Chapter 90: Bad Neighbors (Part 2)

The City of Townsville. Suburbs. The House

03 MAR (Friday) 1989. 2316.

Thinking back to her operation in Precinct 109, Bunny couldn't believe what she had just done. She'd shot those people in the reception area. Most of those civilians were likely innocent, especially that sweet old lady. Were all of those cops she killed guilty of corruption and crime? The uncertainty of it was so painful to her, it was physical.

Then there was that SWAT officer and his red eyes and prodigious strength. His identity was still a mystery, but Chief of Intelligence Rook had filled her in. Where previously, the drug known as His Secret and His Secret 2.0 were found only on the streets and in the hands of criminals and drug abusers with the occasional merchandise ending up in the hands of everyday citizens, it was beginning to penetrate every facet of society, including the Townsville Police Department. The SWAT cop was probably one of its consumers, and it gave him the strength to fight her. Though still weak alone, Rook warned Bunny that a group of them might actually be a match for her.

Rook had even told Bunny about how her sisters, Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup, dealt with the users of His Secret 2.0 - those affiliated with the cult. He'd made sure to emphasize the part where they were usually injured whenever they came up against those red-eyes. It was all she needed to hear to stay motivated to fight crime in their stead.

Bunny drove to The House as quickly as she could. Her motorbike wasn't as loud as the civilian models, partly because its engine didn't have to work so hard with her providing some of the thrust. As usual, when Bunny reached home, she wheeled her bike into the garage. She couldn't wait to fly into the waiting arms of her Dad, so she ran into the living room through the garage door, her arms about to open up for an embrace when she saw that there was no one there to greet her. Despite being fully lit, the living room was completely empty.

"Dad? Where are you?" Bunny called out to her father, but she wasn't sure if she'd reached him. When there was no reply from her Dad, she could feel the panic rising up in her. A horde of gangsters was no problem, but for her Dad to disappear like this unnerved her. "Dad!?" She ran to the middle of the room.

Bang! She heard the shot going off, muted but still audible. She had been keeping her ears peeled, focusing it to receive the voice of her Daddy, so she was able to hear even a pin drop from afar; a gunshot would be deafening, and it came from downstairs, the lab.

Bunny drew her MP5 immediately, shouldering it. Her eyes stung, but she began scanning her surroundings with her newly-discovered x-ray vision immediately. Nothing. There was no ambush waiting for her. With her gun forward, she made her way towards the airlock, then down the stairs leading to the labs.

A ghastly, unthinkable sight greeted her when she had reached the underground lab. Two invaders were there. One of them was at the computer, pulling a floppy disk out of the computer in alarm, while the other…

The other person in black was pointing a pistol at her Dad, who was clutching his shoulder while lying on the floor, his ordinarily white lab coat stained with blood.

"DAD!" Bunny screamed as she sprinted towards the stranger. The man in black hoodie turned his weapon on her and fired instinctively, but was only able to fire another shot before his gun stopped responding. The stranger's shot missed. Bunny fired her MP5 on full auto, aiming at the legs of the man, causing him to fall to his knees. But he was still trying to work his pistol. Pulling back the slide, he cleared the jam caused by his subsonic round, but before he could fire another shot, Bunny slammed the butt of her MP5 into her face.

"Harold!" the other stranger screamed, still frozen at the computer.

"Run! Go! Get it out of here!" the man of the robber duo shouted, and the other robber did as he asked and tried to run past Bunny. Just as Bunny grabbed the male stranger by the collar, pulling him up, the male stranger pressed the muzzle of his pistol to her chin and fired a shot right up her jaw. It did little except incense Bunny further. Slamming the stranger to the ground hard, Bunny made a grab for the pistol and pulled it away from him with ease before throwing it across the lab and into some dark corner.

The female stranger had made it past her and would have reached the stairs had it not been for Bunny, who fired a few rounds at her one-handed, driving bullets into her legs as well. The only reason Bunny didn't kill them was that she wanted to hurt them, even 'interrogate' them for information as to how they managed to threaten her Dad's life.

With the robbers neutralized as threats, Bunny ran up to Dad to check on his wounds. The blood wasn't too much, though it was hard to tell how bad his wound was. Removing his lab coat, she could see a hole where his collarbone was, and something gleaming there. He was alive but unresponsive. The sight of her Dad wounded and unconscious, however, made her mad, really mad. Mad to the point of forgetting almost everything save for the fact that Daddy's hurt bad, and there was hell to pay for it.

