Chapter 8. The Grand Canyon

Meg happily went bouncing back to the temple, just in time for dinner. She bounced right over the temple's exterior walls and landed in the courtyard just outside the dining hall. Skipping along, greatly amused at having run into her old dentist, Meg found the others already eating in the dining room.

"Hi guys!"

"Where have you been?" Raimundo asked.

"Yeah, you're late for dinner," Kimiko told her.

Meg pulled up a seat at the table and reached for some food.

"How long was I gone for?" asked Meg.

"Uh, like, half an hour," Rai told her.

"And you already started eating without me? You didn't want to, like, look for me or anything?"

"Why should we go looking for ya," Clay began around a mouthful of steak, "when the food's gettin' cold?"

Meg just let this roll off her back for now.

"Well, when I was out in the forest, I found out something very interesting!"

"What? That cute little squirrels won't play with you like they do in those little kiddy movies you watch?" Kimiko teased.

"Squirrels are not cute!" Omi snapped quietly.

"Girl, there can't possibly be a single thing in that forest that we haven't already seen about a thousand times by now," Rai told her. "Just eat your egg rolls."

Meg glared at them and didn't touch her food for about ten minutes. None of them, snorting and stuffing away food, noticed her. Eventually, Meg picked up her dish, knocked on some more rice, and took her food outside.

"Butt-heads," she muttered. She sat on the steps and munched quietly on her food, her spirits dampened for the first time in a long time. "I thought this was going to be at least a little bit of fun."

The days continued to pass, twenty four long hours at a time, and Meg took it upon herself to make the lives of her new Masters that much more difficult. When it was time to do chores, Meg would bolt around the area faster than they could see her and upset the dust from the rafters or the crud from the gutters. At training, she would either laze around or use the Shen Gong Wu to play practical jokes. At dinner time, she started food fights, after a bath- if she even took one- she would shake out her dreads like a dog and soak everything around, and at night she refused to go to bed quietly.

"You cannot keep doing this!" Omi screamed down at her at training one afternoon. "I am your teacher! You must listen to me!"

"You're not a real teacher," Meg yawned. "You're, like, a T.A."

"What is a T.A?"

"Teacher's assistant."

Kimiko, even more short-tempered than ever with her newly inflated ego, completely couldn't handle Meg sometimes.

"What are you doing to my laptop?" Kim screamed one afternoon.

"I'm making it pretty," Meg giggled before she ran off to let Kimiko discover the array of designs and pictures Meg had decorated her laptop with in Sharpie.

"I am absolutely going to kill her!" Raimundo hollered after another unsuccessful training.

"That girl's puttin' a lot of good talent to waste, if ya ask me," said Clay.

"Yeah, well, no one did ask you," Kimiko snapped. "No one ever asks you anything because we know it'll take about ten minutes for you to incorrectly pronounce the wrong answer!"

"Be quiet! Can't you see that this is tearing us apart?" Omi shouted. "We are supposed to be a team!"

"Right, the four of us are!" said Rai. "Meg is so totally the fifth wheel here!"

A few unpleasant days later, Dojo sensed another Shen Gong Wu and carted the five of them off to America to search the Grand Canyon.

"Oooh, lookit' how big it is," Meg squeaked happily.

Raimundo rolled his eyes.

"Yeah, big like your mouth."

Meg just stuck her tongue out at him behind his back.

As they circled down over the sprawling ravines, Dojo described the Wu to them.

"It's a Shen Gong Wu that comes in two parts. They're called the Backn'Forth Bracelets. If two people wear a bracelet each, they can communicate to each other and they can trade places instantly, no matter where they are."

"That sounds like fun," said Kimiko.

"Yeah, but I can't think of what you'd use it for. It sounds like something for mean pranks. You know, jump off a cliff and then change places real fast?"

Dojo spiraled down to the ground near the long cliff edges and returned to his compact size.

"Okay, kids, start lookin' under rocks."

Meg dashed off to literally start looking under rocks.

"Hey, don't fall off a cliff or nuthin', Kake," Clay warned her.

"Or bounce off a cliff," Kimiko muttered.

