Chapter 7: The Needs of the Many
"Warning — current altitude is fifty thousand feet above ground level. Please change course to avoid crash."
"Naga-takabah!" 626 blew a raspberry at the ship computer, thrusting the yoke downwards in direct retaliation. "Can't stop meega from crashing ship!"
"Ugh! You little monster!" Jumba muttered with a mixture of pride and anger. Here he was, marvelling at his destructive creation. He would honestly be much more proud of 626 if he wasn't currently being forced to the back of a crashing ship.
"Two minutes to impact," the computerised voice continued, impassive to the situation of the passengers.
The scientist cursed at the announcement, his life flashing through his eyes. This wasn't how it was supposed to end! He was supposed to overthrow the Galactic Federation after years of hard work and turmoil, not blow up to ashes in some unknown planet on the far side of the galaxy! Glancing to his right, he could see that Dr. Hamsterviel wasn't faring much better. Hamsterviel's eyes were shut, his face a mixture of anger, desperation and just a tinge of regret. Jumba could guess what Hamsterviel was feeling. Just like him, the hamster must have regretted not abandoning ship the first chance he got.
"Ow!" Jumba suddenly cried. He was so distracted looking at Hamsterviel that he didn't notice that something hard had hit his foot. Looking down, his face widened in surprise before he smiled sinisterly. Oh, lady luck was on his side today.
By his feet was the experiment container!
It must have fell off the co-pilot seat somewhere along the trip and ended up rolling to the back. He would never have been able to get it otherwise, as the sheer speed 626 forced the ship to travel at meant that him and Hamsterviel were forced to the back of the cabin and couldn't reach the front.
He immediately grabbed it, feeling a sense of hope. With this, he could activate any experiment he wanted that could potentially save him from the explosion!
But which one? Which experiment would save him from being splattered? Think, Jumba, think! Making up his mind, Jumba entered a three-digit number on the keypad to get the pod he wanted. As soon as the container registered his input, a green experiment pod labelled 345 was dispensed into his waiting palm. Without hesitation, he spit into it to activate the experiment using the water in his saliva. The pod began to glow, rising up into the air with a yellow light.
"Warning! Experiment three-four-five activated," the experiment container beeped, barely audible to Jumba over the supersonic turbulence the ship was currently in. "Primary function: distraction of hostile forces."
The pod vanished with a bright flash, leaving a lime green clown-faced experiment in its air. Before gravity could take effect on him, 345 stretched his body slightly downwards to the ground to avoid an embarrassing fall while simultaneously guffawing at the experiment container's choice of words.
"Stop laughing, three-four-five! I was the one who chose those words to be describing your primary function." A flash of annoyance crossed Jumba's face as the giggly experiment continued to chuckle. "Anyway, now is not the time for jokes, I am currently on ship that is about to go KABOOM, so use your elastic body and shield me! Jumba no want to be swiss cheese!"
"What?!" Hamsterviel's ears perked up, turning to Jumba. "A shield experiment?" he gasped out, seeing the chance for his life to be saved.
"Uh-oh," Jumba visibly cringed hearing Hamsterviel's voice. I shouldn't have been saying that so casually!
And sure enough...
"Give it to me!" Hamsterviel yelped in desperation, running over to grab 345's arm.
"No way!" Jumba held on to 345's other arm, starting a tug of war with Hamsterviel over 345's body, much to the experiment's dismay. "When this ship crashes," Jumba grit his teeth, refusing to let go, "it's either one of us survive or none of us do! I won't give experiment three-four-five to you!" In defiance, Jumba used his free arm to throw the experiment container back to the front of the cabin so Hamsterviel couldn't get another experiment to use for himself.
"The experiment container!" Hamsterviel let go of 345 in an attempt to catch the container, causing the experiment to spring back in Jumba's direction with a boing. However, the moment he tried to jump for it, the air resistance forced him back to the wall, making him realise in vain that he couldn't make it to the container. "No, no, no!" he yelled, falling to the ground in defeat. "Curse you and your ridiculously long hands!"
345 turned his head towards Hamsterviel, sticking out his tongue. "Pfffffttt! Hee hee hee hee hee!" he laughed.
