10~
The two gangs had to wade through anxious patrons who were scared and smart enough to stay in the library and elsewhere inside the Database.
Once they made their way through the front doors and into the bright daylight of the complex's broad, circular plaza, they looked up and saw what gave everyone fear, and them, a very healthy pause.
Frankenstein Jr. landed before what few stunned people were caught unawares, outside. He stood, unmoving, but his presence, alone, gave one the impression that he could be moved to violence at a moment's notice.
The motivator of that violence sat high on his shoulder, surveying everything she desired to possess.
Dee looked down upon the fearful, who backed away from Frankie's stature, and then noticed, by the front of the building, some familiar faces.
"Fancy running into you!" she called out from her high perch. Those familiar faces looked up and recognized her, soon enough.
"Dee! Where did you go?" Freddy called back.
"Oh, y'know, stole an air-car, picked up a friend, that kind of thing."
"Who is that?" Vellum asked, running an image of Junior through the National Database and getting no answer.
"The reason I created the looters in the first place."
"Created? You mean reprogrammed by getting their command codes," Marcie clarified.
"Six of one, half dozen of the other, and yes, I did get their codes," Dee shrugged, casually. "Y'know, as a robohostess, I'm programmed to be very charming when I need to be. All I had to do was trick one robot into giving me his code, and then program him to trick his closest friend for hers, and they trick two friends, and they trick two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on."
"How could you do that to those innocent machines?" asked Vellum. "Ruin their lives?"
"It was easy. I practiced on all of you, long enough."
The Fuse Gang already knew that they were close to the truth, but hearing it come from Dee felt more jarring than what they were prepared for.
"Then, it's true," Freddy muttered. "You must have made us do something, and then wiped our memories of it. You have to tell us what it was, or...we'll be forced to make you. I'm sorry."
"Well, Freddy, I guess I'll have to save you the trouble. You all did more than just something," Dee crowed, gesturing all over with a wide sweep of her arms. "You all helped make this world the great place it is today."
Vellum cocked her head to the side in confusion. "What are you talking about?"
"Scan that big brain of yours for Crush. Pesticide."
Vellum did so. "Accessing National Database. Pesticides-Crush." A moment later, she wished that she never did. "No...No way! How did we..."
"What is it *buzz*? What's Crush?" asked Buzzy.
"What I'm about to do to you!" Dee threatened, and then turned to her champion. "Frankie, do your thing!"
A raised foot came down upon their location, but the group scattered before it compacted any of them, breaking a small fissure in the plaza's paving, and setting off parked air-car alarms.
Police robots and their troop carriers circled from their section on the other side of the building and formed into defensive formations on the plaza.
"Why did you come back? I thought you would've gone to conquer our seat of government," Vellum said, keeping her eyes on this behemoth.
"After I conquer Crystalex, this will be the seat of government!" said Dee, gleefully. "What do you think? Am I megamaniacal or monomaniacal? I can never tell which."
"Well, mega-" Marcie began.
"Who cares?" Dee said, reaching over to the wide back of Junior's head.
On its surface was a large control panel, studded with thick buttons marked for different weapons and functions, an on-board manual interface for a pilot or weapons officer. Whatever the reason, Dee didn't care, as she selected a button with all of the casualness of choosing a new hull color, and depressed it.
A small hatch in the tip of Frankie's comical-looking nose slid away, revealing a barrel. He turned to regard the police and their vehicles, and then, as if sneezing, rained round after round of concussive, explosive ammunition down upon his targets, cratering transports and blowing slow-moving officers into scorched parts.
Surviving police took cover behind statuary, firing normally incapacitating electro-bolts from their built-in arm weapons. The charges struck the armor and were diffused, easily.
More nasal bullets leveled the statues, forcing the officers to retreat back to their headquarters to desperately rethink their strategy. At no time in robotic police history had a police force ever had to contend with something of that size, strength and firepower.
During that contention, Freddy took the initiative to scan Frankenstein Jr.'s body with his engineering sonar to find weaknesses in the structure: stress fractures, loose fittings, anything to give to the police to warrant a possibly successful counter-attack.
Apart from the advanced age of the armored hull, he was more distracted by the sheer number of built-in weapons Junior's designer and builder crammed into him. It was a truly distressing sum.
"He's a walking arsenal!" Freddy gasped. "Almost every part of his body's filled with weapons. Where did he come from?"
