A/N: I've finally caught up with putting all the stuff I have up there already; now I'll just post them as I write them, okay?

Chapter 25:

Velma did a pretty good job of acting professionally, Shaggy had to admit to himself. As the week wore on, whether it was security duty, lab work, sweeping the halls for evidence, or just sitting in on ordinary meetings, Velma could stay alert and focused no matter how boring the subject at hand might be. One might have jumped to the conclusion that Velma simply never found anything to be less than fascinating, but after work every night Velma would confide in Shaggy which parts of the day she honestly wanted to sleep during. After work was when Velma magically forgot all about looking, acting, and talking "professionally." After work was fun.

Still, during the workday was torture. Shaggy tried to emulate Velma's professional manner by addressing her as "Miss Dinkley" in front of coworkers, as she always called him "Mr. Rogers." That always felt awkward. Velma had been Velma since fifth grade. Was this last-name stuff overdoing it?

At least she still called him Shaggy when nobody else was around. At least she still kissed him when nobody else was around.

Shaggy often got unprofessionally lost in his thoughts about Velma. Nobody besides Velma noticed; Shaggy was always absent-minded, and all the other employees had long ago learned to chalk it all up to something food-related.

"Shaggy? Shaggy?" Velma waved her hand in front of his face.

"Huh-- wah?" Shaggy snapped back to alertness.

Velma suppressed a laugh. "We were supposed to be at that meeting at two-thirty, remember? The one about whether or not to spring for new security detectors?"

"Oh... right..." Shaggy followed Velma up one of the CCC's numerous staircases. He still didn't know his way around the place and without one of the others accompanying him, he was completely lost.

He was following about four steps behind Velma, with Scooby right at his heels. He felt a tap on his shoulder. "Yeah, Scoob?"

"Rasn't me," the Great Dane answered.

"Then who--?"

He quickly received the answer to his question. Something grabbed him by his shirt. The thing's other hand took hold of Scooby's collar. It seemed to pull them from somewhere into nowhere.

"Shaggy!" Velma called, turning around.

Nothing but a ghostly absence answered her...

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"You're mistaken, sir," Shaggy answered the yellow-eyed creature as it interrogated him. "See, like, it's not the Fizlayen Orb of Power. It's the... uh... Fizlayen Orb of Sour. It's like this giant citrus fruit--"

The Veq groaned. He should have snatched the girl in the orange sweater who looked like she knew what she was doing. He had thought it would be easier to scare these two into revealing everything, but obviously they overestimated their lying ability and assumed they could get away with not telling him what they knew.

"Whatever! Just let me know where the Orb is!" Clearly, he had somehow figured out that after Daphne's encounter, the orb had been relocated. Also clearly, nobody had told him that it was now hidden on sublevel twenty-nine, accessible only by stairs. "Or the both of you are going to pay!"

"Four bits?"

"No!" He walked over to a strange apparatus that looked a little like a dentist's chair, except it had straps with locks on them. "If I have to," he explained, "I will strap you both into this chair. I will leave you there until you tell me what I want to know. Every now and then, a single drop will land on your foreheads."

"Like the Chinese water torture?"

"Like the Chinese barbecue sauce torture."

No!

"We'll tell, we'll tell!" Shaggy begged.

"Good, good."

Shaggy had no idea where he was going in this maze of hallways and corridors he had never bothered to memorize. He simply picked a small, random door that probably didn't lead anywhere important. "It's in here," he told the Veq.

"Reah. Right in rere," Scooby backed him up.

The Veq had a feeling they were trying to ditch him, but if they were telling the truth he didn't dare simply not check. So he tied them to a nearby pole before walking in.

He started falling.

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"Shaggy?" Velma called, hearing the word echoing back to her in a lonely, frightening manner.

Yet there was something about the echo. Velma stood over the spot from which Shaggy and Scooby had disappeared and called again.

There was a certain metallic reverberation to that sound. It was coming from overhead.

Ventillation ducts. Of course... that was how people always moved around mysteriously through buildings in the movies. Velma stood shakily on the handrail next to the stairs, then jumped and pulled herself into the ducts.

