Chapter 24
We settled into something of a routine after that. I brought food in to Lily twice a day, which was all she seemed to need, and spent a few minutes afterward talking quietly to Li Lin-fa in Cantonese. Lily occasionally made sounds when I spoke to her, but they were subtle things -- little sighs or changes in breathing that I might not have noticed had I not been listening for them. There was no repeat of the first day's performance.
The others stopped by every few hours. At my suggestion (and with my careful linguistic coaching) they always introduced themselves with "Nei hou, Li Lin-fa. Ngo giu jo Prime Whatever-my-color-is" before sending her to use the bathroom.
And Shelley, concerned that Lily was spending all her time sitting on a bare floor, took it upon herself to make sure that she got at least some exercise. There was no "Lily, exercise" command that we could discover, but, oddly enough, there was a sort of "follow the leader" command, so twice a day, Shelley teleported in and introduced herself, and then she and Lily did twenty minutes of tai chi together. It was a little uncanny to watch the vids of these exercise sessions and see how perfectly Lily aped Shelley's movements.
The pleasant-dreams project, as I thought of it, turned out to be a complete failure. After some discussion, we came up with about twenty different ways of wishing someone good night. Padma and I agreed that Li Lin-fa had showed up less than two minutes after JB Swift had said his piece and left, but just to be safe, we decided it would be good to wait five minutes between each phrase.
So, wreathed in swirling red mist, Trina crouched in one corner of the stronghouse, just barely within Lily's field of vision, and for nearly two hours she doggedly read each phrase aloud. I tried watching her out of the corner of my eye, and I felt chills run down my spine. Wizzit had gotten both color and voice down perfectly; it really did give the impression that JB Swift was in the room. But in the end, it was all to no avail. Lily gave no sign that she even heard Trina; she simply sat cross-legged staring straight ahead.
Enclave was quiet for those couple of days. We did have one run-in with a monster, but that was all. It wasn't even a particularly nasty monster -- we didn't even need weapons -- although it did manage to break Nicolai's arm.
Shelley, being Shelley, turned his injury into a teaching moment; she had Toby show Padma how to set the break. Padma didn't especially want to learn -- hey, I didn't want to learn how to set fractures when I was Prime Violet, either -- but at HQ, everybody needs to know how to set broken bones. After a half-hour healing coma, Nicolai was good as new.
By the fourth day, Lily had begun telling us that she was "exhausted" and "operating far below optimum functionality". She ate less than half the food I brought for her in the morning, she stumbled once and nearly fell during Shelley's tai chi session, and Padma told us that she had nearly walked into a wall during one of her bathroom breaks.
I have to admit, I was starting to get worried. I thought about it the entire time I was making her nighttime meal, and I had just decided to approach Shelley and Prime Commander about it after Lily had eaten when the monster alarm started ringing. I hurriedly finished scooping the rice into the bowl, set it down, and began running for my room to get my battle vest.
On the way, I happened to pass by Prime Commander's office and saw that he was in. I hesitated, stopped, and then I made a decision that has since come back to haunt me, and which I will regret for the rest of my life. I knocked tentatively on his door. "Excuse me, sir?"
He looked from his computer screen. "Yes, Trevor?"
"Um, it's almost time for Lily's dinner, and I don't know how long I'll be tied up with this monster, so . . .?"
He smiled. "So you want to know whether I'd be willing to feed her?"
"Yes, sir."
"Sure, I'd be happy to. Just tell me what I need to do."
I ran through the commands he needed to give Lily, quickly corrected his pronunciation of "Hello, Li Lin-fa, my name is Prime Commander," and ran off to get ready for the monster battle.
"It's Frankfurt am Main today, kids!" Wizzit declared happily. "Sorry, you're about a month too late for Oktoberfest, and that's in Munich anyway. You're going to their city woods, so enjoy the scenery! Strange monster this time. We've seen it once before, but we've never fought it."
With those cryptic remarks, he sent the six of us into a relatively large, grassy area surrounded by trees of various kinds. It was nearly dark out, but I was able to identify some oak trees that looked really old, and there were a fair number of pines around as well. The oaks were in full fall foliage; it would have been lovely scenery in full daylight.
Except for the tall, skeletally-thin, armored monster standing in the center of the field, surrounded by Zoinks. I groaned. "Not this guy again!"