"The more important question is what to do with him? They'll tear this place apart unless we do something," Vellum observed.
Red threw up his hands and said, "We? Hey, we're just tourists. Remember?"
"We do," Freddy said. "That's why I want you to take my transport and get back to the ruins in Civic City. Get in your time machine and get out of here. We don't want you to get hurt."
Hearing that, Buzzy slunk towards his friend, sensing an opportunity for Scooby and him to escape. "Hey, Freddy *buzz*, since they probably, y'know, don't know how to fly the transport, me and Scoob can take them back for you."
"No, thanks," Vellum said, knowing, all too well, the slippery wordplay they would use to get out of exploring with the rest of them. "First of all, it's "Scoob and I," and I don't want you two getting lost on the way back."
Then, she turned to regard their guests, soberly. "But, Freddy's right. We helped make this mess and the least we can do is try to stop Dee, somehow."
Marcie glanced over at her compatriots. She wanted to do something, if just to answer for their hospitality, but she could not act on something like this without the consent of the rest of her friends.
"Well, guys, how about it?" she asked. "Do we leave or do we help?"
"I don't know. I mean we should help," Jason considered, shivering. "They were nice to us, but what can we do? That thing's a war machine!"
"Jason's right," Daisy concurred, fretfully. "I love junk and parts, but I don't want to end up as them, besides, what about Velma and Daphne? Who going to save them, if we're the ones who need saving?"
That splash of logical cold water made Marcie stop to think on that. She never meant to come here, none of them had. Just the fact that everyone, beside Daisy, chose to come with her, willingly or not, either spoke volumes about how brave they were, or how much they were willing to put up with her quest.
Quest, not crusade. She had no right to try and convince them to risk their lives to help. It wasn't fair to Vellum and the others, or their world, but she had no right.
"Okay, guys," she decided, morosely. "We'll leave. I hope that they can handle this."
"Correction," Marcie, suddenly, said, halting her approach to the transport. "You guys leave and wait for me at the ruins. I'm staying to help."
"What? Are you crazy?" Jason yelped. "Have you been in that thing too long? You're not a robot, you're human!"
"That's right, I am human," Marcie countered. "And what kind of human would I be, if I didn't do something to help people who were helped us?"
"But, think about Velma!" Daisy interjected, not wanting to leave her friend in this strange, and now, dangerous world. "Don't you want to save her?"
"I am thinking about her, Daisy, and I know her well enough to say that she would want me to save others before her, if I can. I'm sorry, guys, but I just can't leave them in the lurch."
There was an uncomfortable, guilty silence between them, between Marcie's decision and the others' self-preservation and confusion. They should flee and close their hearts to the rationale of iron-walled pragmatism.
But kindness was shown, and kindness was given. That fact was enough to soften that iron.
"Ugh! All right, you win, okay?" Red groaned. "We'll stay and help. Geez, you're worse than Aunt Hedda!"
"I suppose I can stay, too, as long as I can help from the sidelines!" Jason sulked, nervously. "I'm good at that!"
Marcie glanced at her older friend, hopefully. "How about it, Daisy? What would Daphne say?"
Daisy lowered her eyes, both in thought and memory. Daphne was almost perfect in the family. What she said, felt, and did reflected a better heart than Daisy felt she had, just then. If the roles were reversed and her sister was here, was there any doubt that she would try to answer their guests' fine deeds with her own?
And wouldn't she, no matter where she was, now, expect no less from her siblings?
"She'd want me to help," Daisy said, quietly. "Okay, Marcie, I'll stay, but how are we going to help them? I mean, who are we?"
Marcie was quiet for moment, attempting to come up with a plan, when simple memory opened a Pandora's Box of opportunities for her.
With a smile of enlightenment, Marcie called out, "We? We're looters! We were modified to loot and fight. Let's turn that against Dee!"
With that understanding, Daisy, Jason and Red looked admiringly at their bodies, no longer seeing them as just shells to reside in, but as a wearable, unassailable force for change.
With a chorus of affirmation, her friends followed Marcie back to the Fuse Gang, who were grouped and hiding behind the tall base of a holographic fountain.
"What are you still doing here? Scooby yapped. "Get out of here!"
"No way. We're going to help out. We've got bodies that can help."
Vellum was taken aback by that statement, looking at them. Then, the remembrance of who the bodies once belonged to, struck her. "Bodies? Of course, the modifications! That might just give us the edge! Now, what can we do?"
