Author's Notes: I purposely decided not to give last names to anyone or a given name for Penny's father – use your imagination, I know you'll come up with good ones in your mind. Also, I decided not to give specific time periods for this – again, whatever you imagine will work just dandy.
.now.
Penny was eleven when she realized that her family wasn't like other families.
She stared down at the blue flier half-crumpled in her left fist, trying to decide exactly the best way to tell Mrs. Thorpe that there was no way – there was simply no way. Because her family wasn't like that. Her family wasn't like other families.
"Penny? How about you?"
A beat of sweat formed on her right temple.
"Well?"
"I – "
"It's a yes or no question, Penny." Mrs. Thorpe, an ancient creature with three chins and a propensity to cough dryly in response when something displeased her, looked over her glasses at the blonde-haired student sitting in the second row of her classroom. "Will your family be attending Family Night this evening?"
Penny was good at answering questions. She could tell you the properties of each element on the table of elements. She knew the difference between halogens and noble gases. She knew what year the Battle of Hastings was fought and what sort of clouds meant rain.
She could even tell you why sweat formed in beads on right temples.
Penny bit her lip. "N-No," she stammered weakly. "No, Mrs. Thorpe."
Mrs. Thorpe coughed dryly and made a swift mark on the sheet in front of her; the sound seemed to tear straight through Penny, and she winced involuntarily.
"All right then," Mrs. Thorpe conceded, not without some condescension in her voice. "Try to make it if you can, Penny."
"Yes, Mrs. Thorpe."
.then.
Penny was six when she learned she couldn't trust anyone.
She never thought it was odd to plan one's own birthday party, even at that age. She'd always done it for as far back as a six year old could remember, which wasn't far. But since she didn't ever remember it being any other way, logically it therefore had always been that way.
She liked chocolate cake the best.
Getting money from her father had never been the problem. Going down to the bakery alone and pointing at what she wanted hadn't ever been the problem, nor had crafting her own streamers out of discarded lab sheets and using markers to make colorful birthday invitations for her father out of paper napkins in the kitchen.
The problem, since time immemorial in her mind, had been getting her father to pay attention.
Penny would always remember her father as a very busy man. That's what she told people when they asked about her parents – "My father was a very busy man." She had no memory of her mother, and as a child, before grasping the basics of biology after reading about it in a library book when she was eight, she'd assumed that she had never had one. It had never been any other way. Logically, therefore, it had always been that way.
"Logic, Penny," her father had said to her once, "Logic is all you can depend on in the world to shield you from the absurd."
She had never known her father to be wrong. At least, not at six years old.
Penny's father had been tall. Very tall, towering over almost everyone else. Blond hair, green eyes, and the type of nose that twitched when she said the wrong thing. He was perpetually busy in his laboratory, creating giant machines that hummed and buzzed and cowered those who did not understand their purpose.
Or, those who understood their purpose all too well.
"War is a contest, Penny," her father had told her when, at age five, she finally worked up the courage to ask what her father was building. "A contest between those who do and those who do not. We must do, so that we never become those who do not."
Penny wished she could remember her father as someone who made any sense.
She left notes around the lab – invitations to the birthday party she was throwing herself in the kitchen. If she and her father had known anyone else, she would have invited them. But there was rarely anyone besides her and her father in the laboratory, or the house, or anywhere. But her father didn't like other people – they were stupid, they were ignorant, they were dangerous. Best to build machines that operated purely on logic.
Logic was so much more predictable than people, who generally possessed very little of it.
She was excited. The clock had struck six o'clock, and the time had come to light the candles on the chocolate cake, make a wish, and blow them out. She knew this is what people did on their birthdays, because she'd seen it in a book she read. She also knew people got presents – something she'd never received.
But seventh birthday parties were different. They had to be. She knew it with every fiber of her being – her seventh birthday would change everything. Her father would rush in with a smile on his gaunt face – he'd give her a box wrapped in blue (or pink! Or green! Or purple!) paper. She'd open it to find something that he had picked out for her. Maybe a book. A doll. A remote controlled car.
