"I've finished collecting the information." Kowalski crinkled the paper as he held the clipboard tight.
"All of it?" Skipper questioned.
"Yes, and I don't believe we need to worry." The ace analyst thought—at least not about Jo and Private—everyone should still worry about intergalactic space squid 24/7.
"Well?" The leader asked, imploring his own right-hand man to continue.
"The secret was related to a physical condition." Kowalski really didn't want to lie to Skipper, so he told a partial truth.
"A physical condition?" Skipper brought his head back in shock that the new recruit could be sick or worse. "Is it contagious?"
"I can say it is not with assured certainty."
"Then why keep it under wraps?" Skipper put his flippers behind his back as he paced around the room. "More importantly, what did it have to do with me?"
"Apparently the new recruit thinks highly of your opinions, and worries that letting you know would just add another layer of separation from the rest of the team." Kowalski summed it up carefully.
"He does, does he?" Skipper puffed up a little more, before looking back to Kowalski. "Good work Kowalski, I knew I could count on you to get to the bottom of this."
The genius puffed up too, content that he was able to straddle the line and find a way to keep his word to everyone. He and Skipper still had a lot of work to do, recollecting the other calculations, and adjusting the schedule.
In the garage, Rico was showing Jo the basics of reconstructing the car. The recruit had worked out another deal with the other tall bird, a trade of teachings. In exchange for painting lessons to paint his Ms. Perky doll, he would show her how to repair the wheels, engine, and hood.
"Nuh-uh." He grunted, coughing up another wrench to show the proper technique. It was Rico's craft, knowing how to take things apart meant understanding how to put them back together.
Private sat on the counter, hoping that everything would work out. It was great, watching Jo and Rico get along. It still took a while, but working together the car was finished in record time, and they had started to chat and tell old stories to the new girl.
"You should've seen the look on Skipper's face when the popcorn started flooding our headquarters!" Private giggled, wagging his feet as he dangled on the edge of the workstation.
"Yap!" Rico nodded, agreeing that the humongous pile of popped corn that rained from the sky was a great event. Finding out his favorite snack was caused by mini exploding seeds had made him gleeful.
At the sound of the garage door opening, the three birds stood at attention, making a line from tallest to shortest as Skipper came in.
"At ease boys." He waved his flipper as he inspected the car. It seemed fixed, and he trusted that it was up to Rico's code. The leader was tired after discussing the next week's overview with his lieutenant. Slapping the hood he made sure it wasn't just smoke and mirrors. "Good as new. Looks like you're off the hook."
"Yes sir." She said, meekly. Even though the order was to be at ease, she still didn't know if Kowalski mentioned anything and-"Kowalski!"
"What?" Skipper questioned, wondering if the recruit had mixed up their names again.
"He said to see him in the lab after fixing the car." She was getting nervous about being so late. Skipper took note of Joe's panic and realized he was waiting to be allowed to leave.
"Go ahead, rookie! When I say at ease you don't need to wait for a dismissal!" She turned to rush off but hesitated, saluting with the wrong flipper before quickly changing it and hurrying off down the exit.
The three watched Jo(e) go, before sharing a moment of exasperation at the odd encounter. Still, it was clear to Skipper that learning was in progress. Why, he remembered some mishaps back with Manfredi and Johnson that gives him second-hand embarrassment to this day.
"Gentlemen, I've had a long day… and would like nothing more than to enjoy Shirtless Ninjas the Movie Three with the both of you." It was a long way to say he cared, but the message was received loud and clear by Rico and Private.
"Oh goody! That's the one with the boat scene!" Private sclapped his flippers and Rico coughed up some bowls to fill. They had started saving kernels to add it to their snack storage, now that they knew how to make the salty, buttery snack.
"Popcorn!" He smiled and started waddling with the other two.
"Indeed Rico." Skipper slapped his sergeants back before looking to the Corporal.
"How are you enjoying your new position?"
"Oh, it's quite lovely!" Private thought, before adding, "I don't really feel much differn't myself."
"That's a good thing." Skipper smiled. "Sometimes power can go right to your head."
"Mmhm." Rico made a knocking noise with a curled flipper on the side of his skull.
"Skipper?"
"Yes?"
"How do you feel, as the leader of our unit?" Private knew his captain took pride in keeping this unit in mint condition, but it must have its own unseen downsides.
"It's rewarding." He answered, bonding with them as they waddled along.
"Don't get me wrong, it is a lot of work, but seeing how far you men have come from where you began, and seeing how much further you still have to go… It's worth more than the tangiest fish of the sea." Skipper's love of leading came out like a spoken song from the heart.
"Blegh." Rico wasn't enjoying this sappiness, but it made Private glad.
They made their way into the main room, booting up the movie and cooking the food in the furnace as they got situated for a men's night in.
In that time, Jo had rushed off and slipped into the lab, out of breath from the chase against a clock. Then again, she didn't have to rush since Kowalski had no way of knowing at what point she had finished fixing the car, but it would have bothered her regardless.