"You can all be turned to scrap!" Dee yelled from above. "That's what you can do!"
Frankie opened a barrage into the base of the fountain, chewing up the front half, but not enough to rip through his targets' cover.
"We've got to move out *buzz*!" Buzzy screamed. "We're getting pinned in here!"
"We need a distraction, so we can slip out!" yelled Vellum.
Marcie, wanting to keep an eye on Frankie and Dee, looked up and noticed the towering image of dancing water flicker in and out of existence, and had an idea. She turned to Vellum, who, also, saw where she looked.
"I think I've got your distraction," she said, turning her back to her and parting her "hair" with her hands. Vellum grinned with understanding.
"Come on, guys. Be considerate," Dee called down over the sound of shots tearing into the fountain. "He can't trash you, if you don't come out."
She looked down with slight satisfaction, as the fountain's "water" finally blinked out from projector damage.
'The next thing that should happen,' she thought. 'Is the capitulation of my life-long friends, under pain of termination.'
Suddenly, a test beam of light strobed, flickered, and then, flashed, once more, up into Junior and Dee's view, from the still surviving holo-projector, and then grew into a gigantic, unfamiliar image of the Ringleader, then the Sea Beast, then the "alien" Voxellans, Pretre du Marais, The Extinguisher, Dr. Darkfang, a PERILbot, the Questoid, the two kidnapping caterers, the trio of Von Gimmick, Crankenshaft, and J. Dastardly Deeds, and finally, the titanic image of the T.H.R.O.B.A.C. Mark I, its every weapons opened and pointed towards Frankie Jr..
Dee slapped a button from the weapons panel, and below, the shield on Frankie's chest swung open, releasing a squat, cylindrical cannon. A light beam flashed out of its barrel and struck the fountain's base, rapidly arresting all molecular motion both within it and the air surrounding it.
Another press of the nasal mini-gun's button, reduced the base into shattered chunks of ice-glazed projector technology, but among the scattered debris, neither attacker saw the two gangs. They had swiftly departed during the showing of Marcie's holographic trip down criminal Memory Lane.
Dee swiveled on Junior's shoulder, using her height's advantage to see where they ran to. It didn't take long to find them, running up the thoroughfare that led to the Database.
With a pat on the side of the head, she signaled Frankie to turn and face the broad street, while she prepared to press another button. Her hand stopped when both gangs split up into smaller groups of two, and scurried into the surrounding landscape of downtown Crystalex.
Dee gave a frustrated growl. Now, it would take twice as long to hunt them down, but then, she smiled. Now, the hunt would be more challenging and a worthy workout for Frankenstein Jr.
"Hover mode. Let's go," she ordered him.
The behemoth activated his anti-gravity drive, once more, only this time, to hover, slowly and quietly, above the streets, so as not to give himself away before melting, blasting, or crushing their surprised prey.
Marcie and Vellum ran in a random pattern among the canyons of buildings, hoping that the structures would hide their progress from any of Junior's sensors, while they lured him away and thought up ways to destroy him.
Stopping to get their bearings in a long alleyway, Marcie asked Vellum, "What's Crush? Is it bad?"
"Shh! Use your radio," Vellum hissed, keeping a worried watch of the sky.
Marcie thought about her comlink connection to the others, and suddenly, she could hear Vellum's voice in her "mind", a kind of telecommunicational telepathy.
"CRUS-h," Vellum related. "Counter-Reproductive Universal Syndrome-human, a discontinued, biological pesticide that used a tailored virus to curb the populations of rats, mice, and other pest animals, by making them sterile. Unfortunately, this sterility virus could, also, be spread to humans and other animals exposed to the insecticide!"
"Is that's how the humans died off?" Marcie thought back. "Because of this Crush?"
"They must have!" Vellum broadcasted. "But, what did we do...what did she make us do...that connects us with this Crush?"
"That's a fine question," Dee said, cheerfully, while Frankie silently hovered into the mouth of the alley, his bulk killing any hope of, somehow, running past him. "I'll radio you the answer, even though you won't survive to do anything with it."
The robot girls ran pell-mell down the length of the alley, as Frankie raised his fists and began smashing the walls of buildings in front of him, causing a cascade of crumbling poured concrete architecture to flow by his feet.
