliding glass doors opening up as she had expected, the brick on the exact opposite side of the doors slid into its hole, flipped over, and popped back out again just like the first one did. This one had a shiny, little key card slot and on a brass plate over it were the words: Iran from danger but not from me now get on the roof and get that key After she had finished reading it, there was another soft click, and suddenly the balcony fell to pieces and slowly started its descent to the awaiting parking lot and a couple unlucky cars below. Iran fell down a few yards, being caught totally off guard, and then changed into a sparrow and flew to the flat roof of the building. She landed softly somewhere near the center of the roof, changed into a gorilla, and looked around her for her attacker. The only other thing up there with her was an elevator hatch and so thinking that that was the only place that the enemy could come from, she walked up to the side of it and got ready to jump him or her. As if to confirm her logic, a few seconds later there was the sound of the approaching car and then the elevator door started slowly opening up. To her surprise, the entire elevator was occupied with a huge set of speakers which were softly playing off a modern techno hit. Then there was a slight rumble as speakers even larger than the ones in the elevator slid up out of each corner of the roof. "The Flight of the Valcoris" started playing on all the speakers at a pleasing volume as Iran looked around her in confusion, and then looked up into the darkening atmosphere when she faintly hear a sound like that of a passing jet. That's when she finally saw him. A green, winged dragon, about eight and a half feet tall it looked, with gold colored claws, a tyrannosaurus-like maw, a set of horns in front of his ears that curved into an upwards half circle, and a long tail was coasting over her with the sound he made coming from the rustling of his high collared, bright blue trench coat with gold trim and only two buttons at the neckline, which was now wide open because his wing joints were under it. After one more pass overhead, he dove straight at her, she formed her arm into a shield, he straightened out just a foot over her, flew parallel to the roof, shot straight up, slowed to a stop, and then fluttered his wings so that he gently landed on the roof about a hundred feet in front of her. His wings partially disappeared inside his trench coat and she could now clearly see his squinty, completely golden eyes with a purple triangle of face paint around each of them, the evil, toothy grin his face was contoured into, the single horn on his snout that resembled a shark's fin, the way the spikes that were only on his head increased in size as they near his forehead and were bent forward so that it looked like a mohawk, and what looked like a sickle with a strap that he had casually hanging on the back of his trench coat. Iran just stood there with her mouth hanging open and the dragon snapped his fingers, reached behind him, and retrieved what ended up being an electric guitar with a sickle blade at the end of the fingerboard. The dragon casually adjusted a couple knobs on the guitar, looked behind him at the speakers, then turned back towards Iran and asked with a raised eyebrow, raising his hand to show that he was going to play, "Hey, babe. Would you like sing back-up?" Iran gasped, said, "Dear Nirvana" a couple dozen times, and then melted into a steaming puddle. Sickle looked smugly down at her and then said before he swung his arm around a couple of times before raking his claws across the guitar's strings, "I'll take that as a yes, so let, us, rock." The speakers behind Sickle and on all corners of the building's roof created a riff so thunderously loud that Iran, who was just a couple feet in front of him, was thrown off her feet (this had also scared her into numerous, indescribable shapes that ended in her normal one) not only from the sound, but by the way the roof shook and shuddered from it, cracking itself in numerous places. The unaffected dragon casually jumped up as she bounced and slid underneath him, turned in midair, and looked down at her when he landed, smiling even more menacingly at Iran. He waited for the echoing thunder to die away and for Iran to get up, and bowed to her, adjusting the knobs on his guitar again. "Now are you ready to be my back-up, babe?", Sickle asked. "Ye-yes. I know ever song of yours by heart.", Iran stated ecstatically. "That's nice. Then you should be perfect for this number.", Sickle commented half-heartedly as he started playing keys on the side of the fingerboard like it was a organ. This was soon followed up by some plucking over the light sensitive pads that served as strings. Iran recognized the song, grew a second head, and morphed one in the shape of a mink's and the other into the shape of a ferret's. "If you're not. In it. For life. If you're not. Willing. To give them all they've got.", Iran started off in unison of the voices of Sickle's original back-up singers as he tapped his foot to the beat and grinned evilly. "Do you mind, if I shut you down? Can I fire a round? Haven't seen your face before. Are you new in town, baby? I could change your life. Kill your husband or wife. Put your name in an obituary.", Sickle sang happily, nodding his head to Iran in approval. "Now every person sees, with every pretty please, that there's a bunch of dy-ing lives, they better make their pleas. He says come be a corpse, in the back seat of my Porsche. Oh, baby slo-ow down, you're gone way too far. Let me make it clear, to you my dear. If you're not. In it. For life. If you're not. Willing, to give them all they've got. If you're in it only for blood. If you're in it only for death. Let me make it clear, to you my dear. I'm out of here.", Iran continued while she tried to imitate the dance moves, but wasn't doing very well. "Don't get me wrong. Let me make it clear. I know you're not the kind of girl, that I can hang up here. I was just looking to say hello. If you think I'm a fool, you'll just have to go.", Sickle sang, turning his head to look at the nearest side of the building as an evil grin formed on his face. "That might change my world, I wanted to be a cover girl. Yeah, maybe become be a beau-ty queen, in a magazine. Now, tell me what's that sign. Why always kill with the same old line? I'd be a number four eight seven, if I changed my mind. Let me make it clear, to you my dear. If you're not. In it. For life. If you're always. Willing, to kill everyone you meet. If you're only in it for blood. If you're only in it for death. Let me make it clear, to you my dear. I'm out of here.", Iran sang as she turned and walked slowly in the direction he was looking, losing all sense of herself. As she walked, she morphed to her original shape and listened helplessly to his voice. "I could change your world.", Sickle continued as she stopped at the edge of the roof. "I'm out of here.", Iran responded in not nearly as good of a singing voice. "I could change your world.", Sickle stated, making Iran blindly fall off the edge of the building. "If you're not. In it. For life. If you're always. Willing, to kill everyone you meet. If you're only in it for blood. If you're only in it for death. Let me make it clear, to you my dear. I'm out of here.", Iran continued as she fell faster and faster down that side of the building and would have had quite a cartoonish death if she hadn't snapped out of the trance half way down and noticed what was going on. "Ahh! Help! What the heck happened?", she screamed as she quickly changed into a falcon and started her climb back up the building as the sky gradually started to turn to night. Three quarters of the way up, Iran stopped on a ledge to think things over. "I can't believe I did that. Walking off a building with Sickle... No, wait, I'd never do that voluntarily or involuntarily. Though I did have this sudden need to kill myself. But why?... Sickle?", Iran asked herself as the piece very slowly started to fit in her mind. "Can he really do that?" As Iran continued up, she tried to figure out how he had done it and how she was going to keep from literally falling for the same trick again, but when she had gotten to the top, she still didn't have an answer for the second one and so she decided to hide behind one of the edge speakers. No more music was being played, so she was desperately searching for the dragon's whereabouts when she saw the writing on the back of the speaker. She quickly looked around her one more time and then read it quickly: Those who knowingly run from the Sickle are just as dead So quickly turn around. Oops, there goes your head Iran took this warning seriously and so instead of turning around now, she ducked down and then turned. As she did this, Sickle, who was now leaning out from his hiding place behind an adjacent speaker, swung the lengthened fingerboard at Iran and managed to behead her as cleanly as physically possible as it cut into the back of the speaker she was behind. Then he pulled it out, it shorted back to its normal length, he ducked back into his hiding place, and started tuning the guitar. Fearing that the writer of these poems had weeded out all possibilities, Iran had changed her tail into a net and had it ready to catch her head just in case. The head fell uneasily into the net, her detached body fell lifelessly backwards off the edge of the building again, and her whole body turned into a shapeless, free falling blob. Then she was once again in falcon form and started up to the roof, hoping that this would be the last time. When Iran was just a few floors from the top, Sickle suddenly dove past her, slicing a huge gash down her vertebrae with the end of his guitar and then disappeared into the clouds. That strike annoying her more than slowing her down, Iran healed herself and then flew faster towards the roof. When she got to the center of it, she landed, turned into an elephant with whip hands, and scanned the horizon. When Sickle finally appeared, Iran lunged and grappled his right forearm. Sickle casually sliced her whip into six unequal pieces with his claws before she could pull him towards her. Then, as he hovered in place, he grabbed her other whip when she lunged at him again and sliced it equidistantly through the middle with his sickle. Sickle flew a little closer as Iran retracted both whip hands, Iran morphed her left hand into a large mace and was about to strike, but then sucked in a deep breath and screamed white noise at her as he continued to hover in the air. Iran started feeling dizzy, fell to her knees, then lost complete control of herself, and turned into a contorting puddle of multi-colored slime. When Sickle finally ran out of breath (after a full minute), Iran slowly pulled herself back to her original shape, still dizzy with a terrible headache. Then Sickle breathed in to do it again. "Please. No. Stop. I give up. You can keep the key card.", Iran sighed, still laying on the floor. "I used to be your biggest fan. Now I see that you're just toying with people's minds. You're the most evil person I've ever met." Sickle circled around her a couple times, landed a few feet in front of her, bowed, and said as he slipped the guitar back over his neck and shoulder and then made a lot of hand gestures, "Well, that's easy enough when you have such small minds to toy with. You see, as the last of a superior breed of beast, I figured I might as well bring the entire world to its knees before I too die out. Be it concert or private request, I want everyone to know that I've got a singing voice to die for. Today, I got a request to kill you and, though you look harmless enough, until I know for sure that you can't move and breath, I don't intend to stop singing your death hymn. Anyway, I have plans for this key card that you couldn't even comprehend. It's very complicated, so don't even try to figure it out." "Well, in that case, I guess I better give myself a fighting chance or you just might succeed with your, complicated plans.", Iran said as she got up and changed herself into a rhino with lobster claws for hands. "Wonderful. Then I guess its time to rock and roll.", Sickle screamed as he grabbed his guitar and started spinning it like a baton. Then Sickle held it normally, raised his hand, and struck the strings again. Iran charged at him as he did this, the riff hit her but she had completely sealed up her ears and jumped forwards off the roof with all her might. When she was within reach, she grabbed hold of the guitar. Sickle was caught completely off guard, but he fell on his back and tried to flip Iran off the edge of the building. Iran had locked her claws tight on the nearly indestructible guitar and Sickle had an amazingly firm grip on the part he was holding, so they tumbled off the building and started free falling to their doom. Iran sprouted wings and flapped them to slow her down, Sickle tried to pull the guitar downwards out of her claws, and then they both let go with one hand and started punching each other. "I see you have a problem distinguishing between what's yours and what's not. So as an expert in the field of behavioral control, I think the best way to solve this would be with shock, therapy.", Sickle explained modestly as a long, slightly curved, razor sharp nail slide out of a tiny hole in his right wrist and lengthen until it was twice as long as his hand. He pulled his hand back, thrust the nail through the thick skin of her neck, and then sent a high voltage current through it. "Just tell me when you've had enough. I won't stop, but at least I'll know." Iran screamed from the pain, her body started steaming, bubbling, and contorting into irregular shapes and forms, and then she involuntarily let go of the guitar. As she fell away, the nail slipped back out of her body, but her body was still overheated and so it continued to go berserk. Sickle watched her for a few more seconds as she fell, screamed a sonic wave at her, then slipped the guitar on his back, spread his wings wide, and flew back up to the roof to rest for a bit and tune his guitar. Iran ended up crashing through the roof of an expensive looking car, the automatic comfort control computer cooled her off and neutralized her spasms, and after a while she decided that she was ready to try again. She opened the door and as she was about to get out, the car's computer asked her politely, "Excuse me, intruder. Can you please state your name. I was instructed to expect someone to drop in at the exact time that you entered." Iran thought about this, smiled, and then said, "Yeah, I'm Iran Thoubal. Was that the name you were told?" "Yes, Miss Thoubal. I was also told to give you this by a Mr. A. Fate.", the computer answered as the ashtray slid out, revealing this company's business card in it. Iran took it out and found written on the back of it: Sick be nimble and Sick be quick Sick's the kind of guy you just can't lick But if you could shut Sickle's jaws tight you could equal the odds on this new fight So spread your wings and fly up high and make him kiss this life good-bye Iran looked the card over, put it back in the ashtray, exited the car, and once again transformed herself into a falcon. It was now completely night time, so she switched her sense of sight to inferred, then looked around her and fine tuned it. She smiled at the thought that the mysterious poet was finally on her side, then spread her wings to full breadth and took off. She watched and listened for any sign of Sickle as she climbed the building, spiraled around the building as she went up to try to find the best point of attack, and once back on the roof, she quickly checked for another ambush from behind any of the speakers and then flew to the center of the roof. "Where are you, Sickle. You know there's no way to kill me, so you might as well-", Iran began and then was thrown completely off guard by another riff, though she still had no ears. A few seconds later, Sickle flew up from the edge of one of the building's sides and landed a few yards in front of her. Iran morphed one of her hands into a whip and the other hand into a sword, and Sickle slowly backed away from her. Then he stopped, closed his eyes, clinched his fists, and took a deep breath in. Iran stopped and got into a ready stance as Sickle slowly opened his eyes, which now glowed with a burning radiance, and stared hatefully at her. Then with a thunderous roar, he dashed towards at lightning speed her and executed a flurry of punches, kicks, uppercuts, and blows with the knee, the last hit coming from his extended metal nail which he stuck in the middle of her chest and slashed up through the top of her head with the electricity visibly at full power. Iran fell helplessly off the side of the building as Sickle staggered and then finally fell backwards onto the roof, as the hellish glow left his eyes. Half way down the side of the building, Iran fell into the opening of a large pipe that had popped out moments before, momentarily slid around the inside of the building, and then found herself being shot back up to the roof, where she landed like a play toy. Slowly Iran recovered consciousness, reformed her body from the blob she had become, and stood up dizzily to once again face Sickle. Sickle, who was now back on his feet, running out of options, and knew that he wouldn't be able to do that last move again for a very long time, quickly raised the guitar over his head, the fingerboard extended out a couple yards, and he swung the sickle down on her, neatly slicing her in two. The fingerboard retracted to its original length and Iran fused herself back together and shot her hands out at his face. When the hands hit his snout, they hardened into a abstract, formfitting tube, and Sickle first thought about using the sickle to break the muzzle (and probably his snout, too), then thought of dropping the guitar and prying off the muzzle with his claws (which would leave his guitar open for stealing), and then finally decided to keep up his defenses and try to crack the object with a closed mouth, sonic emission. All he got out of that was a little disorientation and a slight headache to add to his dizziness. Sickle tripped backwards, looked angrily and dizzily at Iran, who was quite pleased with the effects of her first real attack on him, and pointed the end of the guitar at her body. The fingerboard stretched outwards, the sickle went right through her chest, and then he was going to try to cut her in half again, but she pulled her body through to the fingerboard, clamped onto it with her chest, and turned the end of her tail into a hook so that she could keep herself stationary. The result of this was that the rest of the guitar was now trying to pull towards her, but Sickle quickly caught on and ejected the fingerboard before he lost the whole thing. "You can't use your voice. You can't use your guitar. I do believe your career is finally washed up, Sickle.", Iran told him, praising herself as he looked over the side of the guitar that the fingerboard had been attached to. "Now I'll sign your obituary." "Mumph", Sickle commented incoherently as he pulled on the guitar's whammy bar. A handle popped out of both sides of the guitar, the side that connected to the detached fingerboard opened up, and three tubes extended out through the opening. Then he jumped up into the sky, flew over to the nearest speaker, pulled a cable out of the bottom of the guitar, and plugged it into the speaker. Sickle held the guitar in front of him with the three tubes pointed at Iran, pulled the trigger on both handles, and with a sound like a clap of thunder, the space of air from Sickle to Iran was negatively charged, followed by a direct lightning bolt right at and through her chest. Smoke billowed from the hole where Iran was shot as she was overcome with an unnatural sense of pain. The wound had hardened up from the sudden intense heat, so she had to abandon that part of herself to get rid of the pain and be able to morph into the shape of a jackrabbit. She knew that if she didn't do something drastic, there soon wouldn't be enough of her left to stay alive. It took only a couple seconds for Sickle's gun to recharge, so Iran was given time between shots to dash out of the way, though Sickle had excellent marksmanship and was able to give her at least a third degree with each shot. Then at one point, Iran found herself right in front of one of the giant speakers. Sickle shot at her, the lightning bolt threw her into the speaker, the speaker started sparking, smoking, and shaking, and Sickle's lightning gun wouldn't turn off. Sickle tried pointing the gun away from Iran and the speaker, but the beam was already locked, so the electricity just bent back towards Iran. Then all the other speakers started smoking as Sickle dropped the gun and opened his wings to fly away, but was broadside by his scorched fingerboard, which Iran had continued to hold and so was fired from the speaker. Sickle fell onto his lightning gun, was electrocuted before it finally blew up, and he was then sent spinning off the roof, his scorched jacket leaving a smoke trail. This was finally punctuated by the detonation of all four outer speakers simultaneously, the smoke their craters gave off illuminated by the glow of live wires. Chapter 12: Ultimo Leader "You look horrible, Craig. What are you on?", Jack asked bluntly when he got close enough to get a good look at him. "Um, nothing. Just a little stressed out, that's all... Do I know you guys?", Craig asked suspiciously as he looked from one person to the next, Stoker being able to control Craig's body, but didn't know how to read his mind yet. "Well, of course you do. I'm Randy's friend and roommate.", Jack answered as Henry and Christine stationed themselves on both sides of him. "Where'sss Iran. I thought that ssshe alwaysss came with you everywhere you went", Christine asked, looking all around the room for any other animal. Craig stared angrily at all three of them for a moment with dry, red, unblinking eyes as little wisps of black smoke streamed out of the sides of his mouth, and then finally intoned, "I do not need that inferior creature anymore. I am all the force I will ever need, you... Roommate? Hmmm... So that must make you his best friend. I bet he'd be quite heartbroken if you were to ever be brutally killed. It'd make him quite angry if he were to ever find out that I did it. His, hired help. And sloppy." "Yeah, I bet he would be, so other than what you just said, give me one good reason why I shouldn't just rip you to pieces right now. And what's with your voice?", Henry asked angrily as he stepped towards Craig. "Just a little smoke in my throat, from a new wonder drug I'm testing out. It does wonders to a mortal's body... Oh yeah, back to what I was going to say. Randy assigned me this mission where I have to destroy this building, everyone in it, and any friends of those people. But especially Deena.", Craig said and saw Jack give him a dirty look. "Are you friends with that vile creature, also?" "Well, I like her, but I also know what she's been up to. We've seen and fought against her toys, she knocked out both of my companions here, and abandoned us as we fought an enemy of mine that she had hypnotized, but she also told me about an even bigger evil that Randy and her fought off, who has come back to life, and so is now our duty to seek and destroy the evil incarnate named Stoker before he actually kills someone. You don't seem to be him, but your voice isn't actually that natural either.", Jack explained as the three of them surrounded Craig, who didn't seem to care. Craig stared at Jack for a moment, smiled menacingly, and then intoned, "Very good, friend of all my enemies, for I am that ultimate force that you all seek. Now I will truly enjoy seeing your deaths." Stoker suddenly got quick flashes of pictures and conversations of Craig's morning encounter as Craig's anger towards these three broke through and added to Stoker's thoughts. "And as I see, so does Craig. Christine, Henry, and Jack. Your deaths will mark the dawn of a new reign", Craig added with an evil grin as he pointed at each person as he said their name. Craig quickly spun around, knocking Jack and Henry off their feet and knocking away Christine's head and tail with his tail, and then he opened his mouth wide, two columns of dense, black smoke shot from his mouth, the ends of the columns formed into the shape of hands, they started choking Jack, who got up before Henry did, and at the same time, tried to pull Jack's head into Craig's mouth so that he could bite it off. Henry jumped to Jack's rescue and pulled him out of Stoker's grip as Christine whipped her tail around Craig's body and tried to crush him. Craig laughed in an evil manner as smoke poured out of his mouth and collected around Christine's head. "Not again.", Christine coughed as she tried to outwit the cloud and then dropped loosely to the ground, dropping her grip on Craig's body. "Who's nex-", Craig started before Henry grabbed his jaws and clamped them shut. Jack grabbed Craig's hands, pinned them to the side of his body, and they tried desperately to overpower his increased strength as smoke shot out of his nostrils and ears at full blast and collected above their heads as he tried