PART TWO

"World Domination, Baby!"

Chapter 11. The First Steps

It was still raining where the group returned from the showdown. The sky was still dark, but the thunder was far in the distance.

"Jack! Jack!" Meg went bouncing over the collapsed body of the E.SMART to search for Jack. She sprayed water from her dreads with every bounce and splattered it on the ground wherever she landed.

"Where's Omi?" Kimiko asked, at last managing to get to her feet. Dojo scooted through the debris, though Rai and Clay were still too weak to get up.

Wuya inspected the waiting Master Pen greedily.

"So, if they were both nuked to a fine dust, who's going to take the Shen Gong Wu?" she asked slyly.

Patience was way ahead of her.

"Well, I think I'll just assume they are dust and take this one for myself!" she said, lunging forward in the Mini SMART. "Because, unlike you, Wuya, I'm not afraid of Chase." She snatched the Master Pen out of the air and took her seat, getting ready to leave.

"How dare you!" Wuya shrieked, shaking her fist at the SMART.

"…Hey!" A familiar but weak voice called out from the ruin of the E.SMART. "That's my Master Pen!"

"Jack! You're in once piece!" Patience exclaimed, looking back sharply. "Well, consider this my payment for letting you trash the Element SMART."

"What?" Wuya exclaimed. "But, that means…"

Kimiko found Omi, unconscious, near the E.SMART's shoulder, when she heard what Wuya said.

"Jack won?" she muttered. "How?"

A back hatch with explosive bolts on the E.SMART popped off and Jack crawled out. He jumped up after swaying uneasily for a moment and put his hands in the air, touchdown style.

"Victory! Absolute victory, baby! And with the Xiaolin monks out of the way, the age of Jack Spicer's reign of darkness and terror can finally arrive! Woo hoo!"

Meg screeched for joy and ran to give Jack a bear hug.

"My hero!"

"Ow, ow…"

"Think again, Jack," Kimiko snapped. "Just because you beat us, that doesn't mean…"

"Hey, don't ruin the moment! I'm trying to savor, here!"

Kimiko just rolled her eyes and dragged Omi over to Raimundo, Clay, and Dojo. Clay was sitting up now, albeit painfully, and Raimundo was coming around.

"Is he gonna be okay?" Clay asked, seeing Omi.

"I think so," Kimiko muttered. "I think finding out he lost to Jack Spicer is going to hurt a lot more than getting physically beat."

"Damn straight!" Jack laughed. "And know what else? Know what else? Now, you guys can never go after a new Shen Gong Wu ever again! Oh yeah- Jack Spicer owns! Did ya see that, Chase? Chase? Hey, where'd he go?"

"Probably went to throw up," Wuya muttered sarcastically.

"Chase did see me win, right?" Jack checked.

"Yes, yes, Jack," Patience sighed. "Most of south-east Asia and the Philippines saw you win. Now, if you could silence the personal paean, you still have a hell of a long way to go before you even get close to taking over the world. So, I suggest you start now."

Patience pushed a button on her watch and looked to the sky. While traveling-size Dojo gently lifted each monk onto his back, the group noticed small burst of light in the clouds not too far away. The rumble of a sonic boom reached them moments later as the SMART bot approached and slowed to come to a landing in the field. Unlike the Mini SMART, this one needed to run a few steps when it landed, shaking the ground in the process. It turned and walked towards Patience in long, lumbering steps, coming to a rest just a few yards away.

Jack and Meg stared up at the massive robot with mouths agape. The conscious Xiaolin warriors couldn't believe their eyes as Dojo carried them away. Wuya, too, stood impressed.

"That," Patience said to Jack, "is regular SMART."

The SMART had to be at least 30 stories tall. Each step it took was about a quarter mile. The drill on its nose looked like it could tunnel through miles of concrete without a hitch, and its engine was at least three times the size of the whole Mini SMART.

"All the same Stimuli Mirroring Automatic Reaction Technology, only under a hell of a lot more armor. More guns, bigger bombs, it's faster, hold four people instead of just one, and the whole thing is constructed of my own secret metal alloy: one flexible, extreme-heat-and-cold resistant, shock-proof, virtually impenetrable, and all around perfect."

Jack was almost speechless.

"This is too much for one day!" he exclaimed. "First, I beat the monks. Then, I get this amazing giant killer robot. What's next?"

"You don't need braces," Patience told him without missing a beat.

"Oh, yeah!" Jack hollered. "Let's take this thing for a test drive! I wanna blow up a city!"

As Wuya wandered around the SMART's giant talons in inspection, Patience held a forefinger up to remind Jack of a few small details.

"Don't forget, Jack, that you aren't playing games any more. The board won't reset, win or lose, ever again, and people in the real world bear grudges much more violently than you probably realize. I know this portion of your brain hasn't fully developed yet, but you need to plan ahead…"

"What do you mean my brain hasn't developed yet?" Jack snapped back.

"That's not what I said. The pre-frontal lobe in the male brain doesn't fully develop until the age of twenty-five. And you're, what, nineteen? Plus, most teen-agers lack the sufficient capabilities to plan ahead logically and thoroughly…"

"What is this?" Jack interrupted. "I thought you were a dentist, not a brain surgeon!"

"Isn't she smart?" Meg said quietly, gazing up at Jack. "She's my favorite dentist."