There was no way of knowing which way the three had gone. Velma only sat for a moment and prayed for an accurate burst of intuition just then. She chose the direction and followed it.

Sure enough, Velma soon came to a room where the grate had been pulled off the duct. In all likelihood the kidnapper had been in too much of a hurry to put it back on. She jumped into the room.

Nobody was in there.

Velma felt a surge of frustration before noticing something: a trail. Every few feet, a couple more bright orange crumbs seemed to be trying to direct her somewhere.

Shaggy had had a bag of chips at lunch, hadn't he? Cheetos. Then he had shoved the empty bag, crumbs and all, into his back pocket.

Velma wasn't sure if this Hansel-and-Gretel trail was intentional or not, but she felt positive it would lead to Shaggy. She followed it out of the room.

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"Shaggy!"

Shaggy looked up from his position tied to the pole. It was Velma, all right. She had found him, somehow.

"You found me? Like how?" Shaggy asked.

"You left a Cheeto trail," Velma answered, untying Shaggy and Scooby. Then she remembered when she had first climbed into the ducts and didn't know whether to go left or right. Somehow she had chosen correctly with nothing else to go on, except... "And it was a bit of dumb luck," she added. "Yours must be rubbing off on me." Shaggy smiled at her.

"So... who tied you here, Shaggy?" Velma asked him.

"A Veq," he answered. Velma shuddered. Something seemed very ominous about never having actually seen one yet knowing they were lurking all over the place.

"Which way did it go?" she asked.

Shaggy pointed toward the door. Velma opened it. She turned around.

"Well, no wonder it's gone..." she told Shaggy.

"Like why?"

"Shaggy, do you know what's behind every door on this hallway except this one?"

"No, what?"

"These are guest rooms. For ambassadors who stay at the CCC overnight," Velma answered. "Only you can tell by this door's smaller size and squarish shape that it doesn't lead to another bedroom." She grinned humorously. "This is the laundry chute."

"Ohhhhh," Shaggy and Scooby responded together. Shaggy, laughing, ran up and kissed Velma, partly out of this new habit but mostly out of relief. Scooby looked away, turning red under his fur.

"Thanks, Shag," Velma told him. "I-- I was so worried that something might have happened to you..."

"And like I was wondering if he would go after you once we were out of the way," Shaggy confessed. They kissed again, the relief greater this time. Velma's professionalism didn't care, for a change, that they were late for a meeting, that anyone could come down the hall and catch them at any time...

Shaggy didn't want to get Velma in trouble. He himself didn't care if he were fired, but out of concern for how seriously Velma took her work he pulled back.

"So, uh, 'Miss Dinkley', " he said with a wink, "I like picked up a hair that that Veq thing shed after he disappeared." He started speaking more formally. "I know that as Veqs aren't registered in the genetic database, but perhaps this could be used to identify which species they might be most closely related to." Velma grinned knowingly. Obviously that speech was rehearsed, and Velma was surprised he had produced it without access to a dictionary.

"Great," she told him, "but after the meeting. We'll be excused from the part we've missed after we explain what happened" Leaving out certain details, she thought, "but we really should save the testing until later. You know, we can probably run it through the scanner that detects carbon-12 to C-14 ratios. As long as the sample was pulled recently, we can probably get a reading that will accurately match it to the planet with the most similar atmosphere, if it's one in our database. If not, we at least know what to tell those discovering new planets about environmental conditions to watch out for..."

Good old Velma. Always devoted to her work...

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After an unendurably long meeting, Shaggy, Scooby, and Velma waited around in the lab, waiting to read the machine's results. Velma could already envision what the screen would look like... something along the lines of:

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Species match (approximation): (fill in the blank)

Planet of origin (approximation): (fill in the blank)

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"Raggy! Relma! Rit's rone!" Scooby called from next to the screen.

Shaggy and Velma walked across the lab eagerly. Finally, the results were in... the clue was available...

But wait. These results had to be a mistake... they were impossible...

The three gasped as they read:

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Species match (confirmed): Human

Planet of origin (confirmed): Earth

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