to whip them both with his tail. The more smoke that came out, the less he struggled until a large, menacing cloud hovered over their heads and Craig laid lifelessly on the ground. The cloud spun into a mini tornado over Craig's fallen body, static electricity gathered and crackled in its center, and then fired at Henry and Jack. The lightning wasn't that powerful, so they were just thrown backwards a little ways and slightly singed. The tornado then formed a spiked orb in its center, spun it around its perimeter, and shot it at Jack. Knowing that he was being targeted, Jack dove out of its way, but could feel it nick his right shoulder blade. Then, Stoker fired a flurry of needle-like projectiles at Henry, which burned like acid when he got hit. Finally, Craig's body was sucked into the tornado and while he spun around rapidly, Stoker and the vaporized cannonball reentered his body back through the mouth and nostrils. After Stoker was completely back inside, Craig fell to the ground like a discarded puppet, got up again, dusted himself off, and then looked back at Jack as he also got up. "Would you like to try that again, or should I just suck the life out of you like I did to your friend over-", Craig started on a threat before he was knocked off his feet by a whip of Christine's tail. Christine then quickly wrapped the end of her tail around Craig's ankles, lifted him off the ground, and said while she tried to hypnotize him, "You are both getting very sssleepy. Very sssleepy. You are now under my power. You have no ssstrength, no power, Ssstoker isss trapped inssside Craig'sss body. All you can move are your eyesss and mouth... Can you here me, Ssstoker?" "Yes... no, stop that you inferior being. You're powers are useless against mine. You are a fool if you think, that, I'll... use, lesss", Craig said as Stoker tried to resist Christine's natural powers. Christine smiled slyly and then continued, "Now that we've gotten that sssituated, let'sss continue, huh? Ssstoker isss being sssucked deeper and deeper into Craig'sss body. He cannot resssissst it, cannot get free, Craig'sssoul isss overpowering him... Now only Craig remainsss. Ssstoker isss only an alter ego. Can only get free by Craig'sss anger and will. Will only attack the perssson who attacksss him. Craig, you know that Ssstoker isss inssside you and know what damage that he can do to you and thossse around you. Ssstoker ssseesss what Craig ssseesss, but cannot act without Craig letting him out firssst. Isss thisss clear?", Craig slowly and dizzily nodded, "Good. Craig, you now sssee that whatever happened that made you angry with usss isss falssse. Clonesss or doublesss, but we were not involved. Do you underssstand?", Craig slowly nodded again, "Good. When I count to three, Craig will wake up and remember everything that hasss happened. One... Two... Three." Craig coughed violently as he got up into a crawl position and after a while, he starting hacking up what looked like ash and small, irregular lava rock, which after a while sizzled and then dissolved into black smoke. Once his lungs were finally cleared enough for him to breath, he looked up at his three saviors with cloudy, but blinking, yellow eyes. "Sssay sssomething. I want to make sssure thisss worked before I let you go free.", Christine said with her body surrounding Craig. "I know exactly what you mean. I can feel him fighting his way back {cough} right now and it might be all my fault. I at first mistakenly thought you three for your {cough} doubles that hit Michael and Michael's shop. but, I think I can handle it now... no, it was you. You three are in cahoots with this company, you're trying to kill {cough} me cause I'm a witness. I won't let you get {cough} away {cough} with", the real Craig responded, still on his hands and knees. Then he once again went into a violent fit of coughing as smoke came out of his mouth in small bursts. After a while, he stopped, his head bowed down so that no one could see the expression on his face, and he said unemotionally, "I will spare your measly life, lady of unimaginable wealth of natural power, because you show potential in reaching my goals, with my help. I've realized my fault in the first time I tried to kill you and now see that you were experienced in that basic attack, and given some kind of minor antidote. You're playing possum was believable and whatever you've taken has somehow neutralized my breath's affect on you, so next time, if I was to do so, I'd eat your body up with a cloud of virtual acid. But I wouldn't do that now because I have a better plan. If this body I'm in now, which with your help is now truely dead and completely under my power, doesn't show the complete invulnerability it's claimed to have, I would be grateful to be able to take over your body and use your powers. Until then, you will be my new partner." "You mussst be kidding. Me team up with sssomeone who firssst triesss to kill me, then congratulatesss me on getting out of it asss he explainsss another way he'll try to kill me, and now plansss to go up my nossstrilsss and kill me later if things don't go his way? You definitely have a sssick sssenssse of friendssship.", Christine said angrily as Craig looked up at her and smiled. "And if I were to sssay yesss, what about my real friendsss?" "Yeah. What about us?", Henry quickly put in. "They are also free to live their measly lives. Just as long as they do not get in our way. You are the only one keeping them alive, but once we are one, they will be no more.", Craig answered bluntly. He quickly jumped to his feet and spun towards Jack, who he then addressed as wisps of smoke came out of every hole in his head, "Your girlfriend's days are numbered, and if you try to defend her in any way, so are yours. Do you understand?" Jack looked from Craig to Christine to Henry, and they all seemed to have the same thoughts about Deena. Seeing no way to revolt, he turned away from them, folded his arms, and said angrily, "Yes, for now, but if she could defeat you before all by herself, then you stand no chance at all on her own turf. I'll fight with my so called friends, but when any of you get hurt or are in trouble, don't expect me to help." "I don't care if you help or not. I won't and cannot die, and the death of anyone else is only a triumph of my cause. Except for you of course", Craig said as he stared directly at Christine, never blinking his eyes once as the smoke that he'd coughed out during his trance, floated back to coat his teeth in black acid. Christine nodded with a forced smile to hide her increasing fear of what Stoker might do to her, and he nodded back in an evil manner while he said, "Yes. Together as one, we will concur the world, one death at a time." Suddenly, from speakers that were hidden in the perimeter blackness of the massive room, came that announcer's voice, who seemed quite pleased with what had been going on. "Excellent! And so ends the 'Ultimo Leader' round of our fantastic game, 'You've Bet You Life', with Craig and Stoker leading with one. Christine, Henry, and Jack tagging along with zero points so far. Now its time for round two entitled, 'My Favorite Killers'. Today's guest to pick her fav-or-ite killers is the one and only, Deena Turrentine, president of CPU and Mechtech Constructions, to name a couple, and designer of all the killers you will see tonight. Please say hello to our contestants, Miss. Turrentine." "Hello.", Deena said shyly as all the lights came on in the massive, barren room (except for the four curious people and the four sections of Roadkill) with no visible openings (the hole that Roadkill had made and come out of was now gone without a trace), cameras, windows, or speakers. In the center of the room, painted on the floor, was a large hexagon with each line being about eight feet long. "I've been wanting to see this night for a very, long, time." Chapter 13: Innerspace Iran woke up at the center of the roof, strangely refreshed. Somehow, the blast had reversed the effects of Sickle's gun on her body and the jolt had somehow allowed her to heal and subconsciously replace the wounds that she had had to remove during the combat. Iran got up and looked around, checking to see where Sickle was and then saw some rectangular object lying on the ground near where Sickle had stood. She enhanced her vision and saw that it was the key card. Feeling that she must have inadvertently killed Sickle and won the key card, she casually walked towards it with a broad smile on her face. When Iran had gotten half way to the key card, a leathery, gold clawed hand reach over onto the roof and then Sickle pulled himself onto the roof behind the key card with Iran's muzzle still around his snout and smoking burn holes all over his coat. Iran looked at him in disbelief, then immediately extended her right arm and grabbed the key card before Sickle could reach over and retrieve it. Sickle gave Iran an angry look, then stood up and looked at the holes where the speakers used to be. Iran waved the key card at Sickle as she taunted, "Your a has been, Sickle. You don't have any talent, and now you don't have the pass either. Why don't you just give up and acknowledge that I am indeed better than you." "Mumph", Sickle retaliated, shaking his head in defiance as he said a bunch of other incoherent words, which if she could have read his thoughts, could have been summed up to, "I don't know what happened. I don't know how you came out of it okay. All I know is that you are my one and only target for the rest of my life." As Iran made a pocket and stuck the key card into it, Sickle looked at the muzzle, then at Iran, and pointed at her with his right hand. As the electrocuting nail grew out of his wrist, he spread his wings to full breadth and slowly started to pace towards her, his tail lashing from side to side. Seeing that Sickle wouldn't give her any time to unlock the door while he could still move, Iran morphed into the shape of an elephant and got ready for a fight to the finish. Half way to her, Sickle stopped and knelt down, as if ready to pounce, and Iran positioned herself for a counterattack. Sickle dove forwards, flapped his wings to give himself more speed and distance, and shot straight at her chest with his right arm straight over his head and the other one at his side so that the first thing that would connect was the powerful nail. Seeing that he was going for the direct approach, Iran instead decided to split in half so that he flew right over her, and then whipped her rope-like fingers around his ankles and held on tight as he came crashing back down onto the roof. Then she let go and resumed her original shape as he tucked his wings back in and started crawling away from her. Once he had gotten a "safe" distance away from her, he got up, turned to her, and smiled. His eyes became illuminated as if lit by little light bulbs in his head, and then his eyes got brighter and brighter until it seemed like he was lighting the entire night sky with his eyes. Iran's eyes started burning and she felt a little dizzy, so she blinking her eyes a couple of times, and found the light to be gone, bringing the night sky back to normal as well as Sickle's eyes. The only problem was that she found herself surrounded by a circle of about sixteen copies of the dragon. Each looked exactly the same and as she looked at all of them, they'd switch places with each other every now and then. They all taunted her, one of them would dive at her and either knock her down or disappear and be replaced by another, and then they'd shuffle themselves again. After a few knockdowns, Iran finally morphed into the shape of an octopus and swung her tentacles at eight of them at once. None of them were the real Sickle and so she tried to get the other eight before they shuffled again. The real Sickle grabbed the tentacle that touched him, punched the nail into it, and shocked her. She quickly detached the limb and whipped two others around both of Sickle's wrists. "Check and mate. Now what do you have to say for yourself?", Iran said as she wrapped two more tentacle around his ankles and the dismembered limb oozed back into her body. The other Sickles, which were now smiling peacefully, slowly melted into ground as the real one looked casually all around himself. Still being held captive, he slipped his snout right out of Iran's muzzle, blew on the floating tube, and it drilled a hole through her, right between her eyes. Sickle laughed with the sound of crashing waves, the surrounding ripped away into the horizon, and they were floating over some ocean with no land in sight. "You must not think I'm very bright, cause you know what, Sickle? If you've seen one illusion. You've seen them all. And with you trapped and everything, there's no way you can harm me.", Iran said, healing the hole as Randy's hoveryacht came over the horizon and started racing towards them. Sickle started flapping his wings, trying to get out of her grip and get away, but she tightened her grip and said, "It's no use struggling. I'm not going to let you make this any more than a bunch of visual effects." With that, Sickle smiled slyly, tucked his wings back under his overcoat, and said, "Okay with me, girlie. I'll do as you say and we'll see just who has the last laugh, again." As the ship came closer and closer to them, Iran became unsure of the fact that it might be a jet in disguise and it was suppose to hit her without her expecting it. She watched it get dangerously close, swung Sickle in front of her so that it would hit him first, and rechecked the reality of the invisible solid under her body. She tightened her grip on him, stretch his limbs out like a vertical rack, and watched as the boat finally touched him. As she had first expected, the boat passed right through him, or vice versa, and in a nanosecond was right up against her. She felt her body freeze up and contort as it was successfully fooled into believing it had just been hit by a runaway boat, and a massive spasm shot her body backwards to complete the effect. The boat's image shattered and reshaped itself into Craig's car, which sped away as she felt herself sinking into the water like a rock. Being careful not to let go of Sickle, she tried reaching out in every direction with a clawed hand and discovered that she had no concept of which way was up, if she'd be able to feel the wall if she touched it, or even if she was really falling. Wondering about the last one, she closed her eyes and felt as if she were in a wildly spinning gyroscope as multicolored flashing lights filled her mind, and that's when she decided to form a third arm and punch herself as hard as she could with it. Once Iran's eyes regained their focus, she found herself lying face-up on the roof with Sickle standing over her. She was her normal shape and he had managed to hack off the muzzle with just a few scars on his snout to remind him of his temporary defeat. Being sure to avoid looking into Sickle's eyes, she inched backwards from between his legs, rolled over, and then started crawling towards the nearest edge of the building. Once she got there, she looked down over the edge and found herself looking across the top of the building with Sickle standing in the center. With that, she quickly turned her head back to where she had come from and found herself clinging to the side of the building. Suddenly the building slithered away from her and she fell back onto the roof of the building. Sickle cocked his head to the side, frowned at her mockingly, then took the guitar off his back, spun it around, slammed in onto the roof, and she watched it change into a synthesizer via a blast of fire. Then after flicking a few switches, he started playing it. "Just another night. Another vision of space. You feel joy, you fell pain, cause nothing will be the same. Just another night. Is all that it'll takes, to tell the difference, between heroes and fakes. So baby. I talk talk. I talk to you, in the night, in your dream. Of a world so true. I talk talk. I talk to you, in the night, in your dream. Of a world so true.", Sickle sang to her as she watched the smoke come up from all sides of the building and move towards him like a wave of dirty water. "I won't allow you to do this to me.", Iran stated angrily and the smoke parted as it ran past her so that she could see the roof clearly. "Just another night, another dream, another vision. Of life. With me. I'm here to set you free. I am above her. You discover. Hey sister, let me cover. Your body with my mind is with my mind for just another. Vision of life, that seems to be true. Only I do all the things that could never be true. Vision of life, that seems to be true. Only I do all the things that could never be true.", Sickle continued as the smoke hit him on all sides, quickly spun into a vertical column that reached up farther than she could see, and then with the sound of an ignited flame, widened out and hit her, drowning out everything, including her own screams. After a second of blackness, Iran found herself on a rack in a typical torture chamber. Sickle was now standing beside her with his hands on the rack's crank and when he saw her focus in on him, he smiled and said, "Before was just a dream, and as you know, no one can really get hurt in a dream. But this, this is subliminal reality. What goes on in here results in what your body does to itself out there. You're so deep within yourself that even your soul gets hurt. That's what I'm about, girlie. I like to kill people on the inside and leave the police guessing about how my victims died. You're no different than the other hundred or so people I've attacked. I am the alien abduction, the lobotomy, the nightmare, and the urge." With that, Iran gave Sickle an angry look and he started casually turning the crank. The shackles on her wrists and ankles pulled away from each other, but for some strange reason her body tried to resist stretching with it against her will, and so he was succeeding in hurting her. With every turn, the pain seemed more and more foreign to her until she finally felt that this was too unreal and that she had to start fighting back. "Hey, wait a second here. Is this supposed to be your dream or my nightmare? Cause if this is mine, then I'd like to have at least a little participation in its outcome.", Iran said as she did her best to fight back the pain as spikes started coming up out of the rack, too. She closed her eyes tight and tried to picture a better place to be, there was a momentary flash of light, then after a while the shackles seemed less tight on her, and after a few more seconds she slipped right though them. Then she fell right through the rack and the floor underneath her body started becoming liquefied. She opened her eyes halfway and found herself in a void of dense, gray fog with the concrete floor of the dungeon floating right above her. She grimaced (she was using a lot of mental energy to stay on the border of Sickle's dream world) and then with the wave of her hand, she shot up through and hovered a few inches above the floor. Sickle was somewhat surprised by her willful return and jumped backwards, but then was pleased by it and jumped and slashed at her, his razor sharp claws, which would probably now have scarred her permanently, only able to get within whipping an inch from her flesh. "This is my mind, and from now on I have complete control of it.", Iran said as her floating body was surrounded by a bright aura. After a while longer, the room started cracking and then when it had been weakened enough, it shattered and disappeared in the smoke. "No longer do I fear you or your little toys." "But you do. For a deadbeat, your mind is strong. More from constant dreaming and want of change than from education, but it is of no matter. I can and will overcome all but the mightiest of thinking. No, I will overcome all minds now that I have this.", Sickle said as he pulled a elaborate, golden, skeleton key from an inside pocket of his overcoat as gashes started opening up on Iran's body where he had whipped his claws in front of. "To you it is only a way to get inside that building in the real world. To rescue the person that tortures you day in and day out because you like wasting your life and mind. But to me, it is the key to more power than I have even now. With this key, I shall rock the world of every living being on this planet in a symphony of the subliminal. It will no longer be one person at a time. I will be able to orchestrate an entire concert of people. Bending their feeble minds to my ways and wants." With that, he inserted the key into a keyhole that had just opened up at the base of his neck and when he turned it, the key was sucked into the inside of his neck, the area turned a metallic gray, and three, straight lines traced their way from the keyhole outward. The color spread, the three lines each went a certain distance before they too broke off into at least two more lines of their own, and this all continued until Sickle was a metallic dragon made up of flat polygons. Then all of the polygons separated from each other and/or shifted around and the new spaces between all of them were then filled with more polygons. Then they'd all separate, shift, and fill again and again until he was a hulking, robot dragon with extra, razor sharp spikes sticking out of the back of his head and down the entire length of his vertebrae, a long, curving spike on each elbow and shoulder, claws that were just about as long as his fingers, a row of three horns on top of his snout, and long, protruding fangs. His snout was, in scale, one and a half times longer, his neck was twice as long in scale as before, and his eyes were set in an evil slant. His coat had melted into his skin, which had been replaced with metallic muscles and when he exercised them, there was the sound of whining motors. Then Sickle shot his massive, razor edged wings to full breadth, electricity crackled and streaked all around the wings, and then his appearance changed from that of an evil robot to that of a really evil, living dragon like a rolling wave from the tips of his wings to the center of his body. Then after he had finished changing, the new one hundred fifty foot tall dragon looked down at Iran with his glowing, yellow eyes sending a wide beam of light streaming through the light fog. She looked helplessly back up at him, then remembered that this was just an illusion, and returned the evil stare. She tried to shatter his body the same way she had shattered the room, he smiled an evil grin, the fog dissolved away, and then they were standing in the middle of a giant field that rolled into the horizon in all directions. After nodding in approval, he thumped the ground with the tip of his tail, there was a severe earthquake that knocked Iran right off her feet but didn't even faze Sickle, the ground opened up in several places around them, and the lava that ran out formed a neat, but very deadly circle around the both of them in a three hundred yard radius. "Things happen in this virtual plain when I want them to. Before, I was only a collector of mental power, using it to keep myself alive in the real world. A vampire of thought, if you will. I was no more a mental fighter than any normal college graduate. But now that I have the mental upgrade, my mind power is the sum of mine and all my victim's minds put together. That room was just too small for the new me to be represented by, so I let you destroy it, and when you did, you locked yourself from the real world. You see, you can't control what's already taken from you, and once I destroy you here, you'll be comatose, forever.", Sickle roared to the sky as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "Well, according to Craig, I'm already braindead, so I guess there's nothing here for you to wreck with your pyrotechnics.", Iran said jokingly right before Sickle roared a beam of visible sound waves in her direction. Iran jumped out of the way of most of it, but when it hit the ground, that area exploded and sent her flying violently through the air. She rolled on the ground and then was hit by another beam, then was hit again in midair. She flew backwards like a tossed rag doll, rolled on the ground, stopping dangerously close to the lava ring, and then stumbled to her feet and looked at him dizzily as her smoldering skin slowly fixed itself. He laughed at her persistence and then shot another beam at her, but she was better prepared for this one and so dove and rolled out of its way. He tried again, she dodged it as she made her way away from the river, and then he slashed downwards in her direction. Crescent shaped beams appeared from where his claws scraped the air that he swiped at, shot towards the ground in front of her, and then ripped up the ground until it had reached the lava circle, creating a lava inlet that would then fill up and disappear again in about thirty seconds. Iran had just barely dodged it, but just as she was getting up, Sickle did a diagonal slash which hit her full force and would have thrown into the lava river if a mysterious force didn't slightly nudge her out of the explosion at the last moment so that she ended up stopping about a foot away from the edge of the lava river. Sickle noticed it, but thought that Iran had done it herself, though in truth, Iran just