"Not you, you long-handed experiment!" Hamsterviel corrected the enthusiastic 345. "I meant Jumba! He was the one who threw the…" he left his sentence hanging mid-rant when his eyes landed on something that was of use to him. Crawling against the ground, he made his way to the side of the ship.
"Oh, I almost forgot this was here!" He clung on to his life saviour, an emergency red box. "In case of emergency, break glass," he read the directions, "Well, I think this calls for an emergency!" He smashed the glass panel with his paw and grabbed the weapon within.
"Jumba!" Hamsterviel smirked, pointing the newly acquired plasma blaster right at him. "Hand me the experiment or I'll fry you into next week!"
"Eep!" 345 yelped, and ended up doing the opposite as he was ordered earlier. Instead of shielding Jumba from all angles as told earlier, he retracted his body to cower behind Jumba's leg, smart enough not to get in direct fire of someone armed with a plasma blaster.
Ignoring 345, Jumba scowled at Hamsterviel. "Where did you get that weapon?!"
"Turns out every spacecraft has a plasma blaster equipped aboard for emergencies!" Hamsterviel smiled upon seeing Jumba's death glare. If looks could kill, Jumba's sneer could wipe out an entire platoon of Galactic Armada foot soldiers. "Now… enough small talk, Jumba. Give me the stretchy stretching experiment!"
Jumba grimaced, unable to believe his rotten luck. If only I found that plasma blaster before the ship took off... Hamsterviel would have surrendered and I would have escaped with the experiment container, he thought, The Galactic Federation would have already been mine!
"Ohhhh Jumba!" Hamsterviel sang, "I'm waiting! Hand him over!"
"You little brat! I will never give you—"
"One minute to impact," the ship computer announced, interrupting Jumba. "Current altitude, twenty thousand feet. Descent angle is…"
Hamsterviel panicked hearing the ship computer announce more and more unfavourable variables to his survival. "Do it!" he shouted, firing a warning shot at the ceiling. "NOW!"
"Grrrr…" Jumba grimaced, before giving a solemn nod to 345. What choice did he really have here?
Getting the go-ahead, 345 stretched his upper body up towards Hamsterviel, before jumping to propel his lower body and feet in the air. Mid-arc, he sprang his body back to his usual diminutive size, before landing next to Hamsterviel with a backflip.
"Well... that was something. You could have just walked over! Did you expect me to applaud at your overly flashy performance, you puny experiment?" Hamsterviel asked. "No matter, it doesn't matter," he said, before cocking the blaster for effect to make his next intention clear.
"Hamsterviel…" Jumba's voice turned hoarse, "what are you doing?!"
"Why, I am going to shoot you, of course," Hamsterviel shrugged as if he was stating the obvious.
"What?!" Jumba howled at the double cross. "But you said that you—"
"Crossies don't count!" Hamsterviel revealed the left hand behind his back, his index and middle fingers in a literal cross. "Ahahah, my genius plan is working flawlessly!" he bragged, drawing his cape across his body with his left arm for the "evil overlord" look. "Jumba, you of all people should know that I am a dirty liar!" he laughed at the defenceless scientist as he aimed the plasma blaster. "Good riddance to you, you useless excuse of a partner!" he smirked, pulling the trigger.
"Yikes!" Jumba ducked forward, rolling out of the way of the plasma shot, which barely missed him by inches.
Hamsterviel frowned with irritation, taking aim one more time. "Stay still!" However, this time, a green hand reached for the barrel as he squeezed the trigger, managing to jerk it away from its original target. The shot went wild, missing Jumba by a margin of over six feet.
"What?!" He swivelled around to see that 345 was responsible for the erratic shot. "Let go!"
"Good job, three-four-five!" Jumba exclaimed, cheering on the elastic experiment. "You're doing your job of distracting the hostile force excellently! Now be snatching that blaster from Hamsterwheel!"
"Curse you Jumba! It is HamsterVIE-woah!" Hamsterviel almost lost the blaster to 345 thanks to Jumba's well timed distraction. Only his right finger, caught and jammed in the trigger, allowed him to regain his grip on the blaster with his left paw. "Argh! Let go of m-my b-blaster!" he yelled, beginning to feel the strain of struggling against 345's hold on the blaster's barrel. Pulling against 345 was like continually stretching an elastic rubber band, which took a lot of energy out of the tiny Hamsterviel. In just a few seconds, he was panting in agony, sweat trickling down his face and drenching his cape.