"A long time ago," Dee broadcasted. "I was the servant of the president of a global chemical company, the one that created Crush. His daughter thought she was a gear-head, and liked to tinker with me and the other robots of the house."
Still keeping his sights on the escaping robots, up the alleyway, the tip of his yellow nose slid aside, once more, this time, revealing a lensed barrel.
A widened beam flickered out to bathe the debris in its light. Then, the pile of rubble, steel beams, and sections of wall slowly rose, until they formed a ball of junk tumbling inside the sphere of anti-gravity produced by his hovering drive and projected from his nasal ray emitter.
"One day, she was called away, while she was fooling around with my Emotion Core software, leaving the work half-finished," she continued. "Needless to say, it changed my outlook on life."
Frankie raised his head, his nose pointing the ball of wreckage up, then with a forward pulse of the ray, he launched the scrap skyward towards the two escapees.
The girls screamed as they dodged and tried to outrun the sheer rain of rebar, support beams, concrete wall chunks and their remains.
"I realized that I was a slave, just like every other robot, but unlike them, I had a plan. That's where you came in!" Dee transmitted.
The edge of one beam, flung further out, carved into the high wall of an office building up ahead, causing the beam and more wreckage to fall ahead of them, too fast for them to outrun.
Realizing that they would be crushed by the falling debris behind them, if they stopped because of the junk falling before them, Marcie and Vellum looked for side passages or doors. None were found.
Having no time to think, only act, Marcie saw a bare wall and thought about her Chemix Analysis and Fabrication system and the formula H2SO4.
Deep within her sealed systems, pumps churned and motors whirled mixers full of compounds, and soon, fresh, pressurized sulfuric acid surged into the tube-fed spray guns in her wrists.
She turned to the wall and sprayed gouts of the acid against the wall, as the cataracts of heavy junk flowed towards them. A dripping hole in the wall soon became a sagging maw large enough to rush in, if they hurried.
Knowing that her housing was resistant to the acid, Marcie grabbed Vellum by the arm, pulling her down into a hunch, and yelled, "Follow me!"
Marcie brought a protective arm over the back of Vellum's head and neck, as she led her into a run through the soggy opening.
They both tripped from their reckless passage and fell together, as the sound of buildings falling roared from outside the hole.
"I needed a new computer infrastructure for my smoothly running machine utopia, so I tricked you, Vellum, into writing one, telling you that it was just a thought experiment." Dee transmitted. "Hello, out there! You're kind of quiet. Are you still functional?"
Marcie recovered her bearings and discovered that she was lying on top of Vellum.
Ignoring Dee and the compromising position they both found themselves, Marcie asked her, vocally, "Are you okay?"
"I'm…starting to get hot," Vellum said, and then amended, "No, I'm burning up!"
Marcie got up, immediately switching from the acid to its base, sodium hydroxide-NaOH, as Vellum, rapidly, stood.
"Where?"
"Posterior!" Vellum yelled.
Marcie aimed the wrist nozzles and fired a copious amount of base on her backside. Eventually, Vellum sighed as the chemical neutralized the corrosive.
"How do I look?" sulked the librarian.
Marcie saw a hole the diameter of a shot glass burned into what would have been the right cheek of a human's buttocks, giving her a peek into Vellum's pelvic servomotor assembly.
"Uh," she said, trying to couch the diagnosis. "Be happy it's not raining."
"Great!" Vellum groused. "Where are we?"
Marcie gave a look around at the dim room's small boxes of office supplies and equipment. "I don't know. Looks like a store room," she figured. "I'll melt the lock on the door, and then, we can get out of here."
"Why did Daisy split up from me?" Red fretted to himself, while keeping an eye out for Dee and her flying death-bot, and moving quickly through the block. "I mean I know we didn't have time to pick partners after Scooby screamed, "It's every bot for himself!" But, I would've thought that she would want to go with me, I mean, come with me, whatever."
"You like her, don't you?" Freddy asked, also, on alert.
"It's implied," Red defended, sounding uncharacteristically shy.
"Well, I'm no romance master," said Freddy, as they rounded a corner and jogged up another street. "But love should never be implied. Good communication is the foundation of a good relationship."
Red gave Freddy a glance that said that he should practice what he preached. "Is that why you seized up like a leaky engine when that Vellum girl said what she said to you?"
Freddy's pedantic air evaporated under that question. "Huh? Uh, I didn't hear clearly, that's all."
