Chapter 10.
That evening, while a spaghetti dinner was served up with garlic bread on the side, the mismatched team of villains stepped one after another into Silence's grasp to be boosted into the hidden crawl space. Jack Spicer, Invader Zim, Dexter, Pietro Maximoff, Le Mime, and Hysterika left Katnappe in the Common Room to keep guard and cover for them in case a guard noticed something amiss.
"I'm going last because I don't want any of you coodie-covered boys looking up my skirt!" Erika protested as they funneled along the wall.
"That's not possible, girl," Pietro muttered as he was forced by her.
"Yeah, you're wearing pants underneath!" Jack finished as he went by.
The six of them made their way through the hidden passage at a steady pace, and soon reached the dark vent. From there, they quickly found the hidden room, lit by the blaring exterior lighting coming through the window. The boys, all skinny as rails, had no issues getting through the grate, but Erika…She made the mistake of going through head first and halfway there discovered that her hips inhibited any further progress.
"Son of a bitch!" she snapped, pushing on the inner wall of the room, several feet above the floor, but with little success.
"I guess your derier iz simply too grande!" Dexter snickered as he and the five other boys stood staring.
"She looks like one of those taxidermy animals you mount on the wall with a plaque," Pietro pointed out, quickly running his hands through his hair and crossing his arms.
"Oh, shut up, Speed!" Erika snapped. "That's what I'm calling you from now on: Speed! No, even better, Meth for Crystal Meth! You're Meth Boy!"
Suddenly, a new voice joined in.
"Is this really all he sent me to work with?" asked a high, arrogantly British accent.
They all turned or looked up to see an extremely young boy sitting at the table. They couldn't believe they hadn't noticed him when they first dropped in. He was wearing a yellow shirt with red overalls.
"What the?" Jack exclaimed, jumping back. The others reacted in a similar, shocked manner.
"Who are you?" Zim demanded, his voice rising sharply and straining.
The boy paused- he had amazingly adult mannerisms- and tapped his finger tips together. He was actually sitting on a couple of big books to be level with the table.
"You may call me…Stewie," he said almost cautiously.
"How did you get in here, kid?" Jack asked slowly.
"How the duce do you think I got in here? The same way as the rest of you!" Stewie snapped back offensively. "Although," he added with a faint, haughty chuckle, "I didn't have to crawl."
"I sink zat what zee Spice Boy meant tew ask," Dexter cut in, "iz what aire yew doing here?"
Stewie jumped up on the table immediately and let a long floor plan unroll across the table and little over the edge.
"We are all here, gentlemen," Stewie began in an authoritative voice, "oh, and, Hysterika," he added with a short guffaw at the girl who had become a wall ornament, "for the same purpose: to escape this egregious prison known as the Moore Bideath Asylum! This is the layout of every building within the facility," he went on, taking out a laser pointer to indicate points on the plans. The others all gathered around the table in curiosity, and Erika had a bird's eye view. "I have been working on a few small operations for about a month now, but it will take all of us to pull this off, men!"
"I can see why we aire all here," Dexter commented, "we geniuses or with special powerz…but what is Jack dooing here?"
"Oh, well that's very simple," Stewie began to explain in his intense, deathly sarcastic tone. "Can any one of you say that the people you know on the Outside aren't bumbling idiots or your mortal enemy?"
It was true. Zim, Dexter, Pietro, Le Mime, and even Stewie came from worlds where their neighbors were their enemies, their family consisted of fools, or their roommates were blatantly moronic.
"So, Jack has…"
"I've got JackBots!" Jack exclaimed suddenly. "If I can find a way to contact them, then they could help us escape!"
"Precisely!" said Stewie, turning on his heel in a militaristic style. "I have specialized jobs for each and every one of you, even Gir."
"Now you really have my attention," Jack laughed, snapping his fingers and pointing to Stewie.
"Zim!" Stewie turned to the Irken sharply. "I believe you have something to share?"
"Indeed I do," Zim replied, pulling a little gizmo from him pocket. "This is a recording taken by Gir a fw days ago. He was thrown in the trash and ended up taking the elevator all the way to the basement."
