"What the?" Tommy said, coming to a stop in front of his parents' front door. Usually when they came to visit his mom and dad would be waiting at the door, throwing it open the moment he stepped onto the sidewalk. But this time the door had remained closed all the way up and when he got to the entryway he found a note tapped to the door with a goofy little smiley face drawn it and his name written in his dad's sloppy handwriting.
"Why, I do believe it is a note, Watson!" Dil said, adapting a British accent.
"Thank you, Holmes," Tommy said dryly. "It's from dad."
"Why did only write your name on it?" Dil asked normally.
Angelica smirked. "He figured you'd get distracted by something shiny and not notice it."
Dil scoffed at that. "I would-" Angelica pulled out her keys and rattled them in front of Melinda, who was held firmly in Chuck's arms. "ooooo."
"Dylan!" Steph snapped.
"I'm kidding! Geez!" Dil rolled his eyes. "What does it say, Tommy?"
Opening up the note Tommy read, "'Dear Tommy and Dil-' see, he didn't forget you, Dil, 'Kira and I had to run and get some stuff for lunch, so feel free to make yourself at home. Try not the 'rock' the casbah.' And then he drew another smiley face with a tongue sticking out."
"Seriously?" Angelica said, leaning down and picking up the clearly fake rock that was lying all by itself by the door. She flipped it open only to pull out another note. "'Hey guys, the door is open, just… go right in'?" Angelica looked at Tommy and Dil. "Uncle Stu is kind of an idiot."
"It took you this long to figure that out?" Kimi asked. "I realized that after his Mr. Soapy Disaster."
"Mr. Soapy?" Steph asked as Tommy opened the unlocked door and led his extended family inside. "Do I even want to know?"
Dil shrugged as he flopped down on the couch. "Imagine a 5 foot tall clown butler that would say 'Good day sir' whenever you activated it."
Chuck shuddered. "That stupid thing set back my attempts to get over my coulrophobia by at least 4 years."
"We should schedule an appointment to deal with that!" Melinda babbled as her daddy sat down on the couch and placed her on the floor. "I think Immersion Therapy… take me to Ronald-Donalds for lunch every day! Happy Meals solve every'ting!"
"And what, exactly, was Mr. Soapy used for?" Steph asked with the same dread one might take to discuss the fences in Jurassic Park going down.
"The idea was that he could clean clothes while you were wearing them," Tommy said. "You walk up, pat his head, and he would spray you with quick cleaning and drying foam. No need to change if you got your clothing dirty. The machine worked well enough…" Tommy grimaced.
"It was the foam that was a disaster," Kimi said, letting Louie down before pulling out a few toys from his diaper bag and setting them down next to him, Brian joining him and Melinda seconds later. "Stu messed up the mixture."
"Mixed up?" Angelica asked, raising an eyebrow as she flopped down next to Chuck. "That stuff melts clothing. MELTS! He invented foam that causes your clothing to turn into puddles!"
"And he only got Mr. Deville!" Dil complained. "Couldn't have sprayed Kiri-OW!"
"Thank you, Kimi," Chuck said, his sister nodding as Dil rubbed his head. To Steph he added, "That was pretty much the last invention Mr. Pickels made… at least with the idea of selling it."
"I've always wondered about that," Steph said, walking up to Dil and sitting down on his lap while Kimi and Tommy took the loveseat. "What made your father change careers? You always talk about how he loved making new things but then suddenly he decides to completely change paths… what happened?"
Tommy leaned back, staring up at the ceiling. "Well, Mr. Soapy was a pretty low point. When you melt your friend's clothing off, there isn't much farther to fall." While he was able to chuckle about that day it hadn't been fun at all at the time. He'd been at that awkward time of life when anything that happened, even if it wasn't him doing it, that could be possibly seen as embarrassing was the worst thing that could happen. Tommy winced as he remembered how many times he'd snapped at the people he loved. Getting annoyed at Dil for just being Dil, wishing his father had been 'normal', yelling at his Grandpa… Tommy wanted to go back and slap his younger self and shake him until he realized just how much time he'd lost worrying what people who didn't matter thought.
He looked down at Louie and suddenly had a horrifying vision of the future…
"Oh my znils, dad, what are you doing?"
Tommy looked up at his 15 year old son. He was sitting in their private plane, wearing in a simple t-short/pants combo, while Louie was wearing what looked like an aluminum shirt and pants made from skinned muppets. "Uh… using my laptop? And znils?"
"I'm not going to explain who znils is and why I would use his name like that. It is a young person thing." Louie scoffed, waving his arm at him. "And why are you using that dinosaur machine? Everyone who is anyone now gets all their internet beamed directly into their head. Znils, why are you so pathetic? I wish Blork Redtree was my dad!"
