The Creature Department

by Robert Paul Weston

  “You mean me?” said a loose, gravelly voice from behind the stage. It had come from the screen, which suddenly flickered to life.

  “That’s him,” said Elliot, pointing to the huge, shadowy face. “It’s the Chief!”

  “I hope you realize,” said Sir William, “that is a private screen. Only DENKi-3000 employees can use that!”

  “Correct,” said the Chief. “And as of today, I’m not only an employee, I’m the boss. Or rather, the Chief.”

  Sir William felt his wrinkly old skin getting hot. “What do you mean, the boss? This is still my company, you thief!”

  “He’s right,” said the shareholder spokesman, raising his voice to address the shadowy face looming over the room. “You can’t take any action until the shareholders have voted!”

  “I wish it didn’t have to be this way, I really do,” said the Chief (unconvincingly). “But, you see, I’ve grown impatient. I’m afraid I’ve decided to go ahead with a hostile takeover. And when I say hostile, I mean it.”

  He did.

  Right on cue, a whole army of Quazicom security robots came whirring out from behind the stage. They surrounded the executives, the shareholders, even Leslie and Elliot.

  “We are awfully sorry for any inconvenience that may arise as a result of your unemployment,” a robot announced to the room, “but effective immediately, all current DENKi-3000 employees are fired.”

  “Ha ha!” laughed Monica Burkenkrantz, dancing a little jig on the stage. “That means you, Sniffledon! And guess who’s finally up for promotion! Me, me, me!”

  “Actually,” said the Chief. “I’ve decided to fire you too.”

  “WHAT?!” Monica froze mid-jig, one leg sticking out and her hands waving fruitlessly in the air.

  Sir William snickered. She looks rijigulous! he thought.

  “We would like to ask all the DENKi-3000 employees,” said one of the robots, “to kindly accompany us in vacating the premises.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” said Sir William.

  “We haven’t even voted yet,” moaned one of the shareholders. “What’s the point of being a shareholder if you don’t get to vote on anything?”

  “Please,” said a robot, “we would appreciate it if you didn’t make a fuss. We have been programmed to zap anyone who doesn’t comply and we would hate to have to—”

  ZZZAP!

  “Ow!” cried a shareholder at the back. It was the same old woman who had showed off her original DENKi-3000 electric pencil in the previous meeting. She leapt to her feet and kicked one of the robots in the face (although it didn’t really have one). “What’d you do that for?!”

  “Awfully sorry,” said the offending robot. “Just a quick test of my zapper.”

  Sir William was outraged. First, hijacking a private screen and now zapping an unsuspecting shareholder (not to mention firing the whole company). He shook his fist at the Chief’s shadowy face. “You’ll never get away with this, you villain!”

  When Sir William said this, Professor von Doppler switched on his rocket boots. “This is it!” he cried. “It’s really happening!” He pointed excitedly to the screen. “A menacing arch-villain!” He pointed to the robots. “His insidious henchmen!” He pointed to the shareholder who had just been zapped. “A damsel in distress!” He pointed to Sir William. “There’s even a kindly old man shaking his fist and saying, ‘You’ll never get away with this!’ It’s all absolutely perfect!”

  Monica Burkenkrantz folded her arms. “We have very different measures of perfection,” she grumbled.

  “I mean it’s just like a comic book, and since I’m wearing rocket boots and a cape—well, sort of a cape since it’s really just my lab coat—then that makes me the hero!” He stood up a little taller. “Ahem! Good citizens of DENKi-3000, fear not! It is clear that it has come down to me, the Amazing Captain von Venture, to save the—”

  ZZZZZAP!

  Several robots shot him with their fizzling blue rays, and he fell flat on his back.

  “Uncle Archie!” Elliot ran and knelt beside him, cradling the professor’s head. Luckily, his uncle was only stunned unconscious, but Elliot was still so angry he was ready to fight every last Quazicom robot single-handed.

