A/N Couple announcements. First, thanks for all the reviews from everyone! I really don't deserve you guys :D Second, I hate to do this to you all, but my family vacation is about to get real hectic starting tomorrow, and the next chapter probably won't be up for a couple weeks. :( Third, speaking of Chapter 10, I've started working on it already, and it's getting to be so loooooong that I might split it up into two chapters, bringing the total number of chaps to 12. Haven't decided what to do yet, since splitting them up would be bad for keeping the action going...
Anyhow, the big reveal is finally here! Below, you will finally find out why I chose the title and cover photo for this story that I did. ;) Enjoy, and please no busting holes in your bedroom walls! *coughJoshcough*

Chapter 9

"You wanted to see me, agents?"

"Yes, Ms. O," Otto answered as he and Oscar took their seats by Ms. O's desk. "Sorry we had to keep you after hours."

"It's alright," Ms. O assured him. "Now, what is it you needed?"

"Well, before we get to that," Oscar began, "first could you fill us in on the aquarium search?"

Ms. O raised an eyebrow, but obliged them. "We didn't find anything," she said flatly. "Mr. O told me yesterday that the villain uses a gadget hooked onto a belt to turn people into odd objects. I had every available agent on the maintenance and security staff ransack the entire building and interrogate every employee to find the villain and their belt gadget. And. We. Found. Nothing!" She pounded her desk in frustration. "And not even Mr. O knows how that belt gadget works. His agents destroyed it to defeat the villain before, but there's still tons of missing people in that town because they couldn't change them back! If we don't figure this out soon—"

"Ms. O?"

She looked up at Otto. "What is it?" she groaned.

"That's what we wanted to see you about," he explained calmly. "Math Room said that Carlos could help us solve this case, but we don't know who he is or where to find him. She told us we need to ask you." Otto bit his lip. "Olive and I tried to ask you yesterday, and now she's gone. The least you could do is tell Oscar and me."

It was nearly a full minute before Ms. O answered. "Fine," she finally said. "Here goes...

"You remember that I was the one who first created the Math Room with Yucks Shmumber, back before I was an agent. After I joined Odd Squad, I found myself going to my Math Room more and more, and so did other agents, until somehow, she gradually got a consciousness. She even named herself Carol, though she didn't tell me that until the day I became Ms. O. What I didn't know is that Carol had also created herself a twin brother."

Otto and Oscar gaped at her.

"I know, I thought the same thing!" Ms. O said in agreement. "I didn't find out until my fortieth year on the squad. It was one hundred years ago in 1915, right in the middle of the Great War. Unlike with World War II, Odd Squad all over the world stayed neutral. We kids didn't see the point of the whole war, so we didn't take sides. But with communications restricted, we couldn't contact the squads from countries in the Central Powers unless we wrote in code. So one day, we got a coded message from a squad in Germany—except it wasn't a number code, it was a word code."

"Then Carlos is like a Language Room?" Oscar realized.

"Exactly. That was the first time Carol had told anyone on Odd Squad about her twin brother. O'Donahue and I were put in charge of decoding the message, so we went to see Carol for help, and that's when she told us about Carlos and how to get to him. So we did that, and sure enough, Carlos helped us crack the code. He was very helpful during the war for every message we got and sent. Same for World War II."

The two boys were fascinated. Of course they'd known Ms. O was over a hundred years old, but neither of them had thought about her living through both World Wars. "So...what happened?" Otto asked.

"Nothing, that's what," Ms. O sighed. "After the World Wars were over, we didn't have many odd cases involving language manipulation anymore. There was one agent in my early years as Ms. O who would take care of the occasional language case and go visit Carlos, but she's long gone now. I guess it didn't help that Carlos and I never really liked each other."

"Why?" Otto and Oscar asked at the same time.

Ms. O pressed her lips together. "To tell you the truth, I don't trust words. Never have. Probably it's because of what happened with Olga, when she stole from my fruit stand and tried to trick O'Donahue by saying it had nothing to do with numbers. I trust math because numbers will never lie. That's why I like Carol, because I know she'll always tell the truth. But words can lie to you. They can be manipulated and mixed around so they try to trick you. They'll even make numbers look wrong. I guess Carlos sensed that I thought that, and he didn't like helping me out." She let out a short laugh. "Then again, I was pretty rude to him."