Six o'clock came and went. Then seven o'clock. Eight. Nine. Ten.
She lit the candles and blew them out. Her silent wish, with tears rolling down her cheeks, was for someone to prove her wrong.
She wished for someone who would show her that she could trust someone.
.now.
Penny slammed the front door more loudly than she meant to, and began to dart up to her room before her uncle caught sight of her. She heard a fluttering behind her, and turned to watch the blue flier – which had slipped out of her backpack - flitter down the staircase, landing at the bottom.
"You dropped something, Penny!" her uncle Gadget cried cheerfully, just at that moment seeming to appear out of nowhere at the bottom of the steps to scoop it up, much to Penny's horror. "Hm," Gadget mused, hand on his chin, as he skimmed the words on the flier. "Family night, eh? And they'll have cake. Wonderful!"
"We're – I mean – I told them we weren't coming, Uncle Gadget," Penny said in a voice that was nearly a whisper, to mask the shakiness in her voice.
Her uncle looked up at her in surprise. "Not going? Penny, there'll be cake!"
"I know, but – well, I knew you'd be busy – "
"Nonsense! After I accidently caused the vending machine to explode down at headquarters, Chief told me to take the rest of the night off." He placed his hands on his hips, somewhat exasperated. "You would have thought I blew up the entire western hemisphere with all the fuss he kicked up over it. I've been telling him for weeks that I needed to get my gadgets checked – "
"Never mind, Uncle Gadget. I've got a lot of homework to do anyway."
Penny retreated into her room.
.then.
The morning after her seventh birthday, Penny was somewhat disappointed to wake up to a world that looked exactly as it had when she was six.
Except, of course, for the odd-looking man in the lab.
"Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about at all!" the odd man was saying in a voice that wasn't terribly convincing, as he paced back and forth across the lab. Penny's father stood in a corner, a dour look upon his face.
"I told Interpol that I didn't need protection, and I don't. Especially some half-wit from Metro City PD," he growled in a scathing voice.
"How dare you call the Chief a half-wit!" the strange man burst indignantly, crossing his arms in front of himself. "I'll have you know that we've never yet lost a man we were guarding! Can you believe it? Never!"
"What about Madsen, two years ago?"
"Eh – would you believe one? We've only lost one man we were guarding!"
"Don't forget Thompson. McKale. And I believe Chockle, if I'm not mistaken."
"Chockle didn't want to listen to a word I said!" protested the odd man, dressed in a heavy navy blue coat, gray flannel slacks and sporting wiry black hair that stuck straight up all over the top and sides of his head. Penny frowned from her unseen position crouching on the staircase; who was this man? Why was he in her father's laboratory?
"Chockle thought that he could just waltz down the hallway to the men's room whenever the fancy struck him!" the man was continuing to ramble. "I told him, 'You'll just have to hold it until this all blows over!' But after the sixteenth hour, he got a little testy and insisted. And where did he end up? Nearly to the stratosphere, straddling the john, that's where! Made for a wholly distasteful scene when he finally landed, I can tell you that."
"I've had about enough of this," Penny's father snapped.
"Well, 'tough titty said the kitty when the milk ran dry.' I've got my orders."
At this point, the man with the wiry hair plopped down pointedly on one of the rickety lab stools, immediately began to wobble from the force of his action, and with a yelp, fell backwards into a bookshelf full of liquid in various-sized glass containers, causing the contents of the bookshelf to rain down on the staircase.
Almost at the same moment, Penny cried out as one of the glass shards sliced her forearm.
"Penny!" her father cried. Penny's heart leapt as her father rushed near, but a dark expression played upon his face instead of the worried one she hoped for so fervently. "What are you doing in the lab? You should be upstairs!"