  However, he didn’t have to because the back door of the conference room flew open and Carl, the friendly security guard, dashed in (looking rather odd). The man was wearing some sort of scuba-diving wet suit. Except this one wasn’t made of neoprene; it was made from bicycle inner tubes. Carl had mummified himself in them!

  Several robots penned him in. “We are awfully sorry, but we will have to ask you to halt.”

  “Sorry,” said Carl. “No can do.” He stepped over the robots even as they zap-zap-zapped him. But the zapping had no effect. He was protected by his homemade rubber ninja suit.

  “I don’t wanna alarm anyone,” he said, “but I just came to say that the company is under attack.”

  “Uh, yeah,” said Leslie. She rolled her eyes from the giant shadowy head to the multitude of robots to the unconscious Professor von Doppler. “We kinda noticed.”

  “Be reasonable,” said the Chief. “It’s not an ‘attack.’ It’s simply Quazicom’s aggressive approach to business.”

  “Not an attack?” asked Carl. “Then what do you call that?” He pointed out the window.

  In the courtyard below, the old mansion was beset on all sides—on five sides, in fact—one for each tribe of Ghorkolians. They were swarming up to it, armed with nets and nasty-looking weapons.

  “What are those things?!” cried one of the shareholders.

  “Ghorks,” said Elliot.

  “Whatever they are,” said Carl, “they’re attacking the R&D Department. And if we’re going to keep this company, then we’re going to have to fight for it!”

  A couple of robots tried zapping him again, but they trundled off sadly when the electricity had no effect.

  “One question,” said the shareholder spokesman. “What’s a ghork?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” asked Leslie.

  “It’s a creature,” said Elliot. “A bad one.”

  “That’s it!” cried Sir William. “That’s the thing I forgot! This whole company was started by the Creature Department!”

  “They might have started it,” said the Chief, “but now it’s about to end—with me.” With this dire warning, his mysterious silhouette vanished from the screen.

  “We’d better get down to the Creature Department,” said Sir William. He looked out at the mansion under siege below. “Those are our employees down there, and we have to protect them.”

  Carl, along with the other rubber-suited security guards, was able to protect the shareholders from the Quazicom robots. Everyone was ferried down to the Creature Department via the expectavator.

  Some of the shareholders fainted when they came face-to-face with Gabe, but they soon calmed down when they saw how harmless (and depressed) he was. Eventually, everyone had congregated in the broad corridor outside the laboratory.

  The shareholder spokesman looked around at the patterned wallpaper, the ornately carved woodwork, and the filigreed light fixtures. “Looks like some kind of haunted old mansion!”

  “Don’t worry,” Elliot told him. “This building is definitely not haunted.”

  Unfortunately, that was when Jean-Remy, Patti Mudmeyer, Gügor, Charlton the cycloptosaurus, and Harrumphrey Grouse-man came out from the laboratory.

  “AAAIIEEEGH!”

  Every one of the shareholders screamed, en masse. The scream was so loud, it awoke the professor.

  “Did I save the day?” he asked.

  “Not quite,” Leslie informed him, “but it was a nice try.”

  “I—I—I thought you said this p-place w-w-wasn’t haunted,” said the shareholder spokesman.

  Sir William
rapped the man’s knee with his cane. “Buck up, you coward! Those aren’t ghosts; they’re creatures.”

  The professor rose groggily to his feet. “How are the defenses holding up?”

  “Ze ghorks have not yet found a way in,” Jean-Remy told him, “but we fear it is only ze matter of—”

  CRASH!

  Behind the shareholders, Gabe quietly exited the expectavator. Inside, ghorks had broken through the ceiling and a number of mottled green arms flailed down from above. Gabe reached in and shut the doors.

  “I doubt that will hold them for very long,” he droned.

  Indeed, the doors began to rattle and large, fist-shaped impressions appeared from the other side of the metal.

  “Everyone into the laboratory!” called the professor, clunking off in his rocket boots.

  It was a historic moment: the first time so many non-creatures had ever set foot in the Creature Department. Sadly, there was no time to commemorate the occasion.

  “We need a plan,” the professor announced.

