Chapter 4

Tim cycled through his second half of the day with art, physics, and pre-calculus classes, but he felt like he was only going through the motions. He was pretty disappointed that Ashley Aspen wasn't in any of his other classes. For whatever reason, Tim found himself very interested in her. He'd never been much for intimate relationships or attractions before, but there was something...intriguing...about Ashley. Maybe it was her red hair. Or her glasses. Or her surprisingly high sarcasm tolerance. Or perhaps the fact that she maybe, just maybe, seemed to like-

"Tim!" Ashley called out just as he was opening the doors to the outside. "Hey, Tim, wait up a second!" Tim stopped as Ashley raced up to him, cheeks flushed with exertion.

"What's up?" asked Tim.

"Well...I don't know if you're really up to this, but..." Ashley nervously twirled a strand of hair around her finger. "There's a dance coming up next Friday night. I don't really wanna go, but I lost a bet with my girlfriend and now I have to...so...would you wanna go with me?"

"Depends," said Tim. "What bet did you lose?"

"That's private business between me and my girlfriend."

"Well, when you put it that way..." Tim pretended to think about it. "Okay. But just because you're the only one who's even bothered trying to make contact with me today."

"Thank you so very much!" Ashley barely managed to contain her fangirly squeak of delight.

"Wait a sec," Tim said. "What's with the 'girlfriend' stuff? You're not using me as...whatever boys are supposed to be instead of the beard...are you?"

"I think that would make you the boobs. And no, she's not that kind of girlfriend."

"Oh good," Tim said. "Can't let myself be tricked like that."

Ashley smirked. "Well, I hope you're not tricking me like that."

Tim was thrown by this for a moment, but was soon able to deliver an answer: "No, but if you wanna be a beard, date my brother."

"Not the football jock!" cried Ashley. "How does he survive in the locker room?!"

Tim nodded. "Yeah," he said, incredibly deadpan. "He's constantly bullying me to remind me of what will happen if I out him."

At this point, Ashley realized Tim was joking. But she still had one last word to give: "Oh joy. All hail the homoerotic sport of kings."

Tim was still chortling as he crossed the street and unlocked the door to his new house. He saw, as he climbed up to the second floor, that Rocky had beaten him home (as evidenced by the key dropped on the floor outside his bedroom door, because Rocky was unable to keep track of things in his pockets) and was already in the shower. So he retreated to his room and sat on his bed. He took another look at his guitar, and tried to strum a few bars - but with the broken strings it came out as an un-musical mess. He hung his head. What a way to deflate his mood. He really should have started up on his homework, but he found himself unable to. Tim had always been a big procrastinator. It was perhaps his biggest flaw. That, and his tendency to come off as creepy when he was trying to make friends with people.

A few hours later, Mom laid out plates of pasta salad on the table for the whole family. Never let it be said that the Nemos ever treat themselves at dinner. As Tim was about to leave, Dad called him back for a second. "Tim, I believe your guitar strings were broken. Well, I was able to get you some new ones before we left."

Tim gasped under his breath. "What the...how did you know?"

Dad smiled. "I saw your brother vandalizing it right before we left. Rest assured he will be punished for it."

Axel stared. "What? No I didn't. Tim, tell him I-"

Tim turned to his twin. "How do I know you weren't lying when I asked you last night?"

"Axel, come along with me," said Dad, calm as ever. "I think you should really learn your lesson for this one. Property damage is not something we take lightly."

An hour later, Axel walked back up into the bedroom while Tim applied the new strings to his guitar. "Way to defend me, asshole," Axel grumbled. "You just wanna score some brownie points with Dad, is that it?"

"No," said Tim. "It's just that it's impossible to convince him he's wrong. You know that as well as I do."

Axel rolled his eyes and flipped Tim off. Ignoring the rude treatment, Tim asked, "What did Dad do to you, anyway?"

Axel glared at Tim, while flipping an ancient Pearl Jam CD between his fingers. "Let's just say we might have to find some other time and place to watch Revolution. He took the hard drive from my computer, said he was gonna recycle it. Gotta use my allowance money to replace it. Do you know how expensive those things are? And I was gonna take this hot girl to the dance too. How do I explain to her that I'm gonna be flat broke for a month? God, we coulda been adopted by anyone. Why did it have to be the biggest freaking dickhead CEO asshole the world's ever known?!" Enraged, Axel threw the CD across the room, and it cracked in two against Tim's Buffy poster.

Tim bent over, picked up the broken CD, threw it away, and went back to his guitar strings.

10pm Thursday night. Ansem Nemo opened the closet in the third-floor master bedroom, approached the back wall, and pressed his hand to the cold sheetrock. A hidden panel disappeared, opening onto a small, cuboid elevator. Ansem pressed the single button on the wall panel and the elevator descended, deep underground.

He emerged in a large, sterile, well-lit lab space filled with computers and microscopes and multitudinous other equipment. In the center of the lab, in pride of place, lay a large egg-shaped steel pod.

His wife, Vexen, was working studiously at a computer directly in front of the pod. Ansem announced his presence by raising his hands and leaching the light from the overhead fluorescent tubes, into his hands, where it disappeared into his sleeves. He handed Vexen the hard drive he had confiscated from Axel's laptop, and she immediately slipped it into her desk drawer. Ansem then turned to the pod, now faintly shining green, and keyed in a long, thirteen-digit code on the keypad to the front of it.

The steel surface of the pod slid off, revealing a Plexiglas inner pod containing a glowing green liquid. Suspended in the liquid was a man, connected to a respirator that fed his lungs oxygen, and with an octopus-like network of tubes working blood into the chest cavity - doing all the pumping that a heart would do, if the man had one. The most disturbing thing of all was, the man was six feet tall, sinewy, with dark skin and silver hair.

In short, he looked exactly like Ansem.

Ansem smiled, then closed the steel pod. He released the light back to the fluorescents, illuminating the lab once again. Before leaving, he turned to Vexen, who had just opened an empty computer case and began adding Axel's hard drive to it. He said, "Be sure to buy some food to keep down here, dear. Braig was going a bit...stir-crazy today."

Vexen nodded and resumed her fiddling with the computer's innards as Ansem entered the elevator and left.