Frea's A/N: Thanks to everybody that left reviews and to our wonderful beta boys, AgentInWaiting and mxpw. You guys rock. Also, if you're confused about who Megan Woodcomb or Violet Bartowski are, you should probably read Chuck vs. the Sound of Music or That Which is Greater. We've crashed our stories together with a fun backstory: Devon and Ellie never died, and Chuck still had that little indiscretion that led to Violet (and wooing Sarah several years later). Sir transcends universes and doesn't need to be explained.

quistie's A/N: I second Frea's thanks. Thank you, Damon Runyon and Frank Loesser. Special thanks to Moonlight Pilot for allowing us to use a couple of his characters in this story.

Chapter 02: Debug the Code

After his sister and the other spies left the Buy More, Chuck headed for the Nerd Herd desk. He didn't quite have a literal storm cloud hovering over his head, but it certainly felt that way. With a sigh, he tossed his bag on the desk, crossed round, and dropped into his regular seat.

The loud farting noise that immediately followed made three customers look over.

Chuck merely swiveled and looked at Jeff and Lester. "Whoopee cushions? Really?"

Lester fell to the ground, laughing. Next to him, Jeff gave a boozy little smile and a burp.

"I see your sense of humor is going backward," Chuck said, and pulled the whoopee cushion free. He tossed it on the desk and turned to log into the computer. "Any calls while I was gone?"

"Not a one."

"Seriously?"

"Who do you think we are? This is the Burbank Buy More, not the Beverly Hills Buy More."

"I would have just thought…" Chuck sighed. "I thought we'd have some interest by now. I tweeted about the computer classes and everything."

"I tweeted your mom," Jeff slurred.

"Thank you, Jeff. Don't you two have some repair calls to take?"

"Nope."

Chuck gave the clipboard full of service call requests—which was full to the point of bursting and had been since Jeff had started there in the 80s, no doubt—a deadpan look. Lester threw his hands up in the air. "Why's it always gotta be work, work, work with you?"

"I don't know. Maybe because I'm your boss?"

"Not like it matters. These repairs won't save us from going belly-up in a couple days anyway."

Chuck logged into the Nerd Herd mainframe and checked his watch. The free demo-session was coming up, which meant he didn't have much time. "Where'd you hear that?" he asked without looking at Lester.

"Where else? Twitter." Lester hopped down off of the counter. "C'mon, Jeffrey. Let's leave Mr. Bartowski to sink with the ship."

"I'm trying to save your jobs!" Chuck called after them.

Lester turned and kept walking backwards, arms outspread and oblivious to the four or five customers that had to dodge out of the way to avoid being side-swiped. "Why?" he asked. "We don't even do our jobs."

"Point," Chuck said, mostly to himself. He looked up at the rest of the Nerd Herders gathered behind the desk. "Skip, I'm going to need you to watch the desk. If anybody asks, we're holding the demo class in conference room B, okay?"

He checked his phone for the new message from Skip: the one that smells like eggs Benedict?

"No, that's C. B is the one with the stain on the floor that looks like Napoleon Dynamite. Thanks, Skip."

The bro with the fro gave him a thumbs up and went back to listening to the Three Six Mafia on his headphones. Chuck sighed and, grabbing his computer bag and the stack of free Buy More mouse-pads that he planned to hand out to attendees, left the safety of the Nerd Herd desk with plenty of time to get to the conference room.

Of course, he forgot to factor in Buy More time and how it wasn't like regular people time. Everybody knows, after all, that time only passes in retail in a way that's entirely meant to screw over workers. Because Chuck had somewhere to be, customers swarmed him with questions about this or that product, if this camera was better or that one, why had the toaster stopped working after a bout with French toast? Chuck managed to pass most of them off onto unsuspecting Green Shirts, but by the time he got to the conference room, he was very, very late.

Agitated, he burst through the door. "I am so, so, so sorry, every…" He looked around. Most of the tables were empty, save for a large man with a beard and a crew-cut the color of a fire engine. "One."

"It's okay," the man said. "I think I'm the only one. I don't mind waiting."

"Either way, I'm sorry. You're really the only one?" Chuck looked around, mystified, at the empty tables. Had nobody read his tweet? Sure, he had fourteen followers, but surely somebody had to have noticed.

"I'm just here for the swag," the dude said. "There's swag, right?"

Chuck, despondent now, held out a mouse-pad. The dude wrinkled his nose and sighed, but took it with a begrudging, "Thanks."

"Don't worry about it." Chuck set the computer bag on the podium at the front of the room and wanted to kick something. He eyed the guy with his mouse-pad. "If you just came for the swag, you don't have to stay for the rest. I won't be offended."