thought herself lucky as she laid there smoking on the ground. Sickle slashed downwards at Iran's dazed body, the beam ripped its way straight at her, she instinctively put her arms in front of her face to shield herself, and the beam was stopped cold by a powerful force field that completely surrounded her like an invisible dome. Sickle was outraged by his plans being thwarted so close to her demise and roared a long, sonic beam at her to try to wear down what he thought to be her new found mental strength. This didn't work, so he pointed his hands at the force field dome, electricity shot from his fingertips, and raked all around its outer shell as Sickle tried to overload it, which if done right, would make it implode and kill Iran. Then when he thought that it didn't seem to be doing anything useful, he stopped, the force field grew denser as the electricity was gathered to one spot, and then all the power that Sickle had thrown at it was shot back at him as one, big, powerful, lightning bolt. Sickle saw it coming, formed a shield in front of himself before it could strike, waited for all the power to be neutralized, and then spread his wings and took off, creating a hurricane and tidal wave of lava that the force field also protected Iran from. Sickle flew over above the protective and remarkably adaptive force field, hovered in the air for a couple seconds to make sure that he was in the right starting point, did a flying kick downwards towards it, and landed on it full force. It was rammed deep underground, ended up about a hundred feet down within the lava, shot right back up through the ring, and hovered high in midair with her still safely in the middle of it, now perfectly conscious of what was going on and liking every minute of it. The area that it had originally been at was now molten lava and after getting his feet stuck in the lava and having to frantically flap and claw his way out before he really got stuck, Sickle had stumbled backwards towards the center of the island with all the skin on his feet gone and large, gaping rust holes in the exposed metal, showing the now sparking, mechanical working within. "No way! Only a dolphin could even come close to being that good, but why would any sane dolphin want to waste his or her time helping a nothing like you?", Sickle asked as he flew up and slashed at the force field sphere. His claws struck the force field hard, there was a soft buzz and crackle of electricity, and then his hand was thrown away from its surface. Then electricity once again wriggled its way all around the bubble and increased in intensity until it shot its added energy at him. "That trick is old, Iran. You see it didn't work the first time, so-", he started right before the power shattered his force field and knocked him over to almost the other side of the "island". The force field bubble set Iran gently on the ground, slipped off of her, turned into a two-dimensional wall, and a poem materialized on its surface which read: Now that I've once again gotten you back on your feet, I'll add to your mental power so that you can defeat, this maturing dragon with a powerful mind, that's only a exosuit for the student behind, the creature you see, but do not fear, cause now that it can't read you, the answer is here: Go through a door that's also the key to a chest of powerful goodies, but pick the one that's best for the job that I've set for only you and your small brain, and Sickle's parts will be shattered by the historical pain. Then the wall sucked itself into a ball of energy about a foot in diameter and shot straight at and into her. Iran was momentarily shocked by it, but then she felt a whole lot stronger. She then looked back at Sickle, who was just getting back up, and then glanced down at the bubbling lava ring behind her and noticed how it was slowly eating away at the ground on both sides of it. "A door. A chest. Something that will defeat Sickle. Where is this stuff?... Maybe, I have to make them. I've got to start thinking. Got to reclaim my mind. Gotta make a door. Think.", Iran thought in her subconscious head and for the first time since she first was brought in here, realized that she could hear her thoughts out loud, as if she were speaking them. "So that's how he's doing it, but of course we are in my mind after all. I hope that's what Fate meant when he said that he can't read me." His feet now fully repaired and his body recovered from the blast, Sickle exercised his wings, took off, and then roared from high in the air as he shot a long stream of sonic energy in her direction with every word, "You can't get away from me, you half-witted, little, shape shifter. The dolphin might be able to delay the death of the you in here, but I've already killed the you out there. It's only a matter of time." Iran ran away from the blast, thought hard, a wooden door appeared underneath her, opened up, she fell into an earthen room, and tried to think of what could stop Sickle as he circled overhead. There was a rumble as he landed hard on the ground, the walls of the room started to crack and smoke, and she jumped back out of the room before it was flooded with molten lava. "What is this? I didn't order that to be there. And I didn't hear that coming, either. That intruder's helping you again, but why?... Oh, who cares. Let him or her help you all you want, but don't start thinking that that will change your fate...., no it couldn't be. That two timing little twerp. I'll show him who has the better mind.", Sickle said angrily as he remembered something personal as Iran tried to outrun his words. "If it's a duel he wants, its a duel he'll get. Wa, ha, ha, ha, ha." Sickle whipped his head towards the spot that Iran was now standing at, she quickly thought up a big radar dish, and the sonic wave that he breathed out was ricocheted back at him. He staggered backwards from the blast, then slashed at the dish, and it was blown up by the crescent beam. "So, you're the dolphin's puppet are you? Take your best shot, play toy. Let's see how good you are.", Sickle taunted as he folded his arms, spread his wings, and glared at her. Iran made a shield out of her right arm to block the flying rubble, then thought up a ground based, giant crossbow, and fired it at Sickle when she was just able to make out his massive form in the dust cloud surrounding her. The six foot long, steel arrow whistled through the air, caught him completely by surprise, and the razor sharp tip penetrated the thick hide and metal sheets of his upper torso. With a powerful roar, he angrily grabbed the arrow and tried to pull it out as electricity crackled around it, but it was lodged in there good and tight, and so after a while, gave up on pulling. "Is that good enough for you, you overhyped lip-syncher?", Iran taunted back as Sickle studied the arrow, which Iran was fighting to keep intact. The skin around the arrow then melted away, the metal polygons rose outwards and slid away from the arrow, and then the bent sheets fixed themselves as Sickle effortlessly removed the arrow. Sickle glared at the arrow, then his expression turned into an evil grin as he looked at Iran and threw the arrow straight up into the air. As Sickle watched the arrow rocket away before exploding into a super nova, which somehow was able to weaken Iran, she was examing the still open hole in his left breast. "The door to the chest. That must be what Fate meant. That must be the door.", Iran gasped as she suddenly but momentarily felt dizzy, "I've gotta get there before he remembers to close it." Chapter 14: My Favorite Killers: Part 1 "So who's the first lucky killer to face these four powerful contestants, Miss Turrentine?", the game show announcer asked cheerfully from some secret location as Christine, Craig, Henry, and Jack looked around themselves to try to spot the place where the "killer" would appear from. "Oh, um, I don't know.", Deena stammered, pretending the choice was tough to make. "I guess I'll have to say, Oliver Spectrum." "If it's Oli you want, then it's Oli they're going to get. That's right, three of you faced this otter once. You thought you destroyed his body and outsmarted all of his gadgets, but his head outsmarted you and he escaped. Now, with the miracle of modern technology, we've given him a new lease on life and a full backpack of newer and more powerful goodies. Here he is, Oli "the dude" Spectruuum!", the announcer informed and prompted as a tiny section of the ceiling popped open, Oli zoomed through it on his hoverboard, spiraled downwards, flipped off the board, and landed in the middle of the hexagon. Then the board flew straight at his head, he caught it, threw it into his backpack, and bowed as the hole closed up again. "You've just gotta love that pizzazz." "Oh, what is the prize that the contestants are fighting for?", Deena asked in mock confusion as Oli pulled a pair of rollerblades out of his backpack and started loosening the laces. "Thanks for asking. If you will direct your attention to the ceiling you will now see a tiny cage with a genuine, pure bred Pomeranian clinging helplessly in it. Who is this lucky pup? It's none other than Malissa, the pet of a rich friend of Jack Marcel's, who is one of our contestants and if I may add, your, new, boyfriend. If the contestants can successfully defeat Oli, not only will Malissa be safely lowered to the ground and set free, but she'll also be qualified to fight along side our existing contestants for even better prizes.", the announcer answered as Oli slipped the rollerblades on his bare feet and started lacing them up. "We're on a game ssshow? What'sss thisss world coming to?", Christine asked, trying to find some humor in their situation. "Let them have their fun. After I finish off this building, there's not going to be a speck of happiness for a very long time.", Craig intoned with smoke leaking out of every corner of his mouth as his squinted eyes were illuminated with a reddish glow. "Let's just get this over with.", Jack said and they all started approaching Oli, who had also put on a helmet and elbow and knee pads. "Yeah, I want to rip his synthetic hide to itty bitty pieces for ruining my fleece.", Henry commented, rubbing the back of his neck. "And for electrocuting, burning, and gasssing me.", Christine quickly added, taking a quick glance at Craig when she said the last part. "No way, dudette. That was like for your own good. That heinous creep would of like killed ya.", Oli said, casually skating backwards away from them. "But most of all, for chickening out in the middle of a fight and making a fool of us.", Jack added as they all started jogging towards Oli, trying to corner him. "So, you like gassing people.", Craig said with an evil smile before he opened his mouth wide and a wide column of dense smoke shot straight out of his mouth. "Like, see what I mean, dudes.", Oli blurted as he reached into his backpack, pulled out a short jump rope, cracked it like a whip, and then grabbed both of its handles. He then started spinning it around his body faster and faster until it turned into a force field bubble, where he then let go of the handles and stood still inside of it with his wheels spinning in the opposite direction of the bubble as the smoke gathered around it, but wasn't able to penetrate. "See, he's like for global pollution. Now, if that's like not a heinous crime in itself, then... well, ya can like see for yourselves." Oli grabbed the rope handles again, the smoke was sucked into the lining of the bubble, he jumped up as he pulled the handles towards his body, and the dark gray bubble exploded outwards towards the group, who had now surrounded him. Jack and Henry dove to the ground, Christine curled herself into a tight, brown and yellow mount, and Craig just laughed and started spinning as smoke whirled out of his mouth, nostrils, and ears. The smoky, energy wave was drawn into Stoker's wide column as electricity buzzed all around it, and then when all of Oli's blast was gone, Stoker threw Craig's dead body towards the closest wall and started spinning towards Oli, sucking in any free dirt and debris around it and its path as the electrical static continued to build up. "Sorry evil dude, but there's like no smoking in this room. Though I could give ya a light.", Oli threw the handles to both sides of himself, reached back into his backpack, grabbed the beach lantern, and pointed it at Stoker, who momentarily retreated. He started to fire it up, it dropped out his hands onto the floor, he looked at his hands in mock confusion, screamed, and quickly skated away. Stoker saw that Oli was running away, whirled towards the beach lantern, looked at it via two reddish glowing spots on the perimeter of the tornado, and then blew it up with a powerful lightning bolt. The lantern created a far greater blast than Stoker expected it to, so after the fireball made by the lantern, there was another fireball made by Stoker as it screamed in hate. Both searing blasts illuminated the room in a blinding light, and then almost everyone was momentarily blinded once the light was gone. Oli watched from a distance with shades on and then started casually skating backwards along the perimeter of the room as tiny particles of dust started fusing together to get Stoker back together again. Oli looked into the center of the room suspiciously, reached into his backpack, pulled out a pocket umbrella, pressed the button on its side, the collapsible, metal part of the handle lengthened out, a sharp spike popped out of its flat tip, he threw it like a javelin to the center of the room, and it stuck into the floor upside down. The canvas strap popped off, the entire umbrella turned so that it was sticking straight up, it opened up so that it looked like a yellow and blue striped radar dish, and started spinning until it was a greenish color. "Get it, dudes? The 'yellow and blue make green' seal means its like working properly.", Oli said jokingly as Stoker 's particles, the two handles Oli had left there, and maybe even Oli if he hadn't locked up the wheels on his skates were pulled into the umbrella's vortex, shredded by the blades inside of the umbrella bell, and then sucked into the plastic handle, which exploded to reveal a giant, expanding vacuum bag. After all of the free particles were collected, Oli remotely turned the umbrella off, it closed up, the floor opened up under it, it fell into someone's hands on the floor below, and then the hole closed back up. "Well dudes, that's like the end of that bad egg... any questions?" "Yeah. What makes you think that we're going to be so easily defeated?", Henry quickly answered. "Well, I like almost did before, if ya haven't forgotten your righteous fleecing, I'm like totally covered in the gory, beach supplies department. And if I like YELL,", Oli responded, turning on his televocal amplifier. The room vibrated for a short time as the sound echoed off the walls, hurting everyone else's ears and shaking everyone else up. "Let's just say, dudes and dudette, that I have like nothing to fear. Like, not before and like not this time either." "You had all that ssstuff before and we ssstill dessstroyed mossst of your body. If we had known you'd do what you did in the end, we would have dessstroyed all of you.", Christine said as Oli unlocked his wheels and started skating around the other side of the room. "Ssso you've got a pretty good reassson to ssstay asss far away from usss asss posssible." "No way, dudette. This time there's like no place to hide, and my goods are once again totally rad.", Oli said as he stopped, facing their direction from the exact opposite side of the room, and pulled a short pole out of his backpack. As everyone watched, the pole unfolded into a full-sized hockey stick with a razor-sharp blade. Oli held it professionally in both hands, crouched down, and then his skates suddenly sparked, burned rubber, and finally surged forwards as razor-sharp spikes extended out of the elbow and knee pads. Oli picked up speed as he streaked towards the three with the wheels of his skates sparking madly and whining, swung his hockey stick as the scattering group, and then continued towards the wall. He jumped up as he came dangerously close to it, landed with his skates pointing up it, and continued, climbing it with almost no loss of speed. Then once he had gotten half way up, he jumped off, and flipped around to face Christine. The hockey blade then extended into that of a sickle as Oli flipped it around, threw it at Christine's middle in regular sickle fashion, and started his quick dissent towards her. Christine saw it coming, threw that part of her body to the side so that it wouldn't get cut up, and then readied the tip of her tail to meet Oli. The sickle hit the ground, flipped over her body, and then landed uncertainly on the other side of her a few yards away. Christine whipped her tail at him, hoping to get him in the chest and dent him, but he grabbed hold of it, spun around it once, let go, flipped to the ground, and landed perfectly in front of Henry. Christine grabbed the hockey stick and was about to throw it at Oli, but suddenly she felt a sudden pinprick where one of her coils were holding it and dropped it on the spot. She looked at the hockey stick, which didn't seem to have any sharp edges on its handle, then at her tail, which still tingled slightly but didn't have any visible cuts, and then slithered towards Oli without the stick. "Impressive gymnastics, but you're still going to have to be disqualified.", Henry said right before he grabbed Oli's left arm, spun around, and attempted to throw him over his shoulder, but only managed to rip his arm off. "Not quite, dude. My next trick is like sure to put ya in a whole new light, if ya know what I mean.", Oli said as he reached into his backpack, pulled out a baseball bat, put the tip of the handle into the hole in his shoulder, there was a click, the other end opened up, and the bat turned into a very crude, hollow arm. "Ya may fire at will, arm dude. Oh, I mean fire at Henry." "Stup-", Henry started to criticize right before he was blown away by a direct hit from the three piece arm. The arm fired again, Henry tried to roll away, but was tossed by another direct hit. "Help me, someone.", he yelled in pain as he laid still on the ground, hoping Oli would pick another target. "Hey, you.", Christine said and then whipped her tail at Oli's new arm. Oli was spun around out of control (he still had on the skates) and then fell to the ground. Oli rolled away from her, got into a sitting position, his arm fired at Christine's tail, and she counterattacked by wrapping the tip of her tail around that arm and tried to crush it. Oli quickly detaches the arm and flipped away with his skates locked as the bat ticked once and then exploded, scarring her only slightly. Cursing, Christine slithered after Oli, overtook him, got a firm hold on one of his skates, and tried to whip his entire body in an arch back on to the rock hard floor. Instead, his foot slipped off of his leg and a blade popped out to replace it. Then he put his full weight on the blade, spun around, and kicked the other skate and foot off at her head, which collapsed the wheels into an ice skating blade. As Christine dodged the skate, Oli jumped away and slid on his stomach as he retracted the blade, pulled a spare pair of feet out of his backpack, and attached them. Then he rolled onto his back, flipped onto his new feet, ran back towards her at lightning speed, dove at his detached arm, recovered it while in a handstand, flipped back onto his feet, put the socket back into his shoulder, there was a soft click, and then he continued to run towards Jack. Several feet in front of him, Oli kicked his legs up, pulled out his hoverboard, and zipped right over Jack's head. He circled around the room a couple times and then flew over to Malissa's cage, took out a collapsible fishing rod and reel, cast the line out at Malissa's cage, it caught onto the cage, he jumped off of his board, and swung around in a half circle as the board slammed into the wall and exploded. Oli let go of the rod, flew feet first towards Jack as he attempted to get him with a flying kick where he stood, Christine saw him, whipped her tail around, grabbed the hockey stick again, and threw it at him. It hit him hard on his hip and he ended up landing about a yard to the side of Jack. Oli landed precariously, rolled several yards like a bad plane or race car crash, and then once he had finally stopped and was getting up again, Jack grabbed him by his backpack and lifted him high off the ground. "Any last words?", Jack asked as he slammed him head first onto the ground. "Ow... Not yet dude, but I'll like tell ya when I do.", Oli said as he landed in a headstand and then immediately pushed himself in a handstand, getting Jack under the muzzle. Oli did a backwards roll as Jack fell onto his back, and then Christine got her tail around his waist as he stood up. She threw him closer to herself, wrapped her body around his, whipped the now free tip of her tail at his head, he bit it hard, she screamed and quickly withdrew as blood seeped out of where is razor sharp teeth had penetrated, but then immediately hit him in the back of his head. She slapped his face several times with her tail, uppercut him with it, and then finally went in with her head and ripped his head off by the neck. It landed on the ground next to his body, eight metal rods came out of the bottom of the neck, and then they bent into spider legs as the head got up and faced towards her. "Like, do you mind, dudette. I like just got that reconnected. If ya like weren't holding my body hostage and everything, I'd like really mess ya up right now.", Oli's head told her before turning around and running away. Christine watched it leave with Jack right behind it with the hockey stick, then she looked at the headless body, tried to crushed his body into spare parts, found she had lost a lot of power in her coils, so she turned his body over, shook it, and a pogo stick was the only thing that fell out. "If I wasss Oli, what would I do with sssomething like thisss... ah, of courssse.", Christine hissed as she grabbed the handles of the pogo stick with the tip of her tail, unwrapped herself from around Oli's body, put the pogo on his chest, squeezed the handles, and let the disguised jackhammer do the rest. When she was finished wrecking his body, Christine triumphantly announced, trying to imitate the game announcer, "Thisss endsss thisss round with Chrissstine, Henry and Jack leading with one. Craig, Oli, and Ssstoker dying with zero pointsss." Jack held Oli's decapitated and now leg-less head on the ground, making sure that it wouldn't get away again, and then started hacking away at his face with the blade of the hockey stick, exposing the metal shell underneath. As he did this Oli looked up at him and said, "Excuse me, dude, but I do believe your dudette is like about to die. She only has like ten seconds left to live, eight... seven... six... five... fou-.", and then Oli's head was split into two and then smashed to pieces which sparked wildly. Right when Jack had finished, Christine, who had come over to witness the final death of Oli, screamed in pain and scrunched up her entire body into a tight ball, just barely missing hitting Jack. She loosened up, rolled around on the ground, and then suddenly went limp. Jack knelt down beside her head, gently took it in his hands, and asked with great concern, "Christine. What's going on? How did he do this to you?" "I don't know. Probably poisssoned by the, hockey, ssssstick... It, pricked, me.", She was able to say before she passed out, breathing very weakly. Jack gently placed her head back on the ground, stood up, still looking at her head, then raised his head and howled in sorrow. When he had let it all out, he walked over to Henry, who was still laying on the ground, trying to ease the pain, looked him over, and asked downheartedly, "How bad is it, cause if anything else is going to happen, this is the last place you're going to want to be?" Henry very slowly forced himself into a sitting position and then reached out for Jack's hand. Jack helped him onto his feet, he put his hand under Henry's armpit to keep him up, Henry put his arm over Jack's shoulder for support, and then they slowly walked over to next to Craig's dead body. Henry sat down, leaning against the wall, and Jack walked back over to Christine, who had stopped breathing. "Why the hell are you doing this? What have they got to do with your plans? If you didn't want them to interfere, you could have just told me. You didn't have to kill them!", Jack shouted to the hidden control room from next to Christine's head. "Henry isn't dead yet, and Christine. Well, it's better off that she's like this. It will be less painful for her.", Deena said sympathetically through one of the hidden speakers. "Less painful? What the hell does that suppose to mean? You don't think that slow death you put on her was painful? And what about Henry? He's probably suffering from internal bleeding as I speak, and I know you won't help him. You have no right in saying what's 'better off' for them. Now, if you're finished bumping off my friends, I'd like an exit out of here.", Jack growled as a small cage descended from the ceiling, placing Malissa