"Or get mysteriously pushed…" Rai began, but he stopped short after a warning glare from Omi.

It was late at night and most of the canyon was flooded with shadow, but the temperature had to be up near at least 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Omi held his hands up and sighed in relied as he poured a light stream of water over his head.

"It ain't so bad," Clay said cheerfully, heaving up a massive boulder to glance around quickly.

"Actually, it is," said Rai with an attitude.

Meanwhile, Meg saw what looked an awful lot like a pair of bracelets hanging on a branch just beyond the edge of the canyon.

"I found it, guys, I found it!" she cried out.

They all ignored her.

"Of course, why am I telling you?" she muttered to herself.

Meg got down on all fours and reached out with short arms in an attempt to reach the bracelets. She was barely a finger's length away from the Wu. She scooted further over the cliff, focusing only on the bracelets and not on the thin Colorado River surrounded by a wall of gagged rocks hundreds of feet below.

Big surprise: the cliff began to crumble. Meg screamed as she felt the earth loosening under her, and suddenly everything slowed down. She saw the others in the darkness turn a split second before she tumbled down off the cliff and into the shadows.

Meg's powers of Light kicked in and she could see and think in Bullet-Time. She saw the rocks gliding past her, but she also saw the bracelets floating just below her. If she could grab the bracelets, then she could grab onto a rock or root to slow her fall.

"Meg fell!" Kimiko screamed. The four monks and Dojo zipped to the scene of the accident, but Meg was gone.

"Master Fung is never going to forgive us!" Raimundo cried out, pulling at his hair.

"Now we will never become full Dragons!" Omi almost began crying.

"I'll bet she fell on purpose, just to make us suffer!" Kimiko snapped.

"Dojo! Can't you fly down and find her?" Clay asked.

"In these shadows? Are you joking? She's probably already hit the river by now!"

"We can save her! C'mon, you guys! After all we've been through…?"

But Clay was met only by expressions of complete surrender and utter defeat.

"Guys…!" Clay tried to get through to them, but they only moped in their loss.

As they wallowed in self-pity, Meg grabbed the Backn'Forth Bracelets in mid air. She was still, however, too far from the canyon walls to grab hold of anything. She realized that even though she saw everything happening very, very slowly, she was in reality moving very fast. So fast that, when she hit the water, it would probably kill her. If she hit the ground, it would definitely kill her.

Suddenly, she felt a kind of impact. Her sense of time returned to normal and she was sure she had hit the water because she was moving. Though, she wasn't wet.

Jack Spicer had been searching for the Bracelets, too. He assumed that, because the Grand Canyon was around 1,500 years ago, the Wu was probably hidden within the ravine, and not along the surface, where any Japanese tourist with a camera could pick it up.

Flying along with his Heli-pack, legs behind him slightly, Jack put his hands out to check his watch. It was then, at 9:43pm, that Meg, falling at a rate of about a fourth maximum velocity( ), literally fell right into his arms.

The sudden imbalance sent the Heli-pack spinning uncontrollably, spiraling down hundreds of feet. After a few moments of screaming manically, Jack managed to regain an even course.

"What the heck?" he whined. "Who are you? Where did you come from?"

Her eyes shut tight and Jack's Heli-pack straps clutched in her hands, Meg gradually dared to look up.

"I'm Okay," she said, startled. "Did you save me?" she asked, gazing up at Jack with slightly glazed eyes.

"Apparently!" Jack was equally bewildered. "Where did you come from?"

"I was looking for Shen Gong Wu," Meg explained, which was a strange thing to do because she didn't realized that Jack wasn't just a regular person who wouldn't know about Shen Gong Wu, "and I fell."

"You were looking for Wu, too?" Jack asked. "Hey, I recognize you! You're that Dr. Seuss drawing from Kashmir!"

A series of images from Kashmir ran through Meg's head. Suddenly, a name came to her, along with a reputation. In the shadows of the Canyon with only the faintest moonlight, Jack was a particularly imposing villain to encounter for the first time.

"Oh my Gawd! You're Jack Spicer!"

