A/N Hello again, readers! And I'm back, this time with the first installment of our second Contest-winning fanfic, brought to you by site user 22 Dr. Pickle. As you can see, this'll be laid out much like an actual episode, with two stories and roughly three parts per story, and both Pickle and I are super excited about the math lessons! Yay! (*dies of college stress on inside*)

Oh and while I'm here, I'm gonna throw in a little shoutout to one of my author friends, Agent0002. You may recognize her from the Odd Squad fanfic she's currently writing, "Full Circle". If you haven't been reading this already, I strongly urge you to go check it out! Yours truly is actually the beta-reader for the story, which means I get to look over every chapter she writes before it's published; even cooler, she's basing the entire thing off of my very own "Ships Ahoy"! So you guys'll recognize a lot of the same themes in there. So PLEASE go read it! She would love the support!

DISCLAIMER: I do not own Odd Squad. Just the stories I write about it.

SECOND DISCLAIMER: The story may be written by me, but it is the brainchild of Dr. Pickle 22, who has complete final say in what is published.

Well, what are you waiting for? Happy Reading! :D


THE GADGETMAKER AND THE ELF


Part 1

It was evening on July 6, 2016, the day after Lab Con.

Oscar had only packed his things and been gone a little over twenty-four hours.

But to Oona, the Lab already seemed like a different place.

And not only because she had added her first Odd Squad Scientist shoelace next to Oscar's on the bulletin board to make this place officially hers. It seemed...emptier somehow.

"I mean, that's not at all because it lost its creator and owner of who-knows-how-many years. Not at all, hehe!" she said aloud to herself, spinning listlessly on the swivel chair in the middle of the empty Lab. "Or that my boss and mentor moved on to greater things and trusted me enough to be in charge of it. Not that either, for sure!" She attempted a chuckle at her own humor, but it fell flat and morphed into a sigh.

Oona glanced at her watch. "Nearly nine o'clock. Night Shift'll be here soon, I should probably leave while I can." Then her gaze wandered up to the pile of unfinished gadgets she'd left on the table. "But I can't just leave a job undone! Oscar would be disappointed in me if I did...wouldn't he…?"

Of course, she knew all too well it was that kind of thinking that could get a Day Shift agent in trouble with Night Shift. She and Oscar had found that out the hard way when they finally came out of the bunker at what just so happened to be the midnight hour. Still, hadn't Olympia and Otis managed to solve a case during Night Shift once? And Gadget Repair and/or Tuneup Day had been Oscar's favorite. How could she let him down by not finishing the job for him?

On the other hand, it was getting harder to suppress her tired yawns...

"Maybe if I count how many gadgets I've done so far and compare that to how many I have left to do," she reasoned, "that'll help me decide." Getting up from her swivel chair, the ten-year-old made her way over to the table and quickly sorted out the pile of unfinished gadgets into countable groups, and soon had them all counted out. "...fifty, fifty-five, sixty! I still have sixty gadgets left to finish fixing before tomorrow. And how many have I fixed so far today…?" She reached over to press a button on the wall, and a section of paneling slid away to reveal an array of tiny green storage lockers, most of which were filled with gadgets. "Okay, so if each row has ten gadgets, and there are nine rows filled, then that's nine groups of ten...ninety! I finished fixing ninety gadgets today. Although," she mused, noticing for the first time that the lockers were numbered, "I guess I could've just looked for the last number that had a gadget in it...oh well."

Glancing back and forth between the storage lockers and the pile on the table, Oona pursed her lips as she thought over what to do next. "Ninety is definitely more than sixty...but how much more?" She did some quick mental math. "Thirty more...but still, what does that mean? Sixty and ninety by themselves don't tell me how much work I have and haven't done today. I need another way of analyzing this information."