The three were silent for a minute. Otto was still taking it all in. Who would've thought that Math Room—Carol—had a twin brother? And if he's in charge of words, then what does that mean for solving this case…? "So, will we be able to go see him?" Otto wanted to know.

Ms. O didn't answer right away. When she did, it wasn't willingly. "Yes," she admitted. "After that one agent left twenty years ago, no one's been back there. I don't know how Carlos will react to visitors, but...yes, you can go. You'll have to, if that's what Carol says it'll take to solve this case."

"But how will we get there?" Oscar wondered.

"Same way you go to the Math Room," Ms. O told them. "Just twist your badges in the opposite direction."


Neither Otto nor Oscar knew exactly what to expect when the red and green spirals of paper and light faded. A world identical to the Math Room seemed most likely, just with letters written on the walls instead of numbers. So it came as a shock to both of them when their lights disappeared and everything was pitch black.

"Um...hello?" Otto called out, his voice echoing in the emptiness. "Carlos? Are you there?"

Suddenly the viewing platform lit up. The two agents jumped in shock and looked down at it. It looked identical to the viewing platform in the Math Room, same hexagon shape and crayon-colored look, but there was one major difference.

It was turquoise.

At that moment they heard a faint humming noise, and looked up and around. Slowly, the familiar graph paper origami figures brightened into visibility, but they too looked very different. Math Room's all had four sections with symbols and colors representing four of Odd Squad's departments—a red hexagon, a green triangle, a blue diamond, and a yellow circle. But while the symbols were the same, the colors were in the negative: a turquoise hexagon, a violet triangle, an orange diamond, and an indigo circle. As the origami figures lit up, the spherical paper wall also brightened from black to chocolate brown. Come to think of it, compared to the Math Room, now even the wall was colored in the negative, too.

Then a melancholy voice spoke. "You are...agents? And you have come to see me?"

"Uh, yes!" Oscar answered, moving to the railing as Otto followed. "I'm Oscar, and this is Otto. We, um, need your help on a case. Your twin sister Carol sent us."

"Oh, what joy!" Carlos drawled. His voice still sounded incredibly miserable, like a ghostlier version of Lord Rectangle's. "It has been many long years since I was visited by the Odd Squad. I thought I had been long forgotten…doomed to a destiny of wasting away into nothing but broken-up letters while my dear sister Carol thrived..."

Otto and Oscar exchanged glances. This guy was almost as bad as Olaf or Obfusco.

"...told myself that life is never fair, especially when one is a stack of papers used for naught," Carlos droned on. "Watching my colors darken and turn negative from lack of use, 'tis rather a sad sight to see me wither from my former state of glory—"

"Okay, we get it," Otto cut in, weirded out already. This would definitely explain why Ms. O didn't like him. "Now can you please help us with this case?"

"Oh, yes, of course, Agent Otto," Carlos assured him. "I'd quite forgotten. My apologies. Now, what is it you wanted me to do?"

Otto took a deep breath to calm his irritated nerves. "Please show us pictures of the missing people and the objects they were turned into."

"Generating images," came the melancholy reply. Just like his sister, Carlos unfolded his paper figures and quickly sketched out the people and objects, from Lord Rectangle with the green toll card, to Oscarbot Eighteen with the three goo-filled cabinets, to Olive with the "LEGIT" oven and Oren with the orange net, and everyone in between.

Remembering what happened in the Math Room, Otto then instructed, "Now write the names of the people and the objects below each picture."

A little more scribbling, and below each picture appeared their names. The one with Miss Baker caught Oscar's eye, as below her name it read, "Amber Skis". "Funny," he remarked. "Just before Oscarbot Eighteen disappeared, he made a note on his clipboard that the skis were specifically made of amber."

Otto was only half listening. He focused on each word and name, wondering how and why on earth they could possibly have anything to do with the missing people and odd objects. "Math Room sent us here for a reason," he mused. "The words and names have something to do with this case, I can feel it. Carlos?"

"I agree, Agent Otto," the Language Room replied, somewhat unhelpfully.

"But...what?" Otto groaned and gazed at the picture of Olive. He couldn't let his partner down now, not when they were so close to figuring it out. Yet he felt more helpless than ever…

"I don't get this!" Oscar suddenly burst out in frustration. "We've spent four whole days trying to solve this case, and no matter what we do or find out, we get nowhere! It's all mixed up whatever we—"

"Hold on." Otto looked up sharply. "Say that again."

