Chapter 6: I, Rat
"Hey, Mickie--"
Mickie yelled in shock and jumped about a foot in the air as her room door opened and Bobby's head poked in. "I'm NAKED, do you freakin' mind!?" She screeched at the top of her lungs. Bobby's face went bright pink as his eyes squeezed shut and he withdrew. Mickie huffed out a breath and hurriedly pulled a pair of her new jeans toward her as she pulled off the nightgown she'd been trying on. When she was decently covered, she stuffed all the lingerie into a bag and shoved it under her bed, then went to her room door and opened it. "What do you want?"
Bobby's face was still averted, and the tips of his ears were bright pink. Mickie sighed. "You can look now, I'm decent." Slowly he turned toward her, still moving as though he were afraid of getting yelled at.
Mickie grabbed his arm, pulled him into her room, shut the door, and shoved him into a chair. "You didn't come here just to stare at my naked body, did you?" She tried to sound annoyed, but really, Bobby looked so cute with the tips of his ears pink that she couldn't help chuckling to herself…
"No! no, I didn't know--I mean, I didn't expect you to be—oh, hell." Bobby buried his face in his hands.
There was a soft tap on the door, and Jubilee's voice said, "Mickie? Is Bobby in there?"
"Yes," Mickie said, sighing. So much for her plans. She wanted a nice, quiet evening; first trying on her new clothes, then a long hot shower, and a trip upstairs to the library to read the rest of the night. Looked like these two had other plans, judging from the way Jubilee's eyes were sparkling.
Jubilee bounced into the room, and Mickie had to groan. Her room seemed plenty big enough for her, but somehow, when Jubilee walked into a room the room seemed to shrink exponentially. Her personality was incredibly big for such a small girl.
Jubilee stopped, looked at Bobby, looked at Mickie, looked at Bobby again. "Well, did you, like, ask her yet?"
"Ask me what?"
"Uh, well, I hadn't exactly had a chance yet, I mean, I just got here and she wasn't decent…" And Bobby flushed to the roots of his sandy blond hair.
Jubilee gawked at him. "You mean you, like, just walked right into a girl's room without asking if she was decent first? Bobby! I thought you knew better!" Bobby cringed in his chair, seeming to shrink into himself, and Jubilee threw up her hands in disgust. "Without her the plan won't work, and she's definitely not gonna say yes now that you've totally like, embarrassed her!"
"I'm going to say yes to what?!" Mickie shifted, adding several inches to her usual five foot three height and adding several decibels to her voice in the process. "Will someone please tell me what's going on?!"
Both Bobby and Jubilee jumped a little, then looked guilty. "Uh, we were, like, wondering," Jubilee began nervously "If you'd help us out with this little prank we want to do to Hank…"
"Hank…the big furry blue doctor?" Mickie asked. When Bobby nodded, Mickie frowned. "But he's nice. Why would you want to play a prank on him?"
"Because it's fun!" Bobby squirmed. "He doesn't really mind it when I play tricks on him, not the way everybody else minds. At least, not as much," he finished quickly.
"What do you want to do?" Mickie's eyes were still narrowed.
Bobby stopped squirming. "He's doing this experiment with this rat right now, working on a chemical to increase it's intelligence. I was thinking, maybe Jubes and you could sneak in while he's working, and when he mixes his chemicals I could come in and distract him so he spills the chemicals. Jubilee could paf them with her fireworks, and when the smoke clears, you could be sitting in the rat's place. And you'd sit up and start talking to him or something, and he'd think his experiment actually went right, and…" Bobby ran out of breath.
Mickie sat down and laughed. "Oh, gosh. You guys must drive the adults nuts. How often do you get grounded?"
"About once every couple of weeks or so." Bobby was unrepentant. "So are you gonna do it?"
Mickie frowned. "Hey, I just got changed back to my human form. I'm not going to spend a month in a rat's form." She closed her eyes, bringing a picture of herself up in her mind. As she had done when she had shifted into the form of a cat, so she did now, transforming into a rat. This time, though, mindful of the lesson she had learned, she kept the image of her own vocal cords firmly in the shifted picture.
When she opened her eyes her room was suddenly bigger. A LOT bigger. She blinked, looked down. Right in front of her eyes was a long, narrow, pointed nose with whiskers sprouting from either side. She held up her hands, and found them tiny, hairless pink things, tipped with small claws. She felt her body, confirming she was hairy all over, then twisted her head around and checked behind her, lifting one long, skinny, hairless pink tail. "Yikes!" she gulped. Her voice came out high and shrill, really squeaky, but at least she could talk.