It was Mr. Creepy-pants, that weird monster that had once tried to kidnap Angela and me. He was waving his sword and making that strange moaning sound of his. As I watched, he drove his blade deep into the heart of one of the ancient oaks, causing the tree to wither instantly.
"Good enough, Wizzit?" Shelley asked grimly.
"Yes, definitely hostile. Go get 'im."
Shelley dashed forward, sword held high. Mr. Creepy-pants had never struck me as a monster that was terribly swift, either physically or mentally, and he proved me right here. Shelley's broadsword was whirling through the air toward him before he had a chance to react. And then her blade passed right through him as if he weren't even there.
Surprised, Shelley overbalanced and nearly fell on her butt. Mr. Creepy-pants got himself turned around and attacked Shelley with his sword. She batted away his rather ineffectual swing and struck at him again. Again, her blade passed right through his body.
"What's going on, Wizzit?" she called out.
Trina stepped forward, triple blaster at the ready. "Let me try." She raised her weapon, aimed, fired. The blast passed right through him and struck the chest of a Zoink, which crashed backward, knocking down several of its fellows.
"Interesting," Wizzit commented. "The rest of you try hitting him."
One by one, each of the rest of us Primes took a whack at Mr. Creepy-pants: Nicolai with his war-axe, Toby with his huge hammer, me with my Escrima stick, and Padma with an axe that almost an exact copy of Nicolai's.
I had to grin at Padma's choice of weapons. Up to now, she had almost exclusively been using a special pair of boots that she had originally made to my specifications, something similar to my sap gloves. Now that she and Nicolai had finally gotten together, though, it was obvious she had chosen her new weapon to be as much like his as possible.
I suppose that if I had been more serious about Padma, all this sudden following-around of Nicolai would probably have caused me a bit of heartache, and maybe I did feel some small pang of jealousy over the whole thing. Jealousy, though, was just poison to a well-functioning team like ours; it would eat away at the heart of our little group if left unchecked.
So I smothered any hurt feelings as best I could. What we do is far too important to allow it to be destroyed over such a petty thing as who has a crush on whom, especially since I had never been more than halfway interested in her anyway. And besides, the last girl I had gotten serious about had died at the hands of Enclave over a year and a half ago. It just wasn't worth it.
Regardless, none of the rest of us had any better luck than Shelley or Trina did. Each of our weapons passed clean through Mr. Creepy-pants as if he were some sort of hologram. Actually, it occurred to me that he might be a hologram or some kind of optical illusion, and I almost said something about it. When Padma took her swing at him, though, she was a little clumsy with her unfamiliar weapon. That allowed the monster to strike her with the flat of his sword, a blow which sent her sprawling. Eh, so much for the hologram idea.
"What is going on with this guy, Wizzit?" Shelley demanded. "Why can't we hit him?"
"It's
like he's a ghost!" Toby said.
"Nope, not a ghost," Wizzit replied promptly. "Creating ghosts is beyond Enclave's current level of technology."
"Then what is he?" Trina asked. "Or can't you figure it out?"
"I'm working on it!" Wizzit replied, sounding hurt at Trina's lack of faith in him. I knew that he would work twice as hard on it just because Trina had said that, and that just might have been why Trina said it in the first place.
"Well, while you're working on it," Shelley said, "let's see what happens when two of us attack him at once." She looked around and then turned to Toby, who was the closest to her at the moment. "Blue, let's go. You and I will go at this thing. The rest of you, start taking apart these Zoinks. Ready, Blue?"
"Ready."
Shelley and Toby began running at Mr. Creepy-pants. Nicolai started swinging his axe at the nearest Zoinks, and Padma followed along behind him. I turned to Trina. "Looks like it's you and me, Green. How do you want to do this?"
"I will shoot any Zoinks I can," she said. "You do what you want, but keep the Zoinks away from me."
I grinned. As if I had expected anything else from her. "Whatever you say."
I proceeded to get all badass on the Zoinks in Trina's immediate vicinity while she took on the ones that were farther away with her triple blaster. It made for a pretty balanced attack, I thought. Off to my left, I could hear Padma and Nicolai struggling to work together.
Padma and I had always made a pretty good team because we trained together so much; our newest happy couple, though, appeared to have a ways to go before they made an efficient fighting unit. Different styles, for one thing: Padma was Tae Kwon Do, and Nicolai was Oyama Karate. And it didn't help that Padma seemed to be trying to hold up her end of the fight and keep Nicolai out of harm's way at the same time. I realize that Padma might possibly be the better fighter of the two, but Nicolai is certainly no slouch. I mean, you can't be a bad fighter and be in the Primes, no matter how good your tech skills.