"What? That it's all mixed up?"

All mixed up… Otto thought. All mixed up… All mixed—

Oh.

Oh.

Oh my God.

Oh my God, that's IT!

Otto's mind flashed back to Olive's puzzle book. The two problems she had shown him: how to unscramble words for things that hop, how many words could be made out of Scientific Method. And he had solved them both.

Why didn't I see the pattern before?

"I think I figured it out!" he exclaimed. "Carlos, isolate the name 'Lord Rectangle' and the words 'green toll card'."

"Isolating." The other images disappeared.

"Now unscramble the words 'green toll card'."

"Unscrambling." The letters jumbled up into A-C-D-E-E-G-L-L-N-O-R-R-T.

"And rearrange them so they spell Lord Rectangle's name."

"Generating anagram." The letters shuffled around until, lo and behold, they formed L-O-R-D-R-E-C-T-A-N-G-L-E.

"Now do the same thing in reverse."

"Reversing anagram." Carlos took the original name and scrambled it around until the letters spelled G-R-E-E-N-T-O-L-L-C-A-R-D.

Otto could barely contain his excitement. "We'll try another. Carlos, isolate the name 'Miss Baker' and the words 'amber skis'."

Carlos did the same thing. Sure enough, M-I-S-S-B-A-K-E-R became A-B-E-I-K-M-R-S-S became A-M-B-E-R-S-K-I-S.

"Lemme try one!" Oscar said. "Carlos, isolate the name 'Oscarbot Eighteen' and the words 'three goo cabinets'."

As the two agents watched eagerly, O-S-C-A-R-B-O-T-E-I-G-H-T-E-E-N became A-B-C-E-E-E-G-H-I-N-O-O-R-S-T-T became T-H-R-E-E-G-O-O-C-A-B-I-N-E-T-S.

Otto and Oscar cheered and did happy dances. "YES!" "We got it right!" "Woo-hoo!"

"So this whole time," Oscar chortled once they had calmed down a little, "the villain was just scrambling up everyone's names and turning them into whatever the letters spelled?"

"That is correct, Agent Oscar," Carlos said. "Those are called anagrams. You can create an anagram by rearranging the letters in one word to spell another."

"No wonder we couldn't figure this case out!" Otto marveled. "Anagrams don't have anything to do with numbers!"

"Yes," Carlos sighed wistfully. "Just like that one agent always told me."

Otto froze. "Who?"

"Oh, you wouldn't know her," he told them, his voice sounding its most miserable yet. "There was an Odd Squad agent who loved anagrams, and she would come visit me all the time. She was one of the few who did. But alas, she stopped coming nearly twenty years ago now. It's been so long, I can't even remember her name."

"Twenty years..." Oscar repeated softly. Then his brow furrowed. "What did Ms. O say about an agent who left the squad twenty years back?"

Otto thought for a moment. "Don't remember," he shrugged. "Call her, maybe? We should tell her what we figured out, anyhow."

Oscar already had his badge open and was dialing the number 58. She picked up on the first ring. "Go for O."

"Ms. O, we solved the case!" Oscar told her, and hurriedly relayed Otto's discovery.

Ms. O listened, and when she spoke after Oscar finished, she didn't sound excited. "Anagrams, huh? Not math?"

"Nope!" Oscar answered. "Guess Math Room was right to send us to Carlos!"

"Yeah..." There was a long pause.

Otto leaned in toward the badge phone to say his piece. "Carlos also told us about that agent you mentioned, the one who used to visit him but left twenty years ago. He said she loved anagrams. You think she's got anything to do with this?"

"That's what I'm wondering..." Suddenly there was a gasp on the other end. "Agent Ocean!"

"Who?" Otto asked.

Oscar cocked his head. "Agent Ocean...I remember hearing something about her around the time I joined Odd Squad. But no one would tell me who she was."

"Well, I'm telling you now," Ms. O said, sounding worried. "She joined the squad the year after O'Donahue left. One of our best agents for almost ten years, until...she went rogue. She never liked math, and I disagreed with her on some of her methods for solving cases. One day she showed up to work with a gadget that would anagram things, and she ruined half of HQ with it. Had no choice but to fire her for causing oddness."

