This fic takes place during and after Insert Implausible Search Pattern Here. So don't read this until you have read it or you'll suffer major spoilers.
I do not own any characters besides Jared, Chloe, Chevila and the LPGB. I wrote this particular footnotes story with permission from Hakurei Ryuu
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who that it's naming.'
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.
~The Time's They Are A-Changin', Bob Dylan
"Oh no, my baby, my baby!" Jared cried as he slumped to the floor of the warehouse where the Society had recently battled Death, watching as Charis, Pete and Chloe drug chains all over the wreckage of his beloved Chevrolet pick-up.
"It's okay Jared, you can fix her..." Chloe said, favoring her left arm, still not quite fully healed from when Retsa had broken it.
"It's not even considered fixing at this point! I can't do anything short of completely rebuilding her! Not to mention the cannonizer took a direct hit, that thing has very delicate circuitry! I don't know if I'll be able to get that working again without reconstructing it!" Jared ranted as he walked around the vehicle, surveying the damage.
"Smashed with my own freakin' Boomhammer, I can't believe it, that was so careless of me..."
"Jared, don't you think you are being a little bit hard on yourself, after all, it's just a truck?" Pete added, linking a chain over the crumpled driver side door.
Jared whirled around to face Pete, eyes were glowing like a madman. Pete instantly went back to work.
Before Jared could begin his verbal rebuke, Charis flagged him down from the other side of the wreckage of the truck.
"Okay Jared, I think we're good here. Chevila is ready for transport."
"About time," Chloe muttered, pulling out her plothole generator and opening a portal to Jared's tech lab.
Jared picked up the central chain that linked to all of the other chains that attached to the pick-up as he walked through the portal, once he was back in his lab he attached it to a hydraulic lift system, which proceeded to reel in the chain in order to drag Chevila back into the lab.
"Anything we can do to help?" Pete asked as he, Charis and Chloe guided the truck through the portal.
"No, you've done enough... thank you." Jared muttered as he set to work removing his newly constructed model II Boomhammer from where it was embedded in the hood of the vehicle.
"Here, let me help you with that," Pete said, grabbing onto the handle of the Boomhammer and giving it a tug. The hammer didn't even budge.
"Dang, that Death guy can really swing a hammer!" Pete exclaimed as he and Jared both strained against the hammer with all their might.
"Any of you know where I could find the jaws of life?" Jared asked.
"This is ridiculous," Chloe said, "I think between the four of us we can get that hammer removed."
So Chloe and Charis gripped the hammer.
"On a count of three, pull." Charis said. So the agents counted and gave the hammer a mighty tug. It pulled out free with a massive force; launching into the air. Jared watched with a mixture of fascination and horror as the hammer flew across his lab.
"Please don't hit the wall..." Jared pleaded, "I just got it fixed, and Doug isn't interested in sharing lab space with me again."
Fortunately for Jared, the hammer dropped short of the wall. Unfortunately it landed inside the Little Plastic Green Beret's toy box, which quickly exploded.
Little plastic men filled the air as the sonic force of Jared's hammer blew them out of their barracks.
"Where under attack!" General Idea shouted, picking himself up from the place he landed and struggling to find a rifle, "We've been bombed! I'll bet those Japs were responsible. They've been planning this for months now!"
"At ease soldier!" Jared ordered, "This isn't World War Two, the Japanese are our allies now! Besides, what happened just now was an accident, not an attack."
General Idea grumbled, "Maybe, maybe not. But regardless, I'm raising the Library's threat status up to level 3!"
The General and the rest of his troops departed and began to make repairs to their base. Jared shook his head and laughed.
Jared sighed as paced the Library's graphic novel section, searching the shelves for an elusive comic adaption of one of his favorite books. He hadn't had his agent status reactivated for even five days when Death had showed up, Jared and Chloe had been pulled off another mission to help fight the being who's very existence was little more than a parody of the man who had quite possibly saved Jared's life.
Jared shuddered at the memory of fighting the Sovereign, who had simply been able to shrug off his strongest hammer swing. For all that it mattered Jared might as well have been fighting with a toilet brush.
"Hey Jared, what are you looking for?" Dave shouted, walking towards the techie.
"A copy of the Dresden Files graphic novel, how about you?"
"I'm looking for some independently published comics written by Jeff Smith, do you know of them?" Dave asked.
Jared suddenly exploded in a fit of laughter.
"What's so funny?" Dave asked.
"Isn't it obvious?" Jared said between laughs, "The Archaeologist is looking for a 'Bone'."
Dave frowned. "Now you see why I didn't tell you the name of the series outright..."
"What's a matter Dave, do you have a bone to pick with me?" Jared asked jokingly.
"Did you really just say that?"
"I suppose I'm just digging myself into a hole aren't I?" Jared said, smiling.
"How many Archaeology puns can you come up with?" Dave asked.
"Several, you'll be putting up with them until I'm cold and buried. Of course then you'll have to deal with all the skeletons in my closet I leave behind." Jared said, nearly bent over with his own eccentric sense of humor.
Chloe walked around the corner, looking for Jared, of course with all the laughing going on he wasn't hard to find.
"Hello Dave, I hope my partner hasn't been bothering you to much, his sense of humor is as dry as bones." She said, causing further fits of laughter from Jared.
"Oh, nothing beyond what I can handle, what can I do for you?" He replied.
"Thanks for the offer to help, but it's Jared I'm looking for, we've just been given a new assignment."
"What is it?" Jared asked, poking the strange metallic sphere with the handle of his Boomhammer.
"It's some kind of suergy generator, if I knew more then that, then I wouldn't be giving it to you for examination would I?" Asked Michael rhetorically as he turned to leave, "Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go take care of some paperwork."
