3~

Marcie knew what was called for in this situation, just in all previous ones, to fight science with science. She gave herself a pat-down to check for her carry-on chemicals, and found, to her severe dismay, that the inside of her jacket was potion-free.

"Great," she moaned. "I forgot that the police confiscated my stuff earlier. Now, what?"

Looking to the surrounding buildings of the block for somewhere to duck into, since battling the crackpots on equal terms seemed futile, she spotted it. Across the street from the front of the police station was a convenience store.

A sneaky smile grew on her face. She was going to put the word convenience to the test.


Bill Grammercy, owner of Grammercy's Groceries, stared out of the store's front windows from his place behind the counter, as he had forever, it seemed to him. The same police station, the same neighborhood customers. Nothing changed.

The tiny bell that hung over the door heralded Marcie's hurried arrival, as she rushed in and marched up to the counter.

"Excuse me, sir. Do you have any corrosive or cryogenic compounds in here? I'm being chased by a blob monster, three mad scientists, and I'm pretty sure the cops are looking for me, too."

Grammercy believed in keeping his store as well stocked as possible, but the things that she asked for gave him pause. He wasn't sure he had anything like that in stock. But, when in doubt, let the customer sniff it out, like his father would say.

He gave a shrug and gestured to the aisles off to the side. Marcie jogged towards them to begin her search.

"Good luck," the owner said, noncommittally.

Marcie's head swiveled left and right, giving the most cursory of scans as to what stood on the shelves near the front of the store. Food and snacks, soup and drinks, bagged ice and beers, all useless.

She took a step to go further into the aisles, then stopped when she and the owner noticed that the ambient light inside the store was going from dim to dark, rapidly.

Marcie stepped back and looked at the erstwhile source of sunlight, the window, being blocked by a eclipsing form. A form that busied itself by eating the window and the supporting storefront.

As the facade of Grammercy's Groceries began to collapse from the swift damage inflicted, Marcie turned to the counter. "Sir, you have to get out of he-"

The man was already heading for the storeroom, and its back door, in the rear. "It's on the house!" he yelled.

Marcie shrugged, satisfied that the man was on his way to safety, then ducked into the cover of the aisles, continuing her hunt for anything to end this.


The three mad scientists gathered in the store's parking lot, grinning in easy triumph at the knowledge of Marcie being trapped in the building. All the hungry, blue beast had to do now, was flow inside, and then, it would be over.

"Ha! Ha!" Crankenshaft cackled. "It won't be long, now! Thanks to those police cars it ate, my creature is three times the size it was at the police station! That girl doesn't have a chance."

Any reply he might have heard from his compatriots was interrupted by the report of a gun going off behind him.

The three twisted around to see deputies and the sheriff, himself, rushing from across the street and discharging their weapons in a futile effort to bring Crankenshaft's monster down.

Bullets either entered, loss kinetic energy, slowed, and were dissolved in the body, or made furrows through its surface, as they missed the center mass. All the while, its creator laughed and thought how good it was to be a mad scientist.

Von Gimmick and Deeds saw the police officers and weren't so jovial about their arrival. Von Gimmick reached out with his robotic limbs, sweeping deputies aside with one arm, and deflecting shots meant for him with the other.

Deeds clutched at his chest, twisting the dial of his Zoo Suit to Cheetah Mode. After his transformation, he flew at deputies who didn't get batted around by Von Gimmick, slashing and ripping into them with a feral speed.

Scaleback stood in the middle of the street, making sure that he was far enough back to lead his men into battle without suffering himself as a casualty. But, as men fell before him, broken and wounded, he quaked in his meticulously shined boots at the inevitable attack that would come.


A blue pseudopod, one of the blob monster's limbs, became pliant and snaked its way deep into the store, probing for its meal. It would have oozed its entire body in, but its simple mind was distracted by the fighting going on behind it.

Marcie had made it to the limited automotive/ housewares/ sundry aisle, when she gasped at the sight of the limb slithering along the tile floor towards her position.