"Oh dear, look, I've hurt you!" The stranger grabbed Penny's arm gently to get a better look. "We've got to get that cleaned up immediately!"
"She can do it herself!" Penny's father bellowed angrily. "She knows better than to come down here uninvited! What a fool you can be, girl!"
Penny jumped up and jogged the rest of the way up the steps and into their living quarters, making her way towards the bathroom. Her father was right – she could do it herself.
If only she could see through these idiotic tears in her eyes.
That's how the odd man found her a moment later – sitting on the floor, blood running down her forearm, face cupped in her hands.
"Gee, does it really hurt that bad? Oh my, I certainly am sorry!"
"I'm fine – "
"No one's fine when they're crying like that! Why, I haven't cried as hard as you are now since I went on the flying tea cups ride at Disney World last year!"
Penny's tears stopped momentarily. "Were you crying from having your childhood wish to go to Disney World come true?"
"Me? No! Have you ever sat in an abnormally large tea cup that's gyrating violently and then been leered at by someone wearing an enormous hat and asking you about ravens and writing desks? It's terrifying!"
Penny snickered softly until she saw the man was serious.
This is a very illogical man, she thought to herself instantly.
"I'm Gadget, by the way," the man said, shaking Penny's hand as though she was a grown-up. "Inspector Gadget, with the Metro City Police Department. I'm going to be watching over your dad for the next few days."
"But...but why?"
Gadget had found the antiseptic and Band-Aids under the sink, and was wadding up a Kleenex to make a make-shift cotton ball. "I don't know how much you know about your dad's work, but he invents a lot of things that could be pretty dangerous in the wrong hands." He poured the rubbing alcohol on the wadded Kleenex and wiped the blood free from the cut on her forearm. Once the blood was gone, Penny could see that it wasn't a big gash at all, and she immediately felt a sense of relief wash over her. "We got a tip that an evil organization called MAD was planning on breaking into your dad's lab and stealing his inventions for their own nefarious doings!" He chuckled. "I guess a little kid like you wouldn't know what nefarious means."
"It means bad, wicked, vile."
"It does?" Gadget's eyes got wide. "Chief Quimby always says that word, but I always thought he was getting his words mixed up. Wasn't Nefarious the queen of the Nile?"
"That's Nefertiti."
"I always thought that was a kind of squishy ball that children torture each other with."
"That's Nerf."
"Wowzers. You sure are smart." Gadget said this without a hint of sarcasm or deprecation; Penny realized that he was in earnest, and a curious feeling arose in her.
This was undoubtedly the most illogical man she'd ever met...and yet, he was kind. He was not bad. He wanted to help. He was everything her father said illogical people were not.
She watched as he applied two Band-Aids to the cut on her arm, and then helped her stand up.
"You know, when I was your age, I wanted to be an inventor just like your dad!" Gadget was saying as Penny's mind began to clear after her epiphany. "I thought it would be fitting with my last name – Professor Gadget! Dr. Gadget! Why, I used to spend hours making things – marbles that would shoot out of my sleeve on command, fixing retractable wheels on my shoes. In fact, I spent my tenth birthday in a full body cast after fashioning wings out of kite material and clothes hangers and then flinging myself off the roof!" He did not seem in the least bit traumatized by these obvious failures – rather, he seemed to take them in his stride.
Failure made Penny's father extremely angry. It had never occurred to her that failure did not have to mean yelling, tearing things apart, or not speaking to her for days on end.
She shook her head. "You are the oddest man I've ever met," Penny said in an awe-filled voice.
.now.
There was a knock on Penny's door. Brain's ears perked slightly, but his attention stayed focused on his human – his Penny.
"Penny?" a familiar voice called from the other side of the door. Penny resisted the urge to lay her head on the desk and close her eyes. "Are you sure you don't want to go to Family Night? I mean, they have cake."
A flare of anger rose up in Penny's throat and before she could stop herself she burst, "Family Night is for families! And we're not a family!"
