Chapter 19 Bunnie Rabbot
That morning, the children got up as usual and gathered in the main hut for breakfast and then class. Once all the children arrived, Rosie went about her daily routine of passing around breakfast to all the children. When she had finished, Julayla stood up and spoke.
"Children, I know that what happened to Bunnie is on all your minds right now and I understand that you're all concerned with what happened to her last night. Her recovery is going to take all our help, so until she gets better or gets adjusted, I am postponing classes. But… this isn't going to be all play time… I want to see you children helping her with this, not just goofing around." Julayla finished. As the children finished eating breakfast and doing their chores, Sally's mentor motioned for the young princess to follow her. Sally put down the dishes she was drying and followed the aging feline to her hut.
"Sally, you are Bunnie's closest friend, so it may end up on your shoulders to help her the most. Rotor said she should be awake any time now, so please be by her side." Julayla told Sally. Sally nodded, still trying to accept the fact that her friend was now partially a robot, probably for the rest of her life.
"I'll do what I can. It's so horrible what happened to her… it kept me up all night, wondering…" Sally trailed off. Julayla hugged Sally and wiped away the young girl's tears. Julayla felt like crying also, but held it in. She knew that Bunnie would never be the same carefree child she had been before she was partially roboticized and even if she could be deroboticized as Rotor had called it, she would still carry scars both internal and external. From what Rotor's tests showed, the robotic parts of her were built around her skeletal structure and somehow wired into her nervous system. Once Sally finished crying, she went back to her hut to wait for Bunnie to wake up.
While waiting, Sally sat down at her desk to work on her diary a little. Once she was done with her daily writing, she put her head down on her arms and dozed off a little. About half and hour later, the entire village heard the scream and knew Bunnie had woken up.
Aaron, Sam, and Neile started awake when they heard the scream. Each teenager's blood went cold with the sound of it. They each jumped up out of their sleeping bags and hurriedly threw their shoes on and ran helter-skelter through the forest to the edge of it facing the village. From where they were, all they could see was that the entire village was gathered together around one of the huts. Even through the binoculars and long-range camera lens, Aaron and Neile could not see anything or hear anything from where they were.
"Bunnie… calm down, you're alright, we're back at the hut, and you're safe and sound. Something horrible happened, but you're going to be fine." Sally tried to calm Bunnie, who was alternately crying and screaming hysterically, down. Bunnie kept looking down at her arm and legs and went back to screaming and crying. Sally did all she could to try to comfort the young rabbit, who now lay covered by a thin sheet on her bed trying to come to terms with what had happened. In the back of her mind, she kept thinking of how she would comfort Bunnie knowing that it could probably never be reversed. Bunnie looked down at her body and burst into tears again. Sally held Bunnie close while her friend cried. As she sat there holding her friend, Sally's mind slipped into the past.
When Sally was a young child, Queen Alicia Acorn would sing to her daughter when she would wake up during the night after having a nightmare. Remembering most of the words, Sally began singing softly and wiped away Bunnie's tears. After singing to Bunnie for near an hour, she calmed down enough to sleep. Sally laid Bunnie down on her bed and pulled the covers over her friend and tiptoed out of the hut. Once outside the hut, Sally asked around and eventually found Rotor.
"Rotor… have you found anything yet?" Sally asked, wiping away the tears she had silently cried. Rotor was bent over looking though a microscope at something. He straightened up and looked at Sally.
"Princess, from what I can see here and from the quick x-ray I took earlier, it looks like it can't be reversed. From what I can tell from the x-ray I made, it looks like the robotic part somehow fused to her skeletal structure. As far as I can tell from the sample I took of the metal, it's some kind of alloy. How's she doing?" Rotor explained.
"Is she going to be okay?" Sally asked.
"Well, from what I can tell, she should be fine. It appears that nerves and muscles joined with the metal servos and controls somehow that I don't understand. Physically, she's fine as far as I can tell… it's mentally that I'm concerned about for now."
