Curly is Loki… Joker… Deadpool… meh, let's throw in a little Kylo Ren just for fun now that he's conflicted. Why the hell not? A little more low-key crazy won't break him.

Chapter 14: The Bell Tolls

Watching the lines of sixth graders turned drones in the private army of Ludwig, Curly watched dispassionately through eyes obscured by his opaque glasses that hid his emotions from the world. No one could see his eyes behind his glasses, thus few people ever saw the wheels turning behind his eyes, so they never understood his modus operandi.

Curly knew exactly what he was, and now what he stood to become. He'd never been lauded for anything and believed this school phenomenon would bring him the prestige he so coveted. Few recognized it, but he was a consummate artist, both an actor and a dancer and like any such performer he craved and subsisted off the roars of applause of an audience. Day after day however he rarely found any such attention. To all he was either the quiet nerd with glasses, or a somewhat temperamental fruitcake prone to fits of disproportionate rage and retribution. Now he was poised to be so much more.

Still, pangs of what he could only assume were doubt tugged at his strings now that he had witnessed the deeper brutality Ludwig was capable of. He had seen if before of course, but from the perspective of a victim. Since then he told himself since that he would never be a victim again, and would instead share in the kind of power the Wolfgangs and Ludwigs of the world enjoyed. Yet now seeing abuse hurled at his fellow sixth graders from Ludwig filled him with an unfamiliar feeling he surmised could only be regret.

Ludwig's horde had taken their positions throughout the school and Gino's thugs had made their way to strategic points throughout the city. Now all Culy had to do was wait for the bell; wait, and internally monologue.

Strange… I thought crushing their spirits and reducing them to quivering little jellies would have been somehow more… fulfilling… it's nothing less than they deserve for denying me my time in the limelight! I could have been every bit a hero to the school as them! And so what other choice did I have but to plot the cruel but necessary cleansing of the school by garbage?

…

Probably several… but I'm a busy kid, I don't have time to think about everything.

He paused, and watched as more and more sixth graders passed him by. He knew a few of them by name, but couldn't think of any of them he'd ever thought of as friends.

Who do I have to call a friend in this cold dark world? Eugene may have left me out in the cold, and yet even after all this… Arnold, that infuriating little goody goody still has the gaul to try to appeal to my heart? Only he could try to find the light in a heart as dark as mine. What a fool… what an unwaveringly sappy simpleton… how I despise him… and yet….

Curly glanced back and forth, then reached a hand into his shirt. Withdrawing his hand from inside his shirt, he now clasped in his hands… nothing.

"Had you there for a moment, didn't I? " Curly said aloud as if addressing his imaginary audience. He laughed aloud and wriggled his fingers with animated passion for his own whimsy.

"I know… I know… it's bad enough when Helga does these things but it's been five seasons and I want a few monologues of my own! Arnold… calls himself a friend to all. Always there to patch up a friendship, salvage a career, or just free an animal from its aquarium prison… NO he did NOT give me the inspiration! I thought of freeing all the animals from the zoo myself! But anyway… where is Arnold whenever I'm the one in need? Well after today the joke's on him, I'll never be in need again. I'll be a legend…"

"Four eyes?" Ludwig's voice snapped him out of his inner conflict.

Curly unwittingly continued his little monologue out loud with Ludwig in earshot.
"All shall bow at my feet… all shall remember the name of-" Curly at last noticed Ludwig standing about him "LUDWIG! Hiya. Wow, you're awfully light on your feet big fella."

"Come on, shrimp." Ludwig said, "Everyone else is getting to their positions. We're moving on ahead. When the others arrive, we'll be waiting."

"Ah yes…" Curly said, "To the battlefield we go."

Ludwig grabbed him by his shirt collar and pulled him up to his eye level, fixing the scrawny nerd with an intimidating glare.

"Don't screw this up for me." he said, "We've come to the final stage. You do exactly what I tell you, or it's your can that's getting canned, get it?"

Curly nodded rapidly and gave a sloppy salute.

"Good." Ludwig said. "So begins the end."