"H-h-have a t-taste of your o-own medicine, you s-stupid e-e-experiment!" Hamsterviel heaved, finally managing to turn the barrel back to face 345. 345 flinched in response, dropping his usual goofy grin as he stared into the barrel of the blaster. He wasn't stupid; sure he might be a 300-series experiment and not one of the early ones, but he wasn't willing to find out if Jumba made his rubbery body immune to plasma by chancing a shot at point-blank range.
The moment Hamsterviel fired, he immediately stretched his body around to the side, forming a hole where the molten projectile would have hit and allowing the ball of plasma to pass harmlessly through.
However, neither 345 nor Hamsterviel realised the consequence of 345's instinctive response until they heard the resulting explosion. Hamsterviel's face turned horrified when he realised what had happened—when 345 swerved out of the way, the shot ended up hitting a reinforced glass window just metres behind them, shattering it to pieces.
The searing heat of entering the planet's atmosphere combined with the supersonic speed of the ship ended up being a deadly combination of forces on the area surrounding the breached window pane. Before he could comprehend anything more, the fuselage barely two metres behind him tore itself apart due to the aerodynamic forces. Hamsterviel didn't even have time to react to the sudden decompression before he and 345, both standing in the wrong position, were sucked out of the falling spacecraft through the gaping wide hole caused by his own plasma shot. All Jumba could do from his vintage point was hear Hamsterviel's terrified screams, soon drowned out by the numerous alarms and the ship's very own turbulence as it begun to break apart.
Even more sirens began to go off as the computerised voice screamed again. "Warning, warning, fuselage has been breached! Rapid decompression detected in cockpit cabin. Please descend immediately to avoid losing pressurised air. Repeat, please descend—"
"Choota! Yuuga too noisy," 626 protested, "Meega already descending!" Although he was virtually acting as the ship's pilot, 626 didn't spare the message a second thought, not even bothering to look back at the damage. After all, he was going to crash the ship anyway, so what difference did one more alarm make?
"Yaarrgghhh!" However, that alarm definitely made a difference to the not-indestructible Jumba, who gripped onto the wall for support with sheer terror. The wind howled all around him, coming in through the breached starboard side of the ship. He stayed on the port end, as far away from the hole on the opposite end as possible. It is over, he thought with despair, I lost 345 thanks to Hamsterviel. The experiment had been caught off guard by the sudden decompression and didn't have time to latch on to anything before being sucked out into open air.
Jumba's own chance of survival was lost with 345. 345's stretchy body was no longer there to protect him from the debris and eventual impact. He also had no way of retrieving the experiment container at the front for a second chance, the ship was listing, making it impossible for him to reach.
"Thirty seconds to impact. Current altitude is four thousand feet. Warning, descent rate is far too rapid for safe landing from outer space…"
Jumba braced himself, preparing for the worst. Soon all he heard was a long bang, several explosions, and a crushing weight on his body before he mercifully lost consciousness.
As the fire raged on, the blue experiment could only chuckle in glee at his handiwork. Hearing the crackling flames from the fire that surrounded him brought 626 solace, reason being that he was the cause of this miniature forest fire.
The fact that the ground was wedged in, trees were uprooted, and Hamsterviel's ship was a total wreck that would never fly again? All because of him! All of the destruction around this crater was on him, and 626 loved that. His programming had activated, and the temptation to cause chaos rushed through his veins as quickly as a freight train. He jumped off the broken pilot seat, which had been sheared off the floor in the crash, and began to walk out of what remained of the ship.
"S-six... six-two-six! Help me!"
He whirled around, recognising the voice as his creator's. Running on all six of his limbs towards the voice, he found Jumba pinned down under wreckage, barely conscious. Using his four arms, he grabbed the wreckage and flung it away, freeing Jumba of the crushing weight.
"Pack-ack!" Jumba coughed, limping out. The scientist couldn't believe that he was still alive. "Thank you, six-two-six." Paces away, he scooped up the fallen plasma gun which was dropped by Hamsterviel. It was a miracle that it was still intact and on the ship. It must have been caught by the hole in the fuselage. If it went down with Hamsterviel, it would be splattered into as many pieces as him.
