Patrick gasped. “It’s not fair! Sandy has feet! Squidward has feet!”
“Actually, I have FOUR feet,” Squidward said.
Patrick sat down with a grunt. SpongeBob walked up to him and put his hand on his shoulder. “Patrick, it’s not about feet.”
“What IS this about, then?” Squidward asked.
“It’s about being a TEAM and sticking together no matter WHAT!” SpongeBob said. As he was speaking, trying to inspire the others, no one saw Plankton hide inside SpongeBob’s sock.
Squidward raised his arms in disbelief. “The only way we’re going up there is if some sort of fairy godmother shows up and helps us breathe air!”
The words were scarcely out of Squidward’s mouth when … FLASH! Bubbles the dolphin appeared in a flash of bright light! He floated right in front of them.
“Bubbles?” SpongeBob asked.
“You KNOW this guy?” Squidward asked in disbelief.
“Please don’t hurt us, Bubbles,” SpongeBob pleaded. “We’re sorry we got you fired!”
“HURT you?” Bubbles exclaimed. “I’ve traveled back through time to THANK you. I’d been stuck in that job for eons. I needed a change, but I was too afraid to go for it.”
SpongeBob grinned. “Glad we could help!”
Bubbles said, “And now it is MY turn to help. I can get you safely to the surface. Quick, all of you—jump into my mouth!” He opened his mouth wide.
“Come on, guys!” SpongeBob said enthusiastically. “Let’s go!” He hurried into Bubbles’s mouth.
But the other four hesitated.
Squidward said, “There’s NO WAY I’m climbing into some dolphin’s mouth!”
“Yeah, this guy just wants a free lunch!” Mr. Krabs agreed.
From inside the dolphin’s mouth, SpongeBob pleaded with his friends. “Guys, if Bubbles has the courage to quit his dead-end, nowhere job and travel back through time to help us, then WE need to have the courage to—”
But before SpongeBob could finish his stirring speech, Bubbles swallowed the four of them all at once.
Inside Bubbles’s head, the five friends were jammed together. “I never thought I’d be eaten by a dolphin!” Mr. Krabs groaned.
“No, if he was EATING us,” SpongeBob corrected him, “he’d be chewing us up and we’d be going down there!” He pointed down the dolphin’s throat. “THIS is what you call riding in style!”
“Not a lot of legroom in here,” Squidward complained.
“Well, maybe if you didn’t have FOUR feet,” Patrick said.
Without anyone noticing, Plankton peeked out of SpongeBob’s sock. “Note to self,” he muttered quietly. “Never stow away in a gym sock.”
Above them, Bubbles’s blowhole opened wide. The chamber began to shake. “What’s happening?” Patrick cried. “I feel tingly!”
Bubbles leapt out of the ocean. Then he blew the five friends out of his blowhole in a magical beam of energy!
“YAAAAAHHHH!” they screamed as they flew through the air.
WHOMP! SpongeBob, Patrick, Mr. Krabs, Squidward, and Sandy hit sand, hard. They had landed on a beach. Magical energy crackled away from their bodies.
“Ow! My neck!” Squidward moaned.
Bubbles floated in the air above them. “I have done all I can. The rest is up to you!”
“Thank you very much, Bubbles!” SpongeBob called, waving.
“Farewell, SpongeBob!” Bubbles said. “Now to update my resume!”
The dolphin rocketed into the sky and dis-appeared through a portal that closed behind him.
Down on the beach, Sandy took off her helmet and breathed in the fresh air. “Ahhh,” she sighed. “Sweet not-from-a-tank air! Oh, how I’ve missed you!”
The others took deep breaths through their noses. Squidward wrinkled his. “This place smells awful!”
“I smell a Krabby Patty!” SpongeBob said, sniffing. “It’s coming from over there! Come on, team—let’s go!”
SpongeBob led the way. They immediately saw that the beach was covered in sweaty human sunbathers. “I have a bad feeling about this place,” Mr. Krabs warned.
Patrick stopped next to a man’s foot. To Patrick, the foot seemed gigantic—like a whole creature. “Maybe this guy can help us. He looks smart. He’s got FIVE heads!”
SpongeBob politely addressed the foot. “Sir? Could you tell us where to find a Krabby Patty?”