"Soooooo," Oona began as her tablet unfolded out of her watch, "what I'm trying to find is the proportion of gadgets I have already fixed today—" as she said this the word PROPORTION materialized at the top of her screen "—and the proportion of gadgets I haven't fixed yet. And what do I know? I know that there are ninety finished gadgets—" a 90 appeared underneath PROPORTION on the left "—sixty unfinished gadgets—" a 60 appeared next to the 90, in the middle "—and one hundred and fifty gadgets total—" a 150 appeared next to the 60, on the right "—that I got from Gadget Repair and/or Tuneup Day. I also know," she continued as the numbers cleared from the screen, "that there are three ways I can write a proportion, by using either ratios—" a colon popped up where the 90 had been "—or fractions—" a horizontal bar popped up where the 60 had been "—or percents—" a percent sign popped up where the 150 had been.

Oona scrutinized the three signs, pursing her lips in contemplation. "So which one would show me how much work I've done today?" she thought aloud, scratching her head in puzzlement. Eventually she shrugged and grinned her trademark Oona grin. "Eh, I'll just try 'em all and see what works! First let's do the ratios..."

After punching a few buttons, the following materialized:

90 : 150

60 : 150

"Ugh, that didn't work!" Oona groaned. "This just shows me what I already know! Let's try fractions next." She punched a few more buttons, and the following materialized:

90
150

60
150

"But this still won't tell me anything different yet, not until I make the fraction simpler," she reasoned. "I can start by getting rid of the zeros, so I'm only left with nine, six, and fifteen. And I think they can be divided into smaller groups, too..." After running a quick mental guess-and-check, Oona snapped her fingers and smiled. "Three does! Three groups of six is two, three groups of nine is three, and three groups of fifteen is five! So now my fractions should look like this..."

3
5

2
5

"So that means I finished fixing three-fifths of all my gadgets, and I have only two-fifths left to fix!" Then Oona paused, and went back to scratching her head again. "But two and five are kinda small numbers. Maybe I should try the last one, percents, just to be safe.

"Now, since percents only work between 1 and 100, I first have to put these two fractions into hundredths instead of fifths. But an easy way to do that is to put them into tenths first, and then just add on zeroes. And I know that two groups of five—" she held out both her hands and counted all the fingers "—is ten! So I can double each number, then if I add a zero..." she tapped both of the fractions twice and drew four little circles, so that they looked like this:

60
100

40
100

"There! And now to change that into a percent, I only need the top numbers, because I know that the percent sign already means 'out of one hundred'." She tapped the fractions again, and they morphed into this:

60%

40%

"So that means," Oona concluded, "If I've already done 60% of my work, I only have 40% left to do! Ta-da!"

Folding the tablet back into her watch, Oona looked up triumphantly, half expecting Oscar or Ms. O or somebody to commend her on a math-terful job figuring it out for herself. But of course there was no one, and she sighed at the slight disappointment of realizing that she had been lecturing to nothing but thin air.

And that's when the reality sunk in. "Forty percent..." Oona realized, staggering backward into her swivel chair. "I guess that's more than half of my work done, but...that's still so many gadgets I have to fix! And if I need to get most of them done before tomorrow..." She reluctantly turned her gaze back to the pile of gadgets and heaved a sigh, which quickly became a loud yawn. "Never mind," she told herself, forcibly blinking the bleariness from her eyes. "Night Shift doesn't really use the Lab, anyhow. I'll just have to pull my first all-nighter. Heh, what could go wrong?"

But about five gadgets in, lulled by the muted noise of the Night Shift agents filing into headquarters for work, the stress of her first day as Lab Director began to rapidly take its toll on the exhausted girl. I'll just lay my head down on the table for a bit, she thought drowsily, only for a couple minutes. And before she knew it, Oona had nodded off into a deep sleep.


Meanwhile, back in the far corner of the Lab, something moved in the shadows.

Having been the sole, unknown listener to Oona's entire one-sided lecture from before, it now hopped up to perch on the tabletop by the new Lab Director's arm. Completely unnoticed by the hypnotic agents on Night Shift, it surveyed the remaining pile of 25 gadgets. Quietly but gleefully, it rolled up its sleeves, cracked its knuckles, and set to work.