"Might as well stay," the dude said. "Beats tipping over hobos down by the river."

"I...don't even know what to say to that. But all right." With a shrug to himself, Chuck crossed to the whiteboard and uncapped one of the electronic markers. When that one proved dead, he tested a second, and a third, until he finally found a blue marker with a weak signal. He wrote "PROGRAMMING 101: COMPUTERS ARE OUR FRIENDS" across the board. "So this is just a demo of some of the classes I hope to offer to the public."

Mouse-pad dude nodded to show his interest.

"They're very easy, very user-friendly courses that will help you build your very first program, that will teach you the basics of programming so that you can go on to learn other languages like C-sharp, Java, and even Python. And of course, if I get enough interest..." Chuck cast a despairing look around the empty room. "If I get enough interest, I'll be happy to teach advanced classes in each of those languages."

"Cool. I have a question."

"Yes?"

"What if I don't have a computer?"

"We'll have several units available for the classroom by then." Even if he had to go into the cage and fix them himself, Chuck thought.

"That leads me to my next question. What if I don't even know how to turn on a computer?"

Chuck squinted at the man. "Wait a second, if you don't even have a computer, why do you want the mouse-pad?"

The man looked at him as though the answer should be obvious. "It's free?"

"Oh."

"Plus, I know for a fact that if you get the angle right, you can do some serious damage when you throw these things."

("It's true," Megan whispered to Violet. "Fred threw one at Curtis once and he bled for, like, forever.")

"Great," Chuck sighed. "That's just great. I'm handing out mouse-pads of mass destruction."

"Yup." The dude tossed the mouse-pad from hand to hand.

"Well, why don't I show you some of the great things you could learn how to do, in case you do want to learn how to do more than turn on the computer?" Chuck pulled out his laptop and made short work of hooking it up to the Buy More's AV system. That was the one area where Morgan was a technological wizard, which meant that the Burbank Buy More's conference rooms were always top-notch, AV-wise. Sure enough, an enlarged image of Chuck's computer screen soared over the projector screen.

At least he had an easily impressed audience, Chuck thought.

"Okay, so here are some really cool things you can do," he said, and pressed the space bar. Immediately, the screen went dark. A website popped up. "This blog? I designed this blog completely in . Took me ten minutes. It can be fully integrated into any kind of database you choose, I made all of the graphics, you can comment, you can tweet about your experience on the blog, you can follow the RSS feed, all with relative ease."

"What's a blog?" the dude asked.

Chuck sighed and moved on. "Here," he said, "we have a game. It's like Pong, but not lame. Interactive 3-D Pong, responds to mouse, stylus, even keyboard controls. Here, watch." He played a round of Pong against the computer, holding up fairly well, and hoping that his one-man-audience was at least impressed with the graphics and explosions he had worked into the game (at Morgan's behest, of course, but the gentleman didn't need to know about that).

The only reaction to that was, "What's Pong?"

"Fine," Chuck said. "My secret weapon."

He hit a button. Immediately, the screen filled with an animated 3-D rendering of a beautiful woman in what looked like a white skin-suit at first glance. He was probably most proud of the suit, how the material looked a bit like the white version of Kate Beckinsale's catsuit from the Underworld movies. The sleeves and shoulders of the suit on this model, though, were actually dark blue or black depending on the light. A thin black belt cut across her abdomen, bisecting itself to hold a holster at her right hip. Black boots rose all the way up her slim calves. Black hair waved around a strong and beautiful face, a face Chuck knew very, very well.

"Whoa," the dude with the mouse-pad said, sitting up. "Who is that?"

Chuck looked at his rendering. "I haven't really given her a name."

"She's hot."

"And I created her using only the computer."

The dude's eyes lit up. "Does she do anything?"

"Well..." Chuck tapped in a few commands. The woman on screen turned in place, took two steps, returned to her original spot, and pulled out a bright silver gun. "Yeah, I kind of control her. But this is the best part."

"What is?"

"She sings." Chuck hit the space bar.

(to the tune of Follow the Fold):

Brunette Sarah Video Game Clone:

Debug the code and crash no more,
Crash no more, crash no more.
Put in the indents and then save the source.
Debug, debug the code.

Before you write that "IF/THEN" statement!

Debug the code and crash no more,
Crash no more, crash no more.
Infinite loops are bad, so you say "oops"
Debug, debug the code.

Once the Sarah Walker clone in the white bodysuit's slightly-rusty alto faded into silence, the dude in the audience stood up and pulled out his wallet. "How much for all of the classes?" he asked.