"Louie, I… Blork?"
"See, you don't know anything!"Louie went crosseyed for a moment before opening his mouth and letting out a ping. "I put a Digito up on showing the world how Znils-loving stupid you are."
Tommy shuddered and looked down at Louie. "You aren't allowed to ever grow up."
"That is an option!?" Louie squealed happily.
"Uh, Tommy?" Kimi said, waving her hand in front of his space. "Let's not lose you in the middle of a story, huh? Not old enough to pull a Grandpa Lou."
"Right," Tommy said with a smile, before turning his attention back to Steph. "So anyway, Mr. Soapy happened around the time that we rediscovered Reptar-"
"Rediscovered?" Steph asked.
"Yeah," Dil said with a grin. "Turns out Reptar's #1 Fan kinda forgot about him for 9 years."
Chuck spoke up in defense of his best friend. "In Tommy's defense that's when they did that Gen 2 Reptar where he was weird Hawaiian colors and then had the series where Monkie Moe was the lead…"
"Stupid monkey," Tommy muttered before continuing. "Basically, we found this old Reptar toy, one we'd had when we were babies-"
As Tommy described what Chuck had later dubbed the 'Curse of Reptar' Louie turned to Brian and Melinda. "Daddy was a baby?"
"Weird," Brian said. "I didn't know daddies could be babies."
"Everybody was a baby once!" Melinda said sagely. "Even your daddy!"
"…pull the other one."
Melinda blinked. "Pull what?"
"-and so I just couldn't leave him out in that cold water, so I brought him inside." Tommy smiled, thinking about that crazy night. He now saw that it had been that wild, freaky evening that had gotten him back into Reptar; days later he'd begun looking the show up once more, discovering how much had changed since he last saw it, and rediscovering his love for the green master of monsters. "Originally I was just going to leave it under my bed but then I began thinking more and more about Reptar… and I saw how depressed my dad was…"
Tommy walked up to his dad, shifting awkwardly from one foot to another. His dad had been spending the last few weeks sitting in lab in the basement, tinkering and piddling around but not really doing anything of note. Tommy had seen his father get into design funks before but they'd never been this bad and certainly not this long. His mother had told him when he was a baby his father had gotten stuck in one for about two weeks before hitting on his bubble machine idea but she admitted that this one had her worried. His dad wasn't merely stuck on an idea… he seemed broken and defeated.
He hated seeing his dad like that. His dad was supposed to be peppy and confident and brilliant… not sitting in his basement lab, fiddling with his tools with a look that spoke of pain and regret.
Something had to be done.
"Hey dad?" Tommy said gently, not wanting to startle his father.
"I'll be up for supper in a minute," his dad said, tone bland with no vigor at all.
"No, not… I was wondering if you could help me with something?" His dad waved listlessly to a spare stool and Tommy sat down, fiddling with the ends of the plastic bag he'd brought down with him.
"What is it?" Stu asked, setting the hammer he'd been fingering down with a sigh.
Tommy slowly opened the plastic bag and pulled out the abused and beaten Reptar figure. "Remember the construction workers finding this?"
Stu blinked, surprised. "Yeah… I thought you threw this away."
"I… I was going to… but I kept thinking about how much he meant to me. I had this dream, I was real little and Phil and Lil and Chuckie and I were playing with Reptar and we were having so much fun…" Tommy said, knowing he was rambling. "It just didn't feel right to leave him in a hole or throw him away. He was my childhood, you know? I had so much fun playing with him… he was my hero. It'd… It'd…"
"It what?" Stu asked.
"It's be like tossing you in the garbage."
That startled Stu.
Tommy continued on. "I was just going to leave him under my bed, you know, as a keepsake, but this last week I've been thinking more and more about him and it… it isn't right to leave him like this." Tommy gestured weakly at the ripped out eye, the dirty plastic, the tears and wounds, and all the other little things that marred the toy.
"Tommy," his dad said, looking at the toy. "You know, it would be easier just to get another one. I'm sure if we looked online-"
"I don't want another one. I want this one. This is the Reptar I fell asleep with! This is the Reptar I shared with Dil." In a quieter voice he whispered, "The Reptar YOU got me."
His dad didn't say anything for a long time and for a moment Tommy was worried his father was going to send him on his way. Then, with hands that moved with an almost reverence, his father took the toy from Tommy's fingers. He watched as his dad lifted Reptar up, inspecting it carefully.