Lowering Dad down, Bunny returned to Harold Smith, who was still trying to crawl away. He didn't make it very far. She gave him a kick in the ribs, rolled him over and grabbed him by the collar, lifting him up easily. She jammed the muzzle of modded MP5 into his mouth as she screamed madly, and Harold was screaming too, except he couldn't do too much of that with a gun in his mouth.

"You hurt my Daddy!" Bunny screamed, and at this point, Harold was crying and if he was talking, Bunny couldn't make out what he was saying since he had the barrel of a gun in his mouth, but she didn't care. Shaking with fury, tears gleaming on her cheek, Bunny depressed the trigger of her gun.

"Stop!" Dad yelled from where he sat. "Don't kill him! He- he's not-" The professor couldn't even finish his sentence before collapsing back to the floor. Getting shot in the collarbone wasn't exactly a pleasant experience.

Bunny let go of Harold the moment she heard her Dad talking, warning her against homicide. After giving him a kick in the face, she ran back to Dad, holding him up. Tears were pouring from her eyes like never before. Her lips trembled such that she couldn't even speak.

Footsteps thumped down the stairs. Selicia was running down to the lab upon hearing the rapid-fire gunshots. She was wielding an XM4 Carbine, likely taken from under her bed, and the first thing she saw was Marianne, who managed to crawl all the way to the foot of the stairs.

When Marianne saw that she had been spotted again, she attempted to pull her pistol out, only for Selicia to kick it away. The pistol clattered against the wall as Selicia pointed her own firearm at her. Realizing that she had been defeated, Marianne slumped against the first step of the stairs, appearing to have lost all hope.

Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup were filing down the stairs only when it was safe. They were in their dresses, too injured with all their stitches (Buttercup especially) to fight, not that they needed to.

"Dad? Daddy?" Bunny was shaking the professor when he was slipping back into unconsciousness, still in tears over his injury and plight. "I'm sorry I couldn't protect you! Bunny bad!"

The professor forced himself to open his eyes when he heard how torn up his youngest adopted daughter was. His arms were heavy as steel, but he clutched Bunny by the arm as hard as he could. "Bunny- It's not your fault, so don't ever say that again-" he struggled to say. His shoulder was hurting really badly, so much so that it was almost paralyzing, and his mind was a near-total blank. "You did well. You helped me…"

In the meantime, Selicia had moved on to Harold, handcuffing him, leaving Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup to restrain Marianne, which they did so with extreme prejudice. More boot-stomping could be heard coming from the stairs. Reinforcement was coming from the guards stationed on the surface.

"Daddy's hurt bad…" Bunny cried, still regressed.

"I'm fine..." the professor struggled to stay aware - he had to for his daughter. He winced when he shifted himself, tried to sit up but couldn't. It felt as if his entire skeleton was on fire. "It's just a flesh wound-"

After Buttercup had knocked out Marianne, the original three of the quartet came up beside the professor along with Selicia, who was done with Harold.

"Let go of him," Selicia said to Bunny as she tried to make some space for the professor, but Bunny wouldn't budge. When the purple one looked up at Selicia, she understood instantly why; her eyes were drowning in tears, she was a picture of devastation. "Bunny, let go of Daddy, I have to check him." Selicia herself was gravely concerned; her other half was wounded right under her nose! Had it not been for her Thomas' injuries, she would have settled it with the Smiths right there and then, but her lover came first, especially when their wedding day was drawing close.

"Come on, Bunny… Let Mommy take care of Dad…" Bubbles said to her while she helped Selicia by pulling Bunny away, but the moment the youngest of the quartet turned around from the professor, she started hyperventilating, panicking as she stared into the distance, forgetting that Bubbles was holding her hand and that she wasn't alone. Bubbles hugged her immediately. She didn't know what else to do. Bunny was shaking so much, still crying, but the hug helped a little and Bubbles was glad.

Selicia was able to check the professor's wound where Bunny had faltered from emotional shock. He had been shot in the collarbone, but strangely, the bullet hadn't gone beyond skin-deep. His collarbone had stopped the bullet, and Selicia was able to pull it out even without an instrument. Off the top of her head, the only reason she could think of was that the professor was incredibly lucky to have been shot with a defective bullet.

"Blossom, get me that medkit!" Selicia ordered the leader of the three without looking at any of the Powerpuff Girls. Blossom, however, was glaring at Bunny and had missed the instruction. "Now, Blossom!"

Blossom responded only after Selicia had screamed at her. Her mind had been elsewhere. It seemed suspicious to her that her Dad was wounded even while Bunny was around. She knew her own secret: that she had been working with the Amoeba Boys. What if Bunny was working for someone else? Someone who wanted Daddy hurt? But that could wait. Flying to a medical kit mounted on the wall, Blossom took it off the shelf and handed it over to Mom, who snatched it away without a word of thanks and began taking things out of it: antiseptics, gauze, bandages and a triangular sling.

