A Visitor From Out Of Town
A Bucky O'Hare Fan fiction by J. Michael Shearer
Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars produced by Akom Production Company and Marvel Productions
It is Christmastime in San Francisco. Visitors from across the country and around the world have come to celebrate the holiday season in the City by the Bay. Amongst these visitors is Steve Goran, cousin to Willy DuWitt. The stocky, bespectacled boy, perhaps three years Willy's senior, greets his aunt and uncle, sticking around just long enough to have his cheeks pinched and get the shaggy mass of curly brown hair on his head tousled before running off, carrying a camera, to say hello to his cousin.
"Hey, Willy! It's your cousin Steve! Mind if I come in and say hi?" Steve asked, knocking on Willy's bedroom door. After several seconds with no response, he opened the door and peeks in.
"Willy? You here?" Steve asked, entering the room and closing the door behind him as he looks around for his cousin. While there is no sign of the younger boy, Steve's eyes quickly moved to the photon accelerator on the far side of the room. He moved over to examine the device closer.
"This must be the engine Willy told me about in his last letter," Steve thought as he examined the machine. "Better not mess with it. Knowing Willy, it probably works perfectly."
Meanwhile, in the Aniverse, Willy prepares to return home after a little maintenance work on The Righteous Indignation.
"Everything should run smoothly now, especially if there's no fighting," Willy told the ship's captain, Bucky O'Hare and his first mate, Jenny.
"It would be nice if you could stay a little longer and make sure of that," Bucky replied. "Are you sure you can't stay?"
"I wish I could, but I've got relatives coming for Christmas, and I really want to see my cousin Steve," the human explained. "I'd better go before my folks miss me."
"This holiday of yours sounds interesting, Willy, and I don't think I've ever seen your home," Jenny the Aldeberan chimed in as Willy opened the door to his own world.
"I don't know if that's such a good idea, Jenny," Willy hesitated. "I mean, I don't think my family's quite ready to meet anyone from another universe…"
"In that case, we don't have to make introductions," Jenny suggested.
"And I've got Blinky, Deadeye and Bruiser to help keep things in order here," Bucky added.
"Well, OK…" Willy replied, still hesitant, before he and Jenny stepped through the door.
Upon hearing the door open, Steve turned from his investigation of the photon accelerator to see who it was. His face lit up with a smile when he saw that Willy had shown up.
"Hey, Willy! Nice to see you! And… your friend…?" Steve asked, surprised and bewildered by Jenny's arrival with his cousin.
"S…Steve! You're here?!?! Already?!?!" Willy stuttered, not having expected to find his cousin in his room.
"I… I thought you'd be, too. I didn't touch anything, honest," the older boy explained. "Who's your friend?"
"This is Jenny. She's from Aldeberan," Willy explained. "Jenny, this is my cousin Steve. He's from Iowa."
"Nice to meet you," Steve replied, shaking hands with Jenny. "That's not a costume, is it?"
"It's nice to meet you, too, Steve," Jenny told him. "And no, it's not."
"Mind if I get a few pictures?" Steve asked. "It's for a project I'm doing for my school's writing and photography club. If I'm lucky, I might get published in the yearbook."
"Sure. That would be cool." Willy agrees.
"That would be alright," Jenny also replies.
After several minutes of taking pictures of Willy, Jenny, the photon accelerator, and various combinations thereof, Steve remembered that he should also take some notes. As he left Willy's room, he heard his mother calling him. When he found her, she was with his Aunt Susan, Willy's mom.
"Here's your suitcase, dear. You'll be sharing your cousin's room while you're here."
"Thanks, mom! Thanks, Aunt Susan! I was just coming to get this!" Steve replied excitedly before rushing back to his cousin's room.
"It's so nice that they get along, isn't it?" Steve's mom asked of her sister.
Back in Willy's room, Steve had explained the rooming situation as he took a notebook and pencil from his luggage. As he made notes about what had happened just before, he began asking many questions about what his cousin and new friend did in the Aniverse.
"You two certainly are related," Jenny noted in bemusement from all the questions.
"I'm sorry. It's just that I'm working on a story for the school writing club, and I want to be sure I'm getting it all right," Steve explained, a bit shyly.
"That's quite alright," Jenny replied. "Willy is the same way when we get new equipment."
"I guess I am," Willy said, slightly embarrassed by his habit of curiosity. Just then, Bucky stuck his head through the door and called his crew back to the Aniverse. Without really thinking about it, Steve wrote down what happened, grabbed his camera, and followed Willy and Jenny.
"There's been a toad attack in sector four. We're going in to help Dogstar and his crew take care of business," Bucky explained, barely noticing that Steve had followed his crew members.
"Wait, toads?" Steve asked, still taking notes.
"OK, who are you and how did you get here?" Bucky demanded of the new addition.
"Steve Goran, Willy's cousin. I just followed him through the door. I don't know why," Steve explained hastily.
"Well, there's no time to send you home right now. Just stay down here, out of the way. Bruiser, keep an eye on him," Bucky ordered. "The rest of you, get to your stations. We've got some toads to croak!"
In what barely seemed a moment to Steve, the ship and her crew were in a heavy firefight. Without even really thinking, the young human found a view port and began taking a few pictures. As far as he knew, the battle was going well, until a moment later, when a warning of boarders came from the ship's command deck. Shortly thereafter, a handful of toads arrived in the compartment where Steve and Bruiser were waiting out the battle.
With surprisingly little effort, the toads had subdued Bruiser and surrounded Steve, intending to take him hostage.
"This is working out better than expected," one of the toads told another as they put Steve in a space suit. "The Air Marshall will be pleased."
