1~
Several days prior...
There was the usual ebb and flow of human traffic, settling, surging and settling, again, within Crystal Cove Hospital, with concerns, both major and minor, being attended to.
A woman carrying her shoulder bag stepped through the sliding doors and walked into the foyer, studying the activity in the more sedate lobby, people waiting while watching television.
She strolled up to the receptionist's desk and asked the employee on-duty "Excuse me, sir. Would you happen to know where your restrooms are?"
Inwardly, the man saw the question as the set-up to a joke, and thought to say, "Yes, I do," and then, leave it at that, as the punch line, but saw the rudeness in that, and simply answered, "Yes, ma'am, down this hall and to the right."
The woman nodded, thankfully, said, "Thank you," and then, proceeded down the hall.
She entered the bathroom and locked the door behind her, looking around the room. She soon found what she sought, a ventilation grate on a high corner of a wall.
The woman approached the vent, reaching into her bag, at the same time, producing a battery-powered drill capped with a ratchet head small enough to grip the small screws that held the grate against the wall.
With quiet applications of the drill, the grill fell into her free hand, and was placed on a nearby sink.
The woman stepped back to admire her work, and with the dark mouth of the vent open to her, she reached over with her left hand, gripped her right forearm, and detached it cleanly from her elbow with a twist.
She held the limb up to the vent, where it, suddenly, twitched as if a separate, living thing, held on to the edge of the metal opening with magnetic fingertips, and pulled itself deep inside, guided by an intelligence all its own.
As it disappeared in the hospital's ventilation system, the woman reached into her large bag, again, and pulled forth another right forearm, which she twisted into working position against the interface socket of her right elbow.
She then put the grate back into its place on the wall, closing off the mobile arm, and then, she left the bathroom.
While that had happened, in the men's bathroom, a similar task had been performed by another 'patron'. The arm navigated the duct work via a separate computer/sensor array in the hand that scanned, studied, and recorded the labyrinthine vent system, ahead.
Magnetic fingers helped it along the shafts when it needed to go vertically, either up or down, until finally, it reached the floor that it was seeking, and after yards more travel, entered the vent of the hospital room that it was programmed for.
The hand quietly crawled up to the room's grate, like a stalking spider, and then, inched its hand up along the center of the grillwork. Then, it began its work.
In the forearm, where the bulk of its machinery sat, was a fluid tank in its rear, a pump mechanism leading from it, a heating chamber after that, and lastly, a miniature ventilation system that ran from it, to a small exhaust port in the center of the palm.
With that palm held flush against the grate, a clear mist started to exude from the port in slow, tiny clouds, and flow out into the air of the room.
Directly below the vent, a child rested in her bed, unaware that she was being killed by slow measures, and in the course of the next few days, the two Questoids would continue to enter the restrooms and release weaponized forearms into the ventilation system of the hospital, until every hospital room had a secret assassin sitting over their victims, in the darkness.
Deep dish pizza was readily devoured by the encircling gang, sitting in their usual booth in Rude Pizza, like a pack of hunting dogs around a fresh kill. Marcie, with a grin, tore into her slices with a gusto fueled by ambition born of the confidence of a workable plan coming into sharp focus and pending success.
"Well, this must be a new record for longest self-congratulatory grin ever attempted, not counting sleep," Daisy jibed, after noticing that private smile on her friend's face.
Marcie lifted her head from her feeding to address her good-natured ribbing. "Can I help it if we're so close to breaking this mystery wide open?"
She gave a contrite smile to Red, to ease what was said, next. "No offense, Red, but having that misguided machine coming after you was a gift from Heaven."
"Whatever," he muttered, just happy to have his aunt safe, and all of that danger receding far in the rear view mirror of the past.
"Oh, don't be like that," Marcie happily said. "We now have the key we need to enter Quest's last inner sanctum, learn his and Greenman's secrets, and undo all of their plans."
That reply sounded contradictory to Jason, who asked, "Why do you think this is his last base? From what you told us, he had tons of places to hole up in."
"That was the case, until his pal Greenman, literally, changed everything," Marcie explained. "With the old history dead and gone, the events that made Quest into a criminal super-scientist, disappeared with it, along with all of the hidden labs he secretly built, outside of town. Just his luck that the lab that our departed Questoid came from was built in the one place that didn't change with the rest of history, and that he was in it when all of that happened."
