Chapter 22. Revenge is Sweet and Spicy

With the Master Pen, there was nothing Jack Spicer could not do. He rebuilt all the SMART bots and made them even better than before. He used Meg Kake's bullet-time reflexes to upgrade the SMART's reaction time. He had Evil followers, and his new Mega SMARTs were stationed all over China, with the Xiaolin Dragon's imprisoned in their own temple.

"Don't need to even bother trying to take their Shen Gong Wu," Jack laughed when he first locked them up, "because I've invented this! I call it the Omni-Wu. Just say the name of the Wu, and it uses that power! It can copy absolutely any Wu that's activated thus far!"

The new Mother SMART was stationed in Great Britain, casting a several mile shadow from above Buckingham palace. Jack strode to the controls deck, the Master Pen gripped in one hand and a cell phone in the other.

"I don't care if they just won their independence!" Jack snapped. "They're not the only ones about to join the Spicerist Empire! If they don't surrender within twenty-four hours, make a crater of 'em! That's an order!"

Jack snapped the phone shut and tucked it into his pocket with a smug grin.

"Ah, taking over the world is even better than I imagined. My own array of Evil officers to do my bidding, a hundred thousand Evil robots, and the whole planet it the palm of my hand!" He finished with a maniacal laugh, throwing his fists in the air as a SMART sunk the last ship in the British Navy. "And, on top of it all, I'm independent! No Wuya, no Chase, no Hannibal Bean, no Patience! Just me! I'm top dog! I'm the last Master of Evil standing!"

His cell phone rang, again, just before he reached the climax of his evil rant.

"Now, if only I could be in fifty places at once," he muttered.

"You can be!" Meg said, bouncing into the room suddenly. "Just use the Ring of the Nine Dragons! Then there can be up to nine of you?"

"Only it would be nine dithering, blithering freaks," Jack reminded her.

"Oh, yeah…" Meg said slowly, scratching her chin. "I'll be right back."

She disappeared, as though poorly edited out of existence, and ran off in bullet time. Jack rolled his eyes and answered his phone.

"Spicer," he said.

"I am going to make you suffer in a way you never thought imaginable in hell!" snarled the lethal voice of Patience.

Jack snapped the phone shut instantly and shuddered as he put it away.

"Ugh! I hate those calls."

Meg reappeared in front of him, holding the Ring of the Nine Dragons and the Reversing Mirror.

"I consulted the Fountain of Hui and the Eagle Scope, and I know just what to do. If you use the Ring of the Nine Dragons with the reversing Mirror, you can make up to nine copies of yourself, the only difference is this: with the reversing mirror, you don't get dumber and dumber with each copy. Instead, you improve! Pretty cool, huh? Imagine being nine times smarter and generally better than you are now? That would be out of control!"

"Give me those Wu!" Jack exclaimed, holding out his hand. Meg smiled and handed them to him with a squeak.

"Hmm, I wonder if there would be any negative repercussions…Nah! Ring of the Nine Dragons! Reversing Mirror!"

With a dim flash, Jack Spicer divided himself into four. And, just as Meg said, he didn't reduce in the slightest.

The four Jacks were spiffy and sleek, to say the least. Though each retained the bright red hair, pale skin, and red eyes of the original, each one wore a different colored trench coat. One kept the traditional black, one had a Wuya-red coat, one had Chase-green, and one had Patience-dark gold. Jack was better built, too. He already had a mature body for being twenty, but now he was just ripped. He was possibly a little taller, too.

"This is more like it," said the Jack in red.

"I feel like I could take on the rest of the solar system," laughed the Jack in dull gold, throwing a few mock punches in the air.

"I have a better plan," said the first Jack, still in black. "I say it's time we take out our personal revenge! It's time we went and repaid all the humiliation and disgrace we've suffered over the years!"

"You're right," said the Jack in green. "We've put up with their crap for too long now! The insults, the bad puns…"

"And the over-all verbal harassment and physical punishment!" the Jack in red finished.