"Yeah," the second toad agreed. "But he sure looks different up close. Isn't his head fur supposed to be a different color?"
"It's probably nothing important," the first replied. "Let's just get him back to the mother ship."
"Mother ship?" Steve asked, quickly becoming more concerned about his situation as he absorbed what was going on. "Hey, wait! Help!"
"Quiet, baboon!" one of the toads ordered as they took Steve to the boarding craft and forced him aboard for the trip to the mother ship. Once aboard, the toad soldiers proudly delivered their capture to the Air Marshall. In a rare moment of clarity, the Air Marshall recognized that an error had been made.
"You fools! This is not Bucky O'Hare's engineer!" the Air Marshall croaked angrily. "Can't you see that his fur is the wrong color? Or that his equipment is not mechanic's equipment?"
"B-but Air Marshall, sir! How many pink-skinned baboons are there in the Aniverse?" one of the soldiers asked nervously.
"Enough to fool you nimrods!" the Air Marshall exclaimed. "Now I'll lose my new medal!"
"Only because the mighty KOMPLEX does not reward failure, Air Marshall," Toadborg warned him, approaching from an adjacent compartment to investigate the hostage himself. As a matter of habit, Steve raised his camera, which he had not been stripped of upon capture, and snapped a frame of the Air Marshall and Toadborg.
"On the other hand, perhaps you have not bungled as badly as I think," Toadborg said, having taken note of what had happened and turned to Steve. "Tell me, pinkskin, does your device contain images of your ship?"
"Y-yes, sir, it does, but they have to be processed in a very precise way or they'll be useless to you," Steve explained hastily, trying to buy at least a little freedom.
"You will do so now," Toadborg commanded.
"I can't, sir! All the equipment I need to do so is on the ship your soldiers took me from, and only I know where it is and how to use it!" Steve explained further.
"Then I will send a soldier with you to retrieve it," Toadborg replied.
Meanwhile, back on the Righteous, the crew was assessing the situation and trying to figure out how they were going to resolve the problem before the human boys' family noticed that anything was wrong.
"But how could this happen?" Willy asked, anxiously.
"I dunno, Willy. I was tryin' to get yer cousin away from the portal he was takin' pictures from when the toads came an' took me by surprise," Bruiser explained.
"The question now is how do we get him back?" Bucky noted.
"Perhaps Bruiser and I could run a rescue mission…" Jenny suggested.
"It sounds good to me," Deadeye agreed.
"Another option presents itself," Android First Class Blinky chimed in. "Receiving transmission from toad mother ship."
"Display," Bucky commanded. A second later, an image of Steve appeared on a nearby view screen.
"Hey, guys. Steve here. Sorry about all this," he said.
"Steve!" Willy exclaimed.
"Are you alright, Mr. Goran?" Bucky asked him.
"Yes, sir, I am," Steve replied. "And if I understand what these guys are telling me, there's a good chance they'll let me go if I meet their conditions."
"Which are?" Bucky inquired.
"Simply that I teach them how to use my 'spy camera'," Steve explained, holding up his camera and hoping that his hint about it being nothing of the sort wasn't too obvious for the toads. "In a little bit, they're going to send me over to collect a few supplies. I'll explain more then."
"We read you, Steve. Righteous Indignation out," Bucky replied. A few moments later, Steve was back aboard and explaining his plan to the crew.
"It's just a regular 35-mm camera. Nothing special about it," Steve quietly explained to the mammals huddled around him.
"So, what's your plan, then?" Jenny asked him.
"Well, we're gonna need to go back to Earth so I can get my other camera and a couple blank rolls of film," Steve explained. "I'm going to do what they say, but if they normally bungle the way they did during the fight, I get the feeling they won't know the difference between a photon accelerator and a milk separator until it's too late."
"What's a 'milk separator'?" Deadeye asked
"Just a piece of equipment on my Uncle Ethan's dairy farm back in Iowa," Steve explained.
"We'd better get on with this before the toads really do figure us out," Bucky urged. "Is there anything else you'll need to pull this off?"
"I don't think so," Steve said. "I explained the darkroom, chemicals, and paper to the toads already."
"OK. You and Willy go get what you need," Bucky commanded. "Make it quick so we can get this over with."
In the course of a few minutes, Willy and Steve retrieved the materials that Steve needed from his bags in Willy's room on Earth and had returned to the Aniverse to attempt their ruse on the toads.
As they were gathering the film and camera, Willy's mother poked her head into the room and explained that dinner would be ready in about two hours.
Once back aboard the toad mother ship, Steve spent a very long hour and a half explaining to Toadborg how the camera worked and how to develop the film. Once the cybernetic amphibian was satisfied, he even said he would be withdrawing the toad ships from the region for the moment once Steve was back aboard the Righteous.
"This is turning into one exciting trip," Steve told Willy and his new animal friends. "Too bad I had to give them the camera, though. That was the better of the two I brought."
"We'd better get back home for dinner," Willy reminded him.
"When we're done, maybe we can get a picture or two of these nice folks in front of the tree," Steve suggested.
"But won't your family notice?" Jenny asked.
"Not if we wait until they go look at the holiday lights," Steve answered.
"Sounds good then," Bucky agreed.
A few weeks later, Willy received a package containing a bound volume of Christmas writing and photography from his cousin, marked to the first page of Steve's telling of his visit. On the last page, there were two pictures in front of the DuWitt family tree: one of Willy and Steve's human family; the other of their friends in the Aniverse. With the book came a note specifically to Willy that read:
"Thanks again for the adventure in the Aniverse, cousin! Can't wait until next year, with or without the toads!"
The End.