"So, it is his last base," said Daisy.
"Correct, and we'll never get a better chance to search for clues, than this one, friends! Think about it! Greenman and Quest will never suspect that one of their robots is such a major security leak!"
"I don't know," Jason mumbled, meekly. Things were going too fast for him. "Couldn't we just hack their base's network? I mean, we don't have to, actually, be inside there, do we?"
His timidity was, of course, lost on Marcie's enthusiasm. "Of course we do, Jason, but put a pin in the hacking idea. We can always get more info that way, too, if we have to. Oh, I love having options!"
Marcie was so giddy with thoughts of upsetting the two heinous men's apple cart and thoroughly outsmarting them, that she completely missed the sheepish looks being passed between Red, Daisy and Jason's faces.
"Um, we can't go, Marcie," Jason said, hating to be the bearer of bad news and slightly wilting from the reaction that he knew that she was going to give.
"Sure you can, Jason," Marcie coaxed. "We'll be careful, I promise."
"No," Red clarified for Jason. "He said that we can go with you, Marcie."
Marcie's misunderstanding thought processes came to a halt. Now that the meaning of that was suddenly clear to her, she came to ask, "How come?"
Daisy spoke up. "We knew that you would want to do something like this, so we talked about it, last night. While we all agree that the idea sounds good, we don't think that we can help you with this, right now. With everybody in town nervous about what's going on in the world, and with what happened with Red's Aunt Hedda, yesterday, we decided that we should probably stay closer to our families, right now, to help see them through this."
Marcie almost shook her head in disbelief. The timing for this couldn't have been worse if Greenman and Quest planned it, themselves. Fate had given them a true gift, now was not to the time to squander it.
"But, guys, you have to come and help me out," she beseeched them. "We're so close to learning what we can about what Greenman is doing. He stole time travel tech to change the past, we know this, but it can't be the only thing he's done. I'm telling you, he has to be planning more, and whatever it is, will most likely do more harm than good. Heck, by changing history, he already destroyed parts of yours and everybody else's families, by indirectly changing their personal histories, which either changed them, or eliminated them from history, altogether."
The shock in her friends' eyes, as the truth of that kind of environment settled over them, shot a pang of regret into Marcie. She didn't want to burden their already worrying hearts with such things, but she needed to impress upon them the seriousness and urgency of the moment, because that was how they would be living, under Greenman's auspices, now, from moment to moment.
They glanced at each other, in silent conference, and then, as one, they quietly shook their heads, taking Marcie's scenario to heart and holding firm to the families that they had left, even if their non-action could threaten them, as well.
Still, she persisted. "I promise that if you help me, then after this, I'll never ask for your help, or disrupt your lives, ever again," she implored, so needful was she for them to join her at the hip on this.
Red sighed. Seeing her like this was disheartening, even for him. "We understand how you feel, Marcie, but this is more important. Besides, I think we did more than enough to help bring that Velma girl and the others back," he reasoned. "Our families have to come first, now."
"Yeah," Jason added. "I mean, you can't blame us for feeling that way, although I will keep trying to access that prototype head for you."
Crestfallen, she knew their answer, but Marcie felt like asking, anyway, just to put a cap on this sorry scene. "Is that's your final say on the matter?"
"I'm afraid so," Daisy said, nodding glumly. "I'm sorry."
Marcie silently looked into their eyes, trying to mentally size them up for further persuasion, but it was a fool's errand. She faced danger with them enough to know their hearts, saw their determination when it led them, and watch them stand beside her in battle, in other dimensions, no less.
Even if they were conceivably wrong for denying her, Marcie knew that she couldn't possibly force them to do anything that they didn't want to do. So, she wisely closed the subject, and slid out from her end of the booth, dejected.
"Where are you going?" Jason asked her, as they watched Marcie head for the front doors.
"I've got a few things to do while you hack into that head, and then, I'm going to go out and stop Greenman, on my own, if I have to," she answered, evenly.
"By yourself?" Daisy asked, incredulously, hoping that the younger girl was just being emotional. "C'mon, Marcie, don't be like this. You know we're on your side. Look, things are just getting a little crazy, that's all. Why don't you just patch things up with your dad and be with him?"
Marcie gave them all a glum glance. "Why do you think I'm doing all of this?" she asked, before she left them and the pizzeria behind.