.then.
The next day, Gadget was still in the lab with Penny's father, insisting they never be more than a few feet from each other. Penny spent most of the day crouched on the staircase up the near the door where her father and Gadget couldn't see her, but where she could hear every word they said.
" – and I said to the repairman, 'That's nonsense! I'm not paying that sort of money to fix my vacuum cleaner when I can just as easily do it myself!'" Gadget was explaining vehemently, gesturing wildly with his hands. "So I opened 'er up, plucked out a few wires, soldered them in a configuration that sure looked nice, and then closed 'er up and flipped 'er on. It was only after my third coat of paint, trying to hide the scorch marks on the wall created when I turned the vacuum cleaner on and it exploded, that I thought maybe next time I should just pay the repairman."
"Fascinating as that story is, you imbecile, I am quite tired now and wish to retire," Penny's father said in an icy tone.
"Retire? But you've got so many good years ahead of you!"
"I mean, go to bed, Gadget! Not – oh, I shouldn't even bother. I weep, I really do, I weep at the thought that you're supposedly Metro City's finest."
Penny didn't wait to hear the rest of the conversation and instead darted soundlessly to the kitchen, where she made a peanut butter sandwich for herself for dinner and began to eat quietly.
A moment later, much to her surprise, Gadget threw open the basement door and gave her a beaming grin.
"Happy Birthday, Penny!" His face fell as he scanned the kitchen. "Where's the cake?" He pulled the homemade invitation – the one she'd made for her father for her birthday party a few days previous – out of his pocket and scrutinized it. "Yes. The invitation I found in the lab clearly says that there would be birthday cake."
Penny tried hard not to let her mouth hang open wide enough to slobber peanut butter all over the table top.
"Well, even though there's no birthday cake, I've got a birthday present for you, Penny. It isn't every day you turn seven. In fact, it only happens once in your whole life, come to think of it." He began to dig in his left coat pocket with great purpose. "Now let's see, where did I put it...?"
Penny watched with a mixture of disbelief and anticipation as Gadget pulled out her very first – and her only – birthday present. It was a folded up piece of paper that he slid across to her.
"It isn't much, but I had to do something to pass the time in the lab today," he said with a smile and a shrug.
Hands shaking slightly, Penny unfolded the paper carefully. A baffling drawing met her eyes. The squiggly lines seemed to depict an ill-tempered turkey throwing oddly-shaped bananas at three figures standing in front of what looked like an enormous snake. She gave him an inquiring look. He pointed to each figure as he explained.
"See? It's a nefarious Queen Nefertiti throwing Nerf balls at me, you and your Dad standing on the edge of the Nile River!"
Looking closer, she saw that the turkey was actually a woman wearing a crudely drawn ancient headdress, the bananas were actually lop-sided footballs, and the snake was a river. One figure was small and had pigtails. She realized with a start that it was her, and that the figure standing to her right was Gadget – so drawn with his coat on – and the figure on her left was her father, who was smiling broadly with his arm around his daughter.
She thought it was the loveliest picture she'd ever seen.
"Thank you," she whispered. "Thank you very much, Mr. Gadget."
.now.
"Not a family?" Even though she couldn't see his face, Penny knew Gadget was crestfallen and she immediately remonstrated herself for her outburst. "Penny, you know that isn't true."
"It is true."
"We've been getting the family discount at the movie theater for years now, and this is the first I've ever heard you imply that we're doing something dishonest." She could hear him shift his weight; no matter how much work the boys in the lab did on Gadget's gadgets, his mechanical joints still always squeaked slightly. "This conversation might be a lot easier if we were face to face, you know."
Penny stood for a moment, looking out of her window, before crossing the room and opening the door. Gadget's eyes widened slightly when he realized by Penny's red face that she'd been crying.
Wowzers. Now that was serious.
.then.
Penny had stuck the leftover chocolate birthday cake in the cupboard after her "party" a few days before, and now dug out a slice for herself and Gadget.