In the end, Jumba had to admit that despite 345's untimely exit, the stretchy experiment had wound up being an effective shield for when the ship started to encounter major turbulence and began to break apart as the ship entered the planet's atmosphere at hyperdrive speed, preventing him many potential early injuries for the couple of seconds before Hamsterviel had taken 345 away.
But for the final impact, Jumba had nothing to protect him, so he survived by sheer luck. Grinning broadly from ear to ear, he realised his time was not yet up.
"Yeah heh heh ha ha!" Jumba pumped his fist to the sky in victory, before his voice turned sinister, "Lady Luck is being on my side today! This is proof that the Galactic Federation will soon fall! And with Hamsterviel out of picture," he smiled at the turn of luck, "no one can stop me now!"
626 cocked his head. "Where isa Hamsterviel?" he asked.
"What?" Jumba stared at 626. There's no way, right? He didn't see or hear Hamsterviel's demise? "Annoying gerbil in cape was sucked out of ship. You didn't see?"
"Naga!" he replied.
"You didn't see anything that happened?" Jumba commented incredulously, almost smiling at how oblivious 626 was when his mind was focused on bringing down Hamsterviel's ship.
"Naga! Meega looking straight, meega driving ship!" 626 clarified.
"You are horrible driver, six-two-six." Actually, that was a very huge under-exaggeration. "And about Hamsterviel, is no big deal, you didn't miss much," he chuckled, "So how about now you be handing me the container Hamsterviel took?"
"Uh…" 626 suddenly darted his eyes nervously, "yuuga mean big grey ball?" Reluctantly, 626 opened his mouth and pointed his a clawed finger to his open mouth.
Jumba's eyes widened, slapping his forehead. "It was flung into your mouth in the impact of the crash?"
"Ih! Ih!" 626 nodded to confirm Jumba's hypothesis.
"And you ATE it?!"
"Ih," 626 slurped his tongue, unsure why Jumba sounded so frantic, "in meega stomach now."
Jumba slumped down, almost wanting to strangle something. Oh, come on! This couldn't be happening. Once again victory was so close to him, and yet so far. How could he run into setback after setback after setback?! Running the calculations in his head, he immediately became aware of a new danger and came to a grim conclusion. Taking a glance to see that 626 didn't suspect his thoughts, he switched the topic to avoid suspicion. "Let us forget about container for now, six-two-six. Let us talk about this planet. Do you have any idea where we landed?"
"Ih. Meega heard computer say planet isa Earth!"
"Earth, huh?" Jumba racked his brains, trying to recall any information he knew about Earth. Not once had he remembered hearing anything about this planet. "This planet sounds like good starting point for my intergalactic takeover…" As he rambled on, his right arm slowly reached for Hamsterviel's plasma blaster. When he recovered it earlier, he had placed it in a holster under his now soot-covered lab coat. Just a little bit more of a distraction and he can draw it to fire at 626, hopefully stunning him.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah!" 626 clapped his hands together in excitement. "Takeover good! Takeover…" he suddenly stopped talking as his infrared vision caught sight of the object his creator was reaching for in his lab coat. He reacted immediately. As Jumba fired the plasma blaster right at him, 626 caught the plasma ball in his hand, before redirecting it away harmlessly to the side and dashing Jumba's hopes of a direct plasma shot at close range.
"Argh!" Jumba yelled in frustration, "How did you know I would do that?!"
"Naga tell yuuga how meega know!" 626 glared at Jumba with absolute hatred in his eyes. "Why you attack meega? Why?!"
"It appears I have no choice," Jumba sighed, looking at 626 with melancholy. "Jumba really wanted to be doing this the easy way."
626 didn't take his eyes off Jumba as he sneered. "Gaba easy way?"
"I was going to knock you out cold. You see, I have to be dissecting you, six-two-six," he came clean. There was no point in hiding it, he'd lost his opportunity for a sneak attack anyway.
"Gaba?!" 626 shook his head rapidly, not believing what Jumba had said. Wasn't he just following orders? Why did Jumba want to take him apart for a stupid grey container? "Naga-takabah!" He knew what dissection was, and there was no way he was going to willingly turn himself in so Jumba could do that to him.