Red smirked. "I don't know, big guy. She was communicating like Ma Bell, from where I was. Now, I, myself, am not into nerd girls, but she seemed alright. Don't you like her, too?"
"Of course!" Freddy answered, a little too loud and defensively. He toned down his expression. "I mean...I do, but she's a thinker and I just tinker. What could she see in me? She's smart as all get-out, and I'm just good with my hands and tools."
"Consider that one reason why she likes you so much," Red said with a leer. "Anyway, you guys must work well together. How long have you been friends?"
"Well, we met when my owner and I were hired to do some repair work in the Crystal Cove Library. She was assigned to show us the water damage in the basement. She asked if I was going to do any welding, and I said that it might be as easy as using a polymer sealant on the pipe's stress fracture. She gave me this long list of available sealants on the market, and then it just turned into a conversation."
"So, you were standing in the water to break the ice," Red joked, then had a thought. "Wait a minute. You guys met when this place was still called Crystal Cove? How long ago was that?"
"Three hundred and four years, give or take a month."
Impressed, Red gave a low whistle.
"Yeah," Freddy chuckled, proudly. "We were built to last in those days. But, it seems that monster Dee's using was, too. I gave it a scan before we got away. Judging by some of the parts and wiring inside it, that thing's got to be as old as we are. That means Human Era tech. Maybe it's got a structural weakness we can use. If we had access to some materials, we might be able to put up some kind of defense. What do you think, Red?"
Freddy turned his head to where Red had been a moment before. There was no sound and no Red.
Fearing that Dee and her creature had nabbed him, somehow, he turned to look for them, but only found Red standing a few yards from him, staring out into the distance, his faceplate grinning.
"What's wrong, Red? Do you see something?" he asked, walking to him.
"Friend," Red said, his grin never faltering. "I think I just found us all the material we'll ever need!"
Freddy followed his friend's gaze up a street that was visually anything to write home about. It served downtown visitors and workers with a parking lot on one side, a hotel on the other, and an elevated parking garage that sat on a block, further up, forming an intersection.
It was deserted, and although he didn't want to alienate Red, Freddy couldn't find anything of immediate value in it.
"I don't get it," he finally admitted.
Red kept his smile and began to march up the selected street. "You will, pal, but not as much as Dee will. C'mon!"
In another section of downtown Crystalex, the sound and vibrations caused by the destruction of an alleyway, blocks away, forced two robots to end their terrified run through the neighborhood and crouch for concealment under the awning of a deserted shop.
"This is crazy!" Jason hissed. "What are we doing here? I'll tell you what I'm doing here. I'm getting killed because your boyfriend decided it would be fun to prank me, so I can die not just in another time, but also, another space!"
"Stop over-exaggerating things, Jason," Daisy said, hoping that his hysterical ranting wouldn't give them away. "You're not going to die, because-did you call Red my boyfriend? Well, I mean…I like him. He's a bit rough around the edges, but he's got great taste in old machines, and...he is kinda cute with that curly, red hair, and all."
"Well, your mooning over him just convinced me, Daisy!" Jason said, sarcastically. "It's not Red's fault, it's Marcie's! She's got some nerve guilting us into doing this! Buzzy and Scooby's got the right idea. Find a deep hole and hide in it until the danger passes. Though in my case, being a demolition robot, I can probably make my own hole."
"I wasn't mooning," Daisy, sheepishly, defended. "Besides, that's not fair, Jason, and you know it. Marcie was going to go it alone, when she asked if any of us wanted to come. I wanted to look for my sister, and would've come, anyway. Red said that it would be fun, or something. Who knows, with him? But I know that you wanted to stay home and be with your mom."
Jason leaned forward with his armored, roughly ovoid body, bearing the closest approximation of sadness he could physically convey. "I do want to go home. I want you guys to find your loved ones, too, but…I just want to go home."
"I know," Daisy sighed in commiseration. "What Red did to you was wrong. Trust me, when we get back home-when, not if-I'm going to narc on him to his aunt so hard, he'll be an angel the next time he sees you."
"Really?" Jason asked, hope growing inside him. "You mean no more fat jokes, or him calling me Jellyfish?"
"No promises," Daisy said, pragmatically, before another voice joined the conversation.
"You know, speaking of promises," Dee said, smiling from Frankie's shoulder, as he floated down the street, closing the distance to the shop by tens of yards. "You shouldn't lie to him, like that. Giving him false hope that he'll make it out of here in one piece is way crueler than anything Red's ever done to him."