"Chocolate! My favorite!" Gadget cried happily when Penny slid him a slice.
A smile escaped her face. "Mine too," she admitted quietly.
"Your father can sure bake a great cake."
"He didn't bake it. I bought it."
"You bought it?" Gadget said with a mixture of surprise and confusion.
Penny looked down at her plate and kicked her feet at the legs of the table. "Dad is a very busy man."
"Say, where is your dad?" Gadget asked, rising from the table. "He told me he'd be right up! I need to know what side of the bed he wants!"
"You really have to stay that close to him?" Penny asked, eyebrow raised.
"Of course! He's in a lot of danger!" Gadget brought himself up to his full height and rolled his shoulders to loosen them. Penny noticed that he was almost as tall as her father. "I hope he doesn't mind that I snore. Or that I kick in my sleep. Or that sometimes I entirely forget where I am and pound at the walls and scream at the top of my lungs for a few hours until I remember."
"And...and when Dad's not in danger anymore, does that mean you'll go?"
"Sure! It'll be back to the Metro City PD for Inspector Gadget!"
Penny looked worried. "Will I ever see you again?"
"Well..." Gadget seemed to consider this for a moment. "If you're ever in danger of being kidnapped, killed or otherwise maimed by organized crime syndicates, we'll probably see a lot of each other!"
"But...I...I sorta thought we were...friends," Penny admitted so quietly that Gadget almost didn't hear her.
"Friends?" Gadget blinked a few times. "You want to be friends?"
"Well...yes. If that's all right."
"Of course! One can never have too many friends!"
Penny's face broke into a grin, and a moment later, so did Gadget's.
With this, he disappeared downstairs and Penny began to stack the dishes in the sink until she heard shouting coming from the basement. Rushing over to the basement door and throwing it open, she could hear both her father's voice and Gadget's – and both sounded infuriated.
"You've been working for MAD this entire time?" Gadget wailed. "I knew something seemed funny about you – I've never trusted anyone who slurps soup as noisily as you do. And as soon as I disappear for one darn minute – twenty at the most – you turn around and call MAD! Do you have any idea what MAD would do with your machine? How many lives would be in danger?"
"Yes, and that's why I'm doing it!" Penny's father shouted back. Penny crept down the first two stairs and peered into the laboratory.
Her father had a television monitor on the wall that normally only displayed different calculations or chemical element information, but now, it displayed a large, hideous face that Penny had never seen before. A vile looking man sat in a high-backed chair stroking a gray and black cat; she had a visceral reaction and hated him immediately – whoever he was, he wasn't a humanitarian.
Penny's father had begun to pace. "Gadget, ninety-nine percent of the people on this planet are fools who deserve to die! They don't understand my work – my genius – they've hated my inventions my entire life, calling them weapons of inhumane destruction, able to wipe entire city blocks off the map with just a press of a button!"
"People shouldn't live and die on your whim, or on Dr. Claw's!" Gadget said, pointing at the hideous man on the television, who only grinned smugly in return.
"Metro City nor any international governments would have any idea what to do with my invention – they'd pack it away and never use it!"
"I should certainly hope so!" retorted Gadget.
"Its purpose is to shape the world as people like myself and Dr. Claw see fit! Those with the power to destroy, Gadget, should be the ones endowed with the power to rule!"
By this time, the heat of the argument had sent Penny almost unconsciously down several more steps.
"And I think we'll start with Metro City, am I right?" The gravelly, evil voice emanating from the television screen – which Penny could only assume to be the voice of the man with the cat – sent a chill down her spine.
Penny's father shot Gadget a self-satisfied grin. "That's right, Dr. Claw. Metro City will be our first test target. We'll give the world a little taste of what they can expect when they don't bend to our will."
"Are you insane? We're in Metro City!" Gadget protested. "You'll blow us up too!"
