CHAPTER 4 - DON'T MESS WITH LO!
As her dream continued, Lo found herself in a pickle due to being stuck butt-first in the opening of the staff house chimney thanks to the Marvin brothers shooting paintballs at her, while Fin was in her own predicament as she tried to evade getting hit by paintballs herself as the boys continued firing them with sadistic glee. "You rotten little savages!" Fin yelled down at Todd and Mark in between dodging more paintballs. "When I get down from this roof, you're both gonna be toast!"
"Oh yeah?" Mark replied tauntingly. "How're you gonna do that when there's no ladder for you to get down on?" he added with a cackle of evil laughter before he and Todd resumed firing.
Realizing she needed to do something to help herself and Fin against the bratty boys, Lo thought to herself, Okay, that is IT! Paintballs or no, I'm gonna fix those kids' wagons but good, then she mustered up her strength and began to pull herself out of the chimney opening. Once she got completely out, Lo, whose new teal dress was now almost completely covered with yellow and pink paint from the Marvin boys' paintball guns and soot from the chimney, called "Fin, cover me!" to her friend, then, with surprising dexterity, dashed to the north side of the staff house roof while evading more paintballs coming her way, climbed down to the walkway roof, then grabbed the edge of that roof and, using some gymnastic skills, vaulted down to the second floor walkway, then slid down the rail of the stairway to the main floor porch, jumped onto the porch and then over its railing to the side of the house.
Meanwhile, back on the roof, Fin had found some pine cones on the roof, which had ended up there from the earlier windstorm, and began throwing some of them at the Marvin boys to try to throw off their aim at Lo. Todd and Mark managed to dodge the pine cones, though, and began to double up their efforts in firing their paintballs at Fin. "Okay, now you're really asking for it!" said Todd as the boys continued firing.
Moments later though, the Marvin boys' attention was distracted when a female voice called, "Hey, boys!" Turning their heads to look, they saw Lo standing defiantly a few feet away, brandishing a water hose with a power nozzle sprayer from the side of the staff house. As she now heard the opening guitar riff to "Welcome to the Jungle" begin playing in the background of her dream, Lo said to the bratty brothers with a fiendish grin, "You want to call down the thunder? Well, here's some lightning to go with it!"
Right then, Lo opened fire on Todd and Mark as she squeezed the trigger on the power sprayer attached to the water hose, knocking the paintball guns out of the boys' hands and soaking them from head to toe. "AAAAAHHH! Run for it!" a soaking-wet Mark yelled as he and Todd then ran off back to the hotel. As Lo turned off the hose after the Marvins ran off, canned audience applause and cheering could then be heard by her as she smiled with satisfaction at getting her revenge on the two kids.
Moments after Lo chased away the Marvin brothers with their well-deserved water hose soaking, Ripper, Reef and Broseph arrived back at the staff house to see what the commotion was. Checking over the front of the house while Ripper got the knocked-over ladder propped back up, then checking on Lo, Broseph asked her, "Wow, what happened here, bra?"
"The Marvin boys happened," answered Lo, who then explained about the events that went down when she and Fin tried to install the new satellite dish, while Ripper climbed up to the walkway roof to help Fin down.
As soon as Reef saw the mess that was Lo's new dress, he began to point and laugh derisively at her expense. "Wow, Lo, who designed your dress, Picasso?" he said, then began laughing again before he was hit in the back of his head with a spare pine cone thrown at him by Fin. "Ow!" Reef yelped, rubbing his head. "That stings! What was that for?"
"Serves you right, kook!" Fin responded as she climbed down the ladder to the ground.
Thanks to Reef's comment about her dress, Lo looked down and looked at it. "Oh, no! My dress!" she said, noticing that now, not only was the dress covered with yellow and pink paint splatters and chimney soot, there was also a rip on the lower part of the dress from just above the knee down to the hem, apparently caused by snagging on something as Lo did her acrobatic escape from the Marvin boys' paintball fire. "It's ruined! I just bought it and now it's a mess!" Lo then wailed as she began to cry over the loss of her now-ruined dress, but Fin, who was now back on the ground after coming down from the roof, went over to comfort her friend.