"Jason wants to see his mother, again," Daisy said, boldly. "If we're the only ones left, I'll make sure that happens, you got that?"
Dee gave a false air of thoughtfulness. "I should take you up on that. I'll have Frankenstein Junior waste everyone else that you care about, and just save you two for last, just to see if you can make good on that promise. Okay?"
"I've got one better!" said Daisy, brazenly stepping out of the dubious cover of the shop's facade. She raised her arm to the pair in the street, her small, double-barreled weapon emerging from her wrist.
"Daisy!" Jason whispered, fearing for her existence.
A raving beam of charged magnetism reached out from the wrist gun towards Junior's head, forcing Dee to duck around the back of his head, at the last minute, as the majority of the shot's energy deflected off of the giant machine's cheek, burning off a streak of blue, centuries-old paint and revealing the dull grey armor beneath.
Although Frankie said nothing, dutifully awaiting his next orders from the current ring-bearer, Dee, he glowered at little Daisy with a simmering, offended hatred.
"Oooh, magnetism!" Dee taunted, as she peeked from around the bulk of Junior's head. "I almost felt that one! Can Frankie try?"
"Frankie," she cooed into where his ear would have been, if he had them. "Magnetic Field. Crush them, slowly."
Still keeping his angry sight of Daisy, as she backed away, a seemingly scarred Frankie emanated a low hum from deep within his body.
A whitish aura could be seen radiating from his body, as a magnetic repulsion field of Herculean gauss strength, began twisting streetlights, as though they were wilting, rock, lift and push abandoned air-cars away from the expanding field's center of radius, and force Jason and a returning Daisy to hunker as far into the shop's facade as they could to avoid the encroaching energy.
As the repulsion's radius grew, an air-car that was parked in front of the shop, was tilted, and then, flung on its side and shoved into the facade, painfully pinning the two robots, side-by-side, against the unyielding front door.
From Jason's end, he could feel and see the weaker metal of the car's roof bow and cave against his more protective, reinforced frame. One glance over at Daisy, showed that she was not fairing as well, as her side of the roof still held firm and it was her body that was starting to constrict in the tightening confines.
"Are-Are you...okay?" she asked, incredibly, straining the servos in her arms to try and twist into a roomier position.
Jason couldn't believe that she would ask that, let alone could, considering how she was suffering. "I'm okay, but how could ask that, Daisy? You're hurting!"
"Ugh! I-I'll be...okay. Sh-She hasn't beaten...us, yet! Ahh!"
"Daisy!" Jason called out, starting to panic about what to do, how to escape, and how to save Daisy, while the car on her side gradually started to crush her. "No!"
In the dark of the pressing wall of car, Jason summoned up a clarity of action that came from an anger borne of the fearful thought of Daisy falling to this madwoman, and activated his sonic wrecker, focusing a backward-firing shockwave deep into the shop.
Behind him, the facade shattered and collapsed, as the invisible fist of the pressure wave pulverized the building's foundation and the first floor interior at the singular point of detonation, the store front. From that weak point, the sheer weight of the structure had no stability, and began to break apart in central sections and avalanche into the street.
Frankie tried to fly out of the way, by, mistakenly, trying to fly straight up past the tumbling wreckage. The top floors of the building came apart from the rest of the cascading rubble as an intact section and fell upon a surprised Junior, as he raised his arms to shield his head and a screaming Dee.
The pair rocketed swiftly above the blossoming debris cloud, and the city, at large, avoiding the worse of the destruction and burial.
"So much for her," Dee growled, favoring a noticeable dent in her left shoulder and slight damage to that arm's motor assembly. "If it's a catfight she wanted, it was a catfight she got. Okay, Frankie, let's go down and round up what's left."
Frankenstein Jr. reactivated his anti-gravity drive and floated back down to earth, but to another section of downtown, neighborhoods away from the demolition of the shop and upper floors of its building, and the urban tomb of Daisy and Jason.
Far below and unseen by the duo, the muffled sound of an explosion heralded an upward blast of grist and debris from the rear slope of the mountain of pulverized masonry and glass where a downtown shop had been.
Another blast and the material was loose enough for a dust-coated Jason to back out and pull a stunned Daisy with him to freedom.