"Not true! This entire house is reinforced steel – everything around us will die. You'll get to see the complete destruction of the city-state you're sworn to protect, Gadget! And if other countries don't bow to our wishes, you'll get to watch them die too!"
"Then I'll spend the rest of my life trying to stop MAD!" Gadget swore as he sprang towards Penny's father, who had already begun keying in a code. They struggled for a moment, evenly matched in height and strength, but within a few short seconds, Penny's father erupted into a short, barking laugh that Penny had never heard him use before.
"It's done, Gadget! The code has been entered! There's nothing left to do but wait!"
"You're a monster!" Gadget roared, grabbing him by his lab coat.
Before either of them could react, however, a high-pitched squealing pierced the air coming from the humming, buzzing machine that had just been programmed to destroy the city.
"NO!" Penny's father cried, launching himself at the machine's control panel, Gadget all but forgotten. "No, this can't be happening!"
"What's happening?" barked Dr. Claw's voice over the shriek of the machine.
"It's – It's malfunctioning, sir!" The voice of Penny's father hitched a few octaves higher. "I – I still had a few tests left to perform – but you wanted to do this today – you said we had to get started today – "
"You said everything was ready, you fool!"
"I needed to run a few more tests! But it's – it's going self-destruct!"
"You mean it's going to blow?" Gadget yelled over the noise. "We have to get out of here!"
Penny's father shook his head quickly and turned back to his machine's controls. He'd spent the better part of eight years building this machine – nurturing the hate it took to conceive of its purpose – ignoring his wife, his child, and everything outside of wires, chemicals and steel – he couldn't give it up, not now.
The machine began to rattle, steam and screech. Gadget turned to run up the stairs when he saw Penny, huddled and frightened, in the corner.
"Penny, we've got to go!" he shouted.
"But – my dad – "
Gadget threw one last look behind him at the crazed scientist still manning his murderous contraption.
"I can't save him and you, and he doesn't look like he'll come with me amicably! You've got to come with me, Penny! We don't have much time!" Gadget stretched out a hand to her, the ground beginning to shake.
But where would I go? Penny wondered, feeling somewhat ridiculous.
The shrieking continued to get louder and Gadget made a split-second decision. Scooping the seven year old up in his arms without waiting for her answer, he darted as quickly as he could up the stairs, taking two or three at a time, up towards the kitchen. Just a few more steps and he'd be at the back door – and outside the steel-enforced home lay safety for him and the small girl clinging to him.
As soon as he hit the top of the steps, time seemed to slow almost to a crawl. It seemed like it had been that way any time his life was in danger – and, being the sort of accident-prone man that Gadget was, this was relatively common.
Time seemed to almost stop, just for a second, just long enough to make one last decision that meant either life or death. In that millisecond, Gadget was aware that there was a vast amount of heat nipping at his heels. Fire. Force. Combustion.
They weren't going to make it to the back door. He had to choose now – life, or death.
Of course, not his life.
He threw himself to the linoleum floor with Penny under him. In the last split second of slow time, he wrapped himself around her as tightly as possible, trying to cover as much of her with himself as he could.
He had been a lot of things in his life. But a human shield was a new one.
.now.
Penny sat at the desk in her room, not looking at her uncle but instead watching a bird feeding its young in a nest on a tree branch near her window. "I'm sorry, Uncle Gadget," she said quietly. "I didn't mean to upset you."
"It's just that I don't understand, Penny," Gadget replied. He sat on the edge of her bed, Brain's head in his lap. He patted the dog idly, and Brain whimpered audibly in the direction of his girl. "I don't think Brain understands either."
"It...it's just that we're not related, Uncle. Not by blood, or marriage, or anything. It's just you and me, and we're all either of us has. That doesn't really make us a family, does it?" Penny sighed. She was loathe to think about things like this – it was so much better to always be swept up in some intrigue where all of her energy and brainpower was caught up in solving some mystery, escaping some life-threatening situation, figuring out how to trip up the bad guys and send them away in a squad car. It let one forget that one's father had died a criminal and by his own contraption, or that one couldn't remember one's mother, or that one didn't really have any family and it was only by the grace of a kind-hearted, bumbling police officer who had nearly given his life that one even had a real home.