Jubilee and Bobby both towered over her. It was slightly unnerving, seeing hands the size of her body coming down, but she scolded herself firmly for paying attention to a normal rat's instincts and jumped up on Bobby's hand.
"Wow," Bobby breathed. "You look just like Hank's rat!"
"Yeah, ya do, but can you change back?' Jubilee asked. 'That's, like a really, really important part of this joke. Or it won't be a joke at all."
"PUT ME DOWN!" Mickie shouted as loud as she could to Bobby. It took a few tries before the older boy got the message, but he did put her down finally.
Mickie scampered across the floor to her bathroom, disappearing inside. Jubilee very considerately followed her and closed the door behind her, and Mickie sat up on the cold tile, closing her eyes and picturing herself changing back.
It didn't work.
Tears filled her eyes, and she fought them back as she closed her eyes and tried again. Nothing. She let out a tinny, squeaky wail of despair and buried her pointed nose in her front paws.
"Mickie? You okay? I'm coming in." And before Mickie could react, Jubilee pushed open the door and stepped in. Her foot came down squarely on Mickie's tail, and Mickie squealed in pain.
And suddenly the bathroom was crowded with two bodies, Jubilee's and Mickie's. Mickie realized she was human again, and naked, split seconds before Jubilee did, and she reached out and whipped a towel around her nudity.
Jubilee blinked, but to her credit, reacted smoothly and wordlessly. She stepped backward out of the bathroom, grabbed for Mickie's clothes, which were sitting on the floor where she'd abandoned them, and opened the door the tiniest bit to shove them through the door. "Thanks," Mickie called to her.
Alone again, Mickie put the clothes on the sink counter and closed her eyes again, shifting into cat form. When she was satisfied she was fully a cat again, she extruded one sharp claw and scratched the back of her other paw. The sudden pain, as tiny as it was, sent her reeling back into her own form.
"Got it!" she exulted, hurriedly dressing in her own clothes and opening the bathroom door. Bobby and Jubilee looked up quizzically as she came out. "Got what?"
"I figured it out! I was in the bathroom and I figured out how to change back. I have to scratch myself, or somehow jolt my nerves, and then I change back. Yeah, we can do the trick." Her blue eyes sparkled as she grinned. "So when do we do it?"
* * *
Hank looked up as Bobby strolled into his lab, and instantly went on alert, although he remained outwardly relaxed. "What brings you into my fortress of solitude on such a fine evening, my thermally challenged young friend?"
"Oh, nothing," Bobby said, waving a hand dismissively, trying to act like nothing was wrong. His deliberately careless demeanor convinced Hank something was afoot. He leaned back in his chair, outwardly looking as though he were mixing chemicals while inwardly he was checking out his visitor carefully. Bobby wasn't holding anything in his hands, however. Maybe the Joker was taking a break, and really was 'just visiting'…
He concentrated on the titration in front of him, carefully dispensing small drops of another liquid into the beaker he was holding and shaking the beaker thoroughly between drops. "Here, Bobby," he said to the younger man. "Please take this dropperful and dispense it into the water dish of Master Herbert, there." He indicated a large, spacious ferret cage sitting on the floor in one corner. A huge, fat white rat lazed in the corner of the cage. "Be careful that the liquid does not touch the sides of the cage, however; if the chemical touches metal the metal will react. The result will not be amusing."
Bobby opened his eyes wide. "You're feeding Herbie explosive compounds?"
"Herbert," Hank corrected absently, watching as Bobby neared the cage with the dropper in his hand, loaded with the clear liquid. "The reactive chemical in the solution will become inert once it bonds with the H2O molecules in the water, leaving only the potent substances. If I am right, it should trigger the growth of new brain cells."
"Really," Bobby said, sounding impressed, although he knew all of that already from looking at Hank's notes to plan this particular joke. He positioned the dropperful of liquid over the open water bowl, and started to drop the solution in the bowl. As Hank, satisfied, turned away from him and picked up a clipboard, Bobby unlocked the cage and grabbed Herbie. The rat, used to being handled, did not object. Bobby carefully handed the rat to Jubilee, who replaced the rat in his hand with a glowing little spark, and Bobby placed that on top of the cage. Then Mickie bounded into the cage and took Herbie's place with a twitch of the whiskers, and Jubilee exploded the small spark.