"The eye will be an easy fix… but he'll need to be rewired to get him working again. The plastic could be repaired… I've been wanting to try out some this new paintable epoxy I got… hmmm…" Stu wheeled over to his work bench and adjusted the overhead magnifying glass so he could get a closer look at Reptar's battery box. "You know, I could make it that he runs on button cells… would make him a bit lighter and give him better power consumption."
Tommy walked over and joined his dad. "I'd like it to be as close as I could get to the original but I'm okay with a few improvements…"
"Great!" Stu said, grinning as he took out an exacto knife and carefully began to separate Reptar at his seems. "Hmmm, I'll have to do a pigment test to find the right paints…"
"Wait, is that the Reptar that you keep in that case on the plane?" Steph said, startled. "I thought you got that thing in an auction or something… he's pristine!"
"Nope!" Tommy said with a grin. "Dad rebuilt him."
Angelica picked up the tale, smiling as she remembered what had happened next. "Tommy showed us all what his dad had done with Reptar…"
"And you actually complimented the job!" Dil said with a huge grin.
"Of course I did!" Angelica scoffed. "You people make me sound like some sort of monster."
Tommy, Chuck, and Dil all gave her a dry look. Kimi tried to give her a big smile but couldn't quite pull it off.
"…the point is," Angelica said, ignoring the stares they were giving him, "when I saw how well Uncle Stu did with Reptar I asked him to take a look at my Cynthia doll. When I was young I thought I'd done such a good job making her look pretty but by the time I was 13 I realized she looked like something Dil had gotten a hold of."
"Hey, that…" Angelica, Chuck, Tommy, and Kimi all gave him a dry look. "Point taken."
"Anyway, I gave Uncle Stu Cynthia and when he got done with her she looked absolutely perfect! She looked like she had come straight out of the box. I posted a few photos online…"
"And the next thing dad knew he was getting calls from all sorts of people wanting him to work on their old toys!" Dil said boisterously. "Not just collectors… people wanting to restore cherished toys, parents wanting to repair things they'd gotten from their parents so they could hand them down to their kids, and all those inbetween."
"And the thing is… he loves doing it. With new inventions dad has to come up with everything and has to deal with all these problems that no one would ever expect. But restoring toys?" Tommy chuckled. "He knows what it would become. He has goalposts. He does all this research, contacts interesting people and gets to talk to them, makes friends across the country… it's been great. He'll fly out to convensions and he's gotten to go to the Eggland headquarters and meet with the design teams! Oh! And the salvage guys! There is a whole industry of finding old stuff and dad is their go-to guy! He got the fire in his belly back. Within a year he stopped being an inventor except for fun and changed Pickles Toys from creation to restoration."
Steph smiled. "I'm glad your dad was able to find something he loved doing…"
"Let me get that for you, Kiri," Stu said from in the kitchen. Tommy and the rest of his extended family stood up to greet his dad and Kiri only to grow silent as the two older adults continued talking. "So, how do you think the kids will react to the news?"
"It will be hard on them at first… this is a big change for all of them… but I hope in the end they will be happy for us."
"Yeah," Stu said with a sigh, "I mean, sure things will be different but when they understand how we feel…"
"I just hope Chas stops crying," Kira said softly. "He hasn't stopped crying since I told him it was all settled."
"Didi has been upset too. She keeps saying that it is a tremendous loss."
"Yes, but it is the start of something wonderful for us," Kiri said.
"I just hope the kids react well when we tell them that we're going to be living-oh, hey kids!"
Tommy, Dil, Steph, Angelica, Kimi, and Chuck merely sat there in stunned silence.
"I didn't realize you'd arrived!" Stu exclaimed with a grin. "You guys stay right there… Kira and I need to unpack the groceries and then we'll all sit down and catch up. Didi and Chaz should be here at some point…" Stu trailed off, Kira and him heading back into the kitchen.
"…so we all misheard that, right?" Tommy said, his face white.
Dil shook head head. "I was right."
"We must have," Chuck said, swallowing hard.
"I was right," Dil repeated.
"I can't believe it," Angelica whispered.
"I was right."
"There… there has to be another explanation," Kimi murmured.
"I was right."
Steph wrung her hands. "We can't jump to conclusions…"
"I was right!" Dil hissed, eyes wide. "Dad and Kira are a couple and they are going to get married and move into a house together! Tommy and Kimi are going to be brother and sister and Louie will be a product of incest!"
"I'm a produck of what?" Louie asked Brian.
"Insects," Brian said. "You're going to be a bug!"
"…cool!" Louie exclaimed, climbing up and extending his arms. "I'm a bee! BZZZZZZZZ!"