"Well you don't have a choice in this!" Jumba fired again, hoping to slow 626 down, "I need that container, even if it means taking you down!"
626 scurried away, dodging the shot masterfully. "Can't catch meega!"
"Six-two-six! Come back! That's an order!" he yelled, firing and missing his target again. "Six-two-six!"
He ignored Jumba, continuing to scamper away. He ran through his possible options in his head. He couldn't bring himself to hurt his creator, despite it being the easiest way to solve his problem. Reasoning with Jumba was clearly out of the option as well, so now he had to find some way to ditch him. Luckily, it looked like ditching Jumba would be easy. He ran into a deeper part of the forest, using the foliage and the shrubs as cover. In spite of the dark, he could see objects in his path clearly with his infrared vision. His creator couldn't and would almost certainly lose sight of him.
His plan worked. Because 626 was so short, he was virtually invisible in the undergrowth. Jumba couldn't track him at all amongst the dense forest. "Gah! Where did he go?!" Jumba hollered, "This can't be happening!"
He slowly took deep breaths to calm himself down. Once his anger was within control, he began to access the situation rationally. There was no way he could find 626 now. The night made it virtually impossible to find him, thus his only option was to wait until the planet rotated and the sun rose again.
Even worse, he had virtually nothing with him on this desolated planet. He had boarded Hamsterviel's ship with just his lab coat and the experiment container, and now the experiment container was gone along with 626. He had no experiments, no computers, and no equipment. With just one measly plasma blaster that didn't even belong to him in the first place, he didn't stand a chance against his greatest creation in the slightest.
All the odds were against him yet again.
"Hello? Who's there?!"
"Hm?!" Jumba turned around. Where did that voice come from? Not chancing another sneak attack like what Hamsterviel did earlier, he pointed his blaster in the direction of the voice.
"Strange... I almost thought I heard someone," a small girl said as she crawled out of the bushes, "For a second there I almost thought it was Mertle. That'll be like the worst case scenario!" She smiled at her own joke, not noticing the humongous Jumba closing in on her. "If she found out about this she'd never let me live it down-eek!" she shrieked, suddenly noticing what was in front of her.
"What are you looking at, brown-haired little girl?" he stared with all four of his eyes down at the tiny little human. "Who are you?!"
"I-I-I am…" she stammered at the towering alien, unable to speak when she saw the weapon aimed at her, "I come in peace!" She blinked and rubbed her eyes repeatedly to check that she wasn't hallucinating.
"Hmph! So you are peaceful denizens!" Jumba smirked. His eyes re-shone with hope now that he had seemingly found a way out of his situation. So this planet IS inhabited! That is being very good for me. Finally he could begin to salvage Hamsterviel's mess and retake control of his operation.
"Yeah, we're friendly, I swear!" the girl played with her hair in nervousness.
Jumba frowned, noticing the small creature backing away slowly. Not willing to give up the chance for more information, he continued to shoot out questions to the trembling girl. "Brown-haired little girl, is this Planet Earth? Just what are you creatures? And are you being sure that you are all friendly?!"
"Y-y-yes, this is Earth! We're humans, and we're all definitely friendly!" she paused, musing over her last response. "At least I think we're friendly, E.T sorta ended that way with the humans realising that..." Seeing Jumba's face to that trivia, she hurriedly changed her answer. "I mean we're friendly! We're all friendly, I swear!" If the governments wanted to argue against friendly contact with this alien later, Teresa swore that she would have nothing to do with it! There was no way she'd ever say that someone like Mertle would never be friendly towards him. After all, Mertle wasn't the one who currently had some alien gun aimed right at her!
Not noticing the human deep in her thoughts, Jumba laughed out loud, "Hahahahah! So I'll have no resistance then, what wonderful news for me!"
"Resistance?" she repeated, before she gasped as she realised the implications of what he'd said. Oh, no... please don't let this be like Independence Day...
"You finally am getting it, aren't you?" his smile turned into a grin, "You humans cannot resist me! I am the greatest evil scientist in the whole wide universe, Dr. Jumba Jookiba!" To illustrate his point, he pointed the plasma blaster to the sky and let off a bright destructive flare into the air. Seeing that the weapon was most definitely not fake, the girl screamed, turning around to flee for her life.
