You Can Only Die in Tibet Twice
By n0nameneeded
CHAPTER 3
"311, 312, 313, and 314." Jet paused in front of the hotel door and handed Jimmy a key card. "One for you, Carl and Sheen, and one for you two ladies," he said suavely, handing Libby an identical key card. "You'll be in 315, and I'll be across from you gentlemen in 316. We should all clean ourselves up and then I'll bring you up to speed. We'll meet in my room on the hour. Dress accordingly," he joked, winking at the girls, and pressed his key card into its slot and stepped into his room, the door closing behind him.
Jimmy turned to do the same, but he could hear Cindy sigh, "That Jet Fusion..." before the door shut behind him and the two other boys. He rolled his eyes and surveyed the hotel room. Jimmy couldn't remember ever being in a room this nice. There was a bathroom immediately on the left, and two queen sized beds sat against the left side of the bedroom, with a television set resting on (and not bolted to) a mahogany desk. He walked over to the curtains on the far side of the room, pulling his rolling suitcase behind him, and pushed them open, revealing a breathtaking view of the sun setting in Tibet. Cindy would have loved the view.
What? That couldn't have been right. Jimmy pushed her to the darkest corner of his gigantic brain and turned to his right to see a second bedroom with a bathroom of its own. It looked similar to the other room, but there was only one bed, and it was a king. Noticing his line of vision, Sheen leapt into action. "Dibs on the good room," he proclaimed. Jimmy arched an eyebrow.
"No way, I noticed it first," Jimmy retorted, and kicked his suitcase into the room. "Besides, my stuff is already in there."
Sheen threw his Ultralord backpack into the room and onto the bed. "So is mine." There was a brief pause. "Rock paper scissors?"
"Definitely," Jimmy agreed. They were about to engage in a heated match when Carl spoke up.
"Whoa whoa whoa. Hold on a second here. I want in on this too," Carl said. Sheen and Jimmy looked at each other, wondering if it was possible to do rock paper scissors three ways.
"Why not?" Sheen decided. "I'm going to win this thing anyway." All three boys stuck out their left hands, curled their right hands into fists and rested them on top of their left. "Rock, paper, scissors, shoot!" All three had chosen rock. "Rock, paper, scissors, shoot!" Carl had paper, Jimmy had rock, and Sheen had scissors.
"I guess nobody wins this round," Jimmy said slowly, "because everybody has one win and one loss." Carl and Sheen nodded in agreement. "Rock, paper, scissors, shoot!" Sheen had shown paper, but the other two had scissors. The two boys slapped high fives as Sheen slumped into the room to collect his backpack.
Jimmy and Carl faced off for one more go. "Rock, paper, scissors, SHOOT!" Jimmy had rock, and Carl had paper. "Oh yeah, I'm bad!" Carl celebrated, shaking Jimmy's hand as if he had just beaten him out for the position of President. Jimmy went into the good room to get his suitcase and dragged it over to the unoccupied queen sized bed. Sheen was nowhere to be found, so Jimmy assumed he was in the shower. He pulled his trademark red shirt with the atom symbol and jeans out of his suitcase and set them aside, letting his thoughts wander.
After Sheen and Carl had showered and changed, Jimmy walked into the bathroom and shut the door behind him, stripping down to nothing and turning the water on. He stuck a hand in front of him as he entered the shower to brace himself. As he had expected, because of the elevation and the climate in this part of the world, the water was cold. The fact that Carl and Sheen had already used up the hot water, if any, wasn't very helpful either. He hastened to get out of the shower and emerged in a pair of clean clothes.
Picking up his watch, which he had taken off before he went into the bathroom, he saw that it was 11:56 AM Greenwich Mean Time, which meant that it was nearly 8 PM in China. Jet had told them to meet him on the hour. Jimmy found Sheen and Carl playing 'Ultralord Versus Robofiend Mega Battle 3' on the game system built in to the TV. "This is the coolest hotel ever, Jimmy!" Sheen announced. "The graphics look almost as good as on the giant screen in your lab!"
