It looks like the end for Rocky and his new partner Honeysuckle, who have been cornered in the Corpus Crusty airport by a mob of heavily armed, hostile security officers!
At the departure gate, about fifty security guards wearing overcoats and dark glasses, and sporting various types of weapons, are preparing to assassinate Rocky and Honeysuckle. Seeing that the end is near, the she-moose makes an emotional confession. "Rocky, I...won't get another chance to say this, so...before I became an agent, I was a big fan of your show."
"Well...gosh, Honeysuckle," says Rocky coyly.
"But there's more," Honeysuckle admits. "I...liked...Bullwinkle. I really, really liked him. I had dreams where Bullwinkle and I..."
Suddenly the terminal fills with the deafening sound of gunfire and cannonfire as all of the security guards shoot at Rocky and Honeysuckle...
...and just as suddenly, Rocky and Honeysuckle vanish into thin air.
They find themselves floating and spinning in the middle of an endlessly spiraling shaft of light. The environs of the airport have completely disappeared.
"Hokey smoke! Are we in heaven?" Rocky marvels.
"No, it looks more like some kind of time warp," remarks Honeysuckle.
"Hokey smoke! Are we in heaven?"
"Don't get cute with me, flyboy."
Looking around, they find that they are not alone in the strange, glowing void. "Mr. Peabody!" Rocky exclaims.
"We seem to have been pulled into a time-space vortex," says the spinning, floating canine scientist. "Where were you before this happened?"
"We were about to get our collective moose cooked by a small army of overzealous airport guards," Honeysuckle answers. "What about you?"
"A clone of Bullwinkle fried me with a molecular destabilizer," Peabody explains.
"Then you're the original Peabody," Rocky realizes. "We thought you were dead."
"Indeed," says Peabody. "Someone has yanked us out of time just before the moment of death...but who?"
As if to answer his question, the time warp fades away, dropping Rocky, Honeysuckle, and Peabody onto the bare wooden floor of a room. They stand up and try to get their bearings, and Rocky lets out a horrified gasp. "Omigosh...I've been here before!"
Then they hear a man's insane laughter from behind them. Whirling about, they see three other individuals in the room. One is Sherman, who appears unharmed. One is the duplicate Peabody, who is hanging his head in shame. The third is a uniformed man with a scar and monocle on his face, gripping a machine gun in his hands and laughing triumphantly.
Honeysuckle clenches her fists. "Fearless Leader!" she snarls.
"Muwahahaha!" laughs the dreaded spymaster. "Welcome, my friends...to the world I created for you!" He is standing next to an electronic device, about the height of a child, with various dials and gauges on the front.
Overwhelmed by anger, Honeysuckle marches toward him. "You'd better shoot me right now, because I'm going to kick your sorry Pottsylvanian..."
"No!" The Peabody clone leaps into her path and sticks out his paws. "I just betrayed my country to save your life, and I won't let you throw it away!"
"What?" exclaim Rocky, Honeysuckle, and Peabody in unison.
"This is all my fault," says the despondent Peabody clone. "You tell them, Sherman. I don't have the strength."
Sherman steps forward and speaks solemnly. "After we arrived in Pottsylvania, Fearless Leader used the Dublinator to create an evil duplicate of the Peabody clone. But the duplicate was a copy of a copy, so he only lasted a few minutes."
"So that was the reason!" muses Fearless Leader.
"After that," Sherman continues, "Fearless Leader thought the Dublinator was useless, so he decided to kill us both. That's when the Peabody clone made a bargain with him."
The Peabody duplicate puts his paws over his eyes and shakes his head miserably.
Sherman gestures toward the electronic gadget. "He offered to build a time-travel device, on the condition that Fearless Leader agreed to spare my life and transport the three of you here so you wouldn't be killed in the past."
"How could I refuse?" gloats Fearless Leader. "I wanted all of you alive...so you could witness my final victory!"
"And what did you do with your ill-gotten time-travel device, Fearless Leader?" Honeysuckle inquires.
"The evil Bullwinkle clone and I traveled back to the year 1925, where we warned the Fearless Leader of that time about the coming Great Depression," the spymaster recounts. "The Pottsylvanians exchanged all of their currency for precious metals, so that when the Depression hit, they would be able to take over the world economy!"
"Hokey smoke!" exclaim Rocky, Honeysuckle, and Peabody in unison.
Fearless Leader grabs the time-travel device under one arm, and waves his machine gun with the other. "Now march!" he orders. "Let us leave my office and see how much the Pottsylvanians have improved the world in the past seventy-five years!"