"No, no, no, don't run!" Jumba aimed the blaster back in her direction. Alas, his folly had cost him. She had completely disappeared back into the inky blackness of the forest before he could even get a clear shot. "You dare run from my evil geniusness, little girl?" the furious Jumba shouted as loud as he could so that the fleeing girl, wherever she might be, could still hear him. "Fine then, run while you can, there's no way to be escaping me! And when I have retrieved what I want, your entire planet will fall to Jumba!" It was only after he had a hearty chuckle about his evil monologue that Jumba started to feel a sense of uneasiness.
Planet Earth... despite the girl's words, he still knew barely anything about it at all! And judging by the final reaction of the girl, she was definitely lying about everyone being friendly and welcoming him with open arms. He would bet an experiment that she would definitely come back with more natives for a fight or something. Even worse, it hit him with a jolt that Hamsterviel dragging him off Galaxy Defence Industries meant that the Galactic Council would now be looking for him. Just great.
He couldn't stay here. He hadn't managed to confirm if the planet was part of the Galactic Federation or not. There was a very high chance it wasn't, seeing that the girl didn't recognise his name and he himself hadn't recognise the planet name. But in statistics, there was always what is known as a null hypothesis. Despite so much evidence that Earth wasn't a Galactic Federation member, there was always a slight chance that it was. If it is indeed a member planet, he'd be ousted as an outlaw to the Council by Earth's inhabitants.
Jumba couldn't afford to be rash now. He'd just survived a spacesuit crash. Imagine surviving that and being sent back to Turo! He refused to go down like this, arrested anticlimactically by a simple report from some random people on an unknown planet. Forget finding 626 and the girl, he thought. His first priority now was to blend in with the planet's inhabitants until he found a way off this wretched place with all of his experiments. Groaning, Jumba walked into the dense and dark forest, choosing a random path as he left the crash zone behind him.
Soon all that was left there was a burning ship lodged in a crater, surrounded by miles of natural vegetation.
Morning came slowly to Kokaua Town.
As people started to crowd the once empty streets at eight in the morning, no one paid any heed to the big sized, chubby yellow shirt tourist queuing outside the computer cafe. After all, this was Hawaii, and locals were used to ignoring or silently making fun of tourists.
It didn't matter to the man. If it's one thing he learned, it's that the best way to avoid being detected is to draw as much attention as humanly possible to yourself. He'd even made experiment 345 with this exact purpose in mind.
When he had eventually made it out of the forest, he pilfered a local shirt to throw off anyone who could recognise him by his lab coat, and sunglasses to hide his four eyes from view. They were easy enough to steal, a simple plasma shot vaporised the storefront before he grabbed them and left. The owners would be much more worried about the property damage instead of counting their stocks to notice anything amiss.
"What is taking them so long? It is now five past eight," the disguised Jumba asked out loud. He had been continually looking at his watch for the past hour, waiting for the cafe to open. "They said opening hours start at eight. They didn't start on the dot? This is unacceptable for any planetary shop!"
"Uh, excuse me sir?" a man behind him interjected, "This is Hawaii! Chill out, dude!"
"Hmph!" Jumba folded his arms. Let these locals insult him all they want. Soon they would be at his mercy.
Finally, the sign changed from closed to open. Jumba stormed into the shop, asking for his internet access.
"That will be twelve dollars for six hours, sir."
"Be charging it to my credit card," Jumba took out a little white card bearing the United Galactic Federation logo and handed it to the cashier.
One of the fancier perks about having a Galactic Federation visa was that their union guaranteed a intergalactic bank card for everyone. This little card allowed for universal exchange rates, and was compatible with almost every planet in the universe, even those not in the Galactic Federation. He had gotten this free gift from his position in Galaxy Defence Industries due to his need for constant travel, and not once had it ever failed him when he used it for more nefarious purposes.
"Done, sir. Enjoy your internet access!"
And it had yet to fail him, he thought. When he took over the Federation, this was one thing that he would not change — the intergalactic bank card was way too convenient. Smiling, he walked to his designated computer, booting it up.
