Chapter 26
As the trip commenced, Kitty and Jim were put in the bow of the longboat, where Silver could keep an eye on them. Jim couldn't do anything, but Kitty had her magic on her side. Amelia and Delbert were put in the stern of the boat, bound but ungagged now, but faced with Turnbuckle who kept them both covered with an eager laser flintlock.
Soon the party, in their longboat, flew towards their destination, Flint's supposed trove. Silver halted the longboat when the thin, pulsing green line marking the way disappeared behind a tall wall of jungle. The pirate frowned a moment, then undeterred, jumped out, pulling Jim along with him. Kitty, covered by yet another pirate with a laser pistol, jumped out and followed Jim and Silver's crew. She looked over her shoulder at Amelia and Delbert, who looked back at her, their expression worried. She smiled wanly back at them both, trying her best to reassure her friends.
She moved up to stand next to Jim and BEN, and started when Silver selected his cyborg arm's sword appendage to hack open a passage through the jungle foliage toward the treasure. Kitty couldn't help a smile when she saw the pirates' faces fall when the green line abruptly stopped in thin air. There was an ugly moment when Jim couldn't seem to get the map to work, and Kitty wondered if she was going to be forced to use her magic to defend Jim and herself. But, Jim was finally able to puzzle out the mystery of the map---with some inadvertant help from the memory-fogged BEN---summoning some sort of ancient triangular portal of design that all of them viewed with awe. "A big door... opening and closing," Jim mutterd and experimented by pressing a few buttons. The image within the portal shifted with the blink of an eye... again and again in response to Jim's touch. "So that´s how Flint did it! He used this portal to collect treasures..."
"Aye... but where did he stash it all?" Silver growled impatiently, pushing Jim away and trying a few buttons himself. Silver's deteriorating patience only got worse as nothing he selected looked remotely like a treasure trove.
Knowing what had to happen, Kitty decided to help, and acted. "Look... the treasure´s located---like BEN here said---in the centroid of the mechanism," she counseled.
"Bah! More technological mumbo-jumbo," Silver ranted, his cyborg eye glowing redly.
Jim continued. "Maybe not. What if the whole planet is the mechanism... and the treasure´s buried in the center of the planet?"
Kitty had to snort to cover a wry chuckle, as some of the more cerebrally-challenged pirates began to frantically dig through the thin earth into the hard metallic sheath of the planet.
Silver stopped them with an angry growl and a swipe of his bladed cyborg arm. "And how are we supposed to get there then?" Silver goaded Jim and Kitty.
Kitty stepped boldly forward then, taking over as Jim smiled at her, more than willing to let her do the talking. "Look... you just have to open the right door, all right?" she said and touched the glowing image of the three-eyed skull that was Flint's symbol. The portal flickered, then displayed the image all the pirates had dreamt of for so long... mounds and mounds of wealth. Wealth beyond any of their imaginations. Jim, eager as Silver, led the way through, and the remaining pirates dashed without thinking through to Flint's legendary trove.
Kitty---knowing what was to come---was the only one to spot the booby-trap Flint had devised, but decided to wait in telling anyone just yet. She too had to gape as she saw the seemingly boundless heaps of treasure before and around herself. Apparently, even the movie hadn't done the size of the true treasure any justice. Well, she thought to herself, bending down to scoop up gold and gems into her own jacket pockets, I'll find some occasion later where this will be put to some good use. It was then that she spotted a necklace, a thin golden chain with a small pendant shaped like a star carved from blue sapphire. She knew the blue would look just lovely for someone with Amelia's auburn hair, so she quickly clasped it about her neck and tucked it under her shirt. Then she spied a pair of spectacular pair of green earrings. As she slid them into her trouser pocket, she thought, I wonder if I could get Amelia to get her ears pierced? She spotted a necklace of round platinum links sporting red rubies the size of grapes centered within each link, and quickly stashed it away from sight.
It was when she looked up from her plundering, that she saw where Jim and BEN had gotten themselves off to... they were busily at work on what undoubtedly must be the ancient remains of Flint's corsair. Kitty snapped her fingers and teleported up to them on deck. "So, Jim... what are you doing?" she asked cleverly, making Jim jump.
"Sheesh! Don´t do that!" Jim complained, calming himself while giving Kitty a glare.
"Sorry about that," Kitty said, still smiling. "BEN didn't seem to have noticed anything either."
Jim ignored Kitty, his face screwed up in concentration. BEN had a look of confusion on his metallic face. "This is so... well, familiar somehow," he admitted awkwardly. "But, I can´t seem to remember why."
Kitty moved over toward Jim, when she spotted what had to be Flint´s skeletal remains, perched on some long-forgotten throne. In the figure's hand, Kitty saw what had to be BEN´s primary memory module... the android's memories as it were. "Oh, Jim," she called. Jim blinked, and looked up, then came over to her, where she showed him BEN´s memory module.
Jim, once he understood what it was, took it from Kitty, and rushed over to where BEN still stood, looking lost and perplexed. Jim then spied the opening in BEN's head, and told him to stand still.
As the memory board slid back into place, BEN´s memories returned, and well, the robot sort of had a fit of apparent ecstasy. "Jimmy! I was thinking... Jimmy, I was thinking. All my memories are back! Well, right up until Captain Flint yanked my memory circuit so I couldn't tell anyone about the booby trap!"
Even as BEN said that, a tremendous explosion lit and reverberated the treasure chamber. It was sufficiently loud to cause the pirates---deep in their throws of greed---to looked up to where the booby trap had just ignited, and the destruction continued.
BEN blinked sheepishly, then added, "Umm, speaking of which, Flint wanted to make sure no one ever stole his treasure...so he rigged this whole planet to blow higher than an Calypsian kite!"
Kitty had to swallow hard, flinching as the next series of explosions erupted around them all. Jim looked up and told her and BEN that they should head back to the longboat to rescue the Captain and Doctor Doppler. Kitty nodded her head once, knowing just what awaited Jim, and began running toward the portal opening with BEN in tow, to rescue her closest friend Amelia and the Doctor.