"One more thing," Jared asked, "why are we being assigned to this? Isn't Charis the head techie?"
"That is true, but quite honestly, Chloe and Aster are the only two who have actually seen one of these things up close, and we sure aren't going to be giving it to Aster. I'd say that the two of you are uniquely qualified to examine this device." Michael said as he stood in the doorway. "Now I really must be going, I can sense that paper work breeding..." and with that, Michael shut the door.
"So what did our Fearless Leader say about this thing again? 'Suergy generator' is kind of a vague term." Jared asked once Michael had gone.
"He said that it emits sue energy that's perfectly indistinguishable from the real thing." Chloe asked.
"Sounds like the arrays Deraj used to bait me for his trap in the Metroid fandom, but those looked a whole lot different than this thing..." Jared said, reaching into his desk drawer and rummaging for sensory equipment.
"Yes, but this one is definitely more portable, and it seems to have it's own power source. It's still transmitting even as we speak."
"So, either Deraj didn't make this, or he's seriously improved over the course of the last few weeks..." Jared said, throwing objects out of the drawer at random. "Of course we can't rule it out, it's still within the realm of possibility. You know, it's nice to have a problem every once in awhile that isn't solved by hitting things with a hammer..."
"Personally, I'm doubtful this is of PCMSPS design. Deraj doesn't seem like the type to recycle ideas that have already failed..."
"I agree, this thing has 'power' written all over it." Jared said, "So, how do you want to go about finding out how this thing works?"
"I have an idea..." Chloe said, "get a couple of your LPGB soldiers and meet me in the hospital wing."
"This is fairly ingenious Chloe, I would have never thought of this!" Jared said, watching his LPGB crawling over the device with their mine detectors.
"Sir, this device is definitely non-ferrous, it isn't susceptible to any kind of magnetic pulse." Captain Crunch reported.
"Great, then we can move on to step two!" Chloe said, picking up the generator and placing it in the hospital wards MRI machine.
"I don't understand what is going on here..." Crunch said, powering down his mine sweeper.
"MRI stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging, it's what doctors use to look inside people." Jared said, "But in this case, we're using it to look inside the suergy generator, so we can study it without taking it apart."
"So why did you have us sweep it sir?" Crunch asked.
"The MRI is basically a giant magnet, if that generator contraption could somehow be magnetized, it would of set off your mine sweepers. If we didn't take that precaution and carelessly threw it in the MRI and it turned out to be ferrous, not only would the device be torn apart, it's pieces would fly into the MRI and cause severe damage. Valerie would not be happy with me."
"We're set!" Chloe shouted, as the MRI hummed to life.
"I feel like I'm House!" Jared said, grinning excitedly. Chloe rolled her eyes.
Images began to roll across the computer terminal, showing the insides of the device. Jared and Chloe began pouring over the the images, trying to make sense of them. That's when the Little Plastic Green Beret all fell down.
"Hey, are you okay?" Jared said, turning towards his creation.
"Jared, somethings wrong..." Chloe said, just before the computer screen started showing nothing but ones and zeros.
And then the lights in the hospital wing went out...
"Jared, do you have a light?" Chloe asked, feeling around the darkened room.
"I didn't know you smoked, what other secrets have you been keeping from me? I saw the way you've been looking at Dave earlier you know..."
"This isn't the time for jokes Jared. Do you or do you not have a light?"
"If I can just reach my utility belt... got it!" Jared powered up his iPod Touch and activated the flashlight app, silvery light began to fill the room.
"Did Tash forget to pay the utility bill again?" Came Ben's voice from somewhere else in the hospital.
"Stay calm people, the emergency back up will kick on any second..." Came another voice.
Sure enough the lights came on, accompanied by the slow hum of medical equipment being powered up. Jared put his iPod away.
"What just happened?" Jared asked, examining the fallen LPGB.
Chloe reached into the MRI and pulled out the generator, smoke was billowing from the MRI, and all the instruments read that it had overheated. "I believe," she said, waving smoke away; "this, is what happened."
"Wait just a minute here... are you saying you set off an EMP in the hospital ward?" Tash asked, reading Jared's report.
"Well not intentionally..." Chloe answered.
"You see, the suergy generator acts as sort of an energy sponge, once it holds all the energy it can, it sort of, you know... explodes!"
"What Jared means is," Chloe said, shooting her partner a dirty look, "when we placed it in the MRI, it absorbed the magnetic waves and reflected them back into the room, which is what whipped out all the electronic devices. This is probably how it emits the false suergy."
"The smaller the device, the sooner it was effected by the EMP." Jared said, holding up the limp form of Captain Crunch. "If it's any compensation, it was all Chloe's idea..."
"Well, so we worked all day, and we got nothing accomplished." Jared said, throwing his pencil down after yet another failed test. This time involving bombarding the generator with radiation. Once again the generator simply absorb the radiation and reflected it back into the room.
"Don't worry, we'll figure this thing out." Chloe said.
"Yeah, but I've got other work. Chevila won't get running again if I'm spending all my time poking at a metal sphere."
"I suppose so, but you've gotten by without her before. I think you'll manage." Chloe said.
"Maybe, who knows." Jared said, walking over to Chevila's wreak.
"Some day Chevila, I'm going to get you up and running again. I promise you."
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.
~ Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A Changin'
And now Jared and Chloe have been reinserted into the season two timeline. How will Jared survive without Chevila? Will Chloe fight at her previous skill level with an injured arm? Will they uncover some dark secret about the generator? How the heck should I know, I'm making this up as I go along. Be on the lookout for Insert Homecoming King Of Monsters Here for Jared and Chloe's season II debut mission.