Jack looked at her with one eyebrow raised.

"Yeah, what's it to ya?"

Meg partially curled up in a defensive ball and hid her face, even though it was dark out.

"Please don't hurt me, Mister Spicer! Please don't drop me either! I'm fragile! Go get the Xiaolin Monks! They're the ones you want! They've got all the Shen Gong Wu! They're right up there!" Then, she added quietly after a pause. "Don't hurt me!"

Jack, needless to say, enjoyed the respect.

"Uh…That's right! You're at my mercy now! Give me one good reason why I shouldn't drop you right now!"

"I'll do all your laundry and dishes and clean up after any pets you have for the rest of my life!" Meg screamed at the top of her lungs, clutching his collar desperately.

There was a pause as Jack drifted along, the only sound the hum of the Heli-pack engine. The fact that no one heard her screams echoing over and over through the canyon in the dead of night is a detail still pondered to this day.

"Sounds good to me!" he laughed after a moment. "No- wait! I have a better idea! You have to…um...Join the Heylin side and never fight for the side of good ever again!"

Meg tossed her dreads casually and put her hand on Jack's shoulder.

"Hey, I've got no problem with that! Fighting for 'good' is boring, anyway!" she laughed.

"Cool!" exclaimed Jack. This was an infinitely better response than he was expecting. He descended to the canyon floor, where the SMART bot stood waiting.

"Do they know you fell?" Jack asked, pushing a remote-garage-door-opener type button that opened the black blast shield.

"Yeah," Meg sighed as he set her down on the broad nose of the bot.

"And they didn't even come after you?"

"Naw. I wouldn't expect them to. They hate me."

"Well, if we see them," said Jack, "let's tell 'em your dead."

"Um, you can tell them that. I'll hide."

"Yeah. That's what I meant."

Though there was only one seat in the SMART, there was a small storage space immediately behind that seat, presumably for backpacks or suitcases. Meg fit in the spot quite nicely.

"Let's give your Xiaolin loser friends a good ol' SMART bot So Long, Suckers!" Jack cackled, firing up the bot's boosters. In a few moments, with its wings expanded, the bot went shooting up out of the canyon and blazed a searchlight down to find the monks.

"There they are!" Jack declared. He flipped a switch and a couple of turret machine guns unfolded . He saw the monks change to their Dragon forms and take to the sky.

"What did you say your name was?" Jack asked over his shoulder.

"I'm Nutmeg Kake, but you can call me Meg!"

"All right, Meg! Hand me those Bracelets!"

Again, Jack broadcast his voice from the bot as the Dragons came flying at him in storms of earth, water, wind, and fire.

"Ha-ha! Take that, Suckers! I've already got two Shen Gong Wu with this thing and not one showdown! I guess that old dragon of yours is just TOO SLOW!" He emptied a few rounds of ammo, but the bullets had no effect on their elemental dragon forms. The Dragons tried to attack the SMART, but, with the machine's computer in control of the flight path, it dodged and weaved through every one of their attacks.

"By the way," he began one last taunt, "I saw that little Dread Head monk fall off a cliff! Good job, morons! The four of you couldn't keep one little kid from falling to his death? Wow!"

"You saw Meg?" Clay demanded, nearly smashing into the bot.

"Meg? It was a girl? That's a shame! Well, so long, suckers! I got the Backn'Forth Bracelets!"

Pushing up on a lever, Jack put the SMART up the equivalent of four gears and blasted off, putting miles between himself and the monks in about ten seconds.

"Cool," Meg said, meekly peeking out from behind the driver's seat. "You lie well," she completed him.

Jack shrugged with fake modestly.

"Any world-conqueror to-be has to be a good liar. I'm a natural."

"World-conqueror?" Meg repeated.

"Yeah. I, Jack Spicer, Master of Evil, am going to take over the world!"

Meg thought about this for a moment.

"When you do, can you take "The Weakest Link" off the air?"

"Hell, that's like the first thing I was planning on doing!"

(No one could possibly reach anything even near a tenth of maximum velocity after falling only about 100 feet…Except Nutmeg Kake, perhaps.)