And I could see that Padma's mother-hen-ishness was causing her to neglect her own defense. I looked up once from pounding a Zoink into the ground to see Padma pulling a Zoink (unnecessarily) away from Nicolai while another Zoink was coming up behind her. "Watch it, Violet," I called out. "Bad guy at six o'clock!"
"Six o'clock?" she said, looking around in confusion. "What does that mean?"
"It means behind you." I drew my blaster and shot the drone in the head. It didn't fall down, not like after one of Trina's triple-blaster hits, but it slowed it down long enough for Padma to turn around and begin kicking it in the chest.
"Nice shot," Trina commented.
"Thanks," I replied, feeling a flush of pride. "I've been practicing."
"So have I." With that, she spun about and struck a Zoink across the neck with a knife-hand chop. "Ha!"
"Looks good," I said as the Zoink staggered back. I ran forward and kicked it in the head with a roundhouse. "Of course, one knife-hand attack isn't going to incapacitate a Zoink."
"No, but it feels good to hit something once in a while."
I laughed. "Sure does, Green."
"Okay, kids," Wizzit said suddenly. "Looks like Red and Blue had discovered the secret to getting to this monster. Two of you have to hit it at the same time."
"Two of us?" Trina repeated.
"Very interesting," Nicolai commented. "Let me make a guess: He is able to shift his base frequency about?"
"Well, duh!" Wizzit retorted, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
"Oh, I see!" came Padma's voice. "He can adapt to any single Prime's frequency and be unaffected by that Prime's attack, but if two Primes attack together, he can't adapt to them both! How very clever!" Somehow I got the feeling that she was referring, not to the monster's ability, but to Nicolai's explanation.
"Exactly!" Nicolai told her warmly. "It's the only possible solution."
"Anyway," Shelley cut in dryly, "it looks like we're going to have to attack this thing in twos. We're already paired up, so let's go: First Blue and me, then Green and Indigo, and then Yellow and Violet. Got it?"
After hearing "Got it, Red," from everybody, Shelley indicated that she and Toby were about to strike. I was pleased to see the monster stagger back from the impact. I started my own run toward Mr. Creepy-pants when Trina stopped me.
"Try shooting him with blaster, Indigo," she suggested. "Hold trigger down for long shot. While you are doing that, I will shoot him myself."
I shrugged. "Okay, Green, if you say so." I drew my blaster, aimed, and fired. We generally use our blasters in short bursts to get stronger, more percussive blasts; the beams gradually lose power the longer they go on. Still, if the purpose of my attack was merely to make him vulnerable to Trina's blaster, maybe it didn't matter how powerful it was.
Soon my blaster was emitting a lance of energy. My aim wasn't exact, but it was close enough that I had him skewered on my blaster beam within a second or two. "Go ahead, Green," I said. Trina raised her triple blaster and fired.
The effect was, as we say in the business, satisfactory. Mr. Creepy-pants spun about from her initial blast. Trina followed it up with several more, while I struggled to hold my blaster beam on him as he flailed around. I wasn't perfect, but of the five shots that Trina snapped off at him, I'd say that three of them hit home.
"Good thinking, Green," I heard Shelley say. "Indigo, continue to hold your beam on him as best you can. Yellow and Violet, go!"
Padma and Nicolai dashed forward, axes at the ready. She hit him high, and he hit him low, and Mr. Creepy-pants hit the ground with his back shortly afterward. As he struggled to his feet, I heard Trina mutter, "There is something odd about this monster . . ."
"Keep the beam on him, Indigo," Shelley called out. "Blue and I are going in again." She and Toby ran forward and hit him with sword and hammer, slamming him back against one of the old oak trees.
"There are no sparks!" Trina said suddenly. "Wizzit, why is he not sparking when we hit him?"
"Good question!" Wizzit chirped. "Indigo, stop shooting while I analyze."
"No problem!" I was, in fact, having increasing difficulty keeping my weapon trained on the monster while continuing to avoid the Zoinks that were threatening to swarm me. I could understand now why Trina was always looking for someone to run interference for her while she used her triple blaster.
I holstered my weapon and began pounding on the nearest Zoinks. Trina joined me; she seemed to have acquired a taste for hitting Zoinks with that knife-hand chop. Of course, she kept her blaster ready in her other hand for any of them that wanted to come back for seconds.