  “Maybe I could talk to them,” suggested Monica Burken-krantz. “I think they respect me.”

  “Is that why the Chief fired you?” asked Elliot.

  “Good point.” She looked to the professor. “So what’s the plan?”

  Elliot’s uncle believed the best means of fighting back was to use whatever inventions they had on hand. Unfortunately, most of them were broken, unfinished, or entirely ineffective as defensive weaponry.

  “I have two other pairs of rocket boots,” the professor announced, “but they’re only testing models that—well, never got off the ground.”

  He had them in a dusty box from his office, and when he took them out, there were sighs of disappointment.

  “Why are they so small?” asked Harrumphrey.

  “I told you, they’re testing models.”

  “Definitely won’t fit me,” said Gügor.

  “I know,” said the professor, “but they will fit a couple of kids.”

  “Us?” asked Elliot.

  “Of course! What good is a rocket-propelled superhero like me without a couple of trusty sidekicks?”

  The boots fit perfectly, and as soon as they were fueled with essences, they rumbled to life.

  PHWWOOSH!

  Elliot and Leslie took to the air. The rocket boots made flying seem easy, as if it were the most natural, most beautiful thing in the world—and perhaps it was.

  Next, they sent shareholders and creatures, one by one, through the sort-of-invisibility machine (as it was now being called). It was thought that if everyone was a little bit blurry, they might evade capture.

  “You really need to work on the name,” said the shareholder spokesman after being turned into a hazy blob. “What about the translucinator or the haze-a-tron? Something catchy like that. We’ll never sell anything called a sort-of-invisibility machine.”

  “I don’t wanna get touchy,” said Patti, “but this really ain’t the time for nomenclature.”

  It certainly wasn’t! At that moment, the laboratory doors splintered to pieces and a great terrifying pother of ghorks came roaring and snarling into the Creature Department.

  CHAPTER 29

  In which the professor recommends adult supervision and Leslie and Elliot boost the signal

  It would go down in the history of creaturedom as the Battle of Bickleburgh. Sadly, the ghorks were the overwhelming favorites to win. Certainly, they were clumsy, boorish creatures, incapable of helping one another (even in a united cause), but none of that mattered. They made up for their gracelessness with sheer numbers.

  It also should be stressed that corporate executives and company shareholders aren’t known to be very good in a fight. Almost instantly, nearly every one of them was caught in a Ghorkolian net and hoisted up like a fisherman’s catch.

  Harrumphrey, on the other hand, surprised everyone with his fighting prowess. With his tail, his horns, and his low center of gravity, he was not only agile but quite adept at tripping the ghorks, causing comical domino effects that felled many of the creatures at once.

  Patti Mudmeyer, meanwhile, was an expert marksman with her scalp clay.

  “Me and my sisters used to ping river nymphs back in the day,” she told the others, slinging a headful of resin into the eyes of an eye ghork and right up the nose of another (a nasal ghork, of course).

  By far, the finest fighter among them was Gügor. He gave every ghork he met a thorough crash course in rickum ruckery (with emphasis on the word crash). With the horrid creatures clinging to his arms, his legs, and even to his face, he stumbled backward and crashed straight through the wall.

  Daylight streamed in through the huge Gügor-shaped hole, revealing yet another battle in the courtyard beyond, this one between the robotic security of Quazicom and the human security of DENKi-3000 (in rubber ninja suits).

  Meanwhile, back in the laboratory, the creatures who had been blurrified by the sort-of-invisibility machine were able to sneak up on some of the ghorks. Unfortunately, their haziness was useless against the eye ghorks, whose sensitive peepers could see them coming in spite of their vagueness. Soon, they too were rounded up into an indistinct mass of fuzziness, wriggling and jostling in the Ghorkolian nets.

  Elliot, whizzing above the bedlam in his rocket boots, saw that at the end of the room, the Five Ghorks—Grinner, Adenoid Jack, Iris, Digits, and Wingnut—were directing the action like petulant generals.