The room was quiet for several moments, punctuated only by quiet, intermittent whines from Brain, who never liked seeing his two favorite people upset.
"There are lots of different kinds of families, you know," Gadget said. "Lots."
.then.
Six months after the accident, as she had come to call it in her mind, Penny sat on the back porch of a large house, surrounded by several other children of various ages, gazing up into the leaves of a tree and trying to forget that she was caught in the limbo that is foster care, and for children her age, she probably would be for quite some time.
Having no other relatives that could be located, Penny had been immediately whisked away to a foster home after her week-long stay in the hospital after the explosion. She hadn't been badly injured – she had Inspector Gadget (her friend she would think proudly to herself) to thank for that. If he hadn't shielded her from the worst of the explosion, she surely would have died in the same terrible way that her father must have.
Losing one's father – distant and cruel as he had been - was hard enough. Losing one's only friend was a pretty close second.
At least, she assumed that she'd lost him. She must have. No one could have survived that explosion. After pleading with a nurse for five days to tell her the fate of Gadget, the nurse finally leaned down next to her ear and whispered, They took him away in a military helicopter. That's all I know, and I can't say any more.
Penny had no idea what that meant, but it couldn't be good.
Her foster parents – a soft-spoken, kind-hearted couple named David and Melinda – welcomed her into their home with hugs, a basket of candy, and several new pieces of clothing, since the resulting fire from the explosion had destroyed everything which had been her own, although because of the steel-reinforced structure of the house, the rest of the neighborhood had been perfectly safe. Over the resulting months, Penny had started going to school, getting home-cooked meals (the likes of which she'd never had), and playing with other children her age, who mostly baffled the painfully shy seven year old. In her spare time, she drew pictures of herself and Gadget visiting all four corners of the Earth fighting MAD. These pictures papered her bedroom wall. Whenever anyone asked, she said that it was herself and her uncle – because that's how it felt.
She knew she'd never see him again. She'd accepted that. It was a fact. It was logical.
Which is why it made absolutely no sense for him to be suddenly standing at the end of the walkway under the tree, looking as though he'd never had a single injury in his life.
"Penny!" he cried, and Penny shot to her feet on the back porch, unable to close her mouth or stop the tears from coming.
"Uncle – Uncle Gadget?" she sputtered, not even realizing that she'd called him 'uncle' instead of 'mister.' Without waiting for a response, she practically flew down the walkway and leapt at him, wrapping her arms around his waist, tears already freely falling down her cheeks.
"Why Penny, you're crying!" Gadget said in surprise. "Didn't you get my letter?"
She looked up at him quizzically. "No, Uncle Gadget."
"Well I was sure that I – " Gadget mumbled, beginning to fumble in his pockets. He reached inside his jacket and a moment later, his hand emerged clutching an envelope addressed to Penny. His face fell slightly. "Oh. Guess I forget. Boy, when they put you back together, you're never quite the same. Just try remembering to mail a letter or pick up your dry cleaning or getting the oil changed in your kneecaps. Just try."
Penny didn't understand much of what he'd just said, but she didn't care. Gadget was alive. Not only that, but he'd come back to her. He hadn't forgotten.
She hadn't lost her friend. She hadn't misplaced her trust.
A small ruff sounded from the inside of Gadget's jacket and Penny frowned. "Oh, I almost forgot!" Gadget chuckled, his hand disappearing back into his coat for a moment and came out holding the smallest puppy Penny had ever seen. She immediately gasped and instinctively began to pet the tiny ball of fur.