"What are you going to do?" Meg asked, her hands behind her back, her feet together, and her head to the side.

"My simple and small friend," said the Jack in green as he put a hand on her shoulder. "Isn't it obvious? We four will enact our revenge, our personal vendettas, against all those who ever dared to shame the name Jack Spicer!"

"Wuya!"

"Chase Young!"

"The Xiaolin Monks!"

"Katnappe, Vladd, Cyclops, and even Master Monk Guan!"

"Here," said the first Jack, "take these." He handed Meg the Ring and Mirror. "While we're gone, divide yourself up nine times, send a copy to every corner of the world, and watch over the fleet. Take only defensive action- I'm saving all the offensive fun for myself!"

"Keep an eye out for new Wu, too," added the red Jack, "though the computer isn't forecasting any for a few more days."

"Now, where to start?" one wondered aloud.

"I know just the enemy," gold Jack grinned. He reached into the Shen Gong Wu bag and withdrew Wuya's puzzle box. "And, I know just the place, too."

The four Jack's left in a regular SMART, with only the Master Pen and the puzzle box. Meg watched them leave, greatly impressed by the enhanced Jack. Then, without waiting another moment, Meg pulled on the Ring of the Nine Dragons and held up the Reversing Mirror.

"Sorry, Jack, but I have some plans of my own!"

Nine Meg Kake's are a sight to behold. They were all dressed in bright, neon colors, with multicolored dread locks and wild jewelry. Each had a letter of the name 'Meg Kake' on her belt buckle, though one was just a blank and one was an evil smiley.

"And now, listen up," said the Meg with the "M" on her belt. Here's the plan! The two of you cover North America. You stay here with "E" here and cover Europe. You two: Asia. And you," she pointed to the last one, "you keep an eye on South America, Africa, and Australia, just incase. In the meantime, I am going to check in on Miss Seek, even though Jack clearly doesn't case. Now, go! Go! Go!"

While the nine Meg's spread themselves around the world, the four Jack's were en route to a familiar place.

"Make sure she doesn't escape once the box is open," said the red Jack. "Other wise, she'll just fly away."

"I've got the Omni-Wu right here."

The Omni-Wu, it should be noted, looks exactly like a TV remote.

The regular SMART landed near a range of gray mountains and dying trees. It was a barren, wasteland of a place, but any one who knew anything about Wuya would recognize it.

"Time to get your reward," the red Jack laughed as he opened the puzzle box, "for all the kindness and fairness you showed me over the years.

The purple, translucent ghost of Wuya drifted from the box, rolling through the air as though in a daze.

"What…happened?" she asked in her unpleasant, haggard voice. "Where am I? How did I get here?"

"We've decided that it's time you got what you deserved," said the green Jack.

"Jack? Why are there four of you? What are you up to?"

"This! Omni-Wu! Reversing Mirror! Serpent's Tail!"

In a flash, Wuya was once again transformed to her human form. She appeared in a vibrating halo of green light and dropped to the ground. When she got to her feet again, she tried to get back on Jack's good side.

"Why, Jack, I didn't realize you wanted to join forces again," she said with a sly grin.

"I don't," said the gold Jack. "Do you think I'm an idiot?"

"I only changed you back because we can't do a thing to ya as a ghost."

"And don't even try to fight back- we took all your powers. Though, that would make it more entertaining."

"Do…what?" Wuya asked slowly.

The four Jacks took a step back and put their hands in the air.

"Rise, my rock creatures!" the cried out in unison.

Four green-eyed, growling rock monsters rose from the ground below each Jack, lifting him up on their shoulders.

"I want the whole world to know about this," Jack laughed. "Master Pen!"

The green Jack created a simple laptop and web-cam, which he designed to hover about and capture the whole scene on a live web-cast.

"This is for when you first turned on me!" the Jack in black cried out. He rushed at Wuya with the rock creature and pummeled her to the ground.

"This is for ripping the roof off my evil lair!"

