The Adventure Before Dinner: Part Five

     “He...” He faltered for a moment, looking at us with wide eyes. “He still has the keys!” he finished rapidly, and then hid inside his coat.

     “WOOOOO!” I shouted and hugged the little guy. “HE TALKED!!”

     The Eyrie reached onto his belt and pulled out his keys.

     “I DO still have them!” he exclaimed.

     After that, we left the prison, and Puppy said that I could use my plan from before, because it was probably so stupid, it would work, and I didn’t even have to tell him what it was, because he probably didn’t want to know. So I happily led all of them up the dungeon stairs.

     “Duh nuh nuh nuh!” I sang as I creeped around a corner. “Duh nuh nuh... Duh dun nuh nuh nuuuuh...”

     “The Great Hall is that way,” the Eyrie told me, pointing to our left. “That’s where she’s got the ice cream shoot-a-nator.”

     “Nope!’ I declared and barrel-rolled into a room on our right.

     They followed me in.

     “The communications room?” the Scorchio asked.

     “Uh huh,” I said and walked to the intercom system in the back.

     “What are you going to do? Tell them there’s a fire drill and to exit in a calm and orderly fashion?” Puppy asked sarcastically.

     “Puppy,” I said, “this castle is made of ice. It can’t catch on fire, and if it did, we’d all be dead anyway. Cause we’d DROWN.”

     “Then what are you doing?” he hissed.

     “Looking for the magnifying glass.”

     He scowled and picked something up.

     “Here’s your MICROPHONE.”

     I smiled brightly, and waiting for everybody to get silent, pressed the button, causing one of those awful “rrreeeeeeeeeeeeeeennggggkk” noises that makes everybody cover their ears.

     I waited a moment until everybody seemed silent.

     “Attention!” I said in my most official voice. “This is our monthly Sandstorm Drill. Please get into the fetal position and cover your eyes, nose, and ears. Do not uncover them for any reason. I repeat, this IS a drill.”

     I set down the magnifying glass and turned to everybody, who were gawking at me. Probably because I’m so smart.

     “Come on,” I said. “They won’t notice us now.”

     They were still gawking at me as we ran down the hall.

     And when we got to the huge room with the ice cream shoot-a-nator in the middle, there were a few thousand Darblats, snow monsters, and a Lady Frostbite in the fetal position patiently covering their eyes, nose, and ears.

     “By jove, it worked!” the Scorchio whisper-declared.

     “Of course it did,” Puppy sighed.

     I looked over and saw a Darblat moving his hand off his ears.

     “Do NOT remove your hands for any reason!” I repeated in my official voice. He quick closed his ears again.

     We ran to the machine in the middle, carefully overstepping the many aquatic flightless Petpets and snow monsters.

     “Okay, do you know how to do destroy this thing?” Puppy whispered.

     “O’ course I do!” the Scorchio said. “What sort of a Defender of Neopia would I be if I didn’t know how to stop a shoot-a-nator?”

     He reached into his pockets and started picking out tools.

     “What are those for?” the Eyrie asked.

     “For stopping the machine,” the Scorchio said, and he grabbed one of them, swung his arm back, and began beating on the metal hull.

     “SSSHHHH!!” Puppy hushed. “Be quiet!”

     “I gotta get inside,” he grunted, and he kept swinging until there was a hole, though we kept telling him to be quieter. It would have been a shame for me to come up with something as brilliant as a sandstorm drill and him ruin it with his noise.

     “Alright, do you ACTUALLY know how to disengage it permanently?” Puppy whispered.

     “Well, usually there’s a diamond or something in a very important position that the machine cannot work without...” He stuck his nose inside and kept looking around.

     “I do not think he knows what he’s going,” the scaredy-Shoyru said. “What if he turns it on? Or blows us up?”

     “GAAAAHHH!” I whisper-panicked. “Like a flashlight!”