"This is Brain, Penny. They gave him to me as a kind of service animal – a specially bred, genetically enhanced guide dog. He's little, but boy is he smart, and he'll only get smarter as he grows up! He's supposed to keep me from doing anything too stupid until I'm back to normal. That's why I decided to call him Brain – because he's my brain, at least for a while." Gadget seemed to ponder this a moment. "You know, it sounded a lot wittier under the influence of all those painkillers I was on up until a few weeks ago."
Before Penny knew it, both she and Gadget were sitting on the back porch. Some part of her noticed his strange attire, so different from what she'd seen him in before – including the addition of a hat and gloves that he didn't seem in any hurry to remove despite the heat. She held the golden-colored puppy, stroking his nose and cooing softly into his fur. "But how?" she finally muttered. "How did you...how did you survive that accident, Uncle Gadget?"
"Oh! Well! That's an interesting story, Penny. A European engineer by the name of Otto von Slickstein has been researching and engineering cyborg prototypes for years, and was ready for human trials. I was in pretty sorry shape after the accident – I won't get into specifics, but let's just say that any activities which required me to be alive would have been totally impossible if Chief hadn't volunteered me for Dr. Slickstein's cyborg human trials. Chief had heard me talk about how I used to create my own gadgets when I was a kid, and he didn't think I'd mind not being dead. So here I am!"
"A...a cyborg?" Penny knew was a cyborg was; a cyborg was not quite machine, but not quite human, either. And her friend certainly looked human. "You're a...machine?"
"Not all machine," Gadget corrected her quickly. "Just the parts that didn't work anymore, Penny." To demonstrate, he shot his left arm out towards the tree and grabbed a branch that must have been the better part of fifty feet from where they sat on the bench. Then, he shot his foot forward a good thirty feet across the sidewalk, wherein a neighbor walking their dog immediately tripped over it. "Just wait til I show you all my new gadgets! Why, I never need to buy a blender again!"
Penny's mouth was agape and she was speechless, staring at his extended leg and arm. Gadget gave her a worried glance.
"You're not scared of me, are you Penny?" His grimaced. "Gee, I was sure sorry to hear about your Dad, MAD agent though he was – we all have shortcomings, I guess, except for me, because I'm three hundred percent more spectacular than I used to be – but I was hoping...well, I guess I was sort of hoping you'd like to come stay with me. You know, that I could adopt you. If it's all right with you, of course. We're pretty good friends, aren't we? And I don't have any family of my own, and neither do you...I know I can't replace your dad, Penny, and I don't want to – but I was thinking, if you'd like – "
Gadget didn't get to complete his sentence, because he was suddenly covered in ecstatic seven year old and puppy.
.now.
"Every family is different," Gadget said to Penny in a much gentler voice than was usual for him. "Your family is who you want your family to be. It isn't always the people who are related to you by blood, or marriage, or that really dicey gray area when everyone gets divorced and your former step-aunt wants to know if you're still coming to her house for Thanksgiving because she wants to make sure to have enough sprouts, even though no one ever eats them and so they sit in the back of the fridge wrapped in tin foil until Christmas and by then they've gotten all slimy and yellow and you can finally toss them out without feeling guilty."
"Uncle Gadget."
"Eh? I got carried away. But my point stands. Some people make their own family. Like you and me, Penny. You didn't start calling me 'uncle' of your own volition to be polite – you said it because it sounded natural to you, right? Just like during those six months after the accident before I adopted you – I never stopped thinking that you and I were meant to be a family. See?"
Penny slowly turned to look at her uncle. He gave her a small smile and within a few moments, she returned it. "Yes, Uncle Gadget. I get it."
"You, me and Brain – we'll always be a family, because we feel like family. We made our own family, and it's no less special than anyone else's."
Brain wagged his tail at Penny and her grin broadened.
Penny was eleven when she learned that her family wasn't like other families. But she had a family – and that's all that mattered.
"We'd better get going," she said quietly, grabbing her jacket. "We don't want to be late for Family Night."