I'm still extremely jet lagged despite everything and it's currently one am, but I promise that I am trying.
Twelve:
The team fell about laughing. The villain looked absolutely ridiculous.
A girl about their age, or maybe very slightly older, was clad in a dancer's leotard covered in feathers, a cruddy paper beak, a pair of awfully scruffy wings, and a weird feather headdress. Her face was disguised by some truly terrible face paint. She scowled, but it looked amusing rather than threatening, what with the beak and all.
"Enough!"
She squeaked instead of talking, her voice annoyingly high.
"Sorry, gigglers, but nothing's funny about the destruction of the planet. And looky looky here! We've got a gazillion bombs planted under ever country in the world! And who did that? The pretty little psycho called Kookaburra!"
She stopped talking to fumble around with a little speaker attached to her belt, and eventually managed to hit a button that made a grainy recording of a kookaburra's laugh play. She then pressed both of her feet hard to the ground before springing off. She had a feather-covered jetpack attached to her back, and it let her zoom out of sight.
The NERDS kept laughing. Pufferfish composed herself first, and tried to regain order.
"We have a mission to accomplish, and I trust that that will be your focus. Instead of the admittedly ludicrous costume of the villain with the world destruction plot."
Still giggling slightly, the team split up to look for the manual override room. When there's a bomb, there's a big button to cancel the explosion, and the NERDS had to find that button.
Almost immediently, Ruby found a metal tunnel, and walked down it. The walls widened, and the floor became a narrow platform. She caught her left foot on apparently nothing and went sprawling over the narrow floor. An alarm blared harshly, screaming in her ears. She was allergic to everything about this situation. Out of both the walls, cannons suddenly flew from behind hidden flaps. She felt herself turning into a ballon. This surely could get no worse. Them the cannons started firing. Not cannonballs. That would have been far too easy. It fired peanuts at her. Ruby gave a strangled cry and passed out.
Megaphone did not bother to stop laughing. She just turned to Flinch and yelled.
"Last one to the control room's a rotten Easter egg!"
"You're so on-Wait, can Easter eggs go bad?"
He seeemed genuinely concerned, and she took the opportunity to get a head start and raced away. He was right behind her within seconds, cranking up the knobs on his harness. He chased her around the perimeter of the room until she disappeared into an almost invisible doorway, and he ran into a tree. Ten seconds later, he followed her, still at high speed, but ran into her back after only a few seconds. She was frozen completely still. In front of them was a kangaroo.
"Hey, cool!"
"No, Flinch. That's not cool. Now listen very closely. This is a male kangaroo displaying dominant behaviour. Swallow your pride, crouch down, and BACK AWAY SLOWLY. Please do not try to fight the kangaroo."
"Pppffffftttttt. I could take this animal any day. You wanna dance, jumpy?"
Flinch adjusted his harness.
"I AM MIGHTY!"
His harness powered down. Oh. He had not had enough sugar to push it into top gear, so it had blown a fuse or something.
"FLINCH, YOU IDIOT."
Macy was already about twenty metres away.
"It's going to insist on a fight now. Your best bet is just to curl up in a ball and stay still as possible. Kangaroos are vegetarians, so they will normally only attack humans if they are genuinely feeling threatened or if they are convinced that the humans are withholding food. DO NOT FEED THE KANGAROO IN ORDER TO MAKE IT GO AWAY."
Flinch looked at the green lolly snakes he had just thrown on the floor in front of him.
"Oops."
"You bleep."
The silvery door blocking their one exit slid shut and another two kangaroos joined the first one. Flinch probably could have felt the stare trained on him if he was back home, locked in his room and completely safe. Well, time to fight kangaroos. With no upgrades. Like the curling up thing was going to work! What did Megaphone know about fighting a kangaroo?
Needless to say, this encounter did not end well.
Jackson walked right up to the trees, knocking on each one. His logic was that one of them had to be an entrance to some kind of secret basement or something like that. That was the way this would go down if he was in a movie, and his life was cool enough to be a movie anyway. Twenty or so trees in, he got a door. Excellent. He nonchalantly strolled through the entrance, whistling, like the ridiculously cool guy he was. No sweat. Then- CLANG! He was stuck to the magnetic walls.
Curse his braces.
Duncan climbed up a wall. There was a trapdoor, probably the way the villain had made their exit. Matilda flew up and hovered next to him.
"You gonna go through or what?
He grinned. Matilda blasted the trapdoor with her inhalers, and it flew right off it's hinges. They were through in a matter of seconds. Control room. Good. The villain-Kookaburra?-was trying to do that classic evil genius thing where you slowly spun around petting the cat, but Kooky was using a bird. Presumably the one they had modelled their costume off. The bird pecked the girl in the face before flying off with that same creepy laugh. The villain tried to salvage the situation by narrowing their eyes.
"Well, well, well. Guess you found me. Too bad your friends weren't so lucky."
Kookaburra spun around and fiddled with the control board for an awkwardly long time. When she stopped, three images were displayed on the screen behind her. Unconscious Pufferfish, struggling Braceface, and a worried-looking Megaphone trying to drag an unconscious Flinch away from three angry kangaroos.
"If you guess the right button, your friends are saved and so is the planet. If you guess wrong-"
Bad laugh track.
"Then it's bye, bye, worldly. Later!"
The girl ran away, doubtless to use a rocket or something else she had prepared in order to get away from the explosion. Gluestick sat down at the monitor. Wheezer leaned over his shoulder.
"Well?"
"Painstakingly easy to disengage."
Click. Flip. Spin.
"All done. Now let's fix the issues-"
Walls released braces, doors slid open, and some kind of conveyor belt slid along a peanut shooting gallery's floor. A rocket's fuel tank popped open and leaked all over the ground, stopping any launch.
"There."
One combine call and one arrest later, the NERDS were on their flight home. Agent Brand spoke to them.
"Agents, we have discovered something about this 'Kookaburra'."
Macy raised one eyebrow.
"What."
It was not a question.
Benjamin projected an image of Kookaburra's body with an undisguised, very famous face attached to it.
"Kookaburra is Scarletta Scar."
Scarletta Scar was the most popular singer the world had ever known. Her first hit had been at age eight, and even now at fifteen, she was a BIG deal.
"If it gets out she has been arrested, billions of angry fans will band together to find a way to get all blame off their precious girl and they will do anything to do so. They will be determined enough to find out about us. Because fans are crazy people if they love something or someone too much. We have to cover up her disappearance. But she is due to play a sold out concert with some extremely important people in attendance and near a billion people watching from their own homes live. We need to get an impersonator in there in less than four hours."
In a half-asleep, practically delusional state, Flinch pointed to the hologram and giggled,
"Hey Macy, it looks kind like you with a big scar on your face. Isn't that funny?"
Everyone turned and studied Megaphone for a half-second before nodding, satisfied. Benjamin spun and bleeped.
"Macy will also be able to impersonate Miss Scar's voice. She is perfect. She only requires a faint scar an her right cheek."
The lunch lady spoke from the cockpit.
"Heading to the stadium now."
As aforementioned, it's late and I blame jet lag. Sorry if it sucked. I tried.
~Madei