Stunned, Chuck named a price and was soon holding that amount in crisp twenties. His heart couldn't help but soar as he went back to his laptop and began to enter the man's information into the class database he had set up. "All right, good sir, what's your name?"

"Dave," the man said.

"Hello, Dave. Welcome to the Buy More Bits and Bytes Academy."

"Thanks." Dave stared admiringly at the screen for a long moment. "For future reference? You should have led with her."

Chuck laughed. Wasn't that the truth?

- O -

Even as the Uncanny Valley version of Sarah Walker was singing on the projector screen, three spies stared in dismay at a screen of their own. "This is really what Grenouille's information returned?" Casey, evidently deciding that he should be the one to fall on his sword, asked. "We were expecting something a little less…"

"Twisty," Carina finished for him.

Ellie wanted to sigh. They'd reported in to the bosses, who had turned over the stolen intel to the nerds at headquarters. What the nerds had found out in return was that Granota had been in negotiations to buy something from a man that none of them had suspected to be in bed with Fulcrum. Well, they hadn't suspected it, but it certainly didn't surprise any of them. Evil Ted Roark was a bad man who—

"Grandpa," Violet said, interrupting the narrative yet again. She had a line furrowed between her eyebrows.

Stephen looked up from the book. "Yes, Vi? Do you need to go to the bathroom?"

"No. Actually, yes. Well, maybe only a little, but what's that mean?"

"What?"

"In bed with? Why is Evil Ted Roark in bed with Fulcrum?"

"Are they sleepy?" Megan wanted to know.

"Ah, no. It's a metaphorical bed."

"A med-a-fur-i-cal what?"

"It means…" Stephen frowned as he thought it over. It really wasn't all that easy explaining metaphors to a couple of five-year-olds, he discovered. Finally, he closed the book over his finger so that he wouldn't lose his place. "You know how your daddy always says he's so hungry he could eat a horse?"

Megan nodded, eyes wide.

Violet, on the other hand, looked nervous. "Not a real horse, right?" she asked, looking down at the floor where Sir drowsed, probably dreaming of chasing rabbits.

"Right," Orion said. "He's not going to eat a real horse. He's just going to eat a lot. But a horse is also a lot, so he says one thing and means another."

"Why doesn't he just say he'll eat a lot, then?" Violet said, a challenging look on her face now.

Megan turned to her cousin. "It's funnier if it's a horse," she said, her voice sage.

Stephen had to hide his smile as both girls considered this.

Violet finally picked up Bun-Bun and hugged him close to her chest, her tiny forehead lined with doubt as she turned back to her grandfather. "So Evil Ted Roark is a horse?"

"You know what? I think it's time for a bathroom break."

"No, I can hold it," Violet said, her eyes wide now at the thought of losing out on more story-time.

"Are you sure? Because we're coming up on another song, and I don't want any…accidents—"

"I'm sure. Story, Grandpa, story!"

"Story, Grandpa, story!" Megan echoed, bouncing like her cousin now.

"All right, all right," Stephen said, and opened the book again. "Evil Ted Roark was a bad man who…"

Evil Ted Roark was a bad man who had ties with every other evil company in the world, stealing good and honest inventors' ideas, so why shouldn't he be Fulcrum?

Now, Ellie thought, they had to steal something from him that he had stolen from somebody else. It was just another day as the Intersect.

They'd figured out that Roark was expecting to sell Granota a mysterious device only known in computer hacker circles as "The MacGuffin." Granota was supposed to buy the MacGuffin that weekend with at least twenty of his closest business associates in attendance as a show of faith to Evil Ted Roark. The only saving grace was that Evil Ted Roark didn't even know who Granota was, which meant Ellie and the others could pretend to be Elaine Granota and company.

The problem lay in the whole "strength in numbers" thing. Ellie was a brilliant Intersect, but there was no way that she could possibly clone herself, Casey, and Carina in order to make up the team of twenty-strong they would need. So they were calling in the backup: seduction master Roan Montgomery (who feared Carina for doing just a little too well in his class), dashing James-Bond-lite Cole Barker (who had spent twenty minutes hitting on Ellie before meeting Devon. Upon seeing the man's nuclear biceps, Barker had immediately switched his attentions to Carina), Alex Forrest (much to Carina's disgust at not being the only redhead, as they'd found out on Facebook that Forrest had cultivated a disturbing addiction to henna), French agent Ilsa Trinchina (who hated Carina), even Big Becks (whom Carina feared). The list of spies went on, but the gist was the same: it was going to be an interesting weekend with Carina.

Casey and Ellie turned to give the primary redhead in their lives a look. She blinked back at them. "What?"