back on firm ground. "Don't quit now, Jack Marcel. You've already made it half way through 'You Bet Your Life', and it's only going to get better. For this round, you successfully scored one kill, but so did Oli, and then some, so you're still losing. You can either continue fighting and hope for some extra points, or you can now go for sudden, death.", the announcer suggested after Jack had finished talking. "Sorry, Jack. There's nothing I can do. It's his game, not mine.", Deena whimpered. "What's sudden death?", Jack and Malissa both asked at the same time. "Do it and you forfeit everything. That's right. Your life, the lives of all your friends, and you and your friend's own identities, but you still get to take your prize with you. Now, before you make your choice, here's who will claim what you'll lose.", the announcer answered as a large screen came down out of the ceiling and showed the parking lot of the building they were in with a lone individual standing in front of the camera. "Hi, partner. You've set up quite an empire for me. To say I'm grateful would be an understatement. Do what's right. Go for sudden death. You know you can't do anything without your bodyguards' help.", Jack's double said to him before picking up a machine-gun and shooting the camera. "It's a no win situation, Jack. But it's better that you fight than die meaninglessly.", Deena said painfully. "So, what will it be, mob king. Are you going to fight, fight, fight. Or are you going to diiiie.", the announcer prompted. "Die, brother. I'm willing and able to take over.", Jack's clone suggested over crackling static. Jack looked down at Malissa, who looked sadly away, and then Jack angrily looked back at the rising screen and shouted, "Okay. Who's next?" "Won-der-ful.", the announcer responded as the screen disappeared from sight. "Roadkill, start your engines." "Hey!", Malissa gasped as she quickly turned her head towards the four grounders. Chapter 15: The Subliminal Messenger Iran took off and flew towards the hole in Sickle's chest as fast as she could, but he saw her coming and grabbed her in mid flight without even having to take his eyes off the light show above them. The panels of his left breast plate then closed up and the skin splashed back into place. He looked sadistically at her, squeezed her so that she couldn't wiggle free, and then laughed sonic waves straight at her as she helpless changed back into her original form, and in the background was a repetitive rhythm. She tried to liquefy herself to escape, found that she couldn't as the energy ball was forced out of her, and looked helplessly up at Sickle's toothy grin. He squeezed her harder until she screamed with pain, then threw her to the ground and breathed a sonic wave at her as he said the word "automatic" on cue. The area around her blew-up, she flew backwards, and rolled and bounced towards the lava ring. The area that was hit filled up with lava and steam started rising from the rest of the ground as the grass started wilting. Sickle noticed all of this, slammed his foot on the ground, and shot a sonic blast towards the lava ring. As the earthquake and churning lava cracked up the land and melted it, he sang as he flapped his wings to the beat, "Can you feel the force? Can you feel it? Can you deal with the marly inclination, combination, with excelled loss of sophistication. Deep deep down. Deep in your head, baby. You know there's something deep inside, a kind of mystery. So if you really need to satisfy your burning desire. You better look out or I'll set you on fire." The energy ball reentered Iran, she quickly got up, morphed back into the shape of a hawk, and took off just as the ground below her turned into superheated mud. Sickle tried to shoot her down with sonic blasts and when he said the word "automatic" again, both accompanied by electrical fingertip shots. After a while, the super nova faded away, the edge of the sky started cracking from all the abuse, and it finally shattered into the blackness beyond it like a glass dome. Iran worked her way closer and closer to him, tried to keep to his back but away from his flapping wings and whipping tail as he sang, "It's only destruction that I seek. I'm a teacher to the meek, cause I have everything it takes to mutilate and vaporize you, perhaps you know that I'm someone very special. A brand new hired assassin. And if they dial my number, I'll give them satisfaction. Yes, call for death. Get in touch with me. To feel my super, magic, space, robotic personality." After some very close shaves, one being a well timed "automatic" (she was better prepared for the "automatic" that came some time after that), Iran was able to land on the top of Sickle's head. He swiped at her and bucked his head, but she just formed her wing tips into metal hooks, ducked safely between his spikes, and when she thought the time was right, she dove down to the side of his snout and swung herself into his mouth. "Gaph, what the heck do you think you're going to do in there, winch?", Sickle asked, Iran forming a force field around herself and hanging onto the inside of his mouth with hook hands. "As long as you don't know, it doesn't matter.", Iran answered, and then created a giant tack on top of his tongue, which sparked and then crumbled to dust as she too jumped to on top of his tongue. "Damn." The second Iran landed on his tongue, she started feeling weak as the energy ball shot out of her. She then immediately changed back into her original self with the ball of light circling around her, waiting for the opportunity to safely reenter. She suspected that he could probably hear her thoughts now, so she tried not to think of what she had to do or was doing now. Sickle roared with disgust and she found that she had to hold on to the top of his tongue with all her strength to keep from flying back out and stay in one piece. Then seeing that that hadn't worked, he shook his head violently back and forth, wide mouthed and after a short while, Iran did lose her grip, flew out helplessly with the ball chasing after her, and fell towards the vast pool of lava below. She tried several times to change shape, the ball finally caught up and reentered, and she changed into a four foot long dragonfly with several feet of falling to spare. "Now I know you're really out of options. First you try to seek haven in my mouth, where I could have easily crushed and grinded your body to a bloody pulp. And now you change yourself into a useless creature. I don't know what Fate told you, but I can see that it went way over your head.", Sickle taunted as he flapped his wings and created a hurricane of scalding hot air, which Iran darted away from and then returned after he was finished. Iran shot straight up, hovered in front of Sickle's face, shot sideways just before he breathed a sonic wave at her, flew in random directions to make him lose track of her, and then flew straight into his mouth right after he'd finished breathing another beam. She flew into the back of his throat before he could slam his jaws shut, morphed herself into her original form, created a grappling gun, and shot the grappling line up at and into his uvula. The blade started rusting and the rope started smoking and fraying the second it was in place, so she knew she had to think fast, or die. She found herself surrounded in a dissipating and flickering energy cloud as she tried to stay in his metal plated throat as he tried to get at her with his tongue and by whipped his head around to get her back out of his throat. "Door to the chest? Hmmm, I guess this is what the dolphin meant.", Iran told herself and was about to let go, but then the energy ball shot out of her, whipped around a couple of times, and then finally flattened out into a wall with writing on it: Ahh, the door to the chest, but there are two. Which one is best? The safe one, which could be in sight, will be the death of you if you don't think right. It's fool's gold, but you're a fool. I will offer just one more tool. Think back, cause I can't stay. All this fighting's taken my breath away. "Breath away, but this a mental fight.", Iran said and then looked down past the fog and at the glowing pipeline below. "He's a dragon, so that glow must be coming from his stomach. But he doesn't breath fire, so it could be... his... ah, hell. I am just Fate's little puppet, playing his game, for his enjoyment. If I die, he'll probably just send the next idiot.... No, I've gotten this far and if I die, then they'll both be right. Think back? Back door? Breath?", Iran looked all around her, then up at the rope and the arrowhead at the end of it. "Ah, shit. Of course. Yo, Fate. I need you to punch a hole in this beast's throat big enough for me to swing into." The energy wall swirled the words on it and then it read: Now you're bossy, and not a deer, but any hole won't do I fear. You didn't think the message quite through. Which way should I do what I have to do? "The message? Mine, or his? Think back, he said. If I'm such a fool, then I'd probably just turn around... Where's this fog coming from? Think, right? He likes to be literal, so that deer thing probably has a meaning, too.", Iran turned her head to the right and looked closely at the wall. "Think right, or think right? I've done both, but I'm no better off. It looks the same, or am I looking right?" Iran tried using infered, but the fog was hotter than the walls. Then she tried ultraviolet and it was as if all the panels had disappeared to reveal Sickle's intricate workings of wires, pipes, motors, gears, flywheels, and belts. There was a tube right beside his throat which looked big enough to be a backup, so she told the energy wall to poke in that direction. The wall then rolled up into a tube, which then contorted into a wall mounted plasma cannon oposite the direction that Iran had pointed to. The cannon fired, a fairly large hole was blasted throught the sides of both tubes, and more of the hot fog flowed into the dragon's throat. Iran briefly examined the hole, saw that it was closing back up, and then swung into the other metalic tube as the plasma gun shrunk into nothingness. The length of this tube was like a very long, dark, dangerous slide where every time Sickle moved his neck, Iran would be slammed into the walls of the tunnel and sapped of a little more of her strength, though she figured that it was better than falling into his stomach and being vaporized instantly. After what seemed like forever, there was a blinding flash and she finally found herself free falling through a huge room with wires and tubes of various sizes and colors strung around in all directions like jungle vines. She tried to grab hold of a few of them, but had lost a lot of her strength and so bounced around between them until she finally crashed onto the hard, concrete floor. She hurt all over, couldn't change shape, and hardly had the strength to push herself onto her hands and knees. She slowly crawled towards the nearest hanging wire, pulled herself onto her feet with it, and just stood there for a while as she tried to figure out where she was now. As Iran walked and listened to the stereo humming of remotely scattered machinery of every sort, smoke and steam hissed from various pipes around her, creating an eerie mist. Every once in a while, electricity would crackle from a frayed wire and then there would be the distinct sound of someone running to check on it. Sometimes he or she would be right behind her and she'd quickly spin around to catch sight of the person, or he/she'd run along one of the three levels of elaborate webbing of catwalks above her head, or he/she'd be a shadow in the mist in front of her but would dissolve away before she could get there. The shadows never looked the same each time she saw them, and so started to think that this was some kind of mental factory. Iran wandered between the wires, pipes, motors, and pumps not really knowing what she was looking for, and then decided to try to pull out one of the wires. She concentrated her thoughts on doing so as she pulled hard on a medium sized wire, felt it stretch, and then was thrown away from it by an unseen force. She slammed into a machine across from the wire, looked at the wire while still flat on her back, and was somewhat amazed as a tough looking bear in a lab coat materialized right next to the wire. He looked angrily at her, checked the wire, then walked over to her, and lifted her off the ground with one hand. "Only a complete idiot would purposely enter this hell hole, let along trying to then sabotage the only thing that's keeping her alive.", the bear bellowed right in Iran's face as a crow, a goat, and a lioness, also in lab coats, materialized behind him. "How you got in here is completely beyond me." "She got in here with the help of Mr. Fate. Probably was put in here to pollute the machines with her thoughts... Yes, that's got to be the answer, because she definitely doesn't look or act like business material.", the goat said, waving the wrench in his hand while setting down the milkshake he was holding in the other hand. "Well, neither did Kim, but look where she is now. Boss, brain, and... jailor of the company.", the lioness said, angrily adding the last part as a pipe hissed loudly behind her and then ripped open. They all turned to look at it and before she started towards it, she added, "Us four built this entire place, willfully gave her the mentality to run it, and now look at us. The second she uses that key, we become nothing more than another one of the mechanics. I hope this ego trip ends real soon." "Before you came along and provoked her to use it, we were the corporate heads, working with Kim in the master room as she turned people like you into potential energy. Now she thinks that she's the only person in this body and we're stuck in here having to fix things. Not only that, but she's draining the batteries trying to outwit Fate and all the machine's are being worked beyond their limits over your stupid body and mind. Now that you're in here, it's two times worse. This is Fate's doing, I just know it. You're some kind of system virus put in here to destroy us all.", the crow put in, pointing his wing tip at Iran's face. "Well, yeah, kind of. But it sounds like you're all slaves in here anyway, so why don't you just stop fixing it?", Iran asked blankly. "It'd probably fall apart by itself and then we could get out of here before anything major happened." "Because, number one: as you so kindly put it, thanks to that key this place would be blown out of existence. Number two: that was a one way door you just casually jumped through, and even if it wasn't, most of us, including you, couldn't fly back up to it anyway, so if it were to blow, it would be suicide for all of us. And number three: this place makes the thirty or forty so still existing people who are now stuck in here, completely immortal.", the crow said as they quickly patched up the leak until you wouldn't even think anything had happened. "And from what I've heard from the real mechanics, if you work hard and don't complain, eventually your sleeping quarters becomes your dream house." "Okay. Well anyway, where is Kim's office?", Iran asked, still determined that Fate had sent her in here to destroy the place. "I have a job to do, and I'd rather do it now and blow myself up then work for an eternity and have someone else do it for me. This is the first chore that I'm determined to complete at all costs." "You're not very bright, are you? Sickle is heaven for those who will work for it. This.", the goat raised his hands to emphasize the factory, "This is just the harsh core of a world as big and as beautiful as the imagination itself. You may have conned your way in here, but you have no idea what you're really up against. But you still want to face Kim, and why not? Go ahead and face Kim all alone. Fate is no longer here to help you. You weren't put in here to sabotage, you were put in here to be eliminated by your exact opposite. Go straight and take a left, pretty soon you'll see what you want, and die by it, too. If you want to make your way to Heaven just to be killed by a godess, so be it. Go ahead you job jumping patsy, you've earned the right to put a little more power in this system's core reactor." Iran slowly walked off in the direction she was told and as she went along, she tried to decide what her purpose really was. By the time she got there, she was more sure of herself and her mission, and looked disapprovingly at the small, ten by twenty by eight foot, fully inclosed room with dozens of wires leading into each wall and an eerie glow shining from around the door. She weaved her way through the increasing amount of wires, hissing tubes, and pipes, and tugged on the door's handle. It didn't give at all, so she thought hard about the door opening as she tugged on it with all her might and found that her strength was slowing coming back. Some of the wires and tubes around her crackled and hissed menacingly, one of the tubes snapped and started pouring dense, green smoke all around her, and then the door shattered towards her with a sonic blast as a rush of searing heat and light shot out of the door. She was thrown backwards, slammed hard against the chugging motor behind her, forced herself forwards onto her knees, and looked into the bright green light that spiralled out of the doorway of the tiny room. She then closed her eyes tight, and forcefully crawled through the strong wind and the doorway as the door started reforming itself back into place so that the "mechanics" could safely repair the damaged equipment. "Inventive, action without judicious conviction or a discretion of discomfort by its consequence. I now perceive that Fate is veritably exceptionally knowledgeable of how to couple antagonists, do you not contemplate this to be accurate... no, I surmise that you do not, but that was the element of his stratagem all along, was it not?", a girlish voice said from the other side of the doorless room as Iran tried to get her eyes adjusted to the extreme opposite of the lighting she had just appeared from. After a short while, Iran could see that the person who had addressed her was a young doe in a rubber-like shirt with seamlessly attached gloves. The whole outfit was strategically laced with wires like the top half of a virtual reality suit, but with more wires, a box with many buttons and switches on it located on her left forearm, and two, thick wires that ran from the back of her skullcap-like helmet, to some device on her back and the control on her arm. Her helmet was also connected on the outside to four, clear, plastic tubes with light green fluid streaming from a machine with a built in fan beside her, into the thin, automatically form fitting helmet, through something in or under it, and then back to the machine in a slightly darker color. Seeing this, Iran correctly figured that the inside probably connected directly to her brain, which would make an actual VR suit completely unnecessary and would allow her to press the buttons when needed without showing it as Sickle. She also had her eyes closed, a peaceful smile on her face, and seemed to be bolted to the wall with the hooves of her hind legs dangling a few inches off the ground by whatever was on her back, which also had about sixteen wires that snaked around the room, plugged into various control boxes which were strode around the room, then wires exploded out the other end to connect to the walls and the mechanical jungle outside of them. "Hello, you have attained the essence of Kim Walker. I am presently obliterating someone's recollection and physique, and so cannot confront you personally. At the beep, conflict a pragmatic facsimile of myself, and I'll terminate you as promptly as conceivable.", Kim said telepathically as Iran pulled herself onto her feet. {beep} As Iran slowly started towards Kim's soul, a translucent double of Kim stepped out of her own body in a leather, she-warrior's outfit with two swords crossed in holsters on her back. The new fawn stood in front of her wired soul, the surrounding rippled into that of a tournament arena with Iran on one side, the warrior Kim on the other, the forty-three mechanics in the surrounding stands, and Kim's soul hovering twenty feet above the arena's center. The warrior double touched the handle of the swords with the bottoms of her bare forehooves and they came out as if she had grabbed them with real hands. "Hey, I don't have any weapons.", Iran thought out loud as she looked at her situation. "I am quite comprehensive of your prevalent circumstance.", Kim responded telepathically, "Which is quite comparable to the certitude of you not being adequate enough to fluctuate from one fabrication to the other, and merely acquire sixty-percent of your usual vigor... oh, and you will perceive every jag and scour to its extreme." "You bitch!", Iran cursed as the warrior Kim practiced a few professional poses and moves, not knowing everything that she had said, but knew that it definitely wasn't to her liking. "You have the appropriate class, but inappropriate order and family for my species. I am just a virtuous, little yearling that no one would truly adjudge of accomplishing anything iniquitous.", the real Kim said telepathically and then faded from sight. Kim flipped towards Iran, thrust one of her swords at her, and then did a backwards roll. Iran had just barely dodged Kim's attack and dove at her, but Kim spun her floating swords like propeller blades and was able to shred Iran's right hand to pieces. Then the swords stopped spinning, Kim struck the sword's edges against each other, and a lightning bolt shot from where they touched and threw Iran to the far end of the arena. Iran rolled off the arena floor, hurting all over and blood flowing out of her severed wrist, and dragged herself towards the door that stood in front of her. Kim did a series of flips to the door before Iran could get there, opened it up, and a cluster of arrows flew through the doorway and wedged themselves into Iran's back. Then Kim flipped over beside Iran's disgraceful body and drove one of her swords through Iran's back and into the floor, pinning her there. "You have succumbed to my intellectual endowments again, Iran. But naturally that is because I am the academician and you are a bagatelle.", Kim's soul said through the room's walls as her warrior self stood over Iran's bloody body. "No, that's because you cheat at everything you do in this little, kangaroo court of yours.", Iran retaliated as blood started coming out of her nose and mouth, wishing she knew what a bagatelle was. "{cough} It's been that way from the very beginning. You're just a psychotic bully, or as I said before. You-" "Ha. This concluding confrontation was as impartial as the amiable deer I was innate to be. I permitted you to subsist as yourself, and you got through a hundred fifty foot serpent. Moreover, you deceived me by permitting a dolphin to perform every exertion you did. Therefore, its utterly apparent that it does equilibrate my demeanor. I had to encumber you to equilibrate the advantage. For I am just a delicate, juvenile doe who could not lambaste a fly," Kim thought angrily to Iran as the sword in Iran's back started ripping its way, inch by inch, towards her head, "and you, in effect, are a chameleon parasite that could hinder me and every one of my subordinates' ingenuousness incessantly." "Ha! Is that why you have to use this other you to fight me with her relentless knives, and use Sickle? Why, you'd be just a nothing without Sickle, and all those people outside who work their tails off to keep him running. You do know they're out there, don't you? You think you're big stuff because you control his thoughts and movements, but the reality of it is that if you take away all this fancy machinery that you've hooked yourself into, you'd just be another stupid, little jackass who doped her way into a high office. Take away Sickle's powers and you'd be just like me without-", Iran taunted, catching onto Kim's flaw, as the room started rippling and steaming, and the warrior Kim looked at her like she thought Iran dying right now would be way too kind. "Shut up and get it right, you inept fool! I am a fawn! The most ingenious fawn in this insignificant biosphere!", the arena exploded into millions upon millions of tiny shards of glass, leaving Iran and the warrior Kim floating in midair, "Sickle is a fabrication of my own intellect. I constructed him, so therefore I am a hundred times more ingenious than you could ever be and now imminent to cognating or even transcending Fate in intellect. This fawn is the most adroit animal on Earth." All the pages of Sickle's schematics created a massive sphere that completely surround both animals. "You are a insignificance and-" "And so were you. You didn't make Sickle. You stole him and then stole the minds of the real people who made him. You locked them up in you're petty, little brain and then tried to compete with a race of prodigies. Admit it, even now your a bigger loser than I could ever be, you-", Iran demanded, hoping that she had picked the right weapon as the pieces of glass swirled around, showing Kim's not so studious childhood and then the scientists hooking her up to Sickle. "Now I see. I was sent to bring back