"It's okay Lo, don't cry," Fin said to the rich girl, putting her right arm over Lo's shoulders and offering her a Kleenex to wipe her tears with. "I got shot up with paintballs too and my outfit got messed up, but I'm not crying over it - I'm planning a little revenge of my own," she added with a smirk and a gleam in her eye as she had the Marvin boys in mind.
"Really?" Lo said, dabbing at her eyes with the tissue as she got what Fin had in mind.
"Yep," Fin replied with a nod. "Anyway, look at the bright side to all this - thanks to your idea, we now have a new widescreen TV with satellite for the staff house. No more one-channel TV universe for us."
"Sweet!" said Broseph, who had overheard Fin talking. "Does it even come with those satellite music channels?"
"Seventy of them in all," said Lo as she wiped away her remaining tears.
"Cool," Broseph said in his Caribbean accent. "Reggae channel, here I come!"
"And now I can watch Dorm Life in first-run again!" Reef added, to which Fin rolled her eyes.
"See what I mean?" Fin said reassuringly to Lo. "The guys are already happy, and so will the rest of the girls as soon as they hear about the new set. Everything worked out in the end."
"Yeah, you're right," Lo agreed. "But then, things will work out even better when we can get the guys to finish the job we started on the dish installation, right?"
"True that," Fin said with a giggle. The light-hearted moment was interrupted a moment later, though, when a yell came from the direction of one of the third-floor windows.
"Okay, who broke the window in my room?" said Reef, sticking his head through the open window of his room.
Lo and Fin looked at each other with sly glances, as though they knew how to respond. "Go ask the Marvin boys!" Lo called back, and she and Fin began laughing, joined by the laugh track, then by canned applause and more 1950s sitcom background music.
A moment later, Lo woke up from her dream with a start, then turned on the lamp on her bedside stand. Checking out the surroundings of the girls' room, Lo was relieved to see that everything was in color again as she let out a sigh of relief. Fin, however, was also woken up the moment Lo's lamp went on. "Hey, what gives?" Fin asked as she sat up in her bed.
"Oh, I just woke up from this weird dream I was having," Lo said as she also sat up.
"It wasn't, like, a nightmare, was it?" Fin said with a yawn as she got up to go sit on the side of Lo's bed.
"No, nothing like that," Lo replied. "I dreamed that I was a character in one of those old TV comedies - the real old ones, you know, like in black-and-white? On top of that, I was even dreaming in black-and-white, like I was in such a show."
"Oh," said Fin with a laugh. "Was it because of those Lacey Show videos and those other old shows we watched on YouView earlier?"
"I guess so," Lo said. "Thing is, you were in my dream too, and we got into all kinds of wacky adventures, just like in those old shows."
"Oh yeah, sounds like it, all right," Fin said with another giggle. "But that's all it was, just a dream," she added as she put her hand on Lo's shoulder. "It's not like we get into such crazy misadventures in real life, right?"
"I could say that was true," Lo said, "if it wasn't for Reef and his hot-dogging, or all the pranks and jokes, or all the other stuff that goes on around the hotel when we get important guests. Even Bummer's blowouts would be funny if it weren't for him being the day manager here."
"Well," Fin mused, "you're right about that - especially about Reef and Bummer." After she and Lo shared another laugh, Fin then yawned again. "Okay, 'night Lo, sleep tight," she said as she went back to her own bed.
"'night, Fin," Lo said. Turning off her lamp and laying back down in her bed, Lo then grabbed her teddy bear and held it close to her as she turned on her side, then began thinking about the dream she had moments earlier. Okay, maybe Fin has a point, Lo thought to herself. The stuff the gang gets into may or may not be as kooky as what we saw on those old TV shows online, or what happened in my dream. Then again... she added with a smile as she closed her eyes and cuddled her teddy bear again, that dream did give me a good idea about getting a new TV set for the staff house.
THE END