"Let's check back with our heroes." Curly said as Ludwig just looked at him in confusion again, never knowing quite to make of some of the things the boy had to say.

Everyone in the no longer secret base in the basement felt the same crushing feeling of defeat weighing them down. Their entire plan had seemed bold and outside of the box earlier, but Ludwig's harsh reminder of reality had just hammered it home for them that blunt force was going to win out in the end in this case. For all the idealism Arnold had spread around the school, now all hope had evaporated before their eyes.

Park lay on a couch as Lila pressed an ice pack to his eye, while Eugene, Lorenzo and Peapod stood close by him. Rhonda and Nadine too looked on in silence, while Arnold Gerald and Phoebe stood off in their own little circle not far away. No one had said much of a word since Ludwig had departed.

Barely a word had been uttered since Ludwig left, but finally Rhonda broke the silence.

"Well, that could have gone a lot worse…" she said.

"Speak for yourself, Rhonda…" Nadine murmured, gesturing at Park.

"Seriously, I thought he was going to hang us by own own clothes on the wall…" Rhonda continued.

"He didn't need to." Eugene said solemnly.

Eugene's endless sunny optimism at last gave way, and all eyes fell on him as he hung his head in sorrow.

"The dream is over…" Eugene said, "Ludwig is right… this whole idea was a fool's errand. I don't know what I was thinking… trying to make heroes out of us."

Arnold and Gerald remained silent, glancing back and forth at one another without knowing what to say.

"You know…" Eugene said, "The first time I found out my own personal hero was a fake, it broke me. I wanted to be like him, but when I found out he wasn't really a hero I gave up on believing in heroes… but then I met a kid who told me he looked up to me… like I was his hero. I didn't even know his name, and hadn't even met him before then and yet he looked up to me. And seeing me go bad made him give up on heroes too… and that was when I realized the kind of responsibility we all have to each other, because we never know when we're a hero to someone. I didn't know I was his hero… just like the Abdicator didn't know he was mine.

"Maybe there are no real heroes…" Rhonda sighed.

"What about Park?" Nadine spoke up from behind Rhonda. "Park took a stand."

"He shouldn't have." Arnold said, "I was the one Ludwig wanted. I should have been the one to take the fall."

"You can't always be the hero, buddy." Gerald said. "None of us can."

Eugene looked at Arnold and the others before continuing his unfolding speech.

"I know we didn't come up with the best plan in the world… or any plan really, more like the bare bones premise for what could become a good idea… but what we did have was a dream; a dream of bringing together a team of bold kids who could fight the battles that the little kids of the school couldn't… and Park went down still believing in our dream…"

"I'm not dead… I'm alive, you know, right?" Park said. "It's just a black eye-"

Eugene waved at him dismissively and said, "Could you just play dead for a minute? It would make the dramatic weight significantly more real."

"Okay… if it'll help…" Park said skeptically, and just laid back down and closed his eyes.

"Cut down in the prime of youth, and all to preserve what hope we had left…" Eugene bemoaned.

"Hope we intended to gift to the next generation." Peapod added, "A faint hope to inspire kids of this school… and those still to come."

"Showing kids that they could take a stand against bullying," Eugene said, "But we couldn't even take a stand against Ludwig ourselves…"

"Yeah, but only because we've spent all our energy fighting each other." Arnold said, "Curly hit us all right in our weak points and we did the rest… and then Ludwig took us down without even laying a finger on us…. well, most of us. Maybe if we stood together it would have been different."

"Yeah maybe…" Gerald spoke up, "But… if he divided and conquered us so we wouldn't take a stand against him… why didn't he just pound us all right here while we were down?"
Everyone turned to Gerald, as his tone of voice suggested he was onto something.

"Wouldn't it have been easy for him to just pound us into the ground down here?" Gerald continued, "Instead he just tore down our spirits…"

"Mostly…" Park moaned.

"Shh…" Eugene hushed him again.

Phoebe crossed her arms and looked at Gerald thoughtfully, "Perhaps he gains just as much sick satisfaction by going after people psychologically."