She backed away, realizing that she had run out of time looking for suitable weapons, or components to craft her own, and searched for room to maneuver.

Then, her elbow tapped a small can of Freon, used to replenish a car's air conditioner system, off its shelf, and it hit the floor, rolling towards the tentacle.

The limb's senses reacted to the sound and impact, instinctively wrapping itself around the can, and cutting it into ragged halves with its secreted hyper-digestive acid. The pressurized contents sprayed out, coating the floor and tentacle, causing the appendage to frost up and recoil in pain. Eventually, it left the aisle, altogether.

Marcie gave herself a clever smile, and then gathered up whole armloads of the cans.


"Now, you hold it, right there!" Scaleback quavered, pointing at the criminals with a shaky hand. "Don't make me come over there a-and read you the Riot Act."

The blob monster and its master casually approached the sheriff, the creature ready for its next meal.

"Oh, I wouldn't worry, Herr Sheriff," Crankenshaft said, allowing his creation to crawl ahead of him. "I doubt that my monster would even know what you were talking about, anyway."

The attempted murder was interrupted, however, by the sound of Marcie suddenly bounding out of the ruins of the convenience store, carrying a can in one hand, and hauling a full, plastic trash bag over her shoulder.

Deeds and Von Gimmick quickly out-flanked Marcie by running behind her at the front of the store, forcing her to stay where she was, in between monster and scientists, and cut off from any shelter she could find in returning to the building.

With his Cheetah Mode worn off, Deeds had switched to something more deadly, his Cobra Mode, ready to strike if Marcie tried to pass him in her attempt to head back in to the store.

Von Gimmick slowly flexed the mechanized fingers of his gloves, eager to manhandle her, again.

"This time, young lady," he cried, as he stretched his metal limbs out at her. "I'm going to hand-feed you to that thing, myself!"

Her body tensed, waiting for a mistake like that to occur. She dropped her cargo and shifted her body into a spinning, ducking move that made the gauntlets miss her as she fell to the ground.

The arms, their motorized weight adding to their momentum when extending fast, couldn't stop in time, and they flew over Marcie, into the near-mindless maw of the blob monster. They were promptly sucked in like steel spaghetti, dragging the screaming, terrified professor closer and closer to the fate of being eaten alive.

"No! No! Not me, you blue booger! Not me!" Von Gimmick cried out, as he tapped at the glove release buttons inside the arms, but because they took on structural damage, the arms, or rather, what was left of them, ceased to function.

Foot by foot, the man was pulled into striking distance of the creature, when finally, he managed to wiggle his small arms out of the half-devoured metal sleeves that were once his vaunted gloves, and like a pratfall, fell to the ground.

"Von Gimmick, are you alright?" asked Deeds in a hiss.

Gasping, Von Gimmick said nothing. He looked down on the hands that once created wonders, understanding just how close he was to losing them. He, then, got up, and without fanfare, tried to run off, only to succeed in running into the bruised, irate, and waiting arms of Gatorsburg's finest.

Now, that one professor was dealt with, Marcie focused her attention on the invention of the other. She stood and gave the can she carried, a casual toss, where it landed by one of the monster's feet, rolled, and made contact.

The can's metal began to bubble and perforate, releasing super-cold jets of Freon from its innards. In seconds, searing pain and freezing bio-plasm resulted. The blob bellowed, and in primal rage, returned to its previous mind of hunting Marcie.

Crankenshaft was visibly troubled, if not outright shaken, by the sound, and he focused his own rage on Marcie. "What...What is happening? What did you do to my creature?"

"This," Marcie said, watching the monster close in on her, its mouth quivering with hunger.

She grabbed the trash bag from the ground, and began to swing it like a hammer toss, its contents making a banging, clattering racket.

When enough momentum was built, Marcie let go, and the bag flew up in an arc, straight into the creature's mouth. After what had happened to Von Gimmick, it proved that the blob's primitive brain only provided it with the unchanging impetus to feed, and obey Crankenshaft, not to think defensively, so, as before, it didn't question what it swallowed, it just salivated on, and tried to digest, whatever its mouth came in contact with.