"I know this from reading the science pages in the Sunday papers," Patience replied calmly. "Now, as I was saying, you seriously need to plan ahead."

She pushed a button on her watch and the SMART responded. It lowered its massive, somewhat egg-shaped head to the ground and its black blast shield whooshed open. Patience climbed in via walking up the drill nose, while Jack flew in and Meg just bounced.

"Say, Jack," Wuya called up in her sweetest voice. "Now that you've beat the monks and you're on your merry way to take over the world, I just thought you should know that I was on your side all along, and that…"

"Take a hike, Wuya! I've so completely outgrown you! You can't contend, witch: I'm playin' in the big leagues now! And," Jack paused for a moment, considering the effect his words might have, "pass the message on to Chase!" he finished in a laugh.

The blast shield snapped down and the bot started to rise back up. Wuya heard Jack laughing triumphantly and stuck her tongue out at the bot.

"You've made a big mistake, Jack! You're going to regret this!"

The SMART, standing at full height again, turned away from Wuya and scratched up wave of dirt on her. Then, it expanded its massive wings, fired up its engines, and launched with a running start.

As the SMART ascended into the dark clouds and rain pattered on the windshield, Patience brought up a map of the world on the control board's display screen.

"Meg, don't push any buttons," she said without even looking into the back seat. "Jack! Don't push any buttons! Dear God, you two were made…to annoy me. Anyway, Jack, pay attention."

"I'm listening, I'm listening."

"Taking over the world doesn't mean flattening cities and burning villages. If you do that, you'll destroy thousands and thousands of years of priceless treasures, both man-made and natural, and you'll find yourself ruling a worthless planet of several billion pissed-off people."

"Whoa, back up! What are you, some kind of tree-hugger? I wanna blow stuff up! And rein of 'darkness and terror' demands it!"

"If you want to become the ruler of a totally sterile planet and make absolutely no profit off it whatsoever, that's fine by me! But you're the dark Evil Villain here and they are the struggling warriors of peace and love, and if you goof off then the story of your life will look an awful lot like a recycled Hollywood screen play."

"…oh…"

"Anyway, here's what I think you should do! You need to make yourself the top priority of every military in the world. You have to become such a massive threat that everyone will join forces against you. Believe me, you don't want the Chinese or Russian government saying they'll be your allies, because then you'll have to play by their rules and you'll probably get assassinated a lot faster. You should essentially force the whole world to put aside their differences and focus on you. That way, when you crush them all, you'll crush one giant army all at once in an undisputed victory, rather than mulling around in South America trying to track down the last little bits of warring armies that just didn't feel like joining the bulk force to come out and fight you."

Jack tapped his chin thoughtfully.

"You know, that sounds like it's going to take an awful lot of robots. Where are we going to get that many?"

Patience chuckled a bit.

"Jack, can you think of any weapons company that would sell such destructive equipment to a trigger-happy lunatic like you?"

"Lockheed Industries."

"Exactly. Them, and the entire good state of California will send out every last bomb and jet they have as long as we pay up. Of course, we'll just suck all that money right back up after we control every last back account and company stock on the face of the earth!"

This time, the triumphant evil laughing was partaken in, and enjoyed, by all three.

"They're never going to stop us now!" Jack laughed, adjusting his goggles and taking the SMART's controls.

"Damn straight they aren't. After all, I have one of the few Shen Gong Wu that even remotely interests me: the Master Pen. Meg," she looked over her shoulder into the back seat, where Meg was toying with her dread locks, "name an object. Any thing I can hold in my hand."

"Um…a Game Boy!"

Patience grinned.

"Watch this, Jack," she said. Pulling on the little arm that would normally draw up ink on a real calligraphy pen, Patience scrolled through a kind of Menu list displayed on the body of the pen, entering deeper and deeper into each category until she came to the Game Boy Color option.

"Master Pen!"

Ink poured from the tip of the pen and solidified in midair. In just a few seconds, the ink changed color and became a real, playable Game Boy, only with no batteries and no game cartridge.

"Cool!" Jack and Meg exclaimed at once. Meg snatched the Game Boy to inspect it.

"It's real!" she said, stunned.

"And that's why every one made such a big deal over getting to it when it first revealed itself," Patience explained. "It's right up there in the top five most powerful and most useful Shen Gong Wu. And now, it's mine. At this point, I can only think of three forces that could possibly stand in our way, and I've already got them figured out," Patience bragged.

"Who?" Meg asked, leaning up from the back seat.

"The U.S.M.C, the Russians, and…"

"The U.S.M.C?" Meg repeated with a quizzical expression.

"The United States Marine Corps, Meg. They have about a thousand mottos on how to destroy things as fast as possible, part of their training is yelling KILL KILL KILL, and every one of them is a dangerous combination of homicidal tendencies, faith to their commander, and faith in God. But, as I was saying: The Marines, the Russians, and the Japanese. Well," Patience paused for a moment, "and Chase Young, too, I suppose. But, I don't think even he is bullet proof!"

Jack squinted at something in the distant clouds and pushed a button for the radar system.

"Check it out! Speaking of not bullet proof, it's a Chinese fighter jet!"

"Oh, good!" Meg giggled. "Let's rear-end 'im and get this show on the road!"