"Like it is"
By Rain Crow

"It was just another day in the park. The falling leaves bedeviled the beguiling beauty who was currently working on the Ranger Plane. Gadget playfully swatted a skittering, gold flecked oak leaf away from her while she examined the mess of wires and, disregarding all safety regulations, tossed half of them into the back of the Plane, calling them spare parts. The havoc that would ensue when they turned out to have been from the port side wing gyro was in the distant future and she-"

"DALE!" Gadget's exasperated shout echoed off of the landing branch and up to one of the upper branches where the red nosed chipmunk lay relaxing in the Fall sunshine. "I can HEAR you. Aren't your "canon-fanon" stories supposed to bring us good publicity?" Dale looked over the side of his branch to see the lovely mechanic push a grease stained mass of hair out of her eyes as she stared up at him with a miffed expression. "And those wires were redundant! Re-Dun-Dent! The wings fell off last week for a completely different reason!"

Frowning, Dale tucked his pen and paper into his shirt and rolled off of his branch, dropping down and landing in front of Gadget with a nearly graceful thud, causing her to jump back with a surprised squeak. Before she could recover Dale came to his feet and asked, "Aren't redundant systems a standard safety feature on most complex vehicles?"

Gadget blushed, and discarded Dale's words with a swish of her fingers, "Sure, but those extra wires were taking up too much space! I needed more room to try out some new modifications to the wings internal structure."

"What new modifications?"

Chip's curious voice caused both Gadget and Dale to jump. Gadget quickly seized on the opportunity to defend her flaunting of FAA safety regulations and common sense.

"Dale," she began, "Is being snarky."

Chip and Dale blinked, looked at each other, and asked, "Snarky?"

"Yes!" she cried, happy at their agreement, "He's implying that my removal of the secondary relay wires from the port side gyro-synchronizer on the Ranger Plane caused our unexpected landing last week."

"Oh," said Chip, "Did it not?"

Gadget smiled her widest smile, "No! The gyro-sync worked great; it was the anomalous malfunction in the RATS that caused us to have to land in the rose bush."

Dale looked at the Ranger Plane. It still had scratch marks. Come to think of it, so did he and Chip and Monty. He glanced at Chip and could tell that his friend was thinking what Dale was about to say.

"So," Dale said, "it was the Rocket Assisted Takeoff System that caused the crash?"

"Yes," Gadget frowned at Dale's continued use of the word "crash". It hadn't been that bad. "What I think happ-"

"And, you removed the wires to make room for the RATS?"

She gave her friend a glower, but nodded; really, Dale should know better than to interrupt people when they were explaining-

"Well, then you really could say that taking those wires out caused the crash," Chip said, looking at Dale, who grinned at his friend. Both missed the steam that beginning to leak out of their teammate's ears.

"Yup," Dale grinned at Gadget, happy to have his fictionalized recounting of the Ranger's harrowing lifestyle defended by the team's unofficial leader, "And my readers have come to expect a certain amount of chaos when it comes to Gadget's inventions, so-OMPH!"

Dale sat down and tried to remove the plunger that had suddenly slapped over his snout. Chip's alarmed shout was cut short as another unerring bolt of molded rubber set him down next to his friend. Gadget put away the two plunger pistols that she'd produced from, somewhere, and stormed past the two struggling boys and into the tree to make a snack.

"Put that in your story!" she called over her shoulder as the hanger door closed.

fin