  They had their former employer, Monica Burkenkrantz, tangled tightly in a net at their smelly feet. It was clear she had been very wrong: The ghorks didn’t respect her. Now and again, one of them would poke her with a toe, making her yelp indignantly (much to their delight). Elliot was surprised to find himself feeling sorry for her.

  We have to stop this, he thought. We can’t let them win.

  But the creatures of the Creature Department were losing the battle. Nearly all the smaller creatures had been captured, and without their help the larger ones were running out of steam. Only Jean-Remy and the others who could take to the air remained capable of defending the laboratory.

  “Look!” cried Leslie, pointing to the top of the teleportation device and the second-most-comfortable chair in the universe. Sir William and Harrumphrey were standing on its plush leather arms, batting away ghorks as best they could.

  “Maybe,” said Leslie, “we can teleport everyone out of here.”

  “How?” asked Elliot. “You gotta relax for it to work, remember? How’re you gonna do that when you’re surrounded by ghorks?”

  “There’s also the fact that we have no idea where it’ll send us.”

  “Plus,” Elliot added, “if we leave the Creature Department now, we’ll never get it back!”

  “Take that, you monster!” Sir William bravely brandished his cane and rapped a large ear ghork square on its forehead. The creature tumbled off the machine, thumped on its butt, and cried like a baby.

  “I’ve got it!” said Elliot. He swooped down and collected the tele-pathetic helmet, rising again to the scaffolding above the laboratory floor.

  Leslie rocketed up to join him. “Of course! They’re a bunch of crybabies! Remember in the tunnels? How they ran off wailing and moaning? I’ll bet they’d be super-sensitive to the tele-pathetic helmet.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping.” Elliot donned the helmet and beamed pure sadness at them—and it worked! (Well, at least a little.) The hoard paused, in a slightly melancholic way, but then went right on fighting.

  Elliot tried again. Same result.

  “There are too many of them,” said Leslie. “We need to boost the signal.”

  “But how?” Elliot asked.

  Leslie snapped her fingers. “The roof of the North Tower! There’s that big antenna.”

  “Good idea, but we’d better get up there fast—we’
ve got company.”

  A group of ghorks was coming along the scaffolds, while on the other side was a group of Quazicom security robots.

  “Wait for us!” said the professor. He soared up to join them, followed by Jean-Remy. “If you intend to hook up a tele-pathetic helmet to a giant transmitter on the roof of a tall building, it’s always advisable to have adult supervision.” He thunked down on the scaffolds, hands on his hips. “But fear not! The Amazing Captain von Venture is sure to put the super in supervis—”

  ZZZZAP!

  Professor von Doppler collapsed unconscious (again).

  “Uncle Archie!”

  Jean-Remy sighed. “He is a brilliant inventor, but he is not very good at saving ze day.”

  “Awfully sorry,” said the robot responsible for this latest zapping, “but I’m afraid we’ll have to ask you to climb into the nets of our associates.”

  “No way!” said Leslie, blasting off. She spun around to where Elliot knelt with his uncle. “We have to go! We have to get to the roof!”

  Jean-Remy flapped out over the railing, “Leslie is right! We must—”

  A huge butterfly net swooped up and caught Jean-Remy like an insect.

  “Go on!” he urged them, even as the ghorks were tugging him out of the air. “Plug ze transmitter into ze back of ze helmet. Good luck!”

  Elliot knew he had no choice but to leave his uncle, at least for now. He dove off the platform amid swipes from Ghorkolian fists and wild arcs of blue electricity. Joining Leslie in the air, he soared with her across the laboratory and saw that nearly everyone—Patti, the Preston Brothers, Harrumphrey, and even Gügor and Sir William himself—had been captured.

  The two of them swooped out through the hole Gügor had made in the wall. Outside, Carl and the other security guards were losing the upper hand, their protective rubber suits coming to pieces. Without their help, Charlton the cycloptosaurus could hardly fight on all by himself. Already, his bulky red form was ensnared in countless layers of netting.

  Leslie and Elliot were the only ones left.