Buttercup, in the meantime, was passive, as usual. She had been sitting on a swivel chair nearby and would have stayed there had she not been called by Mom to assist. After scratching the corners of her stitches, she obliged - though in her mind, she was only doing it because she still saw something in her Mother.

Blossom had gone back to glaring at Bunny, but she couldn't stay quiet any longer. Marching up to Bunny, who was still crying on Bubbles' shoulder, she started screeching accusations at her: "What were you doing, Bunny!? Weren't you supposed to protect Dad whenever you're back at home!?"

"Bunny's better than the rest of you!" Blossom imitated General Blackwater's deep voice, still incredulous that the general would say such a thing.

"How are you even better than us!?" Blossom continued berating Bunny, who jumped at every emphasized word.

After letting go of Bubbles, Bunny stood before Blossom with her head bowed in shame and submission. Unsure of what to do with herself, she clutched her hands tightly. "I…" she couldn't even begin to say anything, already guilt-ridden as she was.

"Leave her alone, Blossom!" Bubbles stood in front of Bunny as if shielding her from a monster, or someone like Naga or Mojo Jojo. "It's not her fault Daddy's hurt! She saved Dad too!"

"Like how you nearly killed him?" Blossom had run her mouth before she realized it, and the moment she understood what she'd just said, regretted it immediately. The shocked look on Bubbles was quickly replaced by something far worse, as her face scrunched up in misery, on the verge of tears, while she was forcibly reminded of her past trauma.

"Bubbles, I… Didn't mean to say that…" Blossom tried to apologize, but it was too late. Bubbles had already retreated inwards, and the physical world had become a blur while she was back on that fateful day, when she had hurt her entire family and almost killed her Dad just for another hit of His Secret 2.0.

Bubbles' hands went up to her mouth as she tried her best to control her sobbing, and failed. Bunny tried to pull her into a hug to repay the favor, but Bubbles shrugged it off and began walking, just walking away without a word towards the stairs.

"Bubbles! Don't go- Bubbles! I didn't mean it! I was just…" Blossom half-apologized fruitlessly as she watched her sweetest sister leaving them. She turned back to Bunny, who didn't look much better herself. "Upset…"

Blossom felt as if the world was crashing down on her ever since she began helping the Amoeba Boys. She had been questioning herself at every turn. The most recent deaths under her watch had made it worse, made her feel guilty no matter how many times she told herself she shouldn't be, that the people who were getting hurt and killed were heartless criminals. And now, the more upset she got, the more she found herself lashing at her family, which would make her even more upset.

It was a never-ending cycle that felt impossible to escape from…


The City of Townsville. Suburbs. The House

03 MAR (Friday) 1989. 2329.

The professor had been going through his computer despite his injury, doing scans, going through activity logs. While he was being held at gunpoint by Harold Smith, he saw Marianne Smith switching it on and sticking a floppy disk into the drive while the computer had booted up the account login screen. She'd made no attempt to hack his account, not that she would have made it far as three strikes on the password would have locked the whole thing up.

"What were they trying to steal?" Selicia hovered (not literally) over the professor as he was opening and closing windows over the course of his investigation. "What could be worth so much to them?"

"I need answers, professor. General Blackwater's breathing down my neck," Captain Scott of the PTF guards stood on the opposite side of Selicia. He had reported the incident to the general only moments prior. Predictably, the general didn't like it. "What's the damage? What's been compromised?"

"Harold mentioned the Anti-X and data concerning the chemical," the professor finally revealed just as he was running through the myriad security software installed all over his computer. "He was trying to steal it."

"He didn't make it very far now, did he?" Captain Scott said with a smirk on his face. The Smiths were taken to the USDO HQ immediately to be treated in the medical wing. As soon as they were ready, which would be mere days after their surgeries, they would be interrogated, and as soon as they were healthy, they would be jailed, and then their lives would be a living hell. "Lieutenant Blake shouldn't have let them stay in this neighborhood. So much for kindness! I would have kicked them outright from the start!"

"One of them did insert a floppy disk," the professor muttered as he continued to diagnose his computer. He was no expert, but he had been tinkering and playing around with computers ever since he was in university, and he knew a thing or two about them.

"But it's just a floppy right?" Selicia said, confused as to the significance of the storage device.

"Yeah, so what?" Captain Scott echoed Selicia's sentiment. "What can a slice of electronic cheese do to your computer?"

"I think Mary stuck it in just so she could copy your files into it the moment she got through the computer's security," Selicia took a wild guess.

