Despite the stacking of the odds, Maria and Sara remained undaunted. But if they were to be truly honest, they had to admit that the sight of so many mechanical gremlins, clamoring and pounding the floor, howling and hanging from the rafters, was fairly unnerving.
No matter their vast experience in the weird, this was something they had never before faced. The handful of mecha-monkeys they had encountered in the service corridor had been more than enough to keep them occupied, and the effort of repelling their attackers had temporarily exhausted the sisters. Now they had to face a multitude of the critters, and these adversaries were fired up beyond measure.
Previously, there had been a sense of mischief to the behaviors of the mecha-monkeys, which mildly tempered their aggression. That element of tomfoolery was nowhere to be seen at the moment, however, and there could be no mistaking the malicious intentions of the gremlins. With each passing moment, the tumultuous frenzy increased, and the sound of the horde’s fury reverberated throughout the stage area.
“Well, this is a bit… uh… unsettling,” Maria said, putting it mildly.
Withering beneath the onslaught of these strange robots, crafted by the nefarious hands of Jasper, never crossed the minds of Maria and Sara. In the face of such daunting opposition, failure was an option that remained firmly off the table. No matter what they faced, they would get their dad out of this jam.
“Look!” Sara cried, pointing toward a section of the gathered mecha-monkeys.
Amid this sea of rowdy robots, a ray of hope emerged. Among their ranks, one of the gremlins had stepped forward, closer to the humans. But its steps were slow, and its behavior was erratic. It lurched forward with jerky movements, and after a moment of off-kilter motion, it crashed to the floor, face first, remaining utterly still.
“What happened to it?” Sara asked.
“Of course! Its battery power must have finally drained!” Double H exclaimed, clapping her hands with excitement. “That must be it!”
“Well, that’s great, but what about the rest of them? They’re still going strong,” Maria pointed out. “One less gremlin isn’t a very big help.”
Even as she spoke, a second mecha-monkey seemed to exhaust its remaining battery power. It stepped forward, spun once in a wobbly circle, and then fell to the floor in a heap, releasing hold of a screwdriver it had grasped in one hand.
“Jasper maintained a very tight schedule for swapping out the batteries in the mecha-monkeys,” Double H explained. “They were programmed to report to the workshop every other day, and he would remove their current batteries for charging, replacing them with fresh ones. Since it’s been a few days-”
“The batteries are running on the last of their power!” Maria concluded.
“That’s right! If a couple of these little guys have already run out of juice, that means they should all be exhausting the last of their power supplies soon,” Double H said. “They must be running on fumes!”
Jasper’s battery technology, while certainly amazing, paled in comparison to Lefty O’Houlihan’s SunTech power cells. The batteries in the mecha-monkeys could only run for so long. Without Jasper’s routine swapping of the drained batteries for freshly charged ones, the gremlins were bound to run out of energy.
“It’s great that their batteries are failing, but we don’t have the time to wait for them to all wind down. Dad needs our help right now,” Sara said.
Above them, Chief Fresco continued to dangle in the chair he was bound to, high above the stage - but now he was violently swaying from side to side!
The mecha-monkeys, in their increased agitation, had begun pushing and pulling at the rope that had hoisted the chair. There were perhaps a half dozen of them, clambering around up there, jostling one another and making the whole setup (which was sketchy to begin with) quite unstable.
Chief Fresco’s eyes bulged with alarm, and he struggled against the duct tape that bound him, but with no success. It seemed he was trying to shout protests against the gag that bound him, but it was impossible to hear him with the clamoring of his captors.
“If those maniacs keep this up, he’s going to fall from up there!” Maria shouted.
“There’s no time to waste – we’ve got to go now, even if the batteries haven’t yet run down in the majority of these critters,” Sara said, bracing herself to sprint. “Let’s go!”
“Wait!” Double H shouted. She had reached to her belt and withdrawn several of the cylindrical fireworks she kept there. “We can use smoke to conceal our movements. It can give us an advantage!”
The sisters nodded in agreement to the plan, though they were anxious to get going, bouncing upon the balls of their feet and frantically eyeing their helpless father.
“Hold your breath!” Double H warned.
Without further delay, she threw the handful of capsules to the floor, breaking them open upon the stage at a place equidistant to herself and the sisters. The fireworks erupted at once, spilling out heavy smoke that enveloped the three of them.
Maria and Sara had done as Double H had instructed, taking a big gulp of air just before she threw the capsules. They immediately found themselves immersed in a whirling plume of thick, colorful vapor, swirling around them and cutting their visibility to nearly zero.
They had seen Double H’s smoke pellets in action before, but this time she had thrown several at once, creating a much larger effect. The smoke, having been artificially manufactured, was not particularly abrasive to the eyes, but it did make things awfully hard to see.
Maria and Sara grasped one another’s hand, and then latched onto the cape of Double H, the silhouette of whom they could just barely make out.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Unseen Assailants
The Green Beans, Volume 5: The Phantom of the Auditorium Page 26