Zim set the device down and pushed a button. The little thing began to spin around like a top until it was just a blur. Then, it projected a bluish holographic video in the air. At the speed the image was spinning, it looked like a straight-on view no matter where you stood. The video of Gir's expedition began at the moment he jumped out of the trash can in the elevator and into the white tile halls of the basement. Through the little robot's vision, they saw that the basement shared the curved shape of the rest of the building, but there were only two doors- one for the elevator and one that seemed to lead into a room directly beneath the courtyard. Gir sat down on the ground and watched the blinking buttons on the code-entry panel.
"Uh, this part goes on for a little while," Zim muttered, pushing a button on the device to fast-forward through about ten minutes of uneventful blinking. When he let it play again, Gir watched as a security guard came down the hall and, without noticing the little robot, punched in a security code to open the door.
Immediately Gir leapt up and went running through the door, where he was met with a remarkable scene.
The courtyard had split down the center and opened up like doors of a hanger. Trucks on the surface were backed up to the edge of ramps leading onto the basement, and dozens of men where moving materials into the giant cavity under the courtyard.
"Wait, what is this?" Jack exclaimed, pointing at the recording. "That looks like one of my JackBots!"
"It is," Stewie replied grimly.
As they watched the video a few moments longer, realization gradually set in.
"They cleaned out your labs," Stewie told Dexter and Jack in a foreboding tone. "They couldn't get much from Zim's lab because it's so deep underground, but yours were just in your basements."
"This is impossible, though!" Jack cried out. "The sun was clearly still up when this all happened! There's no way we could have missed it all."
"Listen," Zim said darkly, raising a forefinger.
After a moment, there came a loud bang as a steel box slipped off the ramp and plummeted to the concrete floor.
"Sound familiar?" Stewie asked the group.
There was silence for a moment as everyone thought.
Suddenly, Le Mime waved his hands in the air excitedly. He made a series of pantomimes, but it was tough to tell what he was getting at. He seemed to be stirring a pot, then lighting a match…
"Oh, oh, I got it!" Erika exclaimed. "It was the- the- that huge explosion we all heard the other day! Remember? It came through the vents!"
"The guard said that came from the kitchen," Jack recalled.
"Of courzz 'e said zat!" Dexter snapped. "'e was not about to tell yew about how our laboratories have been cleaned out!"
"But, there was nothing in the courtyard when that happened," Pietro added. "We would have seen all this."
"Is there ever anything in the courtyard?" Stewie asked. "Have you ever seen a single bird or leaf? Have you ever seen movement in the other windows?"
"Well, no, they're darkened…" Pietro began.
"How convenient! They could build a super laser in that courtyard, blow up Mars, and we would never know about it!"
"This doesn't make sense," Jack interrupted. "If those are just, like, TV screens on the other side of the windows, we would be able to tell. It would work if we looked straight on, but from an angle we would be able to see the depth flattening."
"You are correct," Zim exclaimed. "But they aren't just using weakling HD TV, now are they? You see this?" he snatched up the device on which he had played Gir's recording. "It only seemed to be playing in your direction, when in fact it would have appeared that way no matter where you stood!"
"Theatre in the round," Erika murmured approvingly.
"So, yew sink zey aire using somesing like ziss?" Dexter asked, eyeing the device.
"Perhaps," Zim replied, tucking the thing away in a flash. "But, it would have to be ENORMOUS!"
"Yes, well, we'll get to that. In the meantime, do you all realize what this means?"
"I don't!" Erika said, throwing her hand in the air. "I mean, I think I know what it means, but I just want to make sure we're all on the same page."
Stewie rolled his eyes and tried to get the laser pointer in Erika's eyes.
"It means," he said, "that all the technology we ever designed and all the tools we need are right here, practically under our feet. They have made a fatal error and the time for our attack has come!"
"You did not just say that last part," Jack gasped incredulously. Stewie completely ignored him.
"If Pietro can get Hysterika into the basement, then she can read the mind of whoever last entered an access code in that panel- a code we can use to sneak into the holding area and take back what is ours!"
"Oh, that's just great," Jack said calmly. "But, I think the first order of business is to stuff thunder thighs back through that vent before we run out of air in here."
"YOU ARE GONNA DIE, JACK SPICER!" Hysterika screamed, flailing her arms and dreadlocks viciously. "I'M…"
"SHHHHHH!" the whole group silenced her at once.