Rocky, Honeysuckle, and Peabody trudge helplessly toward the exit door, glowering at the Peabody clone as they pass.
"How could you do such a thing?" Rocky chides him.
"I wish you'd left us dead!" Honeysuckle laments.
"You're no clone of mine!" growls the real Peabody.
As Fearless Leader follows Rocky, Honeysuckle, Sherman, and the two Peabodys out of his office, he finds to his surprise that the room has been cordoned off. Mounted on a nearby wall is a plaque that hadn't been there before, containing a list of all the Fearless Leaders up to 1929.
"It's...it's a museum!" he cries in astonishment.
Rocky is standing in front of an audio exhibit with a sign that says, PRESS BUTTON TO HEAR A RECORDINK OF IGOR ROTTENOV, THE LAST FEARLESS LEADER. Curious, he presses the button, and a scratchy, threatening voice intones, "We will bury the capitalist pigs!"
"That voice...it's Rottenov!" Fearless Leader reflects. "I spoke with him only an hour ago! But why was he the last Fearless Leader? Who replaced him?"
A Pottsylvanian man steps up to the group. He is wearing an overcoat, dark glasses, a badge identifying him as a tour guide, and a pair of fake plastic antlers on his head. His eyes are glazed and emotionless.
"You will please hand over your weapon, sir," he says in a monotone. "Museum patrons are not allowed to carry weapons. Furthermore, the fact that you don't know who replaced the Fearless Leaders proves that you haven't been re-educated."
"Re-educated?" Fearless Leader repeats. "What do you mean?"
The tour guide presses a button on his wristwatch. "You are freethinkers," he drones. "You must be taken to the re-education center."
"This is getting weirder all the time," says Rocky.
Suddenly the halls of the museum are filled with armed Pottsylvanians, each wearing the same fake antlers and glazed expression as the tour guide. About twenty of them form a circle around Fearless Leader and his captives. Seeing that resistance is useless, Fearless Leader drops his machine gun and time-travel device, and puts up his hands.
"You are enemies of the Antlered One," declares the tour guide. "You must be re-educated."
"The Antlered One?" says Honeysuckle with surprise.
Fearless Leader gapes. "Bullwinkle!"
"You have spoken the forbidden name!" exclaims the tour guide. "Away with them at once!"
As the armed guards escort Fearless Leader, Rocky, Honeysuckle, Sherman, and the two Peabodys toward the museum exit, a mother and her little boy walk by. The mother has a glazed expression like the other Pottsylvanians.
"Mommy, what are those people with guns going to do?" asks the little boy.
"Mine is not to question why," intones the mother.
Once they reach the sidewalk in front of the museum, Rocky and the others receive the shock of their lives. The street is crowded with drivers and pedestrians who appear to be in hypnotic trances. Tall buildings line the street, and to every wall is attached an enormous poster bearing the stern-looking visage of...Bullwinkle.
"What a fool I was!" laments Fearless Leader. "I thought he was lost, so I left him behind. But he was secretly plotting to take over Pottsylvania before Pottsylvania took over the world!"
"What did you expect?" says Honeysuckle. "He's more evil than you are!"
Moments later a police wagon pulls up, and the guards force Rocky and the others into the back, where they are handcuffed. One of the guards hands the time-travel device to the driver of the vehicle. The wagon carries them through the streets of alternate Pottsylvania to a building that looks like a huge library. The police officers lead Rocky and the others through the front entrance, which is framed by two towering gold statues of Bullwinkle. The staff of the re-education center, also wearing fake antlers, speak not a word as they strap Rocky and the others to gurneys, pry their eyelids open with clamps, and place gags over their mouths. In front of each prisoner hangs a TV monitor on which Bullwinkle, wearing a gray uniform, speaks the same words over and over in an endless loop.
"You are a subject of the Antlered One. You will obey the Antlered One in all things. You are a subject of the Antlered One..."
Rocky realizes too late that the repetitive TV broadcast is being accompanied by mind-numbing Idiot Waves--a technology which Fearless Leader had tried to unleash on America by buying up all the cable channels, only to be thwarted in the end. Rocky struggles to resist, but he can feel his mind slipping...
Ten minutes later, a re-education staffer switches off the TV broadcast, removes the gags and clamps from the faces of Rocky, Honeysuckle, Fearless Leader, Sherman, and the two Peabodys, and unfastens their straps so they can stand. All of them have glazed expressions on their faces.
"The Antlered One commands you to report to the work office to receive your assignments," the staffer informs them.
"We obey the Antlered One," they all intone in unison.
Do I need to say it? Don't miss our next thrilling episode, "Slave the Day", or, "All Brainwashed Up"!