     “Oh! I see something!” the Scorchio hollered and tried to reach further in, but he lost his balance and fell facefirst into the hole with a resounding “WHAMMCRASHBANGTHUD.”

     Lady Frostbite, who was cowering nearby, leapt to her feet.

     “SAND MONSTERS!” she shouted fearfully.

     Her eyes grew narrow and scary and livid when she saw us.

     “YOU!” she hissed. “I knew that sandstorm drill sounded suspicious!”

     I shrugged.

     “And yet, you went with it anyway,” I said. “Better safe than sorry. It’s usually a good plan, but not in this situation.”

     Lady Frostbite scowled and started kicking and waking up her snow monsters and Darblats and screaming, “GET UP! GET UP!” and they all got up looking a little frightened.

     “Idiots!” she yelled and threw her hands up in the air, then she pointed at us. “And you idiots, you thought you could stop me!” she screamed very loudly. “But I cannot be stopped! I am completely invincible! My plan would be utterly perfect, if it weren’t for these stupid aquatic flightless creatures.”

     “You’re a stupid aquatic flightless creature,” I said.

     “And THAT’S how that joke works,” Puppy declared with a proud smile.

     “SILENCE!” Lady Frostbite roared. “You cannot disrespect me anymore! None of you can! I will prove to the world how brilliant I am today, more brilliant than any of you, by taking over the world in a completely unexpected way with my ice cream shoot-a-nator!”

     “Which really is a very refreshing plan,” I announced.

     “And I don’t think anybody objects to the excess of ice cream!” the Eyrie cheered, lifting his ice cream so everybody could see, and he and I and all the Darblats and snow monsters cheered.

     “Enough of that!” Lady Frostbite yelled. “This plan is not for your approval!”

     “Actually, it really technically is,” I said. She stopped and stared at me.

     “What?”

     “Technically, you do need our approval for this plan,” I said. “I mean, since you’re doing it to prove to the world that you’re smarter than everybody else, you need our approval, too.”

     “I do not need your approval!”

     “No, I see Umbreon’s point,” Puppy added. “You’re trying to prove yourself to the world, and we’re a part of the world. So you DO need our approval.”

     “NO!” she shouted quite angrily. “No! This is not about proving myself to the world! This is about creating a beautiful and glorious empire for myself and the Darblats!”

     “You didn’t mention that in your speech earlier,” I said, after having to remember really hard to see if I didn’t remember anything, which really wouldn’t work since I wouldn’t remember it in the first place, but I tried anyway.

     “I didn’t?”

     “Nope,” Puppy said. “You only mentioned proving you were smarter.”

     We were smiling very suspiciously at her, because we knew what was going on, but she narrowed her eyes.

     “Well, this isn’t about me! This is about the Empire of the Darblats!”

     All the Darblats roared in excitement.

     “They are a very reactive crowd,” I whispered to the scaredy-Shoyru, who was whimpering from inside his hood.

     “Now watch as I give everybody in the whole world brain freeze with my...!”

     There was suddenly a loud groan from the machine, and smoke started coming out of it.

     “What?!” Lady Frostbite hollered, looking quite panicked and surprised. I was quite panicked and surprised, too, until I remembered why it was smoking.

     The Flaming Scorchio stuck his head out of his hole.

     “Did it work?” he asked.

     “Yes!” Puppy shouted. “Nice going, buddy!”

     The Scorchio smiled and wiped his hands off as he got out, having to go one leg after the other.

     “I knew it was the red wire,” he said proudly, and he reached onto his tool-belt and grabbed a pair of Defenders-of-Neopia-handcuffs.

     “Lady Frostbite, you are under arrest for code #321759, attempting to dominate the world with an ice cream shoot-a-nator.”

     “You really have a code number for that?” I asked.

     “I made it up,” he said quite heroically, and cuffed the evil villain.

     We all cheered, even the Darblats and snow monsters who really were a very reactive crowd.