"Yeah, but did you hear what he said?" Gerald asked, "He wasn't just shutting us down, if he wanted to we'd all be hanging by our underwear on the wall right now. He could've just beaten us without any witnesses right here…"

"So you're saying… wait, what are you saying?" Arnold asked.

"He was goading us… because he wants witnesses." Gerald said as an epiphany grew in him, "Ludwig doesn't just want to can the lower grades, he wants to make himself a legend, and to do that he wants to be seen taking us down!"

The other kids all exchanged glances amongst one another as Gerald got fired up.

"So he's set a trap for us…?" Arnold asked.

"That's right." Gerald said as he made a fist, "And now we're gonna take the bait."

"What?" Rhonda asked incredulously, "You think he's luring us into a trap and you want to just walk into it?"

"There are few traps that can't be turned against their architects…" Phoebe said with some mischief entering her voice. "If Gerald is correct, then I calculate the one factor Ludwig isn't expecting is that we know this is a trap…"

"That's crazy…" Arnold said.

"Yeah, it is." Gerald agreed, but then he smiled, "But… the whole world's gone crazy and… well, if there's one thing I've learned from you in all the years I've known you, Arnold… it's that the only way to beat crazy is to be even crazier sometimes."

Gerald smiled at his best friend and stuck out his fist. Arnold just looked at him blankly for a moment, but slowly a smile crept across his face and he stuck out his own fist and the two of them engaged in the secret handshake they had devised the day they had met so many years ago.

"Even crazier…" Arnold repeated Gerald's words thoughtfully.

"Okay." Rhonda said, "If we're going to make a stand I'm in."

"Me too." Nadine agreed.

"We all are." Sheena said, "Too bad we lost Helga…"

"She'll come back." Phoebe said, "I just know it."

"We can't afford to wait," Lila said.

"Now, if we only knew where this trap is going to be…" Arnold said.

Lila spoke up, "If I may remind you, Ludwig did say his plan was to drive the kids towards somewhere inescapable. Perhaps if as Gerald suggests, he intends for this to be an ever so symbolic victory, might it be somewhere significant to us?"

"Yeah, so what's a big enough space where he can trap upwards of fifty kids or more?" Gerald asked, "It'd have to be huge, but also boxed in, he'd need a whole battlefield, but one that's-"

Gerald froze as his eyes went wide. He snapped his fingers.

"Son of a gun!" he blurted and then turned to Arnold, "Come on man! We gotta beat him there!"

Gerald dashed over to the wall and grabbed a fire extinguisher, still gesturing for Arnold to go with him.

"Where?" Arnold asked slightly flabbergasted.

"The battlefield!" Gerald shouted, "Gerald Field! Meet us there! We'll go ahead!"

"Wait… your costumes!" Rhonda cried out.

"There's no time!" Gerald shouted back as he and Arnold dashed out of the door.

As Gerald spoke, suddenly the three thirty bell rang as a look of terror came across all others present.

"It's time…" Eugene said ominously.

Arriving at Gerald Field, Ludwig stood alone as Gino's thugs, directed by Curly, lined up roughly thirty full trash cans against the walls. Once the younger kids arrived, his army would box them in and Trash Can Day would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Ludwig sniffed the air and smiled with satisfaction.

"I love the smell of garbage in the-" He stopped himself and coughed, "Okay… no I don't… but still… this is gonna be awesome."

Back at PS118, dashing out the door ahead of all the other kids, Arnold and Gerald rushed over to the bike racks where Arnold had docked his bike that morning. Arnold leapt onto the seat and Gerald sat upon the handlebars still holding the fire extinguisher.

"What about the others?" Arnold asked.

"They'll catch up." Gerald insisted.
"You sure about this?" Arnold asked.

"Not in the slightest." Gerald said "Let's do it."

Arnold commenced peddling as quickly as his legs allowed, as Gerald pointed the hose behind them and squeezed the trigger, and the extinguisher discharged pressurized air which propelled them forward as they sped off towards Gerald field.

And end of act 2. Thus begins the final battle... well, the first battle...