Shoyru didn't move or speak for another whole day. His eyes were flooded with
constant tears that spilled all around him. He didn't care to eat a morsel.
He didn't even go to sleep, or try and look for Wingman or Aqua. He just lay
there beside Felicity, gaping at her and crying every second.
"Why... why could this have happened?" Shoyru gasped.
Kacheek and Voltager tried to comfort him, Voltager with some difficulty.
"Y... you're brother, Voltager... destroyed Felicity..." Shoyru continued,
then his voice tailed off.
Kacheek leapt to his feet.
"No, Shoyru!" he snapped. "Felicity isn't a goner, I know it! She's in the
same condition you were when you tumbled out of the courtroom! She can't be...
she needs treating!"
"Look, a whole day has passed and she hasn't moved a muscle! She IS gone!"
More tears flew from his face.
"Leave this to me!"
Shoyru spun round and gasped; Voltager stepped forward, her arms sparkling
with electricity.
"Don't!" he wailed. "Felicity won't survive after that anyway!"
"Then how come YOU did?"
"The jolt didn't even touch me! It must've hit the computer, but it didn't
hit me! And I never had a mysterious illness either! It was poisoning after
careless drinking from cans in the street! Extreme poisoning, come to that.
It's all over now, because I seem fine!"
Voltager took a step back. Surely a jolt as powerful as that at the hospital
would have started the fire and that miraculous healing in the first place?
But no, miracles in this case don't exist. She remembered Inferno, grabbing
her by the throat and yelling. "WHAT-DO-YOU-THINK-STARTED-THE-FIRE?" She swallowed,
breathlessly.
"You mean..."
"Yes!" Shoyru fell to the ground, dragging Kacheek with him for some company.
Kacheek, although taken by surprise, understood Shoyru's problem. Voltager thought
hard. What could have cured his illness in the first place? Did he actually
have a serious illness?
Voltager stepped up to Shoyru, wobbling and turning to see whether Felicity
was coming round. Out of the satchel that was still on Felicity's back Voltager
took some bandages and wrapped them around the burns and cuts.
"At least," she muttered, shakily, "we could cover her wounds, treat her and
hope for the best."
At last, Shoyru stood up, accidentally knocking Kacheek out of the way headfirst
into a burned tree.
"Maybe you're right," he said. "But don't let's keep our hopes up." He brought
Kacheek back to him, still crying, and headed back to the town with Felicity
propped up on his back.
Kacheek tried to comfort Shoyru.
"Shoyru, every time we're attacked you end up this way, and you're still alive!
Look at you now. Remember when we were in the hospital? You survived even when
the building blew up. You were in a worse state than Felicity. And look at you
now!"
"But," said Shoyru, getting red in the face with fear, "no one knows what
the Shoyru Gang is dreaming up. That might have been a poisonous attack!"
"Oh to blazes with that!" Kacheek squeaked as they continued their struggle
back to the town. "The Shoyru Gang only have Shoyries! Shoyru Gang!"
"What about the poisonous PetPets?" Shoyru cried, lifting his wings and holding
Felicity with his tail to stop her falling off his back. "They could inject
powerful venom!"
"Enough," said Voltager. She couldn't stand it any longer, so decided she
might as well get it over with. "I'll carry her from here." She slipped Felicity
off Shoyru's back and onto hers. The walk sped up a little this way and they
reached the Japanese town again. They burst in through the gates and tumbled
into the local hospital nearby, keeping a close eye out for fake officers.
A familiar, green Gelert greeted them at the door, quivering. She eyed the
team with wide eyes to stop them quavering in fear.
"I... I think I'll take it from here," she said, nervously taking Felicity,
who still looked pretty bad, and placing her onto a smallish stretcher nearby.
"Please sit down," she continued, waving her long ears in the direction of six,
cushioned, wooden arm chairs sitting along a curved line in a Waiting Room.
In the room were magazines on a table, cushions and pre-school toys in one corner
and pink, flower wallpaper on the walls.
"Are you Geraldine?" asked Voltager quickly. "I think I recogn...."
"No, I'm her mother, Linda," she said, quietly. "She told me all about what
happened over there. She reckons that an inadvertent electric shock from you
caused it..."
"No! It was Inferno!" Voltager squealed in a high voice. Linda took a step
back, startled.
"Please control yourself dear," she said in a small voice. "I was quite mistaken.
But I must say I don't know who Inferno is, he can't be one of the Shoyru Gang
team-mates. I've never even heard his name. Please sit down, do."