     As the Scorchio began flying her out of the moon-sun-window-gazer-thing, she raised her fist and shouted. I was expecting something like, “Darn you meddling kids!” or “You’ll never escape me!” or “I’m blasting off again!”

     But instead, she said, “The joke’s on you! The red wire was the self-destruct!”

     I thought of the four-man boat.

     “SHOTGUN!”

     I started running for the beach, going as fast as I could even over the slippery hallways and random items strewn about, as Darblats have little sense of tidiness, and over the sand with those little sea shells that you can find at the beach, and I hopped into the boat first, and then Puppy followed, and the Eyrie and his Selket, and then the scaredy-Shoyru, and a Darblat tried to hop in but I shoved him out with my foot because he’d helped to make this mess, plus there wasn’t any room.

     After that we rowed to safety, quite a long ways from the castle, actually, and the Darblats and snow monsters rowed out in their boats but none of us went further because who would want to miss an explosion?

     And we waited.

     And we waited.

     And we waited.

     “You want to play I Spy?”

     “No.”

     We waited some more.

     “Do you think she was just messing with us?” the Eyrie asked, and we were thinking about rowing back to the castle when we heard a huge rumble, and then a “BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!” and there was a very entertaining explosion, complete with fire bombs and icicles shooting in the air, and it was all very triumphant and beautiful.

     “We did it,” Puppy said proudly.

     “We did,” I said. “We stopped a villain and we ate ice cream and we played I Spy and we resolved conflict and we got ten million Neopoints in the process!”

     We were sitting there quite happily, with burning debris falling around us, and this would have been a very beautiful, wonderful happy ending.

     But this story has no happy ending.

     “Not to burst your bubble...” The Eyrie suddenly spoke up, and both our eyes got wide with fear. “But your reward was inside my castle, and you’ve just blown it up.”

     “What?” Puppy shouted. “You mean you kept ALL of it inside your castle? You didn’t invest anywhere or have an offshore account, like at the BANK?”

     The Eyrie shook his head.

     “It’s my castle. I didn’t have a need. So I’m afraid you’ve just destroyed your reward.”

     I watched a burning fireball fall into the sea.

     “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!”

     My mouth was hanging open and my eyes were feeling all big and sad and the fireballs were not near so pretty now that they were filled with Neopoints.

     “But... but... You promised me ten million Neopoints!” I wailed, and I wanted to complain more, but my mouth kept blubbering and my words came out sounding like “Bububububububu...”

     “I do hope we can find some diplomatic solution to all this...”

     Puppy and I looked at each other, and I realized that we both were thinking of the same diplomatic solution.

     So, in the end, which is where I am supposed to finish, we took the Eyrie and scaredy-Shoyru and Selket home with us, and we made them work out the ten million Neopoints. We decided that would be fair. But apparently, the Chia Police accuse you of kidnapping in that certain diplomatic situation, so we had to adopt the two as pets.

     For the first job, we made them make us steak and potatoes for dinner. But they didn’t know how to make that. So they went and got omelettes.

     “You know, Umbreon,” Puppy said as we watched them try to cut the omelettes up and put them on our plates. “I know we didn’t get ten million Neopoints.”

     “Yeah,” I said, thinking of a pool filled with ice cream.

     “But can we really put a price on good winning over evil?” he asked. “And... we did get two new technical members of our family. That could even be better?”

     Our two new pets sat down across from us, and picked up their forks and knives.

     “I did not know I could be so excited for a strange, free, egg-y meal!” the Eyrie exclaimed, and he stuck his fork in his food.

     “I am not comfortable eating something that’s been out in...”

     “Eat your food,” Puppy barked at the Shoyru, and then I raised my head and smiled at him.

     “You know, Puppy, I think you might be going on soft on us,” I said.

     “You’re soft on us.”

     I smiled and started eating my omelette, in my new moderately-priced house, with a basement that smelled like rotten eggs, and my family that really didn’t make a lot of sense, but not much makes sense to me, anyway.

     But I do know that those were some good omelettes.

The End