Graham, on the screen, cleared his throat. "It's twisty, yes," he said, the word sounding weird coming from him. "But it can be done. You'll be expected to keep the team in order, and to find a suitable location for the buy-out to go down. Have plenty of surveillance ready to go so that we can finally nail that Evil Ted Roark bas—ket case for at least some of the awful things he's done. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir," Casey said for all of them, and the screen went dark.

Carina flopped into one of the chairs. "Well, that suc—stinks," she said. "Usual place for the meet, do you think?"

"No, no, no," Ellie said. "We can't use the Buy More again."

"Why not?"

"Because I promised Chuck? Because he might lose his job? Because it's ridiculous in the first place to hold this kind of meeting in a big electronics box store?"

"Well, we can't hold it in the Wienerlicious. That's even more ridiculous," Carina said.

"We'll worry about that later," Casey said as Ellie picked up the pages coming off of the printer. "Where's your head at, Bartowski?"

Ellie looked through the pages. The MacGuffin had been stolen, she saw, from a brilliant scientist named Orion, and it was rumored to be something pretty special. Special, she thought, was something she felt less and less with each passing day.

"I…" she said, and looked at the roster. "We've dealt with all of these people, but only one at a time. This mission is big. Can we handle it?"

Casey and Carina exchanged a look.

(to the tune of The Oldest Established)

Casey and Carina:

Ted Roark stole Orion's machine
Something we could not have foreseen.
And now we are tasked to get it back
Because we're the team that has the knack.
They don't know we've got a secret weapon
Lodged in the noggin of one of our spies.
We'd better get a step on.
Evil Ted Roark is in for a surprise.
So the Intersect is what we need
To stop Ted Roark in his evil deed.

Why it's good old reliable Ellie!
Ellie, Ellie, the Intersect!
If you're looking for action
She just has to flash.
Count on her to do the job
The dirt bags she'll smash.

"Grandpa, what's a flash?" Violet asked, her face scrunched at the question.

"Well, you see—"

Megan sat forward eagerly, picking up the Barbie lying next to her on the bed. "Can I explain it to Violet, Grandpa?"

"You know what flashes are?" Stephen stopped himself from saying anything else since he wasn't sure what Megan meant. Maybe she was thinking of something as innocuous as lightning. "Sure, Megan. Go ahead."

Megan grinned and sat up on her knees, as if she was preparing to launch into the story both verbally and physically. "So I was playing Spy Barbie one day and GI Joe was captured and tied to a chair by some bad guys. Aunt Sarah asked me why he had been captured. I told her it was because Joe had a computer in his head." She dropped her voice and Violet, wide-eyed, leaned forward to better hear her cousin. "But not like a robot. Joe has this computer in his brain that flashes pictures about bad people and he uses them to catch them."

Violet narrowed her eyes at Megan and said, "But that's silly."

Stephen chuckled nervously. "Strangely, Violet, Megan's right." Trying to sound nonchalant, he asked, "Did someone tell you about it?"

Megan shook her head emphatically. "No, Grandpa. I thought of it all by myself. Why?"

"Oh, no reason." Maybe she took after him more than he realized. She was his granddaughter after all.

The flash conversation concluded, he continued singing:

Yes it's good old reliable Ellie!
And we have Bryce Larkin to thank
For the oldest established Intersect Project
Right here in Burbank.

Ellie looked up in surprise as the door leading from Castle into the Wienerlicious opened, and old friends and acquaintances began to pour through. Roan Montgomery came down the stairs like the cool cat he was, a martini glass in his hand (three olives, of course). He winked at Ellie before gesturing Agent Alex Forrest down the stairs. Carina and Forrest glared at each other for a minute before the brilliant inventor Manoosh, whom Ellie had convinced to work for the CIA, flipped down, his Intersect glasses in place. He was followed by General Stanfield, civilian Alex McHugh ("Aunt Alex!"), Agent Longshore, and DGSE Agent Ilsa Trinchina (Casey straightened up and then flinched when mercenary Gertrude Verbanski followed the French agent. He sidled off to the side, looking for an exit). The parade continued until the room was completely full. Without missing a beat, the group picked up the song.

The spies:

There are evildoers everywhere, everywhere
There are evildoers everywhere.
And an awful lot of glory
For the agents who can catch them there.
When we have Intersect along with us
We do everything with flair.

That's good old reliable Ellie!
Ellie, Ellie the Intersect.
Yes, for Ellie to help us she just needs to flash
Pretty quick the bad guys are in prison to crash
With detention provided by Ellie
To escape they'd need a large tank.
It's the oldest established Intersect Project
Right here in Burbank.