what you've been able to forget. What could shatter this world of disillusionment you live in... I am the original you." Iran morphed into the exact image of Kim before Sickle and stated in Kim's voice, "I, the fawn. The only fawn in here, am as stupid as Iran and I know it. I knew it all along, so I don't want to be a fawn. I want to be a crow, a lioness, a bear, a nanny goat. No, I want to be a dragon. A male dragon." "Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! I am a propensity! I, created, Sickle! His gender was insignificant to his conception. This undiminished forge was fabricated by me and purely me! It is utterly mine! Do you perceive this justified disagreement? Miiiiine!", Kim's mind shouted rabidly as lightning flashed rapidly all around them, ripping the blue prints to pieces and vaporized the glass fragments. Iran was also ripped into a shapeless cloud of molecules, and the warrior Kim's image became hazy and then started taking the forms of each of the different animals she had stolen the minds and souls of. As this last part happened, she shouted in unison of the voices of all those people, "No! I am a yearling. Legitimately an untainted, petite, cerulean-eyed fawn." "Stupid, little fawn. You could have killed that girl.", a hazy image of an adult male raccoon said from one side of Kim as a female bear cub laid curled up on the ground on the other side of her, noticeably beaten up. "I am not proficient in ravaging any vital creatures.", Kim retaliated as she found herself surround in a inky blackness. "What is wrong with you, Kim. Can't you learn anything?", her father yell angrily as he looked and pointed down at her, him being three times bigger than real life. "I am a propensity.", Kim repeated, not so sure of herself this time as her father faded away and the void seemed to get hotter by the second. "Fawns don't hit back. If you do, then you're not being a fawn. Remember that and you'll never have to worry about anything.", Kim's mother said downheartedly to Kim as smoke and steam tried to cloud her out. "Damn you, Iran.", Kim said as she faded from sight as lightning streaked in from all directions. A warning siren sounded and Kim suddenly found herself back in the master room, strapped and now chained to the wall and equipment. As she tried to break free, green smoke started pouring into the room from under the door until it was up to her knees. Kim looked all around herself, the machine beside her continued to sound its warning, and then its fan stopped. "Warning. New program being initiated. Last file undeleted", the computer stated in a monotone manner as a wireframe image of Iran rose up out of the smoke. Then the image was covered with a flickering, holographic screen of Iran's 'real' self. "Structural damage persisting." "What is this? I justly slaughtered that shape shifting... cur. Your existence has hindered me beyond restoration. I will not permit you to obliterate what I, I, my crew has gone to great lengths to achieve.", Kim said as she starting feeling weaker by the second. Iran looked Kim's body over, walked over to a small hatch on the wall to the left of Kim, opened it up, and looked at the occupied keycard slot as she said in the same voice as the computer, "Vital systems locking up. Attempting removal of memory upgrade. System shutdown in ten seconds." "How can you do this to me, Sickle? After all I've given you.", Kim bleated as Iran's image ejected the keycard, it went up in a puff of smoke, Iran's image flickered, and then disappeared. "What about Fate? We were, so, clooo-" The lights went out in the room, there was a distant explosion, and then the images of all the animals, including Kim and Iran, were flashed rapidly one after another again and again until the whole innerspace exploded with an intense, green light with a sound like that of a rocket taking off. Then it all slowly faded to black again, while in the real world, Sickle's body started sparking and smoking heavily until there were finally small explosions and his body parts fell lifelessly off of Kim, one by one. Once Sickle's legs fell apart, Kim fell forwards unto the ground and the part of her mind that was still there, was reminded of the fact that she had been paralyzed from the waist down ever since she got into that big fight behind the junior high, had ending up clubbing that teacher to death while it happened, and now no longer had the great mental and technological power to overcome it. Dazed, she rolled over, propped herself into almost a sitting position using a few of Sickle's parts, and felt the two broken wires and four tubes that hung down out of her thin helmet like dredlocks, the output tubes leaking fluid onto the same shirt she had been wearing since she let them wire her up to Sickle for behavioral modification, and watched as the fluid turned from not so light green to semi-clear with little gray particles floating in it in ever increasing numbers. She rubbed some of it unto her forehooves and then bleated as she stared down at it, "Why me? I'm the one who had to work nonstop to get that smart. You, Fate, were, born, like... like..... uh..." Then she stared blankly into the night for a couple minutes before finally falling sideways onto the cold, hard roof. She couldn't get comfortable like this, so she slowly inched her way onto the thick, warm, dark green puddle that used to be Iran, rolled around and then curled up in it, and then went into a peaceful coma, which she stayed in for a few minutes. "Deep in the night... Deep in the night... Deep in the night. I'm all alone. I can hear you calling me. Calling on the telephone. I think about it, baby. Every night. Every day. How I promised you devotion, but you threw it all away.", Sickle sang to Kim in her head. Then she was dead. Chapter 16: The Bigger They are Worn out from the endless fighting in the Mechtech building and the long drive back to his company, Randy parked the stolen car in the closest, available spot, and briskly walked in through the front door. He nodded to the people that he passed on his way to the elevator, pressed the button so that it could take him back to his office, and then saw the blinking sign. "Great. They took out the elevator, too. Now what am I suppose to do? That's supposedly the only one that goes to my floor. Oh well, I might as well visit Robert and see what he's been doing.", Randy said, turning towards the next elevator. Once the doors opened, Randy got in and rode it one floor down to the basement. He got out, walked down the corridor, put his hand on the sensor next to the door that opened to the data storage room, and then walked around until he found Robert. Robert looked over at him curiously, then casually walked over to greet him. "So, what's new. You never come down here, no matter how important the situation.", Robert said bluntly as he looked over to his side to look at a spinning reel. "My elevator's not working. I was jumped by a couple of thugs and now they've sealed me from my own office.", Randy said just as bluntly. "What are you talking about? How did a couple of unknown thugs get all the way into your office without you letting them in first? I know that the elevator is out of order, but that was a hostel virus. All the circuitry and computers are screwed and now almost all the elevators have it, but back to you. How did they get you out of you're office and on the ground floor without someone seeing something suspicious? And without Nancy or Malissa... where is she anyway?", Robert riddled, looking Randy straight in the eyes. "Yes, I let them into my office because Nancy said they were Jack and Henry. They beat us all up, warped us away to the Mechtech building, and stuck us in different cells. Once we woke up, we were told that each of us would get our chance to fight for our lives. In desperation I was able to escape, but though I searched each level thoroughly back to the ground floor, I couldn't find either of them. I came back here hoping I could get a clue of where else they could been taken to, and maybe finally some reinforcements.", Randy answered with just a hint of accusation. "You left Malissa, that's hard to believe. You'd put your life on the line for her. No, there's something seriously wrong here. I don't know who you are, but you are definitely not the real Randy Lee.", Robert said as he started walking backwards away from Randy. "Now, let's not start that again. I tried my best to find her. Yes, I did put my life on the line, but that just wasn't good enough. I really am Randy, and I told you so.", Randy said as he cautiously followed Robert. "What? What's that suppose to mean?", Robert said, stopping dead in his tracks. "It's your fault that they're gone, and now because of you, the world as you know it is going to come to a complete halt.", Randy said as he also stopped, looked all around himself, and then raised his right arm towards Robert. He made a fist, it and half of his upper arm rocketed off of him and straight at Robert's head. Robert deflected it by putting his arms in front of his face and Randy commented, "You're one, tough cookie. I see I'll have to break out the heavy artillery if I'm going to finish you off." :"What's going on here? We destroyed you back at the CPU building.", Robert yelled as he dove behind a nearby terminal. "No, you destroyed my prototype brother, Randy Lee the first. I am Randy Lee the second. I am here to take out you and Bob, and then make sure that this building goes down one way or another.", Randy said as what was left of his right forearm extended about an inch outside of his flame-resistant shirt sleeve, and exploded into an unfolded plasma cannon, which he immediately started charging up. "And what about Randy Lee the third?", Robert asked from behind the computer. "As I already told you, he's waiting for his chance to fight for his life. He's still back at Mechtech, and when the time comes, he will meet his Fate.", Randy said as his monocle and the part of his face behind it moved outwards, the lens tinted red and spun to focus on Robert's balled up form, and an electronic cross hair appeared at Robert's center. "But I'd say that you were getting ready to meet your maker." Randy then fired a plasma bolt that blew-up the terminal and sent Robert sailing over and on top of the clutter of terminals behind him. Randy watched him land, then booster jumped up and on top of Robert's still balled up form. He held him stationary, charged up his cannon once again to full blast, pressed it directly against Robert's plates, and let loose the charge. The cannon exploded, sending Randy hard against the ceiling, and Robert was driven through the terminals, pieces of shattered plate imbedded in his back. For a while after that, nothing happened, then Randy finally got up off the ground, dusted himself off, and then looked at Robert's uncurled body, still facedown in the machinery. "As I said before, you're one, tough, cookie. Just a slightly less amount of power and my mission could have been all in vain. Well anyway, I want you to see what happens next, before you die.", Randy said as he picked up Robert with his one hand and leaned him against one of the terminals. Then he removed his shirt and undershirt, his torso opened up like a set of double doors, and Malissa jumped out of him and walked to the nearest intact computer terminal. "You see, this time I really didn't leave Malissa behind. As you said yourself, we're a team until the end." As Robert watched, Malissa, who had a thick cord running out of her tail and into Randy's chest, got up onto and extended her hind legs until she was looking at a cable plug, which she placed her left paw on, extended her right front leg, placed her right paw over another plug located on the far right of the terminal, and then she started buzzing. She stayed connected to that terminal like that for a full minute and then contracted herself, unhooked herself from Randy, and dashed down the aisle of super computers. Randy smiled at her, picked Robert up, and followed Malissa over to the main terminal located at the other end of the room. "This is where it gets good.", Randy said slily to the dying armadillo as Malissa bit off a few wires off the central computer. Malissa opened up her back, stretched and held onto the loose wires with her four paws, several, mechanical wires grew out of her back and plugged into the computer, and an extension cord grew out of her stomach and plugged into the wall. Randy plugged himself back into Malissa's tail and then, as Malissa buzzed and hummed, all the passwords were broken through, all data codes encrypted, and all the information on all the computers all over the building were sorted through, bundled up into a nice, neat signal, and then relayed to Deena's personal satellite. Then all the computers were short-circuited, monitors cracked and smoked, and as the sound of a distant rumble was hear in the basement, all elevators were brought to a permanent halt and all electric doors locked shut. Malissa then retracted herself again, looked up at the main computer one last time, and then jumped back into Randy. Randy closed up his torso, listened to the increasing rumble with a smile, and then said to the dead Robert, "The calvary has finally arrived, but I still have one more victim before I can call it quits." Randy put his hand into his pants pocket, reached into his leg, and took out a laser torch, which he used to cut a hole in the ceiling and each ceiling above it until he had jumped up to the floor that Bob was located on. Then he reopened up his torso, Malissa jumped out unconnected, and he guarded the hallway as Malissa casually walked down the connecting hallway and up to Bob's office door. "Hey, Bob. It's me, Malissa. Let me in.", Malissa called via a mini-disk with everything she was going to say prerecorded onto it which ran on a timer, as she knocked on the door. Bob opened the door a few seconds afterwards and Malissa strutted in and sat on top of his desk. Bob looked down the empty hallway, closed the door, and then turned back to Malissa. "So. What brings you to my place.", Bob asked as he leaned casually against the wall. "Randy told me to kill you.", Malissa said happily and then jumped at Bob, who got out of her way but didn't get what was happening. "Randy says you're no longer needed. Obsolete." "What?", Bob asked in disbelieve as Malissa jumped at him again. This time he caught and held her at wing's length. "Is this some kind of a bad joke?" "No, this is.", Malissa said just a cheerfully as she extended her arms and raked Bob's face with her sharp claws, which were now three times longer. Bob immediately dropped her, she extended her hind legs, jumped back at him, and sunk her claws in his ankles as he flew around the room. Then the needle-like wire jacks shot out of the pads of her fore paws, drove themselves into Bob's ankles, and she shot a quick bolt of electricity through his body. Bob fell hard to the ground, crashing into a wall, and then started crawling dizzily away from Malissa, who he had broken free from. "Tell me. How do you feel about having roast eagle for dinner?", Malissa asked as her extension cord plugged into the nearest outlet and her arms extended back over to Bob's ankles. She let the full one hundred twenty volts flow into his body and in a matter of seconds, Bob had stopped screaming and flopping about. "Mmm, mmm. Doesn't that just smell dandy." Malissa then retracted herself, Randy opened the door, she jumped back inside of him, and he closed himself up just as the entire Focse building suddenly fell into the earth, which, amongst almost everyone else in the building, killed Pete Recald along with the heart attack he had when he realized he had suddenly become weightless. Once the building had hit bottom, it was made into Swiss cheese by the two busy grounders. One of them picked up Randy's mangled body while going through each "floor" and then when they were finished, they buried the rubble with the surrounding dirt and rocks, and headed back towards the Mechtech building as Alexandria and Sarah watched with horrified expressions from inside a limousine in the center of the parking lot. Steve let the two vixen's look at the rubble as long as they liked, and then when he was told that they could leave, he cracked a smile, turned the limousine around, and drove them back to their houses so that they could cry and try to track Deena and me down. Chapter 17: My Favorite Killers: Part 2 "MYSTERY GUEST" and "UNDER CONSTRUCTION", alternately read for a short while on the monitor that appeared on the front of one of the center grounders as they all widened until they were one, big structure. The monitor disappeared back into that grounder, Roadkill expanded until it took up that whole side of the room, and after a short while, the monitor appeared near the top of the mini factory and blinked, "PLEASE STAND BY" "So, Miss Turrentine. Who's going to be the next, lucky killer for our equally lucky friends here?", the announcer asked as Henry, Jack, and Malissa looked suspiciously at Roadkill. "Do I really have to go along with this? Jack's seen too much death today already. He's made it through two rounds already, and won a prize. Don't you think that's enough?", Deena asked downheartedly, which made Jack think that she might be doing all of this against her will. "You know the rules, Miss Turrentine. One round of Ultimo. Two rounds of M.F.K. A bonus round if he makes it through that. Then the Brainteaser for anyone left standing. If he can win all five rounds, he can go home with anything and everything his heart desires. Now, who's the next killer?", the announcer explained impatiently. "Okay. I'll continue with this, but on one condition. You have to make the prize for winning this round, the freeing of his friend Randy.", Deena blackmailed. "Do it or I spray you and let him go with what he has already." There was a moment of hesitation and then the announcer finally came back on and said, "Miss Turrentine, you know that your spray has no effect on me, el Game Master, your life long simpatico. We can't kill each other, but I can make your life miserable. Just for the entertainment value, so be it. Upon winning this round, Jack's prize will be his life long friend, Randy Lee the third. Oh, but then there will be no point in him wanting to fight, which means everyone will die, anyway. Ha ha ha ha ha." "He'll still want to get out of there, and he'll have better help doing it, so... so let me see. The next killer, will, be... um...", Deena started uncertainly. "Your ex-boyfriend, the Warden?", the announcer suggested. "What? No... well... No, I couldn't do that.", Deena stated as Jack looked at the hidden speakers curiously. "Your ex-boyfriend, the Warden.", the announcer repeated impatiently as a cell with Randy standing angrily in it came out of the ceiling, suspended by several thick wires. "Why?", Deena questioned sheepishly, making Henry, Jack, and Malissa wonder why not. "Just, say, it, Miss Turr-en-tine. Or, else.", the announcer growled and then calmly explained, "You know, Miss Turrentine. If push comes to shove, you may not be able to get rid of me, but I sure as hell can get rid of you. You know that as well as I do, sweet, heart." "You win... The next killer will be my ex-boyfriend, The Warden.", Deena sighed after a long pause. "May Nirvana be mersiful on me for getting them in this." "No such luck, girly. The Warden it is. Hahahahaha. Not only was this guy your boyfriend before Jack came into your life, but you also personally reconstructed his body so that he is now the head of the entire police force, and could singlehandedly be the entire police force, plus, and this is the amazing part, he is also the Great Arcadia's personal bodyguard. You have pit your boyfriend against the ultimate foe, Miss Turrentine, or as they will soon see if they can actually defeat The Warden, the second, ultimate, foe.... Now, let's see which one of these guys is going to win you back.", the announcer prompted as the hexagon in the center of the room split into six, equal triangles which all disappeared into the surrounding floor. Then, as the new, hexagon shaped floor rose up to take its place, Henry, Jack, Malissa, and Randy were appalled by the tiger that stood rigidly on top of it. The Warden had to have been at least ten feet tall with a body built tough enough to stop a speeding train. His muscular body formed tight creases in his police uniform, his high, steel belted boots looked like they could survive a direct hit by a missile, his massive claws showed through his pitch black gloves, and his eyes were completely obscured by deeply tinted, wraparound shades. After the floor had stopped moving, he stepped off of it and each of his steps was like a thunder clap. "Well, at least he's weaponless, as if that makes any difference. He could crush my body with just one hand... if he can catch me.", Jack said as he removed his boots and dashed towards The Warden. "He can't hurt what he can't touch." "Stop, in the name of the law. You, Jack Marcel, are guilty of several counts of murder and breaking out of jail. Your sentence is death.", The Warden said in a deep, booming voice and then slammed the ground with both fists. The ground where The Warden smashed his fists against cracked and threatened to crumble away, the area around it cracked lightly, and Jack was thrown off balance and was almost fair game for The Warden's boot, but rolled away just in time. Jack quickly turned, raced back towards Henry and Malissa, who had gone to Henry the second she saw The Warden, and started rethinking his tactics. The Warden stomped his way towards them and to save the rest of them from an unnecessary pounding, Jack ran along the wall towards Roadkill. The Warden watched Jack run, turned around, the rocket engines in his boots burst to life, and he flew all the way across the room, landing with a earthquake thud back on the ground. Jack was thrown back and if there had been anything but solid bedrock under that part of the floor, The Warden would have dropped right out of sight. "You are resisting arrest. For that you shall be punished before your sentence.", The Warden boomed as he drew his fist back to punch Jack, "Neither you nor your outlaw friends can escape the long arm of the law." Suddenly, his fist stretched into the head of a giant, black mallet, he swung that arm over so that the mallet was facing Henry and Malissa, and his forearm extended at lightning speed with a high pitched whine. Malissa tried to pull Henry out of the way, saw that if she stayed there, she'd get crushed too, and dove away just as the growing mallet crushed Henry's body into a bloody pulp. The Warden looked briefly at his kill, turned his head back towards Jack, and then cracked an evil, toothy smile as his arm retracted just as fast as it had been let out and he said, "Your friends share your punishment. Even that one." He briefly looked up at Randy, who was watching them very closely, rubbing a metallic object in his hands. "Accept your punishment, or the mutt dies next." Jack stood momentarily stunned by what just happened, then looked angrily at The Warden, growling, and jumped straight at him. For a moment it looked like he had gotten him off guard, but then he was being held at the waist by The Warden's other hand. The hand that had been a mallet was now a giant, double edged, black sword poised to skewer Jack at any moment. "Though you do have the right to remain eternally silent, do you have any last words before you die?", The Warden asked Jack with extreme seriousness as the hand that held him stretched into the form of a shackled rack with a hole where the sword was to go through. "A plea for mercy, maybe. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha." "Just one for Deena. If you have any authority over this situation, I'd really love it if you'd shut this guy off and let me go, please.", Jack pleaded, looking where he thought the control room or the hidden camera was, then looked at the sword. "I've never chickened out of a good fight, but this is way beyond my control. Please say it isn't beyond yours." "I am the authority here. You put this upon yourself, so by right of law, your sentence must be carried out to its extremes.", The Warden stated and then thrust the sword towards Jack's body as Deena screamed. {bzzz click} Jack opened his eyes to find The Warden's sword suspended in mid-thrust just centimeters from his body. He looked at it for a second, squirmed to see if he could break the chains of the shackles, and to his surprise, found that he could free his hands and feet without moving the shackles or making a sound. He got up and jumped off the rack, and now to his horror found that he didn't make any kind of sounds landing. He pounded the ground with his fist and it was met with cold silence. "Am I dead? Is this what happens when you die? Your stuck in the exact second before your death, forever.", Jack thought since his voice couldn't be heard either. {bzzz click} Jack looked down at his watch, which had made the sound and saw that it was blurry and when he moved his arm, it left a momentary trail of gold outlining its path. "What the hell? What's going on here." {bzzz ka-boom} There was a blinding flash of light and when he could see again, Jack turned around just in time to see The Warden knife his own hand. There was moment of bewilderment from both of them, then The Warden looked at Jack, let out a roar that would have shattered any glass that would have been present, no matter how thick, and sent Jack, Malissa, and Randy to their knees with their hands over their ears. The Warden's hands became hands once more, then his fingers stretched into what looked like giant, curved, black, sword blades, and he lunged at Jack. Jack was gone before The Warden's fingers ripped the ground he had been at, his hand on his watch, and then caught the glint of Randy's metallic object in the corner of his eye. He looked back to see where The Warden was, looked up to see exactly where Randy was, and then ran on all fours at top speed to where Henry's mangled body was. "Hey, Randy. What do you have up there, cause I'd love to know what's going on.", Jack asked, hoping he had enough time to hear at least the start of an explanation. "I don't know what your talking about.", Randy lied, watching both fighters carefully, the pocket watch in his hand, the minute hand just briefly having gone from the twelve to the three, where it was stopped at now. "Just get me down from here." "Then I thank you, Deena. You've given me a second chance to live. Even if I don't know how you did it.", Jack said as The Warden rocketed towards him, fingers ready to spear him. "Whatever Miss Turrentine did, it will be the last help your getting for this round. There's a one life maximum for all my games and I'll have no exceptions. Got that, Deena.", the announcer stated as Jack dove out of the way of The Warden and rolled to his feet as The Warden hit the wall, his fingers having gone effortlessly through it. "Yes. Watch me all you want, you... you, psychotic... brother. I'm not controling the shift. At least, not anymore.", Deena taunted, which brought a momentary smile to Jack's face. The Warden pulled himself out, turned towards Jack, and then they briefly looked at each other. Jack turned and took off again on all four, The Warden stretched his hand into a wrecking ball, swung his arm around, and then extended it at lightning speed towards Jack. Jack heard it coming, turned, and kept on running as the ball zoomed past him. Seconds later, the ball was bouncing back at him in retrieval, and he jumped straight up, hoping he could go over it. The top of the ball hit his ankles, which made his landing painful and gave him second thoughts about running once he had landed. He cursed at himself for trying that, now in a sitting position, rubbing his throbbing ankles, and watched as The Warden rocketed up in the air half way to him, cut off his engines, turned himself around, and started at quick descent to flatten him under his boots. "Help!", Jack yelped at he looked wide eyed at the spiked soles of The Warden's boots. {bzzz click} The Warden was stuck just a few feet above Jack's head. There was a slight pause as Jack realized what happened, then he breathed a sigh of relief and rolled out of The Warden's way. He gingerly got up, looked at his blurry watch, hobbled over to hold on to The Warden for support, and almost ended up falling over as The Warden tipped slightly to the side. Jack regained his footing, looked curiously at The Warden, and then grabbed one of the spikes and lifted him up a few inches with very little effort. {bzzz click} Jack jumped away from the Warden and saw through the blur that the watch had just ticked off another second, but that The Warden hadn't moved yet. Jack went back to The Warden's boot, touched it, and was thrown backwards by a burst of electricity. The Warden dropped a few inches and Jack looked at his now blurry hand, which was lightly sparking. Then his watch turned an intense white as it made crackling sounds. {bzzz ka-boom} With a flash of bright light, The Warden smashed onto the ground and flipped over from the awkward landing, the watch came off Jack's wrist and flew quite a distance away from him and The Warden, and Malissa, who had been trying to be everywhere Jack and The Warden weren't, ran to the backpack still on Oli's mangled body to see if she could find something that might help Jack. When she got there, the first think she saw was a small, plastic card on a string that had fallen out of the backpack, but was still connected to something that was still in there. Being curious, she immediately read it and to her surprise, found that it was addressed to her, for it said: Here's a weapon even you can use, for an offer that you can't refuse. To The Warden, you're no bigger than a bug and that's how you're going to defeat this lug. Even though you think you can't aid in this fight, with your size and this weapon, you'll have real bite. Long arms for the law don't mean long legs, so make the climb and see the pegs of Frankenstein's monster and throw the switch. You'll skin the cat and fry this bitch. Fate says you'll win this war with pride and stand forever at your owner's side. With that, Malissa tugged on the string with her teeth and pulled out a set of jumper cables. They were made light enough for her to run with and she had a vague idea of what she was suppose to do, but after seeing what he had done to the others, she still didn't want to run into the fight and end up getting caught under The Warden's foot. She saw what Jack had done to The Warden singlehandedly, so she dropped the jumper cables and started to run back to her hiding place. "Like do it for Randy, mini dudette.", Oli's voice said from somewhere inside his body. "You do like him, don't ya?" Malissa quickly turned around and growled at the opening of his backpack, "You're still alive! Oh, when Jack hears about this." "No. Ya like can't tell him. Ya can't tell anybody. If ya do, everyone like dies a very heinous death.", Oli's voice explained. Then the head of a Chihuahua wiggled its way out of the backpack up to the back of its neck and smiled at her, "Ya like got to do this, or Randy like has no hope of surviving." "How do I know you're on my side? You could be one of those killer cyborgs.", Malissa said as she backed away. "Like, I am, and that's like exactly how you're going to pull this off, dudette. Cause I've like gone totally extreme.", Oli's dog head said as it moved out farther from the backpack, revealing that it was attached to the end of a mini-crane arm, which was attached to what resembled a closed laptop computer on wheels. The laptop opened up an inch, two buzzsaws on remote control arms came out inside it, a knife blade flipped out of the back of the laptop for a tail, and the wheels folded under the laptop to become hoverpads. "Either play along or I'm like going to have to kill ya myself. Then like again, dudette, everyone like dies that same heinous death." Malissa found Oli's makeshift body almost comical, especially with the Chihuahua head mounted on the front of it. She picked up the jumper cables with her teeth and ran towards the two, bloody bodies as Oli chased her, making a screaming sound for her. When she was just about to get to the bodies, Oli suddenly jumped in front of her, she skidded to a halt, almost dropped the cables, and ran in another direction with Oli hot on her trail. While Malissa was running towards Oli, Jack had turned his head to see where the watch landed and said to himself as he ran painfully towards it, "I guess I only have a limited time to change things. I hope I didn't damage it, though I hope I won't need to use it again, how ever its used." "Good job, Jack. I think you might have actually hurt him.", Randy cheered from the cage, the pocket watch now at six. Jack snatched up the watch, fumbled to get it strapped back on his wrist, and then looked up at Randy's cage and asked, "Do you or do you not know how this thing works?" "No, but I know that he wouldn't have done that to himself, so you've got to have done something.", Randy quickly lied to him again as he watched The Warden roll to his feet and charge towards Jack. "Quick. He's right behind you." Jack looked back at The Warden, then up at Randy, and back to where he thought Deena might be watching him. He didn't know what to think, where to go, or what to do. His ankles hurt too much to run and his feelings that The Warden was going to kill him anyway overpowered his will to block the pain out. The Warden stretched both his hands into giant, black, butcher knives, drew back his arms, and lunged towards Jack. {bzzz click bing} Jack fell backwards as The Warden froze. {bzzz bzzz bzzz} The Warden continued his descent very slowly, sparks running over his body, the floor, walls, and ceiling, Malissa, Oli, and Jack's watch. {bzzz click click wrrrr} Everything was blurry and as Jack continued to hobble away from The Warden, it was like running under water. {wrrrr click} The Warden was frozen but blurry, and to Jack's dismay, so was the watch. He tugged on it, hoping he could slip out of it, and then stood there waiting for it to do something. After about a minute of frozen silence, Jack became panicky, and started tugged and pulled with all his might as he worked himself up to pulling a muscle in his shoulder, and after a few more minutes, came very close to gnawing his arm off. {bzzz click ka-boom} Jack went spinning like a top and Malissa, Oli, Randy, and The Warden all stiffened up as time exploded against them at all sides. Malissa stopped momentarily, saw that Oli was still coming, and darted away. Upon seeing all of this, Randy immediately suspected that something was wrong and when he looked at the watch, it confirmed it. The time read eleven thirty-eight instead of eleven forty-five, so with a slight hesitation, he pulled out the button on top of it and corrected the time. {bzzz click click ka-boom} This time it was Randy that experienced it, but it ran through so quickly, that he momentarily thought that the watch had exploded. Jack was finally on the run again, having overcome his injury, and so Randy resumed his position of leaning against the bars of the cage, watching Jack with pocket/ stop watch in hand, hoping that whatever went wrong before wouldn't happen again. "You have the right to remain eternally silent. Anything you say or do will be used against you. You have seen that you cannot escape the long arm of the law.", The Warden stated in his booming voice as he reached up and removed his shades, revealing his glowing, completely red eyes. "Now you'll see that justice isn't as blind as you might think." The Warden's eyes flickered and then there were two, wide, red, laser beams that shot behind Jack, traveled over his body, he quickly skidded to a halt, and then laser beams shot down in front of him. {bzzz click} The laser was on its way back towards Jack, who was just on the verge of turning around. Seeing that time had stopped properly this time, Jack turned towards The Warden and tried to get over to him before the next second. He reached him, rammed into him, and watched in amazement as the laser beam bent like an extended whip as The Warden fell backwards. The Warden now free from movement, Jack jumped onto and easily crushed his right arm when he landed on it, then he got ready to jump and crush his chest. {bzzz click} Jack jumped backwards off of The Warden's arm, turned, and ran towards Christine's undisturbed body several hundred feet away. {bzzz ka-boom} {wham screech} The floor cracked like a safety glass windshield as The Warden pressed against the ground in real time, his right forearm imploded, and two, long, welding marks formed up the far wall to the spot on the ceiling above his head where a couple of holes were quickly forming. Even before The Warden turned the lasers off, that hand started inflating like a balloon and then when it couldn't stretch any more, exploded in a huge ball of fire, black plastic, and sizzling neon green liquid. The Warden slowly got up off the ground, looked at his sparking, mangled arm, and then let out another one of those sonic roars that brought Jack, Malissa, and Randy to their knees. Then the Warden looked over at Christine and Jack, then at Randy, stretched his intact hand into a massive, black sword twelve feet in length, and pointed it towards Randy, who wasn't sure what to do with the watch now that it had reached twelve sharp. "Injuring an officer. That's another punishment for you. Your second and last before your sentence. Any last words for your friend before he suffers because of your unlawful act?", The Warden boomed. Randy wondered if the watch would still work, pressed the button on top, and nothing happened. Then he he tried pulling out the button and, figuring that if he turned it forwards it might literally get him killed, he rewound it all the way back to the twelve again. {click click click click bzzz ka-boom} There was a blinding flash of light and Randy saw Jack turn around just in time to see The Warden knife his own hand. There was moment of bewilderment from both of them, then The Warden looked at Jack, let out a roar that would have shattered any glass that would have been present, no matter how thick, and sent Jack, Malissa, and Randy to their knees with their hands over their ears. {bzzz ka-boom} With a flash of bright light, The Warden smashed onto the ground and flipped over from the awkward landing, the watch came off Jack's wrist and flew quite a distance away from him and The Warden, and Malissa, who had been trying to be everywhere Jack and The Warden weren't, ran to the backpack still on Oli's mangled body to see if she could find something that might help Jack. {bzzz click ka-boom} Jack went spinning like a top and Malissa, Oli, Randy, and The Warden all stiffened up as time exploded against them at all sides. Malissa stopped momentarily, saw that Oli was still coming, and darted away. {bzzz ka-boom} {wham screech} The floor cracked like a safety glass windshield as The Warden pressed against the ground in real time, his right forearm imploded, and two, long, welding marks formed up the far wall to the spot on the ceiling above his head where a couple of holes were quickly forming. Even before The Warden turned the lasers off, that hand started inflating like a balloon and then when it couldn't stretch any more, exploded in a huge ball of fire, black plastic, and sizzling neon green liquid. The Warden slowly got up off the ground, looked at his sparking, mangled arm, and then let out another one of those sonic roars that brought Jack, Malissa, and Randy to their knees. Then the Warden looked over at Christine and Jack, then at Randy, stretched his intact hand into a massive, black sword twelve feet in length, and pointed it towards Randy, who tossed his pocket watch away in fright. "Injuring an officer. That's another punishment for you. Your second and last before your sentence. Any last words for your friend before he suffers because of your unlawful act?", the Warden said again, having no idea that he had said the same thing only a few seconds before. "Now, dudette! Like run towards The Warden while he's like preoccupied. I'll like cover for you, okay.", Oli said and Malissa did as he said. "Like now for an excellent light show from yours truely." When Malissa got to The Warden's pants leg, she jumped up, grabbed onto it, and hung there struggling as she looked up at the ten foot structure with fear and Oli zipped by her with a very good hologram of her in front of him. Knowing that there was very little time left before The Warden blasted Randy, Malissa grabbed onto the coarse fabric of the pants with all four paws and quickly inched her way up to the hem of his shirt. "I don't remember seeing any bolts on this guy's neck, so they must be somewhere under here.", Malissa thought as she pulled herself onto the top of The Warden's tail. Once there, she slipped under his not so tight shirt and quickly started up his back by grabbing onto his fur and leaning on the inside of the shirt. There was sudden commotion around her as The Warden realized something was on his back and he unsuccessfully tried to get her with his hand as Malissa climbed to the middle of his back. When she got there, she found a velcroed flap of skin which, when she lifted it up, covered a couple of generator plugs. She looked at them curiously and then clipped the first two battery clips to the top pair of bolts. "If I hadn't read that last part, I would have sworn that I was the bitch that was going to be fried. Well, here goes nothing Randy.", she said as she switched around the remaining clips and placed them on the bottom two bolts. Neither Jack nor Randy knew what was going on, seeing that Oli was still chasing what looked like Malissa as 'they' went in a large circle and then through a small hole in Roadkill. They didn't know what happened, but both of them were grateful for the interruption. Now The Warden was waving and spinning around like he had fire ants all over his back and then suddenly there was a loud pop, some crackling of electricity, The Warden stiffened as the back of his shirt caught on fire, he rocketed straight up to the ceiling, crashed into it head first, the engines died out, and he fell hard to the floor on his back. After a couple more seconds, his eyes faded to black, his hand deflated, and the fire spread to the rest of his clothes and fur. "Wow. The poor guy short-circuited. I guess they just don't make killers like they used to.", Jack said as he watched The Warden burn and reveal his metallic endoskeleton. "Anyway, the point was for one of us to die, not that one of us had to kill the other." "Oh, but that is the point, Mr. Marcel, so because of technical difficulties, you do not win the prize, and you do not get to win any more prizes, though you can still look at this one here. So, without further ado, we present the mystery guest. Is the mystery guest ready, Roadkill?", the announcer asked after a slight pause as Craig's body started lightly smoking black mist. Chapter 18: Downtime "Oh, this is interesting.", Deena said in a very amused manner as she watched The Warden try to get something off his back. "No! That not in the rules. What the hell is happening to my character?", Deena asked angrily in the announcer's voice (this second voice being a dual personality of her own, which she most of the time liked, and sometimes hated) as she/he watched The Warden dance around on one of the monitors. She flicked a few switches and then turned around in her seat and yelled in the male voice at a technician seated at a terminal across from her, "Why is my The Warden toy going berserk? I thought you said he'd run flawlessly. It was your job to make sure he worked right." "He-he is b-but there's that dog on his back. He can't get it off and its gotten to his plug.", the technician sputtered as Deena glared at her. "H-he's only got one arm and doesn't have any sensors on his back to tell where exactly she is." "What!? Are you blaming me for this? How the hell can she be on his back? Isn't Oli chasing her? Well, is he?", the announcer yelled at a technician a few seats away. "Well, no. He's chasing an image of his own creation.", the technician said, cracking a smile. "Why in the name of Anubus is he doing that? Has he also-", Deena started, trying not to burst out in laughter. "Shut-up, you! If I need comedy relief from you, I'll let you in. Now, you're not telling me that she reprogrammed him, are you? And why in the hell is she on his back anyway?... What the-?... No! She's ruining everything!", the announcer yelled to everyone in the room as she/he inadvertantly sprayed the person behind her. "How, the, hell, did, she, know about the, plugs? Someone give me some answers. Now!" "A-a-arcadia must have told her. It's just that, well, y-you, I mean, Deena gave Randy and Jack the time stopper, and now The Warden can't reach Malissa. And Oli, well, um, maybe Arcadia did that, too.", that same technician said weakly as The Warden flew up towards the ceiling. "If The Warden was able to use both arms..." Deena watched it, then turned back to the technicians, and the announcer roared, spraying a couple other people, "That's not suppose to happen!... She knows that item doesn't belong in my game, and as for that mutt, how the hell can she do that? What the hell did that meniacal dolphin do? Change all of The Warden's wiring and Oli's programming behind my back? Why didn't he tell me he was going to do that? No, that doesn't matter. Why didn't you see what she used and tell me? She must have been carrying it in her mouth. You're all a bunch of incompetent fools." "B-b-but you were watching, too.", a different technician said fearfully. "No, Deena was. Oh, I'm going to kill her. Her and her dolphin.", the announcer threatened as Deena quickly turned her head towards that technician, screwed up her face in a demonic glare, and then dove at him with her claws out. As she lacerated his face, spattering blood all over the room, the technicians that were still alive ran to the door and tried to open it, but found that she had locked it. Deena angrily turned to face them, hissed, turned back towards the bloody animal behind her, and sprayed them all. Then, with all her temporary coworkers now dead, her anger almost gone, and the room reeking of corpses and skunk's spray, Deena sat back down in her seat and glared at the monitors. Having just missed what Jack said, she rewound the tape a few seconds back, listening to it, frowned, and then grabbed the microphone. She cleared her throat, pressed the button, the announcer responded to Jack's statement, and then threw the mike on the floor, shattering it upon impact. "Damn you, Arcadia, and you too, brother. If I really didn't think that Jack and Randy could do it themselves, I would have told you.", Deena stated in a winded voice as she looked distantly at The Warden's burning body with Malissa as charcoal under it. "Oh. I almost forgot. I wonder how far they are from here, anyway." After taking one last look at the monitors, Deena hissed the password to unlocked the door, walked into the lavishly tiled hallway with its sky blue paint and soft florescent lights lined along the wall, and thought of how it had been decorated to resemble the large, water tubes that ran parallel with all the hallways and elevators in the building. She looked up at her shadow on the ceiling as she walked down the hallway, passed a few busy workers and Workers that all quickly got as far away from her as possible with the first sight and sniff of her, and then she rode the first elevator she came to (also painted sky blue on the inside with a tiled floor) up to the tenth floor. Like the introduction of Get Smart, she passed through many hallway doors, a room, another hallway, and then finally came to a room almost completely filled with a massive, glass tank with a pipe running out of each side of it except for the one that she was standing at. When she got there, the tank was empty, but then a few seconds afterwards I swam into the tank from the tube above, and then a few seconds after that, the water level in the tank dropped so that I could go up for air. Of course I did, then decided to create a few ripples on the surface of the water by swimming really fast around the edge of the tank (with skin like mine, it's the best I can do without breaking the surface). After I had gotten it to the speed I wanted and admired it for a short while, I swam up to the side of the tank that Deena was standing behind and asked her telepathically, "Well, Deena-ma-neena? I hope you two didn't just come here to look at me.", she tried to say something aloud, "But, the both of you've got to see, it wouldn't have worked. The watch always malfunctions on the third stopping, so without Missy, Randy gets killed, and that means-" "I know what that means, Arcadia. But you still should have told me that you were going to bring Malissa into it.", she cut in in her mind. "There is a force field around Randy's cage, as you know." "Of course I knew that. What don't I know. But, that wouldn't have been fun at all because your boyfriend then gets his intestines pulled out through his nose, if you know what I mean. I don't have to tell you two everything, and anyway, it was fun watching you waste the others as, whoever that other person is suppose to be. What is it, now down to you, you, me, those two rhinos of yours, and twenty-three other living employees. You really have get your, brother, to see a shrink, Dean-dean. Hmmm, Deena y Deeno, the mentally hermaphrodite biological bombshell. Well, like I said before, it all goes along with what comes next, which I know you two don't know. Or did you two know I knew you didn't know, because then I could say I knew you knew I knew you two didn't-", I started before, of course, she got annoyed and interrupted me. "Enough! Why do you always have to do that.", this was her mental interruption, so of course I laughed my high pitched dolphin laugh that all dolphins laugh like. "And there's only one of me." "I knew you were going to say that, Deena, but guess what.", I prompted as if she could possibly know what I'd say next. "What?" "Stoker's fighting a war for living, breathing people. He's fighting a war for food. He's fighting a war for living, breathing people as food. No machines allowed.", I sang and then laughed again. "And he's coming to eat, you. Both of you." "He eats people? That seems a little odd, being that he's just dirt." This was the first thing