"Guys, we have to meet Jet in just three minutes," he reminded them. Carl set down his controller and crawled across the bed behind Sheen to meet Jimmy in the doorway, leaving Robofiend exposed for a series of Ultrapunches and kicks from Ultralord. Sheen raised his arm in triumph, but turned off the TV and set his controller down, too, following the other two out into the hallway. He tentatively knocked on door 316. "It's Jimmy, and I've got Sheen and Carl."
The door swung open to reveal Jet in his usual tux and bow tie, with Cindy and Libby already sitting Indian style on one of the beds in the room, with several manilla folders filled with photographs and papers scattered across the covers. "Hey, guys, come in," he said. "The girls and I had just started, so you haven't missed much." Jimmy and Carl opted to take wooden seats from underneath the desk in the corner of the room, but Sheen chose to flop onto the other bed on his back. Jet walked over to the center of the room.
"Right, then, down to business. You all have probably seen the posters at the movies for 'You Can Only Die in Tibet Twice', right?" There was a chorus of nods from the five teenagers. "Well, the movie is actually based on a mission I went on three years ago with Jimmy for B.T.S.O, only, I'm sorry to say, the company didn't go for having a child costar in the film, so I fly solo in this one. I, of course, play me, but we also have two other show-stealers in this film." He motioned towards one of the stacks of photos Cindy and Libby had been looking at earlier. "Tim Curry and Wendie Malick will be the other big names. Ladies, if you would?"
Cindy passed two pictures to Jimmy, which he studied with utmost attention to detail. Curry was of about the same stature as Professor Calamitous, and wearing the same outfit minus the robotic glasses, but there were several distinguishing features that set him apart from Calamitous. For one thing, Curry had no overbite, and for another, he had no freckles. In addition to those two missing features, Curry's eyebrows were less bushy than Calamitous's, so Jimmy found them easy to tell apart and passed the photo on.
He studied Malick's photograph with much greater interest, though, for she seemed to be Beautiful Gorgeous's exact duplicate. They had the same short but alluring black hair, same high cheekbones, same green eyes and the same tanned skin. Even their bodily proportions seemed to be exactly the same; both women wore skintight black leather that showed off their supermodel figures. "I can't find a difference between Gorgeous and Malick," he confessed.
"That's good," Jet said, "because that's Beautiful."
"I'll say," whistled Sheen, to whom Jimmy had passed the photograph of Gorgeous. Libby made a face from across the room.
Jet took a photo from one of the folders. "This is Malick," he said, handing it to Jimmy. Again, Jimmy saw the similarities between the two women, both having stunning features and bodies which made them almost identical, but he saw the difference after just a brief twice-over. While Gorgeous had green eyes, Malick's were brown.
"The eyes," he said. Jet nodded. Jimmy passed the picture to Carl.
"Anyway, since Beautiful and Calamitous seemed to fit the plot of the movie too perfectly, I designed the movie's characters to be just like them, and I even pulled a few strings to get them to actually play the characters by their actual names. It really helped me get into the movie, because I'd done it once before, and it's a really big inside joke for B.T.S.O. agents since Tim and Wendie look just like them," Jet elaborated.
"Won't that raise the possibility of your cover as a secret agent being blown, though?" Cindy observed.
"You would think so," Jet replied, "but B.T.S.O. has kept this under wraps better than you would think possible for them. The only members of the general public that know that Beautiful and Calamitous's run-ins with me off the set are you five. Everyone else's memory had been adjusted thanks to Jimmy's hypnobeam blueprints."
"Still, couldn't some problems arise? Beautiful's a crafty foe. She could be released for good behavior again," Jimmy said, putting 'good behavior' in hand quotations, "and assume Malick's role on the set. She would just need some contacts to match Malick and otherwise they could pass as twins! And Curry isn't a far cry from Calamitous, either, with all the face-changing makeup I'm assuming will be present there. Are you going to do DNA checks of some kind to make sure who's who?" he asked.