"What do you mean, Rotor?" Sally asked.
"Well, as we've already seen, she's in mental shock from what she went through. The shock could last any number of days. Once that wears off, she'll probably be depressed for a couple months and eventually she'll learn to live with it, hopefully." Sally sadly nodded. "All we can really do until she comes to terms with what happened is be there for her."
At the border of Knothole and the forest, Aaron and his friends watched what they could.
"Aaron… should we get closer so we can see?" Sam asked. Aaron shook his head.
"No… any closer and we risk being seen. I think we should get out of here… we can't see anything and we're out of food." Aaron said as he finished taking what was left of pictures on his last roll of film. Once Neile and Sam were done looking and making rough sketches of what they could see, they all three started the trek back to the car and campsite.
Once at the campsite, Aaron searched the ground a little bit and eventually found a young sapling. Carefully uprooting it, Aaron placed it in a baggie with a wet paper towel. Once Aaron had the sapling for Professor Leif, they hastily packed up the tent and camping gear and packed it back in the car. When that was done, they piled into the car and Aaron started it up for the first time in three days. The car started on the second try again and they left for Earth. Immediately, once Aaron got the car started, he switched it over to the electric drive system and they proceeded to reach speed and open the portal to Earth. After six hours of driving, during which the three of them slept and let the computers drive, they finally came off what Aaron had named the InterDimensional Super-Highway onto the main highway through their hometown.
It was night and the traffic was light, so once he morphed the car back to normal size Aaron pulled a U-Turn and headed back into town to his house.
"Neile, if you want to you're welcome to stay at my house. Sam's been staying there with me until her parents come home." Aaron said, resetting the cars computers to local time and Mobius time.
"Yeah, if you don't mind. My mom's sleeping by now and I don't want to wake her. Thanks for taking me with… that was awesome!" Neile answered.
"Not a problem, dude! We probably won't go back for a while now, just to be safe. But, yeah… next time we go there, we'll hook up again and take you and Liz with." Aaron said, looking from road to Neile to computer as he tried to calibrate the clocks.
After a little driving and turning down multiple races, they made it to Aaron's house and quickly unpacked what they had taken with. Once the camping gear and the car was in the garage, Aaron showed Neile to the last empty room and then went back to his room and flopped to his bed and fell asleep almost right away.
Samantha went up to her room, went through her sketches, and labeled them before writing down in her diary about what happened.
'Dear diary,
These past few days, I have seen some things that no one has and almost certainly will never see. I didn't even think to write anything here the first time we went there, but we saw some things this time that are worth noting. We went to a planet Aaron called Mobius and stayed there for two nights and three days. While there, we saw many interesting things; animals that talk, exotic plant life, we even saw one of the talking animals become partially robotic (according to Aaron). That one was a little scary… seeing flesh and blood turn into cold steel and wires was really scary.
I don't want to go back there for a while and Aaron already knew this without me telling him. He seemed a little worn out and nervous when we got back to his house, almost like there was something we should have or shouldn't have done. I'll ask him about it tomorrow. In the meantime, I want to get those rolls of film developed and see what the pictures turn out as. Next time we go there, I want to take along a video camera if possible and tape some of what we see.
More tomorrow sometime… it's been a long three days on a far distant planet.
And… I think I'm falling for Aaron. Though it's too soon to know for sure, but I think I like him… a lot!'
Samantha tucked her diary under her pillow and then sleepily climbed into bed for the night. In Aaron's room, he was up most of the night browsing through star charts online, trying to get an idea on where Mobius was. The second night of the trip, Aaron had roughly sketched a few of the constellations overhead and was now trying to locate them on a star chart. As the night wore on, Aaron got more and more tired and just as he was about to give up on the whole idea, he found a tiny constellation near Drago.