that came to her mind and when I heard it, I couldn't help but laugh and spin around the tank. "No, Deena-ma-neena, and you too, bo-ey. He doesn't eat them like you'd eat something. He's a giant virus. He eats their cells and multiplies himself in them until either he's as big as he wants, or they're deader than a doornail.", I explained to her, laughed, and then added, "You can suck him, your brother can blow him, but he's just going to keep on coming. Back." Then I just went completely histerical. Deena took my high pitched laughter for only a few seconds, and then she was him, and he was banging on my tank. He got ready to leave and get something more productive to killing me, but I wasn't through with either of them. A mentally calmed him down, he fell to the floor, and she got up, slightly dizzy. As she tried to straighten out the fur on her head and tail, I continued, "He's got billions of copy of himself all over that room and especially in Craig. You know what you need to do? You need to get yourself a big needle of penicillin." "Are you serious or is that a joke?", Deena asked me mentally with a straight face as she looked at her tail. "Let the scientists worry about that. That's what they're being paid for or made for, depending on who you're talking about. Now, if you want to see how this bonus fight of yours is going to turn out, or should I say Deeno's bonus fight, I'd say you two had a little bit of running to do. I'll open all the doors and meet the both of you again after the fight. Then we'll see what the punch line is.", I laughed again, then turned around and disappeared in the bottom tube. "If it weren't for that stupid time vault of his, I swear I'd...", she started as she left the room and then thought that I might be listening in, which I was or it wouldn't be here now. Chapter 19: Bonus Round "ALMOST READY", Roadkill's monitor read as it continued to hum and bang. The Warden's body was now almost completely metallic with tiny specks of fiery fur and as the last speck disappeared, Jack walked up to the body to examine it. With no flesh or muscle-like padding, The Warden just looked like a giant, mammal-like robot with a rat-like tail and a small, gold button in the center of its left, chest plate. Jack thought about what could happen if he pushed it, figured that whatever happened, it would just short-circuit again anyway, and punched the button. The Warden's eyes flickered to life, Jack jumped backwards and was reminded about his ankles, and the two chest plates rose up and outwards. Jack got a little closer to see what was inside and the rest of the front of the torso rose up and slid down the body to reveal a small (about Robert's height), lifeless figure with a few minor burns. After looking him over, Jack lifted him out of the massive exosuit, ripping the two wire from the back of his neck, and showed the midget tiger to Randy. "Hey, do you know who this is? It's that lawyer. That guy who you were in court against. What's his name?", Jack asked as he walked towards Randy's high cage with the white bangled tiger dandling high in the air by his collar. "Jason. Jason Ward. Well, at least we now know where he disappeared off to. Serves him right.", Randy said, leaning on the bars to get as good a look of him as he could at that height. "What? Disappeared from where?", Jack asked, dropping Jason. "The hospital. He got shot I can't remember where, was taken to a hospital, and then disappeared without a trace.", Randy explained as he looked at Roadkill. "Deena's old boyfriend was a lawyer. Well as they say, opposites attract.", Jack said to himself as the words on Roadkill's monitor changed. "I wonder if he wanted to be The Warden, or if she forced it on him." "BONUS CHARACTER" and "READY" both alternated on Roadkill's monitor as a giant, brown, dragon head with fiery red eyes ripped out through Roadkill's front wall and roared an ear deafening, war cry. "I knew I should have seen to the dismantling myself.", Randy said to himself and then leaned against the bars and yelled to Jack, "I faced this dragon before. Not even a falling building can hurt it and as far as I know its only real weak spot is inside its head." "You want me to just walk into its mouth? Not on your life.", Jack said as a small, thin fog surrounded Craig's body unnoticed. "That'd be suicide, though I guess I could try it once and if I'm about to die-" "You'll die. Yes, it was me who controlled the time stopper, but you've used it all up. The watch was slipped to me by a friend of Rusty's with a note saying not to advertise it to The Warden, or else I'd be the one in trouble. 'Four times to go around the clock and then it won't work anymore' was the other thing that was written on it.", Randy explained as he picked up the pocket watch, held it out of the cage, and then dropped it onto the rock-hard floor. The watch hit the ground, bounced once, sparked as the glass shattered, and then it imploded into nothingness with the sound of a thunder clap. "Fear me, fools. Fear me or be burned", Fear said with a voice like grinding rocks as little wisps of black smoke came out of its mouth and nostrils. Then it took a deep breath and shot a massive burst of flame at Jack, who ran towards Craig. Seeing Jack run, Fear let out a deep, fiery laugh and then pulled itself out of Roadkill up to its neck. "Fool. You run from the fires of hell. All will get burned", he continued and then spat a string of fireballs at Jack and Craig. Jack jumped to one side and the darkening fog flew in the other direction as Craig's body immediately burst into flames. The pre-Stoker fog flew quickly to Christine's body, entered in through her mouth, flew down her throat, passed through all her mucus membranes into her bloodstream, and continued to fill up her body, feeding on her still fresh cells. "Keep it busy, Jack. Your master's almost ready to help", a tiny, metallic voice like the whisper of a breeze said from within Christine's head. "Just keep away from the snake." "Run, fool. Run all you like. You have no where to hide from me and my fury. I will burn you and break you until you're dust", Fear growled at Jack as it tried to get the arms it didn't have free from inside Roadkill. Seeing that nothing was happening, Fear turned its head around to face Roadkill and growled with fiery words, "Let me out, you stupid machine. Let go of me or I'll melt you down and let myself out." "REQUEST IMPOSSIBLE" and "YOU HAVE NO BODY" flashed on a large monitor in front of Fear until Roadkill thought of something else. "ERROR" and then "I AM YOUR BODY" blinked on the monitor. "What? How? Tell me now, you stupid machine. Tell me or I will melt you down", Fear growled at the monitor, heating it up with its blasts of fire. "YOU ARE THE", "STUPID MACHINE", and then "I AM ROADKILL" blinked one after the other on the monitor a few times and then it continued, "REMEMBER", "RANDY PARALYZED YOU", "FROM THE CHEST DOWN", "DEENA SAVED YOUR HEAD", "I KEPT IT OPERATIONAL", "I AM YOUR BODY", and then "RANDY'S OVER THERE" blinked in a continuous loop. "Me a stupid machine? You're the only machine around here, fool. But if Randy actually did escape from that building and found some way to hurt me, then you better hope that he is here or you're the one that will feel my vengeance", Fear growled as it turned to scan the room for Randy and then spotted the cage and the figure in it. "Randy! You're toast!", Fear roared and then shot a massive fireball towards Randy's cage, which was stopped by a small force field that surrounded it. "No! You will pay for almost killing me. You and your puny friends will pay with the fires of hell! Then you will fear me for eternity!" "Almost kill you? I, I mean, Robert did kill you, you stupid dragon.", Randy yelled back, the force field giving him a lot more confidence. "I watched him gut you from the inside out like you were some oversized suitcase. Your fire did nothing to his indistructable body, so we left you to rot in peace." "Ha! Then why do I face you now, you stupid fox? Why am I here to grind your bones to dust?", Fear challenged Randy as it tried to force itself out of Roadkill again. Realizing its predicament, it quickly turned back towards Roadkill's monitor and growled, "If this is all you're going to do as my body then I just want to be a head, so let me go and you don't get melted." "I WISH I COULD" and "BUT YOU'RE WIRED TO ME", Roadkill "said" downheartedly and then molded itself into a enormous, armored tank with Fear's head and neck in place of the barrel. "Great, Randy. Now you've got both of them after me. I could probably have handled the living remains of this dragon or this shape shifting rig, but both of them? If I get out of this alive, I'm going to kill you.", Jack yelled as Roadkill shifted its massive transmission, its gears started rolling with a loud clatter, and it slowly rolled towards the center of the room. "Living remains? If there's anything you are, it isn't living. You're just a, no... okay. Yes, you were living before, but it was Roadkill that turned you into a machine so you'd be enslaved to that tank, forever. We all saw you being put together. All that's left of you is your tiny brain.", Randy lied assuredly, looking Fear right in the eyes. "Liar!", Fear roared with rage and a beam fired from its left eye that made Randy immediately lose his balance. Fear turned its head upside-down to look at the front of the tank and yelled, breathing blasts of fire at it, "What have you done to me, you stupid machine? What am I, a dragon or a robot?" There was a slight pause as Roadkill considered the answer and then formed an upside-down monitor in front of Fear's head that read one after the other, "A DRAGON", "IF YOU WISH","LEFT EYE:", "VERTIGO RAY", "REST OF YOU:", another long pause, and then finally "NORMAL". "You better hope so, you stupid machine", Fear said, heating up the front of the tank with its breath, and then whipped its head around to look at Randy. "You've lied your last lie, foolish fox. You may not fear my fire, but you will fear my bite. I'll chew you and that cage up just like I chewed up that other fox." Fear and Roadkill having been momentarily distracted, Jack had ran around to the back of the tank and thought about climbing the treads. Though this tank was a little over thirty times the size of the tank it was modeled after, the treads were still climbable and he figured that there probably weren't any sensors to detect him with as he went up. He was wrong, but Fear couldn't feel him on there, and that's all that counted. He had gotten about halfway up when he was suddenly grabbed at the ankles, which still hurt, and he almost fell off trying to swat at the attacker. When he turned his head to see what grabbed him, he found himself looking right into Christine's eyes. She smiled slily and then said in a monotonous voice, "Hi, Jack. Remember me. I'm your old friend, Chrissstine, but only better." "Why can't you two just stay dead. Either follow me or leave me alone. I've got a couple of lives to save, so get lost if your not my sidekick.", Jack growled at Christine, looking up above him and starting to climb again. "No. You will follow me now. I am bigger, ssstronger, and more gifted than you are and you know it. You've alwaysss needed me but I've never needed you. Now look at me or I'll crusssh you to a pulp.", Christine said angrily as she wrapped her tail around Jack's leg and kept him on that one tread. "Believe me, Jack, all I want to do isss reform you. Not kill you." "You just said you didn't need me. If that was so, then why do you want to hypnotize me. I've got better thing to do than come after you.", Jack said he tried to pull himself up to the next tread with all his might. "My bad ankle will just slow you and your plans down." "Yesss, you are right. What wasss I thinking. I am wasssting my time on you. If that truely isss the way you want it, than it isss now that we part for good.", Christine said, letting Jack go. "I hope to sssee you again. Dead." "Yeah. Same to you, you stupid crow, or jackal, or whatever you are.", Jack finished as he thought about Randy's incounter with the elimental and climbed up the next two treads. "You don't even have the dignity to stay out of other people's bodies." "Armor.", Christine said with a sly smile as the faintest curl of smoke escaped from her mouth, "A ssstrong sssuit of armor with a powerful weapon." She then patted with the tip of her tail the ripples on her lengthy body where she had chopped up and swallowed Craig, Henry, and Jason's body. "Not to mention a couple of wonderful power sssourssse. Hey, that'sss right. If you're not going to be my partner, you can be my food. I think I can ssstill fit you into my, plansss." "I think I'll pass on that, too.", Jack stated and then scurried up to the top of the tank treads before Christine could whip her tail around his leg. {bzzz} Fear clamped its teeth on the force field and tried to crush it, but only got a painful shock. It then breathed a long blast of fire on it, but of course that never got through. Then, being very annoyed at the security, it closed its right eye, looked angrily at Randy, and fired the vertigo ray at him. Randy fell down and kept on falling down, and after a while Fear laughed a fiery laugh, then remembered Jack and looked down where he used to be. "Where's that foolish friend of yours, Randy? I want to strike fear into his soul with my new toy", Fear said, scanning the entire area in front of it and then looking all around the tank. It finally saw Jack and fired the ray, but Jack was already on top of the right track, so Roadkill finally started backing up. "It's about time I brought you to your knees, foolish wolf. Fear has taken over your senses and left you helpless. You cannot fight the fear, for it is all powerful. I am all powerful. Fear me and the chaos I bring to your body. Fear me or die a hopeless death." Jack tried his best to crawl forwards and towards the body of the tank, but wasn't sure how he was doing. He didn't know which way he was going, knowing that if he was wrong, he'd be flattened under the tanks massive weight, and it scared him. Then all of a sudden he was falling and hit the ground hard. He had landed on his arm and regretting it, and was still dizzy. The tank stood before him as a giant, twisting mass and then he looked up and saw a blobbish picture of the front of Fear's open-mouthed face as it came straight at him. "Oh, shit!", Jack yelled, covering his face, as Fear closed its mouth around him. Jack's dizziness passed, immediately sweated out of him, and then he was being squeezed against the roof of Fear's mouth by its tongue, the sulfuric acid of its saliva burning his fur and tickling his skin. Even though small flames appeared before him with each of Fear's light breathes, he tried his best to pull himself towards its throat, hoping that Fear couldn't breath fire with its mouth closed, if it truely was just a severed, living head. He could hear the sound of afterburners above him and understood that, for now, it was breathing out of its nose. Jack was able to move himself about a body's length before Fear tried to force him to the front of its mouth with its tongue, but only succeeding in getting him farther and farther back. Then it opened its mouth wide and coughed a big burst of searing flame, which forced him out of its mouth and into midair near the ceiling, as well as nearly setting him on fire. Fear wrapped the tip of his tongue around Jack and held him tied up in front of its sharp, gleaming teeth and powerful jaws as Fear showed its catch to Randy. Both Jack and Randy were fearful of what might come next and then, all of a sudden, Randy smiled slily and said, "Well, go ahead. I don't care. Go ahead and swallow Jack, just like you did to Robert, Bob, and Deena. Let him die a slow, painful death burning and being eaten up by the acids in your stomach. He doesn't have the natural armor that Robert had, so he'll burn nicely in your... Oh, that's right, you no longer have a stomach, Roadkill cut your head off instead of replacing the broken bones with bionics, so you'd be more it than yourself. Okay, then you can slide him down your long throat, roasting him alive on the way down. That machine must have your lungs in there somewhere. How else would you be breathing fire? A blow torch in the back of your head?" "Uhlah Deena, ya fen wo be wapin away, so wha do you na fea ya fen's des, foolis fahs?", Fear asked as best as it could with its tongue positioned outside of its mouth, thinking about how it was definitely going to destroy Roadkill after killing both Jack and Randy. "Why? Well, let's see. Because he's head of an evil, bumbling group and I'm boss of a very successful company that's helping the community in as many ways as you can think of wrecking it. Hmmm? Maybe because I own lots of land and vehicles that everyone else only dreams about, and he just mooches off of me. Should I continue?", Randy said, looking angrily at Jack, who hoped that Randy really wasn't sending him to his doom. Fear shook its head, which shook Jack around, then tossed him up in the air with its tongue, and swallowed him. Seconds later, it let our a great belch of fire but there was no sign of Jack's ashes. Randy then faked sudden shock and sobbing, like he really didn't expect Fear to do it, and then after a short while, his sobbing turned into laughter. He stood up, leaned against the bars away from Fear, crossed his arms, and said with a smile, "Congratulations. You win. For a little while there, I really didn't think that you'd actually have the guts to do it, though literally you don't. But you still can't get revenge on me. At least, not unless Roadkill says you can. It's funny how, no matter what you do, I always win." "No, I still will make you fear me. You and this stupid machine both. There's more than one way to get at you, but first a question for you, fool. How did you get out of the building?", Fear growled as Christine was working up enough acidic smoke to break into Roadkill's thick and quickly repairing underbody. "Simple. While everyone else continued to fight you, I exited out the back door and followed you in that police car you never got.", Randy said slily. "I thought so. Well, you have eluded me for the last time, Randy. Destroy the ceiling, you stupid machine", Fear commanded as it shot Randy again with the vertigo ray. Roadkill didn't move an inch as it was starting to get fed up with the dragon's attitude as well as being very busy with Christine. After a short while of waiting, Fear turned towards the front of the tank and roared, spitting fireballs at the sensitive metal as Randy laughed menacingly, "Destroy the ceiling now, you stupid tractor, or I'll melt you down into scrap metal." "I", "AM", and then "ROADKILL", flashed on the monitor and then it shut off all power going to Fear. Fear felt dizzy and lightheaded, swayed back and forth, and then crashed onto the ground, looking like it was fast asleep with its tongue lazily hanging out of its mouth as the bottom few floors of the building shook from the crash. Then a monitor popped out of the top of the tank so Randy could see it and it blinked one after the other, "CONGRATULATIONS", "RANDY", "JACK'S OUT OF THE", "FIRE AND INTO THE", "FRYING PAN", "AND FEAR'S OUT", and then "FOR GOOD". "Yeah. Thanks a million, Randy.", Deena said through a hidden speaker in the wall. "Oh, and by the way. That was my pocket watch you broke." "Whose side are you on, skunk?", Randy asked, quickly turning towards the speaker and grabbing the bars on that side. "The real you loved that dragon like I love Malissa. You died with the dragon. I don't know what you did. Probably had a spare cyborg body to deceive Jake with, but I still hate you, and your brother." "You should, Randy. I put her and everyone else up to this. She makes the enemies, I supply the heroes, sometimes she wins, sometimes I win, but it's always fun to watch.", the announcer said slily as he looked from one view of the wreckage to another. "This time, it seems like she won. You've won, Randy. Your prize is your life, how short it may be." Deena then piped in as she picked up a brush and started grooming her tail, "You underestimated me and I overestimated my dragon, Randy. It was expendable, but were your friends? Your nonchalant lying has just cost you your best friend. He used to be just my boyfriend, but now he's going to be my loyal servant. He knows this is just a game between twin skunks. We're still just as alive as you are, Randy. This was all a test of just how good you and Jack really are. Yes, he's lost his friends, but I can always make him some new ones. Better ones. Ones that will never turn on him, no matter what. But enough about him. You have an appointment with a very close friend of mine." Chapter 20: BrainTeaser As Randy tried to figure out how to take all of this, a hole opened up above the cage and it was lifted to the floor above the arena. The cage stopped a couple inches above the hole in the floor, the hole closed up, the cage dropped gently onto the floor, the cables disconnected from the top of the cage, and they disappeared into the ceiling. Then with a soft hum, the cage's ceiling opened up into its walls, and the bars that made up the walls fell into the cage's floor. Randy watched this with amazement and then saw a couple of business class figures walking towards him. Randy prepared for a fight, the figure nodded to him, then turned and walked back down the hallway. Randy watched them suspiciously as they continued to the end of the hallway, turned, and motioned for him to follow them. "What's going on here? First, I'm kidnapped, held for ransom, and have to save the life of a friend whose just playing a game created by his girlfriend. The same one that purposely killed another of my friends and was suppose to have died herself. And now I'm being freely escorted to who knows where, for a reason I know I'm not going to like, but probably have no choice but do.", Randy rambled on to anyone who wanted to listen to him as he followed the two businessmen down the next hall. The figures nodded again and since they were walking in front of him, Randy decided to grab them by the necks and do his best to knock their heads together. Not being that strong, all he accomplished was to tap their heads together and so, slightly annoyed at the resistance, they turned towards him and took a phaser out of their side pockets. Randy dodged their first shots, dove at the one on the right, rolled, and foot swept him. He fell down, Randy was almost shot by the other businessman as he grabbed the downed person's gun, shot the other guy, and then rolled to his feet. Once up, Randy shot both businessmen a few times until he thought that they were undoubtedly knocked out, or dead, and then backed away towards the hallway that he had started from as they started to bubble and turn into primordial ooze. "Well, at least this time I'm much better armed to get out of the building.", Randy said to himself as he turned around and turned into the first hallway, bumping right into Mack. "What they would have liked to have said was that you have a date with the great Arcadia, and there's nothing you can do to skip your appointment.", Steve said from beside Mack. "Ha!", Randy exclaimed as he shot them repeatedly with the phaser, which had suddenly turned down and locked into a new setting. Seeing that all he was doing was singing their clothing and ticking them off, Randy turned and ran down the other hallway as fast as he could, with them in hot pursuit. He placed the gun securely in his pocket, dropped to all fours, dashed down and around hallway after hallway, and then when he was sure that he had finally lost them, he stopped. Randy looked and listened for any sign or sound of movement, stood up, and said as he took the gun back out of his pocket, "Ha. Arcadia will just have to find another patsy to play his games, because I'm getting out of here." "Only you can never get out until you're in something in the first place. Do you want to get out of this time, out of this game, out of this building, or just out of this box?", I asked him cheerfully as it took him some time to realize that it was all in his mind. "Out of what box?", Randy asked out loud without thinking about it first. "Glad you asked." Exactly at that second, a wall fell down on both sides of him, blocking him in a tight area with one side being a door. "Lucky for you, it opens away from you, though it would be fun to watch you squeeze yourself out of this situation." "What do I look like, a rodent?", Randy said almost to himself as he pushed on the door. "I knew you'd say that." "Oh, don't start that again,-", Deena, who was standing by the tank, started. "- Arcadia. Don't you ever... Hey! Don't do that either... I said shut up... Shut, up! If you don't, okay I'm leaving. Fine. That's why I hate you, you know that don't you? Fucking mind reader!", I said in her head as she yelled it at me aloud before dropping a sealed envelope on the floor, exiting out another door in the room, and slamming it closed. I knew that she'd go off and find someone to spray, putting the count down to nineteen others. All of them being employees that weren't protected by glass and water. Then she'd have to take yet another bath. "So, as you can see, Deena is still alive and we're still the best of friends.", I told Randy in his head and them laughed out loud. Randy looked as me suspiciously and asked, "What are you a pygmy dolphin? You're a little small to be a regular, bottle-nosed." "Not if I was only four years old. A pre-teen you might say. Old enough to think for myself, but too young for sex. That's why I'm spending my time trying to take over the world. By the time I'm eight, I'll probably be too horny to be thinking globally.", I told him, thought about it, and then rolled around in the tank, laughing. "Yeah. I think yours is the only race that hasn't gained any longevity. What is it, about twenty years. Must be the mind and its overpowered powers. Or the endless orgies.", Randy joked to me out loud. I nodded ecstatically and he continued, "But its not that big of a deal. You can read people's minds, move things with your mind... put people in deadly games with your mind... Actually,-" "- that one might get pretty expensive. Especially since you'd have to set up stuff everywhere in case the person playing it doesn't go exactly where you expect him to.", Randy and I finished off together, "You dolphins can read what we're thinking now, but you can't tell the future." "Only if their not me, triple E. Let me demonstrate how I'm not your ordinary dolphin. Yes, triple E, as in Randy Lee three. Get it? Okay, then pick up that envelope my lovely assistant dropped for you." Randy did as I said. "No, you don't open it yet. First you've got to say something, anything. Make it as long or short as you like." "Okay. Here's are a few questions for you. How did Deena survive, why did she pick Jack, of all people, to be her boyfriend, and why am I here with you now? Oh, yes. Why are you stealing my company's lots?", Randy riddled, flipping the thick envelope over and over between his stubby fingers. "Why ruin my life? And above all, where the hell did Malissa go? If Oliver killed her..." "No, he didn't, honest. Now, I couldn't answer any of those brilliant questions, but you can open the envelope now.", I told him after a slight pause in his head as I tried my hardest not to laugh before the joke was finished. Randy looked at me suspiciously, then placed the phaser in his pocket, ran his middle claw through the top of the envelope, pulled out the ordinary slip of paper, and carefully read some secretary's (looked a lot like Nancy's because it was) handwriting. On it was written: 1) Deena survived the crash of her pet dragon, Fear, without you ever knowing about it by frantically working until all of you had left, then she placed a remote controlled stink bomb in the room, and hid safely in a small, hidden, padded room behind the control room until Fear had stopped. If it had been her for real, the exposer for the amount of time you were in there would have killed you minutes after you left the room. She then called for a rescue service for all of you and was assisted with several other helicopters once you were out of sight. 