"Like with Odd Todd?" Otto wondered.

"Exactly like with Odd Todd." There was another pause, and Otto and Oscar could just picture Ms. O frowning. "But I don't remember what happened to her. I don't even know what her full name was. Maybe..." There was a jangling noise and the sound of creaking metal.

"That's her filing cabinet," Oscar whispered to the puzzled Otto.

"I've got a file on her in here somewhere," Ms. O explained. "It might have something that'll help us—yes, here it is!" There were sounds of paper rustling. "Agent Ocean. That's right, Ocean was her middle name. We used it for her agent ID because it started with O. Her full name is—"

Ms. O never finished her sentence.

Otto and Oscar heard the bang of a door slamming open, and another noise that sounded like Ms. O jumping up from her chair. "Hey! What are you doing here—? Wait...but aren't you—hey, you're—WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH THAT THING?!"

ZZZAP! ! !

Click. The line went dead.

Oscar dropped the badge phone and stared at Otto. "Oh no," he began to fret. "Oh no oh no oh no."

"They got her," Otto realized. "The villain. They anagrammed her." Slowly he turned to Carlos. "Could you—?"

"I'm already working on it." Carlos sketched out the letters A-G-E-N-T-O-P-R-A-H, rearranged them several times into various words, then finally came up with O-A-T-E-N-G-R-A-P-H.

"Oaten graph?" Oscar read aloud. "What is that, like, a graph made of oats?"

"I suppose," Carlos answered. "That's the kind of thing Agent Ocean would have created."

"Then it's her!" Otto concluded. "Whoever this Agent Ocean is, she's the one behind it." Suddenly he snapped his fingers as a lightbulb turned on in his head. "The French Toddlers' Sphere Aquarium. Why on earth would Mariana Mag call her aquarium that, unless—"

"Unless it was an anagram, and she's hiding Agent Ocean!" Oscar caught on. This time he was the one to turn to Carlos. "Write out the letters in French Toddlers' Sphere Aquarium. Now rearrange them."

"Generating anagram." The two agents watched as F-R-E-N-C-H-T-O-D-D-L-E-R-S-' -S-P-H-E-R-E-A-Q-U-A-R-I-U-M mixed around and eventually became M.-F-L-O-U-N-D-E-R-S-' -C-I-P-H-E-R-H-E-A-D-Q-U-A-R-T-E-R-S.

"M. Flounder's Cipher Headquarters," Otto read. "Of course! Anagrams are a kind of code, or cipher. So Agent Ocean is really M-something Ocean Flounder."

"Right," Oscar agreed. "But then what would the M stand for—?"

It was then that the strangest thing happened.

Otto and Oscar heard it at the same time. It was the fizzling sound of a paper spiral, signaling an agent's arrival in the Language Room. They glanced at each other. "But...we're the only ones that know about this," Oscar said, "other than Ms. O, and she's been anagrammed. So who…?"

Suddenly the fizzling turned to sputtering. The two agents craned their necks and squinted at the faint paper spiral forming at the top of the chocolate-brown ceiling. Slowly the spiral lit up and descended to the turquoise hexagon platform. But it was the light that was especially different. Instead of a single color, the spiral was orange at the center, blue and yellow in the middle, and RED on the outside.

"What the—?" Oscar began.

A bright flash of orangey-white light and a ZZZAP! ! ! cut him off. Blinded by the flash, Otto shielded his eyes.

Silence.

Otto opened his eyes and glanced to his left, where Oscar had been standing just a second ago. Turning his gaze downward, he saw a basket full of orange-striped kittens.

A-G-E-N-T-O-S-C-A-R became A-A-C-E-G-N-O-R-S-T became O-R-A-N-G-E-C-A-T-S.

Then he heard a sickeningly familiar laugh.

Otto felt his soul sink to the bottom of his feet. It can't be, he thought, crushed. We trusted her. She would never.

But as he looked up in front of him and his mind started rearranging letters, he knew that of course it was true. It had been this whole time.

Mariana Mag.

M-A-R-I-A-N-A-M-A-G.

A-A-A-A-G-I-M-M-N-R.

I-A-M-A-N-A-G-R-A-M.

"I Am Anagram! ! !"