No answer. Then they heard a snore. SpongeBob saw the rest of the sleeping man. “A giant hairy porpoise! It’s beached! It’s suffering! Poor thing …”
Sandy tried to tell the sea creatures about human beings. “Y’all, those aren’t porpoises, they’re—”
“All hands on deck!” Mr. Krabs cried, ignoring Sandy.
“Oh, brother,” she said, giving up.
“We need to get these guys back in the water!” Mr. Krabs said, waving his claws, directing the others to help him.
“C’mon! PUSH!” SpongeBob said.
The five teammates lined up along one side of the sleeping sunbather and started to push. “Heave!” shouted Mr. Krabs. “Ho!” cried the others. They managed to flip the man onto his face.
“Heave!” shouted Mr. Krabs. “Ho!” cried the others. They flipped him onto his back.
They tried to flip him again, but they were getting tired. The man fell back onto them. From underneath the man, Squidward said, “Well, I guess THIS is where that horrible smell was coming from!”
They tunneled their way into a sand castle and climbed up to the top, where they met a little girl.
“Whoa!” said the surprised girl when she saw the five friends.
“Excuse me,” SpongeBob said. “Do you know where we can get a Krabby Patty around here?”
A shadow fell over the sand castle. The girl’s big brother had arrived. When he saw the four sea creatures and Sandy, he yelled, “Invaders!”
“Uh-oh,” SpongeBob said.
“You get out of my sister’s sand castle!” the boy shouted. He kicked the castle, sending the friends flying in different directions.
Patrick landed on a little girl’s ice cream. To him, it was a GIANT ice cream cone! “Where have you BEEN all my life?” he asked. Then he dove into the ice cream, eating his way through it.
Squidward landed on the slippery, oily back of a sunbather. He tried to walk up her back, but he kept sliding in the suntan oil.
The little girl spotted Patrick in her ice cream cone. “GROSS!” she cried, flinging the cone away with Patrick still in it. The cone hit Squidward and knocked him off the sunbather’s back. He and Patrick landed in the sand several feet away. “Hey, Squidward!” Patrick said happily, ice cream still around his mouth.
SpongeBob and Sandy landed on an umbrella. “Sandy!” SpongeBob said. “The Krabby Patty! I think I see where the Krabby Patty smell’s coming from!” He tried to run off the umbrella, but it collapsed on the man underneath it. When the man opened the umbrella, SpongeBob and Sandy flew through the air and landed in a postcard rack next to Mr. Krabs.
Patrick and Squidward climbed up the rack to join them. “Hey, SpongeBob!” Patrick called. “Did you find the giant ice cream?”
SpongeBob climbed to the very top of the rack and sniffed the air. “Hey, team!” he said. “I smell Krabby Patties! I think they’re THAT way!”
He led them onto a sidewalk. But then they looked up and SCREAMED!
A bunch of bicyclists, skaters, pedestrians, and skateboarders were speeding right toward them!
The team scrambled out of the way just in time.
“Now what?” SpongeBob asked.
“We’re never gonna make it!” Squidward groaned.
SpongeBob looked around for a solution and spotted … a bicycle!
With SpongeBob and Patrick working the pedals and Sandy, Mr. Krabs, and Squidward on the handlebars, they were able to make the bicycle glide right along. To humans on the sidewalk, the bicycle looked like it was moving without a rider.
When a
mother with a baby stroller saw the bike, she stopped and stared. Mr. Krabs frantically rang the bike’s bell—BERING BERING! BERING BERING!—but the mother didn’t budge. So Mr. Krabs jumped from one bike handle to the other, tipping the bike just enough to make it swerve and miss the woman with the stroller.
Unfortunately, that sent the bike straight toward a surfboard leaning against a truck. The bike zoomed up the surfboard and flipped upside down!
“YAHOO!” Patrick whooped.
They all flew off the bike and landed in a toy wagon. WHUMP! The five team members peered up over the edge of the wagon and saw …
… BURGER BEARD’S BURGERMOBILE!
A sign read HOME OF THE KRABBY PATTY. A long line of customers snaked away from the little order window.
“What the …?” Mr. Krabs exclaimed.
“‘Home of the KRABBY PATTY’?” SpongeBob read in utter disbelief.
The customers eagerly devoured the burgers as fast as they were served up. Mr. Krabs read a smaller sign. “Eight ninety-nine for a Krabby Patty? Why didn’t I think of that?”