"They don't strike me as that sort of people," Captain Scott said. "Takes some serious brains to figure out this… electronic wizardry."

"You might be right," the professor replied. He'd finally stopped searching for clues as to what Marianne might have done to the computer. "Nothing's showing up on the security software. I'm no expert, but I don't see any sign of any viruses either."

"Viruses? Great," Selicia said, confused, before remembering her past briefings. Apparently, computers could get sick like people nowadays. Hackers under the employ of the Foundation and third parties had developed programs that replicate themselves and perform specific functions, such as disabling computer systems or stealing data through a dial-up connection. "What a strange world we're living in…"

"So do I get to report that security wasn't compromised then?" Captain Scott asked firmly.

"For now, I guess," the professor said. "I'm going to put in a request for a computer technician to take a look at my silicon-based friend here…"


The City of Townsville. Location Unknown.

03 MAR (Friday) 1989. 2330.

"Muahhahaha! Yes! Yes!" an inhuman voice cackled, echoing as it was deep in the chambers of an undiscovered lair of one… Mojo Jojo. The Chimpanzee was seated on his own swivel chair, like his creator would, typing excitedly on a computer which was far larger than his creator's, one of those things he was proud of - it took him weeks to get the parts and months to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills to build his supercomputer. Where his father's own had several rows of database and logic circuits, he had at least a dozen, built all the way to the ceiling to save space. "This is perfect! Flawless! Ideal! But what else could it be, for it is planned by none other than Mojo Jojo!?"

With the help of the Confederate Foundation of America, Mojo Jojo was able to mobilize spies within the USDO just for this. He'd found the downtrodden Smith family as the key to this, though not in the way most people would consider. He knew they would fail miserably as most humans would. He knew their severe limitations as unremarkable humans. He knew that they were disposable as limited human beings, and so he had planned his remote operation around it.

With only little over two weeks to prepare for it, Mojo Jojo gave them just enough resources to break into The House and try to steal the Anti-X and insert the floppy disk for the research data.

They would fail, but their success wasn't a part of the plan. The success of the operation had hinged more on the floppy disk than the Smiths.

The Smiths had thought that the floppy disk was meant for storing the research data to be stolen. It couldn't be further from the truth. That the Smiths had fallen for this little instance of deception had proven the enhanced Chimpanzee's point. They weren't cut out for anything but being a method of conveyance and cannon fodder. It would have been impossible for a floppy disk to contain every bit of the research data. Even the USDO's cutting edge 2.88mb floppy disks weren't enough. Lacking the shadowy federal organization's access to the more enigmatic solid-state drive which had more than ten times the storage space, Mojo Jojo was only able to procure a commercial variant of the 1.44mb floppy disk.

The human-made floppy disk would have been useless… had he not put a homemade virus in it. The virus was designed to autonomously perform functions in a computer: searching for files containing a few dozen keywords and phrases, including 'Anti-X', 'Powerpuff' and 'elimination of enhancements'. The virus would then send the files and itself through the internet and a chain of random email accounts right into the monkey's secret inbox, deleting any trace of its activities in the process, at every step. As if that wasn't enough, the servers hosting those random email accounts would then be programmed by the virus to reformat themselves, ensuring that even the most adept computer experts couldn't trace the hack-job back to him.

And here it sat, right before him and on the computer screen: the fruits of his father's labor. Little did Father knew that it would be the very tool that would end the usurpers once and for all!

"Muahhahaha!" Mojo Jojo cackled once more. "Soon, Father shall see the error of his ways!" But the thought of Professor Utonium mellowed him out quickly. He picked up a photo of the professor he had managed to have an agent secretly take. "And perhaps… just perhaps… He might accept me again…"

His thoughts returned to Professor Utonium. He had taken a big risk, giving the Smiths guns, but he had made absolutely sure to give his Father a fighting chance by giving them subsonic ammunition that were barely functional. He'd thought it through entirely. Being gun users with barely any experience and time on the range, the Smiths would have handled their pistols the way amateurs would have - by aiming at the center of mass, and 'aiming' would be a bit of a stretch. The ammunition he gave them wouldn't be strong enough to cycle their weapons. In fact, they would likely jam their pistols after every shot. The bullets wouldn't be able to penetrate very deeply into the flesh, and couldn't even fracture bone at all.

Still, it was a risk. A risk he had to take. By his highly-accurate estimates, the Smiths wouldn't have made it to the professor's computer without guns. Still, his decision to jeopardize his Father would haunt him for a while.

"I'm sorry… Father." Mojo Jojo slumped on his chair. He would need some time before he could bring himself to look at the professor's work.