Where's the bad guy? Where's Ted Roark?
Gotta quell Ted Roark.
Do you have a fork?
She's the oldest established Intersect Project
Right here in Burbank!

In the silence following the song, a throat cleared. All of the spies looked over from the positions their dance had deposited them into, and stared at Sarah Walker, who stared back in utter bafflement from the base of the stairs. She had her cell phone in her hand. "Uh, hate to interrupt the, um, singing, but what's going on here?"

- O -

Ten minutes earlier...

Sarah Walker rolled her shoulders as she stepped into the Burbank Buy More and cast a glance around, broken phone in one hand. She'd meant to go straight over to the Wienerlicious and see her old asset, but unfortunately, she'd dropped her phone on the asphalt at LAX. It was simpler to get it fixed before she dropped in on old friends.

Old friends, she had to think. Her only old friends were an ex-asset and the only part of the Cat Squad still talking to her. Was that considered pathetic? She had no idea.

She looked around the Buy More. Ellie's brother had been pretty good with computers, if she remembered right. Sure, he'd always seemed kind of uptight, like he never relaxed, but he'd be able to fix her phone if he was still there. He probably wasn't. If he was even half so brilliant as Ellie was always boasting, surely he'd moved on by now?

When she didn't spot him, she guessed he had. A noise, however, made her look over at the vent by the front door. Was that...singing?

No, it couldn't be. She was tired from the international flight from Salzburg and hearing things, that was it. With a shrug to herself, she headed for the Nerd Herd desk in the middle of the store. The be-froed man working the desk looked up like a startled rabbit when she rang the bell. He stared at her, his mouth bobbing wordlessly.

"Uh," Sarah said. "Can you fix my phone?"

The nerd's mouth continued to move without any sound coming out. To her right, Sarah heard a throat clear and looked over. A green shirt worker with flushed cheeks and a curly mop was standing there. "He says he'll be happy to help," he told Sarah.

"Thank you..." Sarah read the nerd's nametag. "Fernando. I kind of dropped it on the concrete. Is it going to be impossible to fix?" She turned back to the Nerd Herd nerd—Skip Johnson, his nametag read.

He shook his head, the fro quivering.

"Should be an easy fix," Fernando said. When Skip Johnson made a handle signal at him, he coughed into the back of his hand, gathering his nerves. "The Intellicell 6.0 has a really shaky processor, he says. Or something like that. Just a simple turn of the screw and..."

Skip handed Sarah the fixed phone. "All better," Fernando said.

"Oh, great!" Sarah breathed a sigh of relief. "What do I owe you?"

Skip waved both hands. "He says it's on the house," Fernando translated needlessly. "We're happy to help."

"Well, thank you very much," Sarah told them both, and extracted herself from that situation before they could work up the nerve to ask her to dinner or something like that. She'd had to put off several similar invitations in her stint as Ellie's handler whenever she'd visited John Casey at the Buy More. But at least the squirelly little Canadian-Indian fellow didn't seem to be anywhere in sight.

She headed toward the door, and barely missed out on being trapped under an avalanche of CD-R boxes. The entire display crumbled right in front of her; if it had been anybody but Sarah, they would have been crushed. She dodged out of the way, landing easily even despite the stilettos, wide-eyed at the carnage.

Big Mike Brannigan appeared in his manager's vest. "Bunny! I told you to stack this properly! And now, look what you've gone and done. You tryin' to kill whatever customers we have left?" He looked at Sarah and said, "I am so, so sorry, Miss—You." He apparently remembered her face perfectly, for his own took on a look of displeasure. "Great. More spies in the Buy More."

"I'm just here as a customer," Sarah said, her eyebrows shooting up. What on earth had been going on here since she'd been gone? Why the heck did Big Mike know about spies? What had Carina done? "Honest. Just needed to get my phone fixed."

Big Mike did not look impressed. "You pay for that?"

"I..."

"I'll get this out of the way, sir," Fernando said, once again appearing at Sarah's elbow to save the day. "Won't take more than a minute, I promise." He began to scramble around, picking up CD-R cases. At Sarah, he mouthed, "Run!"

She needed no further prompting. "I really should be going."

"I already told your spy friends, but I'll repeat it. This store don't need your trouble, or your kind. It's thanks to your lot we're getting shut down. Unless Bartowski can pull off that miracle and get his ten students, we're all going down, and it'll be your fault." With a final glower, Big Mike stormed off, muttering about Danishes and darn spies as he did so.

Sarah stared after him in surprise and then shook her head. Maybe it was time to figure out what the he-heck was going on in Burbank.

She headed for the Wienerlicious. It was time to get to the bottom of things.