Going by the GPS data that Nicole had provided to Aaron, he had some idea of what direction was what on Mobius and therefore what constellations appeared in the north. By that information, Aaron was able to place Mobius in the small constellation near the last star in Drago. Writing a quick note to himself, Aaron climbed into bed and was asleep before his head hit the pillow.
Every day for a month, Bunnie woke up in tears. She dreamt repeatedly of those few minutes when her life was dramatically changed; first in her home village seeing her friends and family killed or turned into robots and then in the city when she was partially roboticized. No one seemed to know if she would be able to walk or live a normal life with her robotic arm and legs.
Slowly, she regained use of her arm and legs. It took all of Knothole to help her gain enough confidence to try walking again, but eventually she was able to get out of bed. Sally was there for Bunnie all through her rehabilitation; first walking, then using her arm, and slowly the emotional healing. The last one proved to be the hardest as the dreams haunted Bunnie night after night. Through it all, Rotor insisted Bunnie deal with it on her own as much as possible; seeing as how he was unable to reverse the process that made her as she was, she would have to remain part robot part rabbit until some way could be found to reverse it.
The following day, Aaron made a dozen calls to various universities and observatories to see if someone could verify Mobius' location. Eventually, Aaron called his old science teacher who had a contact at an observatory who owed Aaron's science teacher a favor. Aaron gave the coordinates of the planet to the teacher and after thanking her, he hung up. Samantha was sitting at the kitchen table with Neile alternately talking and sorting through the rolls of film and hand-drawn sketches, trying to get them in some sort of order. Once Aaron was done placing his calls, they took the sapling that Aaron had brought back with him and the film to Professor Leif.
"Hey professor! How goes it?" Aaron called out as they walked into the lab.
"Aaron, great to see you again! What'd ya bring for me this time?" Jacob asked, coming out from behind a stack of journals.
"Brought a sapling from the same place I got those leaves from. You find out anything more about the leaves?" Aaron asked, handing the professor the baggie containing the sapling. Professor Leif carefully opened the baggie and removed the sapling from it and promptly put the sapling in a small pot of dirt.
"A little bit. Are you kids going to tell me where you got these from or am I going to have to find out on my own?" Jacob asked while sifting through the stacks of papers on his desk looking for the notes he took about the leaves. Aaron just smiled,
"We can't tell where we got them from other than it's someplace a ways away from here. Like I said last time, maybe someday we'll take you there. But, what'd you find out about the leaves?" Samantha asked.
"Well, I didn't find much else out about them other than what I told you the other time. The leaves are cleaner than anything on Earth, the cells somewhat resemble plant and animal combined, and the leaves seem to regenerate a little bit. That sapling is perfect… maybe I'll be able to find out more about this place from the young tree." Jacob explained. Neile was leaning against a table flipping through one of the many journals that lay scattered around the lab.
"Hey, professor… just out of curiosity, how often does someone in your field see something that doesn't match anything in any books?" Neile asked. Professor Leif shrugged,
"Not sure, though I'd guess not very often. The only people who ever see anything that's not known is marine biologists, most other fields don't see much new stuff these days." Jacob answered.
"Well, I think we'll take off and let you get back to your work. We have some things to get done today, but thanks for doing all this for me." Aaron said as he got his car keys out.
"Not a problem, always glad to see something out of the ordinary. I'll call you if I find out anything about the sapling." Jacob said as Aaron, Sam, and Neile left. Aaron let Samantha drive to the photo store so they could get the film developed. After waiting around for a couple hours, they got the pictures back and went back to Aaron's house to look them over. Most of the pictures that all three of them took turned out; mainly Aaron hoped that the ones from inside the headquarters turned out, which they did. While they had been at the store getting the film developed, Aaron bought a scrapbook for all the pictures and sketches they had made while on Mobius. After putting the pictures in the scrapbook and taking Neile home, it was past eight at night and both Aaron and Sam were tired and hungry. After making something quick to eat, they went to their rooms and settled in for the night.
(End of Chapter 19)