The explosion was loud in the silence of the lab, and Mickie squealed, a high-pitched sound of alarm. The spark might look tiny to a human, but to a rat the spark looked huge. And the sound was deafening. She curled up in the corner of the cage, not having to pretend very hard to give a convincing display of fear.
Hank sprang at the cage, whose top now had a peculiarly large dent in it, and took the trembling rat out of the cage, holding it in one hand as he snatched the dropper out of Bobby's hand, slightly annoyed. "Bobby, I told you the dispensing of the liquid should not include touching any part of the metal cage with the liquid! I shall need to purchase a new cage for Herbert. Are you okay?" he asked the rat, stroking its head with one big blue finger.
The rat raised its head and said, quite clearly, "Don't do that again!"
Hank was so surprised he dropped the rat. "My stars and garters, the experiment was supposed to increase brain cell growth, but I did not expect it to take effect so quickly! Herbert, can you understand me? Bobby did not mean it…" and so saying, Hank put the rat back down in its cage and fairly ran to the lab table, searching through the piles of notes to find the specific formulas to find out what chemicals he'd used in the solution.
Bobby was having difficulty controlling his laughter. Jubilee, hidden in a darkened corner of the lab on the other side of the shelving that held all of Hank's chemicals, was doubled over. Mickie, inside the cage, was shaking. Not with fear, but with laughter.
The door to the lab opened, and Logan came in. "Hey, Jubes," He growled to the corner, without even looking in that direction, "Yer favorite movie's on TV. Wanna watch?" Then he took another sniff, and narrowed his eyes. "Hank," he said, "Why's the new kid in the cage?"
Hank turned around on his stool comprehension dawning in his eyes, and Jubilee burst out of her corner, pounding her tiny fists on his chest. "Wolvie! You just ruined the joke!!!"
"What joke?" But Logan's eyes were sparkling with fun.
Hank opened the door of the cage, and Mickie crept out, scampered off the table, and disappeared behind the rack of shelves. Jubilee tossed her clothes behind the rack of shelves, and they all discreetly turned their backs awhile she shifted and got dressed. Jubilee handed Herbie back to Hank, and the rat was returned to his cage. He squeaked indignantly at being returned there from Jubilee's shirt pocket, but when Hank put a couple bits of rat treats for him, he settled down and nibbled contentedly.
Mickie came out from behind the racks, dressed. Hank looked at the three kids from over the bridge of his glasses. "Which one of you came up with this idea?"
Slowly, Bobby raised his hand. Hank sighed. "Tomorrow after breakfast, Bobby, I would like you to report here. All three of you, in fact. Bobby, the labels of my chemical jars need replacing. I have been meaning to do that for some time now, but have not yet found the chance. You have just volunteered. Jubilee, you will wash and sterilize all of my test tubes, beakers, and other assorted pieces of equipment. Mickie, as you have now demonstrated your ability to shift into different forms, and to extricate yourself from those forms, I shall put you to work cleaning out and straightening the cage Jubilee and Bobby and yourself have bent from your prank."
The three teenagers groaned. "I thought you said he wouldn't get mad," Mickie whispered sotto voce to Bobby.
"I never said that," Bobby said back at the same volume. "I said he didn't get as mad as the other adults do here. I didn't say he wouldn't get mad period."
"See if I ever let you talk me into another joke!" Mickie grumbled to him as they all turned around and started to walk upstairs.
Logan laughed at her. "Don't promise ya won't, kid," he said. "Bobby can be really persuasive. An' this one," He rumpled Jubilee's hair, "can get ya ta do anythin' jus' by lookin' at ya with them big blue eyes." He snickered. "Besides, there's so much fun ta be had playin' practical jokes on us 'dults, huh?" He leaned over to whisper in Bobby's ear. Bobby's eyes widened, and he gave a tiny gasp. Logan nodded, and a slow smile spread over Bobby's face.
Logan took Jubes off down one hallway as soon as they reached the top of the steps, and Bobby was about to head off in the other direction toward the boys' wing when Mickie stopped him. "What did he say?"
Bobby paused for a moment, looking undecided, and then shook his head. "I'll tell you later," he said. "I have to check on some things first." And he disappeared down the other hall and into his room.
Mickie stared after him, then shook her head in puzzlement and continued on to her own room. He'd tell her when he was ready, she guessed.