"First of all, Wendie's voice is different than Beautiful's. I can't exactly say in what way it's different, but you can tell them apart if you're having a face to face conversation with them. And besides, Beautiful and the nutty professor are being held under watch, where only those two are being held and the guard to prisoner ratio is five to one. But as for your second guess, you hit the nail right on the head. They are, in fact, doing DNA checks on the prisoners every hour, and they will be immediately recorded on this," he said, handing Jimmy what looked like a PDA, with those exact letters across the top.
"Portable Deoxyribonucleic Archiving?" Jimmy guessed.
Jet smiled. "Man, you are one smart kid. Yeah, this thing will automatically tell you whose DNA it is if it's not a match, or not give you a result at all if the prisoner has escaped. It's a bit like a cell phone because you can set it to ring or rumble when you get an update, plus you can send live audio mail with whoever else has one of these, namely myself and Baker. You can not let this fall into the wrong hands." Jimmy took the small device and pocketed it.
Jet turned to address the five as a group, his voice serious. "Even though the odds of the scenario Jimmy has described, that is, Gorgeous and Calamitous escaping, are slim, you need to be alert at all times. You should avoid interacting with either Wendie or Tim when no one else is around or in situations you would ordinarily consider dangerous. If for any reason you should need to contact me, which you should only do in the case of emergencies, it can take priority over everything but the recording of the film. If I am unavailable, then you should get ahold of Jimmy, and if neither of us are reachable, assume something has happened to us and treat both Wendie and Tim as hostiles. Jimmy will be posing as my nephew in case the need to explain his presence arises, but I doubt that will happen, and he will be able to provide a story if need be.
"Remember, you're not here for business. This is a pleasure visit. But you must remember everything I've told you. I can not stress that enough." A chorus of nods followed Jet's summary, and his voice adopted a more cheery tone before he went on. "All that's left to do now is for you five to make sure all your things are together and when you're ready, you guys can crash and we'll head off for the set tomorrow."
Jet strode over to the door and held it open, holding his other hand out towards the main hallway. The five teenagers exited the hotel room and headed in separate directions, all of them completely unaware that on the other side of the world, two villains were plotting their revenge against two of B.T.S.O.'s top agents.
Author's Notes
Thanks to my reviewers so far. There's been a very long time between my last update and this one, but it's due to my two week vacation, during which I actually did not work on this story (AP History project needing doing), so I'll have to write like mad to make it up to you guys! One of my reviewers asked about my reference to "Taco Horn" in Chapter Two, and I do believe that Taco Horn is actually used in conversation between Cindy and Libby in the episode Granny Baby, where Cindy and Libby are having a garage sale and are trying to get enough money for a enchalupa or burrito from said restaurant. That reference was just off the top of my head, but at the time I was fairly sure of its validity. It's worth looking into, though. Thanks to all my other reviewers as well!
As for this chapter, I used the names of the actual voice artists that play Calamitous and Beautiful Gorgeous in the actual TV show because unoriginality actually seemed original in this case, if that makes any sense whatsoever. The way I've described them in the chapter does not reflect my personal views about them, because I really doubt Curry is that short or that Malick laughs so insanely (My Big Fat Spy Wedding was a strange episode, to say the very least). However, that's my decision and hopefully it doesn't lead me into some kind of lawsuit that would put me in, to quote Hugh Neutron, "massive, paralyzing debt."
If this chapter seems a bit rushed, that's because it is, but I felt like I owed you guys another one because there was a two week delay between updates, so here it is. As always, working from a Macintosh is frustrating and there are bound to be problems, so check back to see whether or not I've updated the problems that may occur. I won't change the entire focus of the chapter (if I'm not satisfied with what I've created) when I update, but probably just the last few paragraphs, which may be where the chapter seems to be choppy. Chapter 4 is in the works, so hang tight and as always, reviews are appreciated!