"You had an assignment for me, Sir?" She asked as Kowalski sat at his desk, looking into a microscope and jotting down information. There was a long pause, and she felt like he hadn't heard her. "Sir? You said-"
"Give me one moment." His reply was concise, but it made her shudder from interrupting.
She could hear the scratches of the pencil on the board and didn't make another sound until he got up, motioning for her to come to sit in his place at the table.
Avoiding eye contact, it was the tensest she had felt since her arrival, but she came over and sat at the desk. Kowalski flipped a new page on his clipboard before addressing her.
"Look into the microscope and make a rendering. Then, I want a diagram made following my instructions."
He sounded like a recorded voice... As if he could start explaining that the fitness gram pacer test is a multistage aerobic capacity test that progressively gets more difficult as it continues.
To be honest, this assignment felt like a pacer test for an artist, as she looked back and forth to make the rendering for the scientist. He kept to himself, going over to another station while she worked.
When the rendering was finished, she couldn't help but smile after being so tense for so long. Especially when the rendering was shaped like a handlebar mustache.
"I mustache you a question." She held the art in front of her face so it lined up. Apparently, the lab was the place where humor died. Or was absorbed into the walls and dissipated, as the others enjoying their movie came through as muffled laughter.
Seeing the rookie sadly deflate after hearing the laughs, some part of Kowalski determined it may be okay to entertain some lightheartedness.
"Are you going to ask me now, or shave it for later?" He came over, setting the odd purple liquid concoction he was working on in the beaker stand next to various other mixtures and emulsions.
The atmosphere remained a bit tense, but considering he rarely ever made any jokes it was definitely some sort of improvement.
"Well, sir, I was actually wondering what the context was for this illustration. This seems like a weird assignment." She was planning on drawing feathers and other more pleasant scientific renderings.
"This is a rendering of a fly's foot," Kowalski explained, before spinning the microscope around to double-check her work. Rising up, he pointed to the bottom corner of the left side, where it was a little unclear. "There is supposed to be an indication made of how the pads underneath connect to the shaft of the leg."
She went to check it again, accidentally bumping into the bird and pushing him away from the microscope instead of turning it to face her. Pulling back, she felt clumsy as her broad form felt more cumbersome than usual.
"Apologies, sir, I didn't mean to…"
"Calm down, I'm not as much of a stickler for the rules as you may have presumed." He shook his head and spoke with a flipper lifted. "Though, I do prefer a more professional environment than Rico or Private."
"Understandable, sir." She took another look in the microscope, leaving it at that before making the edit to the rendering. Kowalski took another look, before pointing to the image again.
"Remove the hairs, they won't be necessary for this documentation." He rose back to full height, putting his flippers behind himself as the lower rank followed his command.
After a while, it became apparent that the scientist was determined to have explicitly detailed renderings made for several parts of an invention designed to be deployed to walk up walls and across ceilings easier than their old plunger shoe setup.
"I'll call it, the Stick-u-lator!" He smiled, looking at the draft.
"Ah, that implies the stickiness of the chemical reaction to make the glue compound, the you referencing the penguin using the invention, and the -ator suffix is reminiscent of elevator!"
"You like the name?" Kowalski was shocked, considering Skipper usually changed what to call the inventions to something simpler. "Also, the -ator suffix actually refers to the machine aspect, which is why it is so common in names for inventions."
"I think it is a great name. All I could come up with was Must-aschends." She had started labeling the model sheet for the invention, while Kowalski was given a taste of his own medicine as he thought of the derivative for the proposed name.
"Mustachends?" He curled a flipper under his beak in thought. "How do you figure?"
"Mustache for the shape, and ascend for the purpose, combined because they are used when we must ascend."
Kowalski now knew why the others didn't appreciate his nomenclature for inventions. It took a while to understand, and might never be should one not know all the vocabulary. While Jo went about detailing the mock-up on paper, his mind kicked into high gear.
It was a bit suspicious, for another penguin to have any sort of knowledge related to science. Immediately he thought back to Skipper's warning that Jo could be a spy, and realized he had given her access to his lab—his top-secret inventing space—unsupervised.
"You seem to know an awful lot about my line of work."
"What?" She took a pause from her work to look up at the superior officer.
"Do you have a background in science? Physics? Chemistry?" Jo looked at the vials and tubes throughout the lab as she thought, gazing back to the debonair detective.
"No, not chemistry or advanced physics… but I enjoy biological studies and learning about why things work. Anatomy ties into art, and there is a lot of crossover between the fields." She thought back to what Private said, and parroted his words to the bird. "There's a reason my art studio is right at home in your lab."
Kowalski nodded, sorting through the information just given to him, before deciding it was still irregular but nothing to bring to Skipper's attention—or corkboard—just yet.
Instead, he would take precautions to put away certain inventions when he wasn't around and keep an eye on her proceedings just in case this did turn out to be a threat to the team.