Inside the Burgermobile, Burger Beard was grilling up Krabby Patties, happily humming to himself. He heard a voice say “YOU!” accusingly.
It was Mr. Krabs. He was standing on a window ledge with SpongeBob, Patrick, Sandy, and Squidward, looking angry. “Cease and desist that unauthorized patty-flipping!”
“Yeah!” SpongeBob added. “That’s MY job!”
Burger Beard dropped his spatula. “How did you get here?” he asked, astonished. “You can’t leave the water and breathe air!”
“Well,” SpongeBob explained politely, “there was this magical dolphin from the future who shot us out of his blowhole, and now—”
“Wait!” Burger Beard interrupted as he flipped the pages of his book. “That’s not in the book! There’s no magical dolphin in this story….”
Mr. Krabs looked confused. “Book? What story?”
Burger Beard grinned, showing a mouthful of rotten teeth. “The story of how Bikini Bottom was brought to its knees when its beloved Krabby Patty formula was stolen by ME, Burger Beard!” He laughed an evil, sickening laugh.
Patrick sat down to listen. “How does it end?” he asked eagerly.
Burger Beard looked in his old book. “Well, let me see,” he said slowly. “It looks like Burger Beard becomes the richest food-truck owner in all the land.”
“But how did you steal the formula?” SpongeBob asked.
Burger Beard shrugged. “It was easy. I simply rewrote the story. And … poof.! Secret formula!” He held up the bottle for them to see. They all gasped.
“Me formuler!” Mr. Krabs croaked.
“You rewrote the story?” Squidward sneered. “That makes no sense. I’m not buying it.”
“Fine!” Burger Beard said. “I’ll show you!”
He pulled out a feather pen and wrote in his moldy old book, reading out loud as he wrote. “‘The brave and handsome Burger Beard BANISHED our poor heroes to become STRANDED on Pelican Island.’”
Energy began to swirl around SpongeBob, Patrick, Sandy, Squidward, and Mr. Krabs. “YAAAAH!” they all screamed.
And then they vanished!
“‘The END!’” Burger Beard said, laughing as he slammed the book closed.
Pelican Island was a bleak, rocky island in the middle of the ocean. The five team members huddled on a gray rock while pelicans screeched and flapped around them. When a pelican clapped its beak near his nose, Squidward yelped.
“This looks bad,” SpongeBob said, worried. “And these guys look hungry. LOOK OUT!”
A pelican buzzed over their heads.
“Nice,” Squidward said sarcastically. “So this is what teamwork gets you.”
“Here!” Mr. Krabs called to the pelicans. “Take Squidward, ya vile beasts!”
Patrick slumped on the rock. “I wanna be on a NEW team,” he whined. “This one’s broken!”
SpongeBob turned to Sandy, desperate for a solution to their predicament. “Sandy!” he said encouragingly. “You’re smart! Do you have any ideas?”
“I ain’t been too smart since I found this ol’ piece of paper,” Sandy said bitterly. She pulled out the page from Burger Beard’s book that said THE END and threw it down.
Plankton popped up from SpongeBob’s sock, looked at the paper, and laughed an evil laugh. No one noticed.
SpongeBob thought hard and got an idea. As the pelican buzzed over their heads again, SpongeBob plucked a feather from its tail.
“Ouch!” cried the pelican.
“Now all we need is some ink,” SpongeBob said. He looked down at the rock near Squidward’s feet. “Which Squidward has helpfully provided!”
Squidward looked embarrassed. “It happens when I’m nervous,” he explained sheepishly.
SpongeBob dipped the sharp tip of the pelican feather into the puddle of Squidward’s black ink.
“Whatever yer gonna do, make it quick!” Mr. Krabs urged. “They’re closin’ in on us!”
“I’m gonna write us an ENDING!” SpongeBob said.
“Will it be a happy ending?” Patrick asked.
SpongeBob nodded and smiled. “It’s going to be SUPERPOWERED!”
He used the feather pen to write on the piece of paper from Burger Beard’s book. When he finished writing, glowing bands of energy swirled around him, Patrick, Sandy, Mr. Krabs, and Squidward. Then they vanished in a burst of energy that scattered the pelicans!
The page SpongeBob had written on still lay on the rock. Plankton crawled out from his hiding place behind a stone and read the paper. Then he grabbed SpongeBob’s feather pen. “I’ll show you a happy ending,” he said, chuckling evilly.