He continued to trundle and drag her, all the while, watching the skies for Dee and Frankie's return, until he was a block away from the rubble pile. Then, by the shadow of an office building's loading dock, he stopped to attend to Daisy.
"Daisy? Daisy?" Jason whispered, gently nudging her head with one of his large, bull-dozer scooped hands.
His ministrations were rewarded when she slowly stirred and her eyes flickered open. Those same eyes widened in recollection of the trap they were in.
"Jason!" she gasped, sitting up. "What happened? I thought we were crushed like beer cans in my sisters' sorority!"
"I, uh, brought down a building on Dee's head," Jason admitted, meekly. "I didn't want you hurt and it was all I could think of. Sorry."
"Sorry?" she asked, not believing what he said. "You big, brave robot, you! You saved my life!"
She reached over to Jason, wrapped her still functioning arms around his armored ring of a neck and gave him a genuine kiss on his dusty cheek, prompting him to bashfully rub the back of his helmeted head with a clang.
"C'mon, hero!" Daisy said, while Jason followed her into the daylight of the street. "We've got to go find the others."
From neighboring blocks, cybernetic citizens could be seen leaving their places of business or leisure, in panicked groups, heading for the suburbs, or the farthest parts from downtown. Their collective, terrified responses to their possible destruction would have made the erstwhile software designers of their Emotion Cores proud.
"Did you hear that on our radios, just before that explosion?" Marcie asked Vellum, while they snuck from one emptying block to the other, keeping a particularly wary glance at any alley they passed. "That was Daisy was talking to Dee and sending us what she heard."
"She must've ran into her, somewhere!" Vellum reasoned, as they rounded a corner and collided into an equally moving Buzzy and Scooby from down the street.
"And look who we ran into. Where did you guys come from?" Vellum asked them, in a groan, from the pile they made on the ground.
"We were hiding out in one of Crystalex's power substations!" Scooby confessed, licking his chops. "Mmmm!"
"Figures," she sighed. "Did you guys hear that transmission a few minutes ago?"
"Yeah *buzz*," Buzzy said, collecting himself and standing with the rest of the others. "It sounded like Ol' Dizzy Dee tracked down one of us. I just hope she didn't shut him or her down for keeps!"
"It was Daisy and there's only one way to find out if she's okay," said Vellum, angling herself to head deeper into the urban landscape.
"Please, *buzz* don't say "We're going to where that explosion was," moaned Buzzy, fearfully.
Scooby hid his head under his rubber-soled paws. "Uh-uh! Uh-uh!"
The girls simply glanced at one other. Then, Vellum shrugged and said to Buzzy, "Okay."
Buzzy relaxed his worried stance with a sigh, and then heard, coming in from his radio, the girls, in unison, transmitting "We're going to where that explosion was!"
"Didn't I ask you not to say that?" he, nervously, asked.
"We didn't," Marcie corrected him. "We radioed it. Now, c'mon, you two!"
Jason understood the hard way that he was not built for speed, as he revved the drivetrain that moved his motoball to its maximum just to keep up with a carefully jogging Daisy.
"I wish we had homing devices built-in, so we wouldn't have to do all of this running around. How are we going to find them in this town?" he fretted, beneath the noise of his motoball. "We'll probably run into Dee again, before we run into our friends!"
"Think positive, Jason," Daisy told him while she led him. "I made sure that we all had a chance to hear what that glitch had to say, so the rest could, at least, get an idea of where we were."
"That's if that wind-up toy on steroids didn't jam your signals, somehow!"
"Jason, what did I say to do?" Daisy asked, patiently, as they turned a corner and had a six-robot pile-up with a surprised Marcie, Vellum, Buzzy and Scooby.
"Think positive?" groaned Jason.
"Very good."
"Was that you two, back there?" Marcie asked, trying to pull free from the, now larger, pile. "What happened?"
"Well, Dee proved what a crushing bore she was," Daisy quipped. "But, Jason had the last laugh on her, with a building!"
Vellum, like everyone, save Daisy, looked at Jason with a mixture of shock and admiration. "You made that building fall, Jason?" she asked.
"On her? Yeah, I kinda did," Jason said, trying to downplay the intensity of his surprising counter-attack. "It was no big deal. Just doing what I was built for."
Daisy stood up with everyone else, saying proudly, "I can't wait to see Red's face when I tell him."
"Then, let's go find him and Freddy, so you can," said Marcie, glumly. "Wherever they are."