Shoyru peered anxiously over the stretcher, then entered the waiting room
and sank into a chair, deep in thought. Voltager and Kacheek seated themselves
next to Shoyru.
"Shoyru, please cheer up," said Kacheek in a hurt tone of voice. "She'll be
fine after a rest and a good Potion, if possible."
"Inferno could've destroyed her," whispered Shoyru miserably in a broken sob.
"She looks more hurt than I ever was. According to the computer in the emergency
hospital that was destroyed, I nearly had it, too!"
"That was probably a computer mistake!" howled Kacheek, banging the arm of
his chair. "Why, when we fell from the building and landed about a dozen feet
from the hospital ward upstairs you opened your eyes and seemed to be fine!
And the temperature? Extreme heat radiating from Voltager's tarred body! She
had a lot of electricity in her tar coat at the time!"
"Goldy broke the fall!" Shoyru hollered, clapping his hands to his head, tear
streaked with horror. "I only just survived the fall. It couldn't have revived
me! I might still have that Neomonia or whatever this thing is called. The first
thing that happened is temporary memory loss, the next, confusion, and..."
"Fainting," put in Voltager.
"Yes, the third, a dead faint," wailed Shoyru. "I'll never know what's going
to happen next! For all I know it could be terminal!"
"Shoyru," Kacheek squeaked. "You're cured of the disease! How can anything
else happen as a symptom of the illness?""
"How can I be?" Shoyru cried, flinging his arms around the arms of his chair
and rocked it violently back and forth. "Who knows what will happen to me next!
It might be very discreet at times, in other words, yes I might well forget
for a minute that I've got it and..."
At once Linda bustled into the waiting room, frowning. This time she was wearing
a nurse's cap with a Red Cross and a scrawled signature on the cross.
"Will everyone in the waiting room please reduce the noise?" she asked reasonably.
After Shoyru had calmed his voice, the Gelert smiled and left the room.
There was a pause.
"She was smiling," Voltager piped in, with a hopeful face. "Felicity might
have looked like she was finished, but she was just very, very, badly injured.
She should be fine."
"There's nothing about her smile that tells me anything about Felicity," Shoyru
said in a small voice. "I'm worried, Kacheek. What happened to Wingman? He could
hurt himself too!"
"Kacheek, I managed to survive Inferno on my own," Voltager pointed out. Kacheek
nodded dimly, then turned to Shoyru as he started speaking again.
"This gang wouldn't survive many more attacks," Shoyru said in a quaking voice,
trying not to scream. "What about the Aisha judge? She fought our case and had
that fake policeman in jail. If... if she was fighting our case, then she can't
be a judge, she... she knew that we were innocent and took the judge's job to...
to fight our case and she..."
"She got hit pretty badly," Voltager said weakly. Kacheek nodded again, blinking
backward a tear from his eye.
"Precisely," Shoyru cried in huge, broken sobs, hit the floor with his fist
and collapsed into his chair in horror.
Suddenly the door swung open, and a dark red Gelert, fuming in rage, burst
into the waiting room, waving his tail and long ears around, catching Kacheek
and Voltager sending them clean off their chairs and onto the floor.
"Be quiet in there!" he shrieked, slapping Kacheek clean off his seat with
his ears and whipping Voltager's face with his tail.
"But it wasn't us who..." Kacheek started, rubbing himself where he was hit.
"DON'T ANSWER BACK!"
"Gerald, dear!" came a familiar voice. "Come back in here with me and lend
a hand will you? This Shoyru needs a little bone fixing. Please keep the noise
down dear, you're distracting me from my work."
"Okay Mum," the Gelert called, darting out of the waiting room and into the
medical room.
Shoyru's stomach gave a horrible lurch. Bone fixing? That's bad enough,
he thought.
"We're going to be here all night when we should be looking for Wingman, Aqua,
Goldy and Red!" he blurted out frantically, before he could stop himself.
"Calm down Shoyru, pal!" Kacheek squeaked. "Felicity's bones just need a little
fix. Then she should be fine! As for Wingman and the others, well, they should
all be together by now!"
"They might've been destroyed by the Shoyru Gan..."
"Please stop worrying yourself," said Kacheek, shivering. "We might've known
that many Shoyru and other NeoPets alike may have been destroyed by the Shoyru
Gang itself. But take a look at Wingman, Goldy and Red, they're brave enough
to tackle the troubles of the underworld!"
To be continued... | 