"Okay, kids, I have puzzled it out," Wizzit said a few minutes later. "The reason he isn't sparking is -- uh oh!" And then he did something I had never heard before. Wizzit said a very bad word.
"Wizzit, what is it?" Shelley demanded. "What's going on? What's wrong?"
"Red, prepare to teleport now!" And with a flash of light, Shelley was gone.
I stared at the spot where she had been standing. "Um, what just happened? Please tell me that Wizzit didn't just pull Red out of the battle."
"I think Wizzit just pulled Red out of the battle," Trina said. Then, more sharply, "Indigo! Behind you!"
I turned in time to avoid a Zoink that was rushing me. It tripped over my outstretched foot and went sprawling; I ran over to it and began kicking it in the face.
"Looks like you're in charge now, Yellow," Toby said. "What do you want us to do?"
"I . . . I'm not sure."
I felt my heart sink. I think everyone there knew that Nicolai was not a leader, even Nicolai himself. He had confided in me more than once that he dreaded the day that Shelley would retire and he would be promoted to Orange -- second in command. I hoped his indecision here wouldn't cost us too dearly.
"Monster is killing a
nother tree," Trina said. "Perhaps that is his mission here, to destroy ancient forest. Yellow, I would suggest that some of us be assigned to keep Zoinks under control, and others keep monster off-balance until we figure out how to destroy it."
"Y-yes," Nicolai stammered. "Thank you, Green. That is an excellent suggestion. Can you keep the monster pinned down with your blaster?"
"Will do," she said.
"I'll work on the Zoinks," I volunteered. "Violet, wanna help?"
"Actually," Padma began, "I would prefer . . ."
"Oh hell! I'll help you, Indigo," Toby said impatiently. "Come on, let's go!"
Toby and I used to fight as a team back in the day, before Padma joined us, so taking care of business with him was like old times. He and I had developed a knack for herding the Zoinks together, making it easier to keep track of them and to keep them under control. In just a few minutes, we had cleared them away from Mr. Creepy-pants (and away from Trina) enabling the others to attack him without interference. After that, keeping them in check was child's play.
"He is not weakening!" Padma exclaimed after a few minutes. "Why is he not weakening?"
"Wizzit?" Trina called out. No answer. We hadn't heard from him since he had pulled Shelley away.
"I have it!" Nicolai cried suddenly. "I think he is able to adapt his base frequency better than we thought. A single Prime cannot touch him, but even two or three, he is able to handle. He is able to shift fast enough that the strikes do not seriously harm him."
"How many Primes do we need, then?" Trina asked. "Five? Six? Ten?"
"I don't know. If he starts sparking when we attack, then that will tell us that we have enough, that he cannot change his base frequency fast enough to handle all of us. Then we just keep hitting him until he explodes."
"Let's try all five of us, then!" Toby cried. "You ready to attack, Indigo?"
"Hang on." I had seen a couple of Zoinks that were trying to get to their feet. I ran over and whacked them repeatedly with my Escrima stick. "Okay, now I'm ready."
Toby and I charged. By the time we reached Mr. Creepy-pants, Trina was shooting a blaster beam straight through him, and Nicolai and Padma were ready with their twin axes. We came together and struck him. Mr. Creepy-pants dropped like a stone.
But there were no sparks. Within seconds, he was staggering to his feet again, moaning in his weird voice, "Give uuuuup! You cannot defeeeeeat meeee!"
"Damn that thing!" Trina exclaimed. "Wizzit, where are you?"
"Wizzit," Nicolai called out, "this is team leader, urgent priority. We need your help."
I guess Nicolai's mention of urgent priority finally got Wizzit's attention. "What is it?" he said, sounding distracted.
"We need another Prime. Can you send Red back?"
"No. Red is . . . otherwise occupied." Again, he sounded as if he were giving us only half his attention. This was odd, because I have known him to easily carry on two or three simultaneous conversations before.
"What about Orange, then?" Padma asked.
Trina snorted. "Orange is not available," she said, a note of contempt in her voice. "We all know that."
I hated to admit it, but she was right. Mike is a hellraiser. He always has been, and he probably always will be. He has learned over the years to behave himself pretty well when he's on duty, but when he goes on vacation he has plenty of pent-up steam to blow off. I mean, a lot of steam. If I had to guess, I would say that at the moment he was either blind drunk or with a girl or two or three. Or maybe both. Regardless, I think we all knew he would be in no condition to join us. (And for some reason, this always bothered Trina more than any of the rest of us.)