The center of the monster suddenly began to quake, letting out a yowl of agony, as pressurized coolant forced its way out of its cavernous gullet, and heavy droplets of liquid Freon fell back onto the beast, covering it, and the parking lot, in a cooling rain and freezing its body from the inside-out.

In confusion, it thrashed in its torment, crushing Bill Grammercy's car, and then, rolling on the ground, gradually hardening and icing under Crankenshaft's tortured gaze, until, finally, the creature, the professor's lethal pride and joy, stopped moving, altogether, and expired in a ready-made tomb of its own solid body, blanketed with a delicate frost.

"Now, that's an ice cream headache!" she joked, grimly.

Deeds took a look at where Crankenshaft last stood, but he was already in police custody. He was the only one left.

"Your move, pal," Marcie told him. "Oh, and if you decide to go Wild Kingdom, even rhinos aren't bulletproof." The sound of deputies cocking their collective guns in his direction punctuated her point.

To his credit, he brought his hand away from his chestplate.

It wasn't until Deeds was handcuffed, that Scaleback emerged from the throng of police officers in the street.

He swaggered up to Marcie, a big, phony smile on his face. "Well, dearie, you sure showed them, huh?"

"Yeah. It would've been easier, though, if you didn't take my inventions," Marcie grumbled.

"Well, I had no idea you were the little missy who saved our town from that flash flood during the Pageant of Gators, a few months back."

"And rid you of that shifty shaman, Preter du Marais," she reminded him, before continuing her harangue. "But, what do you have against scientists, anyway. The world wouldn't be what it is without them, and, by the way, if you didn't like mad scientists so much, why didn't you arrest Deeds and his little bunch? All of their inventions caused harm."

"Well," Scaleback drawled, while he rocked back and forth on his heels, pleased with himself. "We, or rather, I, needed to see if you not being a mad scientist checked out. I guess it did."

A deputy overhearing the conversation, offered to Marcie, "Don't worry, ma'am. Sheriff, here, he don't mind science, it's just that he flunked science class in high school, and was left back. It's just a big ol' bluff."

Scaleback gave the man an embarrassed cough to get him to drop the subject and go on his way. "Well, anywho, I am authorized to give back your things, and not call your papa."

Marcie was inwardly thankful for that, but rolled her eyes at his brusque egotism. "Boy, that sure sounded like an apology to me."

"Well..." Scaleback muttered with a cough, not comfortable to admit a mistake that he'd much rather sweep under the rug. "The Gatorsburg Police Department wishes you to have a nice day."

'It's all I could expect, I guess,' Marcie thought, as she began to follow the sheriff and his subordinates back to the station. Then, someone called her name.

"Marcie Fleach! Marcie Fleach!" yelled Deeds from where he was being taken in for processing.

Marcie walked over to him, confident that he couldn't do anything to her while cuffed. "How do you know my name, Deeds?"

"A little birdie name Benton told me," he taunted. "Want to guess what else he said? He said that he knows who you are, and that if you want to find him, all you have to do is solve this riddle, and you'll meet."

"What is it?" she asked.

"There are dangers you will have to face,

When you find Benton's hiding place,

Where victims struggle, and leave no trace,

In Nature's awesome, raw embrace."

"C'mon," said the deputy who was handling him. He grew tired of Deeds talking, and so, half-dragged, half walked him back to the station. But, as they crossed the street, a white and green plastic card with a magnetic strip, fell from Deeds' pocket, to the sidewalk.

Marcie looked around her. Everyone seemed too busy to notice her, so, she went over quickly, and picked it up with a deft hand, quietly pocketing it.

As she followed the men to the station, Marcie thought hard about the riddle. She was sure that Quest was hiding somewhere in Gatorsburg, and now, this clue just fell in her lap.

'It's obviously a trap,' she thought. But, this was the strongest lead she found since returning to this town, and she couldn't let it go. No matter where it led.