Back at the Burgermobile, Burger Beard was inside his food truck, flipping Krabby Patties. Outside, customers enjoyed the delicious food.
In the air above the beach, a swirling energy portal opened. The customers looked up to see what was happening.
Four superheroes flew out of the portal! Thanks to the ending SpongeBob had written on the page, he, Patrick, Mr. Krabs, and Squidward were human-sized superheroes with incredibly muscular bodies and awesome powers! SpongeBob was THE INVICI-BUBLE! Patrick was MR. SUPER-AWESOMENESS! Mr. Krabs was SIR PINCH-A-LOT! And Squidward was SOUR NOTE!
SpongeBob, Mr. Krabs, and Squidward landed on their feet and struck heroic poses. Patrick posed facing the wrong way. “Da-da-da-DA!” he sang heroically.
“Patrick!” SpongeBob hissed. Patrick turned around and faced the right way.
The crowd stared at them.
Burger Beard stuck his head out the ordering window to see what was going on. SpongeBob said, “We’ll take one secret formula … TO GO!”
“But … but I BANISHED you!” Burger Beard stammered, amazed to see them back.
SpongeBob turned to Squidward. “We need to clear the area, Sour Note! You know what to do!”
Squidward put his hands together and his clarinet assembled itself right in his hands! He took a deep breath and blew. SQUOOORKKK!
When they heard the hideous sound of Sour Note’s clarinet, everyone on the beach doubled over and covered their ears. Screaming, they ran away.
Burger Beard ran out of his food truck to stop the people from leaving. “Wait! Wait! WAIT! HOLD ON! No! No! Me customers!”
Sour Note stopped playing. SpongeBob said to Patrick, “Mr. Superawesomeness, take him down!”
Patrick closed his eyes and concentrated. Two ice cream cones flew out of a couple of kids’ hands and went straight to Patrick. Clouds formed overheard as Patrick raised the two ice cream cones to the sky.
Then he lowered them and licked both cones at the same time.
“Um, maybe we should’ve picked a better superpower for you, Patrick,” SpongeBob admitted.
Burger Beard ran back to his truck, where he grabbed his old book and a feather pen. “Let’s see you get outta THIS one!”
When he saw what Burger Beard was going to do, SpongeBob gasped and turn
ed to Mr. Krabs. Mr. Krabs launched one of his claws at Burger Beard, pinning his hand holding the pen to the side of the truck.
“Huh?” Burger Beard said. He thought of a simple solution. “All right, then,” he said, switching the pen to his other hand.
But Mr. Krabs fired his other claw, pinning that hand, too!
So Burger Beard took the feather pen in his mouth and tried to write in his magical book that way.
“Get ready for the Invincibubble!” SpongeBob cried. He took a deep breath and blew a HUGE bubble out of the wand on his helmet.
The bubble rocketed toward Burger Beard and snagged the magical book from his pinned hand, carrying it away. “NO!” Burger Beard cried, struggling against the two claws holding him captive.
SpongeBob turned to face Squidward, Patrick, and Mr. Krabs. “All right, team! Time for ‘hands in the middle’!”
Unfortunately, to do hands in the middle, Mr. Krabs had to call back one of his claws, which freed one of Burger Beard’s hands. The pirate used his free hand to pry open the remaining claw and escape!
Mr. Krabs put one of his claws on SpongeBob’s hand. Patrick and Squidward put their hands in, and then all four hands were covered by a giant squirrel hand!
It was Sandy!
The big squirrel struck a few poses and did some cool karate moves. “You can call me … THE RODENT!”
Patrick looked around. “Hey, the pirate isn’t here. Where’d he go?”
They all turned to look, and saw that the Burgermobile was gone! All that remained was Mr. Krabs’s other claw, slowly spinning on the ground.
“Oh, no!” Mr. Krabs cried.
SpongeBob looked around for clues that might reveal where Burger Beard had gone. He spotted a pool of golden liquid on the ground. “Aha!” he cried.
He ran his finger through the puddle and licked his finger. Then he smacked his lips, nodding. “It looks like Burger Beard forgot the first rule of mobile fry-cooking: always batten down your grease traps!”
SpongeBob pointed to a trail of golden liquid leading away from the spot where the Burgermobile had been parked. “Follow that grease, team!” Mr. Krabs shouted as his superhero suit sprouted jet engines.
SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water Junior Novel Page 6