2) Deena picked Jack to be her new boyfriend because of his raw power and friendship to you. She had someone knife Jason and then kidnap him later to test the idea for a permanent exosuit. Now that she's seen its invincibility and Arcadia prevented her from prematurely killing her boyfriend with it, she's going to put one over on Jack and have him pave the way for a new variety of people. People with a little less self-control and a little more vitality. 3) You're here because, as you've heard by now, Arcadia's got big plans for you. You will go and do what he can't, being a dolphin and all. 4) Arcadia was not trying to ruin your life. Just making it more meaningful for what he had in store. The new generation has to live somewhere and he doubted that you would have given them to him if just asked. Once the lots were gone, you wouldn't have much of a business, so this game was training for a much bigger challenge for when you're company literally crumbles. Upon finishing the letter, Randy looked back at me slily and thought, "You better, but what if I don't want to be your legs. What if I like the life that I live now. Hey. If I were to suddenly break the glass,-" Then, without finishing, he took the phaser back out with lightning speed, set it to its highest setting, and shot the glass. There was a red spot as the glass suddenly melted about a millimeter, I mentally helped it along while smiling cheerfully at Randy, still trying not to laugh, the one inch thick glass cracked outwards, and then the entire tank shattered into the sealed room. The water level dropped dramatically and I almost found myself beached, but then more water quickly started gushing out of the top and side tubes as I mentally jammed Randy's gun. In a matter of seconds, the entire room was filled up and Randy was holding his breath, fearing that he had mistakenly brought about his own death. "There's no need to fear. Aqua gills are here.", I squeaked as a fox-sized, pocket gill floated out of the top tube. Randy couldn't understand me, but he did recognize what looked like a small, streamlined, gas mask, placed it over his muzzle, and pulled the elastic strap around his head. Then I told him mentally and then laughed an ear-splitting series of squeaks, "Your phaser is now set for underwater attacking. If you can catch me, you can have yourself a fish fry." "That would make me one, happy fox. You'd feed me, Malissa... hey, you still didn't answer my last question.", Randy asked me mentally with deep concern. "As you now know, I'm two steps ahead of you. How, you're definitely going to find out eventually.", I told him as the door he had come through suddenly turned transparent and he saw Malissa lying in Deena's arms contentedly, not recognizing Deena as the person Randy had told her about. When Malissa saw Randy, she immediately leaped out of Deena's arms and pressed herself against the door, wanting to be back with her owner. She pounded on the door and scratched it with her razor-sharp claws, then saw me slip into the bottom tube, and pointed wide eyed at the mysterious creature in the blue, "antigravity" room with Randy. Randy quickly twisted around, saw my tail disappear, and misinterpreted her gesture as a sign that she knew what was going on, that she was the real Malissa, and that she thought that he was the real Randy. "Don't worry. I'll get him.", Randy said to Malissa, though to everyone else but me, it was just a code of bubbles. "Catch me if you can, triple E.", I said in his head from a distance. Randy swam as quickly as he possible could in billowing clothes to the tube, saw that they were going to definitely slow him down a lot, stripped down to his boxer shorts which had a hole for his tail, and slipped down the tube after me. He followed the tube to an intersection, looked around, saw a mental picture of the tip of my tail dart around the corner, shot his phaser and sometimes hitting it (the reason why I didn't lead him physically), and then continued swimming until he came to another intersect. Through indirect leading, I was able to get him several floors up and into a fairly large, tiled room that was completely underwater and had only one entrance. In the center of the room was what looked like two, eight foot diameter, satellite dishes that stood completely vertical and faced each other about twenty feet apart. "You lose, young dolphin. I got you cornered with nowhere to run.", Randy told me mentally, pointing the phaser at my head from the entrance. "You better be careful. You, Malissa, Jack, and everyone you and him have buddied with have each already died at least a half a dozen times already. Though I have to say that it takes a completely no win situation to take you down. That's why I like you. Your luck is, well there's other way to put it, incredible. I've died a couple times, Deena's died three times so far, and all those times you've had some connection to it.", Randy's gun was jammed by me once more, and as I talked and swam around, the entrance silently closed up like a Chinese puzzle box. "If you could and did kill me now, Deena and my associates would make sure that you died again as well. Then I'll just make sure that next time I don't make the same mistake." "You? Next time?", Randy said as he quickly learned that I had jammed the phaser and so looked at the two dishes. "That device me and Jack had. It worked normally only once, but it could also... You mean-" "Yes. With a time tube and a mental recorder that, unless told otherwise, sends a waterproof portfolio of today's happening to yesterday morning, I am truely the smartest and luckiest creature on this entire planet. Now, if you're ready-", I started as I stopped between the two dishes and then emitted a high-pitched squeak at one of them. With Randy's phaser still jammed and him now not bothering to attack me, we both watched as the sonic burst hit the dish, ricocheted back past me to the other dish in greater intensity and frequency, ricocheted off of that one in even greater intensity and frequency back to the first dish, and the signal continued to scan me faster and faster until a visible, vertical whirlpool was formed around me which I willfully rode as it looped me around and around, faster and faster. Then I started to shrink and break up, bubbles formed in ever increasing numbers around me as I laughed uncontrollably out loud, and then I was gone, my laughter fading away like a passing , high pitched, train whistle. Randy watched with awe as I disappeared and then when I was gone, swam into the vortex after Deena had switched the destination and before she switched the recoil off. Malissa was sitting contentedly in Deena's lap, watching the screen in front of both of then, and Sickle's parts were in a large box in the far corner of the room. "Bye, Randy. Good luck.", Malissa said to the screen, now hooked up the computer that Deena was working at. Malissa's mind had been copied and downloaded onto the Mechtech network and now basically was the Mechtech network. Deena didn't approve of a system's computer having free thought, but figured that if her body was going to be the hacker, than her mind might as well be where all the information is hacked to. It also cut down on the chances of Malissa ever becoming a double spy and trying to ruin Deena and my empire. "Hey, he's done pretty good so for.", Deena stated with a smile as she rubbed Malissa's head and neck and Malissa panted. "I don't think he needs you giving him even more luck." Chapter 21: Game Over As Jack slid down Fear's long throat, he half expected to be engulfed in flames at any moment. Every time he hit a downward curve in its slick esophagus, he would bump his head on the ceiling and/ or tumble around until he either righted himself or finally hit bottom, the sounds of flames high above him. When he did land and slid along the waxed, marble floor inside Roadkill which was formed into a half capsule shape, he found himself momentarily on the ceiling and then falling again. He cushioned his second landing with a diagonal roll off his left shoulder and stood up, looking around the well lit, red, orange, and yellow swirled room with great caution. "So, I'm back in you, am I? Well, I think I can handle just about anything you throw at meee-", Jack started, ready for a fight, right before the entire floor split, opened up like a pair of bomb bay doors, and dropped him onto a grated surface in an extremely dark room. "- ahhh {thud}. Ow. Hey, what are you trying to do, really break my leg? It was hurting enough before, I don't need you crippling me. Now, if you're through dropping me, I'd like to get this over with." "COMPLIANCE", glowing letters at the other end of the room responded as Jack slowly got up, having found a metal banister on both sides of him. Then the overhead lights came on and Jack found himself high on a long catwalk in the massive engine room. Everything was currently off, but there was a door at both ends of the catwalk and seconds later a cheetah and a grizzly with a patch over its left eye and scars on its muzzle, both dressed in police uniforms and looking half-dazed, came out of either door. Jack looked first at the cheetah walking towards him from the left with a stun gun, then at the grizzly walking towards him from the right with brass knuckles, and then looked down at the massive, quiet engine below him. Then the generator was hear charging up, the engine started, and chains and gears started moving all around him. A squarish structure directly below him whined softly, burst open, a thick rod popped up out of its center and climbed towards Jack, stopped a few feet below him, four, thin, flat panels were pushed upwards so that they're perpendicular to the rod and each other, the rod went back down towards the opened box until its a foot above it, and then the giant propeller started spinning. The only thought that came to Jack's mind as he looked at it was looking into Randy's blender. "Okay, that will just about do it. Now, if only I had something to use as a weapon.", Jack said hopefully to everyone. "I don't think so, Jack.", the grizzly said as he stopped and grabbed hold of the banister. Then he pulled the section he had away and up from the catwalk, and threw it into the propeller. There was a sickening crunch as the poles were twisted and mangled, and the grizzly continued, pounding his fist into his other hand, "It's time to take out the garbage." "Yeah-Jack-you're-not-worthy-to-be-Deena's side-kick-or-even-the-boss-of-your-so-called-mob, make-this-easy-on-yourself, just-jump-in-there-now-and-get-this-all-over-with-without-the-added-pain, do-it-for-your-friends-Jack, do-it-for-Randy.", the cheetah said before launching herself at Jack at lightning speed with the stun gun held in front of her. Even though Jack didn't know how high a voltage the stun gun was set at, he instinctively decided to counterattack the cheetah by charging at her himself with his good shoulder. They crashed into each, both staggered backwards, Jack being only slightly hurt by the impact and the shock, and the cheetah knocked senseless so that she fell over backwards, and then seeing his chance, Jack ran for the gun before she dropped it over the side. The grizzly was right behind him, so he dove at the cheetah, grabbed the gun, rolled, was back on his feet, and so just turned around to face the grizzly. "Ha ha ha ha ha. You think that puny thing is going to stop me. I am stronger than the strongest bulldozer. I am tougher than the toughest rock.", Jack picked up the unconscious cheetah and threw her at the grizzly. He knocked her out of the air with a single downwards swing and she fell into the propeller blades, spattering the catwalk and engine with real blood and guts. "I am mightier than The Warden himself." "I bet you are.", Jack said as he looked at the stun gun to see if it really was at its highest setting. Beyond the normal settings of the stun gun was one more notch with the words, 'In case of bragger' etched above it. Jack snickered at this and turned the dial to this new setting. "But then again, that is expected from someone as dumb as you are." Jack thought about charging at the grizzly with the stun gun, but knew now that he'd just end up like the cheetah, and so tried to quickly think of another plan of attack as the grizzly charged at him. He couldn't think of one in time, the grizzly left-hooked him, and at the same time he slammed the stun gun against the bear's forearm. Both the grizzly and Jack were thrown off the catwalk, the grizzly fell spastically into the propeller, where he was grounded into hamburger, and Jack was thrown with a shattered jaw past the propeller and ended up facedown on a huge airbag which, when Roadkill knew exactly where Jack had landed, changed into a small bed. Jack hurt too much to move and so, when the two, sudden pin pricks on the back of his neck turned into a mind numbing pain that made him unable to feel the rest of his body, he didn't really care and just hoped that it was finally over for good. For some reason he then fell asleep and dreamed about him, Randy, and Malissa on Randy's boat in the middle of nowhere on the North Atlantic. Also for no reason at all, at one point the boat hit Iran, who was floating above the water like some demigod. He never really liked her anyway. {bzzz bzzz bzzz whir} Jack suddenly woke up to find himself looking up at an old, gray, stone ceiling. There were thick, electrical wires hanging down from the ceiling towards his head, the sound of a generator behind him, someone talking softly to someone else to his right, and no pain anywhere on his body. He tried to move, but found that his arms, legs, and body were firmly strapped to whatever he was lying on. Even his tail seemed to be strapped down. He turned his head to see who was in the room with him and whatever else was in the room and saw Deena's tail before he saw Deena herself. Deena turned towards Jack before he could say anything, threw her hands up in the air, and shouted triumphantly in the announcer's voice, "He's alive! Alive, I tell you. Alive!" Then she laughed psychotically as a hunchbacked raccoon in tattered clothing laughed with her and then walked diagonally out of the room, dragging his right leg. "I must still be dreaming, or I died and fell into a bad movie.", Jack said in a voice a lot louder than he last remembered. "Yes. My movie. Here, let me undo your straps so that we can get back into the real world.", Deena said in her own voice as she walked over to one of the big, bulky machines that was making electrical noises. Deena pulled down a giant switch and with a spray of electricity from around the switch, the straps snapped apart and disappeared into the giant, wooden board that he finally saw that he was lying on with a perpendicular board nailed to it right below his boots. The board, which seemed to be suspended by four, heavy chains connected to wooden cranks on the ceiling, slowly tilted until Jack was lying upright, looking down at Deena, and when it was finished moving, he stepped off of it, looked back down at Deena, and then at his black, plastic "gloves". "I'm The Warden? Why?... Hey, why not? I'd probably make a better, all powerful warden anyway.", Jack said, trying to see if he could morph his hands into anything. "You can call yourself The Warden if you want to be, but the real warden was only a test model. Jason was just as much a zombie as John, Bono, who you've done a great job beating up on the road, in prison, and here, and that cheetah that was with him this time. If you want, you could be the Punisher, the Terminator, or ever just Jack.", Deena said as the machinery melted into the floor, the floor, walls, and ceiling turned from stone to a shiny, metallic substance, and the room shrank down until it was just a few inches over Jack's head. "Jack the Ripper", Jack announced as the fingers of his gloves stretched into sharp, black, metallic blades. "Alright, Jack the Ripper. Now that you've gotten the hang of the basics of your greatest prize, let me tell you what else you have won. Along with what The Warden had, your chest opens up to reveal a fold-out missile launcher with six, that's right, six automatically loaded, homing missiles, your right thigh opens up to reveal a gun hustler for your big, photon pistol, and, although it eats up a lot of energy, you can temporarily stop, time.", Deena said in the announcer's voice as a door just big enough for Jack to walk through formed in front of him. "Oh, and that's not all. Thanks to the daring stunt performed by Malissa the pomeranian, the door to your recharger plugs has an electronic lock that can only be opened by you and your sweetheart, Deena "The Gamemaster" Turrentine." "Do you do that to yourself often?", Jack asked in his booming voice as they walked out of Roadkill and then it turned into a regular rig with two, very long trailers and Oli in the driver's seat with yet another rebuilt body. "Only when I want to put some emphasis into my words, games, and life in general. I was an only child, so I needed someone to talk back to me and beat me at my own games.", Deena explained in her normal voice as they both took a second look at Oli, who was sitting there snickering at them. "I'm really beginning to hate that guy. You wouldn't mind if I got personal and ripped him to pieces, would you?", Jack asked as they both stopped and he morphed his fingers into long blades. "Not in the least, Jack.", the announcer said with a sneer, "I'll personally help you do it, too. He broke the rules of the game, and it's time he paid for it." "Not right now, though. You have places to go, and people to meet. I'll make sure that you get all the chances you want to mangle his devious hide.", Deena promised angrily, baring her claws. "When I face him, there will only be one time. No more playing opossum. Even if I have to crush him into an inch in width and dice him up, I'm going to make sure that he has no more chances to live.", Jack explained as he picked Deena up off the ground with his hands back to normal, and set her on his shoulder. As Deena and Jack walked towards the hexagon in the floor, Deena concluded, "Fine with me. Now, I know that you'll no longer need it, though you could compare it to your daily recharging, but I'm both hungry and tired. I feel like having a heaping plate of seafood spaghetti and then sleeping until tomorrow afternoon. A long catnap, if you like." "Whatever. You sleep, sis, and I'll gladly shread Oli with your big boyfriend here. Then maybe I'll take Jack out for a real test drive.", Deena's male counterpart responded, not much of a sleeper. "By now, I thought you, two were, a cyborg.", Jack booming in a growingly concerned voice as he looked over into the bottom of Fear's decapitated neck. He supposed that there wasn't really any advantage of making a robot think that it was real, and so wondered if Fear was going to be scrapped completely or just reprogrammed. Either way, it had seen its last fight. He also wasn't sure if he would be able to live with his girlfriend's bitchy side, "Another one of your own creations." "No. There's three things that technology still can't duplicate: our brains, my spray, and Stoker.", Deena said grabbing hold of Jack's head as the hexagon started rising. "Oh, yeah. Whatever happened to that, thing?", Jack asked as he morphed his left hand into the shape of a large, black, coffee mug to amuse himself and Deena. "Because it was left with such a small amount of itself in Craig's already dead body, and picked Christine's even more dead body with its special antitoxin still working in her as its vessel, it somewhat became just Christine when it recreated itself almost from scrap for what I'd suspect was the first time. Roadkill made it use up as much of itself as possible before it could get inside, trapped them both in a small, airtight tank pumped full of pure acid, the vapors and the still very weak Stoker was trapped in another, smaller tank, where he was atomized, and after that there were no traces of him anywhere inside Roadkill, or the arena.", Deena explained triumphantly as a hole opened up above them and they went up through it. "And Malissa?", Jack finished off as the hexagon and its passengers stopped in a room just a little bigger than it was. "Oh, she's fine. She got cremated while frying The Warden's circuits, but the new her is better than ever.", Deena explained casually as she jumped out of Jack's arms, lead him into and down the connecting hallway, and towards a large door at its end. Malissa poked her head out of that door, stared wide eyed at Jack's huge body, ran up to him, extended her legs as she jumped into his arms, and nuzzled him. "As you can see, she's still the same size as before, but now she'll never have to worry about those high shelves ever again." They all entered the huge room behind that door, and when they did, they saw an equally large tank in its exact center, and in that tank was me, having only been warped about a half hour ahead. I swam to the top of the water, waved to Jack as I swam backwards above the water, and then fell backwards and laughed. "Welcome home, J.R. From now on only fun things are going to happen to you, my friend.", I told him mentally as I looked over Deena's perfect video game hero as he set Malissa down on the floor and then posed in front of me. "And if not, I can always reset it for you until its to your liking." "That's great, but first I'd like to get Oli and my double both up here. I have this great need to beat the living daylights out of a pest and myself.", Jack said with an evil grin on his face as he morphed his hands into black, spiked balls. Jack the Ripper will definitely distroy his normal sized double, and maybe, just maybe, be able to outclass Oli, though I doubt it. Like Jack said about The Warden, "He can't hurt what he can't touch." Jack has a time stopping device, Oli will be graphed with Sickle (the way things are going, he may be changed into an opossum), has his original mind in storage, will be rebuilt everytime he dies (like playing possum), and will eventually become the speed and thought equal to Jack's strength. The future looks to be quite fun, so as far as the setting up of the pawns go, this is all to my liking. To the mental recorder I can now safely say... 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