--Chapter Three
A few minutes later, Angus and Brenda had almost reached their destination at The Motherboard, when suddenly they both heard a frantic squeaking sound coming from the next alley. The ints cautiously looked around the corner to see what was making the noise.
It was an enormous animal of some sort, completely albino, and chained to the wall. It yelped desperately in between attempts to gnaw at the gag over its mouth. Brenda approached the creature so as to try and remove the chains.
"What are you doing?" asked Angus.
"I'm trying to figure out what this fella's doing here," she replied.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you, Brenda, he looks kinda dangerous."
"Dangerous?" said Brenda, looking back at him, "It's only a harmless white mouse. It looks like Arrow from the Monitor world."
"W-what's a creature from the monitor doing down here?" asked Angus. He was still a bit nervous about the idea of a mouse that was twice his size.
"I don't know," Brenda repeated, "but let's get it loose so we can find out."
--
Gus "Smiley" Yellow was receiving the beating of his life. Arrow had been stomping on every bomb possible. Then instead of stomping on the "New Game" space, Arrow had been stomping on Gus's face to resuscitate him. It was a painful combination of blowing up and getting "clicked" on.
"Ow! Ow! Ow! What's wrong with you, Arrow?" Gus asked in a sad, shocked voice—although because of his job, he kept smiling the whole time.
Arrow stomped on another bomb. Gus actually heard the mouse laugh with delight as it clicked soundly on Gus's face. Surely something was awry here… this wasn't the Arrow Gus was used to seeing in the game. What had happened to his pet?
--
While all of this was going on, Angus and Brenda managed to get the real Arrow free from its chains. The mouse seemed relieved to be let loose, but it clearly did not know how to communicate its thanks, or its situation, to the little ints that faced it.
Brenda tried to help out by asking it, "Who did this to you, Arrow? You are Arrow, right?"
The mouse nodded.
"Okay," said Brenda, "Is there some way you can tell us how you got here so we can get you back home?"
The mouse went into a series of squeaking noises, none of which the ints could understand.
"Wait a minute," Angus interrupted, "I think I know how we can communicate. If I know mice, they like to click, right?
Arrow nodded enthusiastically. Angus responded by repeating Brenda's question in Morse code, stomping on the floor. Arrow clicked back his response.
"He says a mean int in a trench coat kidnapped him and chained him to the wall," Angus interpreted.
"I didn't know you could do Morse code," said an admiring Brenda.
"Any janitor who knows the first thing about defragmenting knows Morse. And you might say we members of the DeFrag family are naturals."
Not wanting to sound like he was bragging, Angus quickly returned to the subject at hand.
"Well, we have to get this guy to the monitor. Say, Brenda, do you know where the inter-hardware highway cable to the monitor is?"
Brenda replied in the positive. She added, "And it's not far from here. The kidnapper probably dumped the mouse off at the first back alley he saw from the highway."
"Great," said Angus, "let's go!"
Arrow squeaked in agreement as only a mouse can, and the three were off to the Monitor world.
--
Fatal Error decided he had tortured the smiling idiot Gus enough. Fatal was getting impatient, largely due to the fact that he had put out his cigarette before putting on the giant mouse suit. He was cranky. He was insane. And now he was ready to cause some real trouble.
He took of the Arrow suit and threw it at Gus so that it covered "Smiley's" face. Gus had no arms, so he could not take it off, and he just sat there smiling, blinded by the white fabric over his eyes.
Fatal then lit a cigarette and went to work once more. As an int, he was small enough to slip through the crack between the spaces on the Expert game board and squeeze his way under the tiles. The tile he had picked, however, contained a land mine. The bomb character turned around to see who had entered its private hiding spot.
Now, land mines are not particularly personable creatures. And this bomb did not wait for Fatal Error to explain himself; it didn't want to know just what Fatal was doing there. All it knew was that a tiny, unwanted and unwelcome creature had invaded his domain—and bombs do not tend to like that very much…
So there Fatal stood on the edge between life and death as the land mine attempted to set itself off.
--End chapter three--