"Primitive technology," he moaned as the startup screen took ages to boot the operating system. "Fifty seconds to boot to OS? This planet is beyond ancient!" He opened the internet browser, before typing a long string of numbers into the address bar to connect to his personal experiment database. This personalised IP address was only known to him and his experiments. He had decentralised the system this way so that any experiment could connect to his database for communication purposes if necessary without requiring the need of buying an additional computer for each new experiment.
Jumba entered in the password for his personal experiment logs and prepared to update the log for experiment 626. "Hamsterviel…" he drawled, "this is all your fault."
At least one advantage to all this chaos was that his traitorous ex-partner was gone. Hamsterviel had been sucked out of the ship at an altitude of what had to be at least ten thousand feet in the air. Jumba wouldn't miss him anytime soon. After all, his backstabbing had almost ruined everything. Even now, Hamsterviel was still complicating things, as he wouldn't have been stranded here and in this situation in the first place if Hamsterviel hadn't paid his lab a visit.
"Now all I have to be doing is settle the situation with six-two-six, and then my plans for intergalactic dominance can finally resume!" he thought, while typing furiously on the keyboard about the events that had just happened.
Experiment 626
Primary function — widespread destruction of populated areas.
Log Number 1:
Remember what I said about everything going according to plan in my Experiment 625 log? Well, Jumba now takes back everything he said. I had just activated Experiment 626 using the fusion chamber, but that good-for-nothing gerbil came and ruined everything! He managed to take experiment container from right under my nose! When trying to retrieve it, 626 sent the ship on a crash course to unknown planet, which I later discovered is called Earth.
It is interesting to note that 626 came out exactly as planned. He is cunning and devious, having tricked my former partner into crashing his very own ship in the first place. I am very proud of him, but unfortunately that makes it so much harder for me to catch him.
You see, 626 has accidentally swallowed the experiment container in the crash. This is an absolute disaster! First off, I now have no access to any of my dehydrated experiments at all. But more importantly, I can be calculating that the container metal lining can only withstand 626's stomach acid for just a couple of weeks. If I do not get it back by then, the lining will dissolve. This will cause all the experiment pods inside to activate simultaneously, the result of which will implode 626 from within!
So now I have no choice but to be taking 626 apart in order to get back the experiment container. If I do not dissect him to remove container, he would be finished! Even though dissection has only 2.7% chance of fatality, 626 has run away, terrified of the idea! I must find him before it is too late!
What is an evil scientist like me to do?! What should I do…?
Dr. Jumba Jookiba
Author's Note:
...outweigh the needs of the few. So what do you think of this development?
We finally get to the first real conflict and drive of this story — Jumba going after Stitch just like the first movie, except for a very different reason compared to canon. Don't worry, for this is just the beginning of even more chaos!
Random editing fact, the part where Jumba interrogates Teresa was originally a lot shorter. Quite literally, in the original draft the prose skipped straight from "peaceful denizens" to "humans cannot stop me; I'm the greatest scientist in the universe". I wasn't satisfied with that brief exchange, so now you get references to multiple other movies involving aliens.
jurassicdinodrew: Honestly, even if I wanted to, I can't write Leroy into this story. It's based off the beginning of the franchise, while Leroy & Stitch takes place near the end of Lilo & Stitch: The Series! I don't have any material to write Leroy in when Stitch hasn't even bonded with Lilo yet! If I do write a sequel fic to this story—geez, am I thinking that far ahead?—then maybe, maybe I can write Leroy in.
nightmaster000: I'll admit though, Teresa was an improvisation. Sometimes characters do things contrary to your expectations when you write a scene. Ignoring the fact that you usually have to add subplots to the main storyline or change some stuff later to compensate, it's usually fun when this happens. Even the author can be surprised!
And yes, some of the more comparatively minor characters and experiments will show up! Jumba activating 345 in this chapter is probably proof of that. Not many stories focus or write about the minor experiments in a manner that isn't background fodder, which is such a shame, I like some of those experiments. Of course the more popular experiments will also appear here, that's a given, but I hope to characterise all of the experiments that show up in this fic, not just the usual main ones, so there will be a limit to how many experiments I'm willing to write into this story for feasibility purposes.