"This is for destroying my time machine!"

"This is for trying to vaporize, crush, and otherwise torture me!"

"This is for calling me an idiot, and all those other names!"

"This is for abandoning me for Chase Young!"

"This is for ganging up on me with Hannibal Bean!"

"This is for double-crossing me at every turn!"

"This is for smacking me around!"

"This is for taking general pleasure from my pain!"

"This if for betraying me after just one season!"

"This is for using me!"

With every vengeful outburst, the Jacks wailed on Wuya. They chased her around the barren field, kicked her around like a soccer ball and threw her through the air, making nasty jokes about her the whole time.

Finally, when the Jacks had had enough for the time being, they locked the unconscious Wuya in the stomach cage of a rock monster. The flying web-cam drifted down and rested on the ground outside the cage. Gold Jack kneeled down and typed in a scrolling banner.

"Wuya, evil Heylin witch, humiliated by Jack Spicer, Master of Evil and Earth. BEWARE, all who ever dared disgrace the name of Spicer: You are next!"

And, so it was.

The four Jacks traveled around the world to find every last person they could think of who ever dared to them wrong. Le Mime was all but vaporized, Cyclops was never seen again, and Katnappe was given a flea bath in a giant tub filled with angry dogs of the German Shepard and Rottweiler breed. Tubbimoura's 'Muffin Face' was unusually but cruelly put down, Vladd ended up hanging from the tip of the sword of an old USSR statue by his underwear elastic, and, the last Jack saw of his obnoxious cousin Megan, she was shrunken down to the size of a grain of rice and set free in a lab-mouse maze.

The Jacks even went back to the several towns he had gone to school at in his youth, and annihilated all the schools.

"School's out forever, Principal Brophey!" he laughed, firing another laser cannon.

Once they had returned to cruising altitude, the Jack in green crossed another set of names off the Spicer Evil Hit List.

"I think we've covered almost all of them," he said with dark satisfaction.

"Too bad we can't get at Hannibal Bean," said the Jack in dark gold, his feet up on the chair in front of him.

There was a pause, unbroken until the black Jack raised his forefinger.

"Actually, I think there might be a way. But, I don't think it's worth going through the trouble just to take out revenge."

"I know what you're thinking, and I agree. Besides, what could we even do to him? Cook him into a burrito?"

"We should," red Jack laughed.

"Do you have any idea how nasty that would taste?" the green Jack exclaimed, laughing. "That would be like…ugh, I can't even think about it!"

"I dare you to eat a Hannibal Bean burrito," the gold Jack snickered.

"You're daring yourself," the green pointed out.

The gold Jack just rolled his eyes. "Anyway," he said, "who else is there?"

"Well, I think all we have left is, actually, Chase Young."

The Jack in black sighed faintly.

"I don't know, guys. You saw what he did to Patience."

"So? There's four of us here, and were smarter, faster, and stronger than ever before! We have the Omni-Wu and the Master Pen; he doesn't stand a chance!"

"So, what should we do to him?" asked the green Jack.

"I say we hose him down with lead-based, yellow paint," the gold Jack said, panning his hands out, envisioning the scene.

All the other Jacks turned and looked at him with quizzical expressions.

"…Why?" asked the red Jack.

"Two reasons. One, if we get a fire hose, it'll hurt like hell. Two, he's a yellow-bellied bastard!"

All four Jacks broke out in evil laughter, picturing the scene, too.

"We have to do something outright cruel," said the red Jack.

"After all the times he humiliated us!"

"There we were, idolizing him every step of the way, and he treated us like toxic waste!"

"Made fun of us! Called us names, knocked us around, and insulted us!"

"And the time he made me change Cyclops!" the Jack in black growled in a deep, deadly voice.

"Right! He may have been our Evil idol years ago, but we've outgrown that!"

"I, for one, am no longer impressed. He may be powerful, but he's not good enough for the Master Pen!"

"He's not good enough for Jack Spicer!"