"What are we going to do, then?" Padma demanded. "We can't destroy this monster by ourselves!"
"Well, we could call in Junior Prime Pink," I suggested.
Nicolai sighed. "It appears we have no choice. Pink it is."
"Wizzit, can you get hold of Junior Prime Pink for me?" I said. "You can pull her cellphone number from my list of contacts."
"Sorry, what?" Wizzit said. "I wasn't paying attention." I frowned. What was going on with him? I repeated my request. "Will do," he said distractedly.
From my belt radio, I heard the sound of a phone ringing, and then someone picked up. "Hello, this is Angela Chiao. Who is this, please?"
"Hey, little sis," I said cheerfully. "How's it going?"
"Trevor!" she squealed. "Hey, big brother, when did you get in town? We weren't expecting you for a couple of weeks!"
"Actually, I'm not in town," I said. "I'm in Germany, and I'm, uh, working."
"Working?" She sounded puzzled. "Oh! You mean you're . . . working? Like . . . working?"
"Yeah. Hang on a sec." Two of the Zoinks had gotten up from the general pile and were converging on me from opposite sides. I ducked down, let them collide, and swept their legs out from under them. Then I pounded each of them a few times with my stick just to make sure they stayed down. "Sorry about that. I had something to take care of. Hey listen, we're a little short-handed out here, and we were wondering whether you'd be willing to come and help us out. You know, like you did at the football game that one time?"
"Sure, I'd love to!" She hesitated. "But . . . um . . . I'm sort of in the middle of a tennis match right now -- we're taking a water break between games -- and Coach would kill me if I just walked out, you know?"
"Oh. Sure, I understand," I said, struggling to keep the disappointment out of my voice. "Look, don't worry about it. We'll manage somehow. I'll, uh, catch you later, okay?"
"Wait! Don't hang up yet! Umm . . ." Angie abruptly switched to Mandarin, speaking more confidentially. "The girl I am playing against is not very good. She cannot return my serves at all. At the moment, I am ahead six-zero, five-zero, and I am serving the next game. Can you wait for five minutes? Or perhaps ten?"
"Sure," I assured her. "That should be fine."
"Okay, sounds like a plan," she said happily, switching back to English. "Coach won't be happy if I don't stick around to watch everyone else finish their matches, but I can deal. Should I call you back at this number when I'm done?"
"No, just go ahead and, you know, get ready. We'll pick you up."
"All right. 'Bye, Trev!"
"'Bye!" I switched to Prime-to-Prime communication. "Pink will be available in ten minutes or so."
"Any chance Pink can get here sooner?" Toby asked. "Ten minutes is a lot of time."
"Pink will get here with all possible speed," I said tartly, "but there's something else going on at the moment. Remember, Pink is not full-time like the rest of us."
"All right, let's get back to work," Nicolai said. "Let's keep the Zoinks under control and this monster off-balance until Pink can get here."
I judged that Toby had the Zoinks pretty well in hand, at least for a few minutes, so I managed to get Wizzit's attention and had him 'port me out to the weapons room and back to pick up Angela's weapons. And I made him promise to bring her out as soon as she had activated.
Toby and I were starting to get bored, and I was just wondering if there were any way we could play Bowling-for-Zoinks, when I saw a burst of pinkish light off to my right.
"Hi, guys!" I heard Angie say. "How can I help?"
"Thank you for coming, Pink," Nicolai said, relief obvious in his voice. "Indigo has weapons for you, and Green will show you what we need you to do."
I handed Angie her blaster and Escrima stick and sent her off to talk to Trina. The plan, as we had worked it out, was for her to pin down the monster with her blaster as I had done earlier, while the rest of us attacked with our assorted weapons. It was a simple plan, easy to execute, and it was designed to keep Angie out of danger.
And, for once, it came off without a hitch. Angela was able to keep her blaster beam centered nicely on target, and when we smacked Mr. Creepy-
pants, the sparks started flying. There wasn't much to it after that. Bam! bam! bam! and nighty-night, Mr. Creepy-pants. (Well, okay, to be accurate, I should put nine or ten more bam!s in there, but you get the idea.)
The Zoinks had cleared out by the time the sparks stopped flying, and Wizzit teleported us out.
Attack Doll 2: Junior Prime Page 24
