Grocery Day is a Very Dangerous Day
in which the title is a quote from the same cartoon show Control Freak skipped over in chapter 1 (just to let you know)
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It took a long time and many nearly impossible contortions, but eventually Control Freak managed to squirm both himself and the two mice out of the ventilation shaft and onto the lawn before the Tower, panting heavily. "OK," he wheezed, doubling over, "that didn't work. What's next?"
Brain groaned, his pupils spinning woozily around the rest of his eyes. "How about I pop my discs back into place first?" he asked, his voice wobbling up and down in pitch like an acrophobe on a balance beam.
Control Freak stood up, slowly and shudderingly. He was in substantial pain, although by all rights that fall should've killed him. Why were all these attempts with Pinky and Brain so painful? They—well, the Brain at least—were supposed to be geniuses! How was it that Brain still hadn't gotten them inside yet? And—actually, it seemed like a jinx to ask it, but why hadn't any of this severe violence killed him? He cast a wayward glance at Pinky, who seemed to be doing a slow-motion, dizzy version of a waltz. All the sciences of the situations would also have demanded that the mice die, whether it be while rocketing into the atmosphere or plummeting down a ventilation shaft.
Well, Control Freak suddenly realized, they were cartoon characters. They were supposed to be able to do that. But then why had he suddenly become immune to death? HE wasn't a cartoon character.
"Yes you are," Pinky mumbled almost incoherently somewhere off to the left, but Control Freak assumed that he was answering some mental question of his own.
"WELL?!?" the supervillain demanded impatiently in order to have something to do. He glared at Brain. "ARE YOU DONE WITH YOUR SPINE YET?!!?!?"
Brain returned his glare with an equally menacing one. "Of course," he replied through gritted teeth, standing up with a cracking noise. "Unfortunately, my bone structure doesn't have quite as much cushioning as yours!"
Control Freak felt like screaming something exorbitantly antisemitic at the mouse, but managed to twitchingly hold it in. You need these guys to meet the quota, he reminded himself for what felt like the thousandth time. "You got another plan?" he spat.
"I always have another plan," Brain retorted acridly. Then Pinky shouted something totally unexpected.
"And I always have fish sticks!"
Control Freak whirled around, and was surprised to see that the little mouse was right. There he was, sitting there, stuffing his face with fish sticks.
"WHERE IN THE WORLD DID YOU GET THOSE?!?" Brain and Control Freak demanded in almost perfect harmony.
Pinky waved a hand vaguely at a nearby bush, a few over from the one the three had been hiding in before, and continued to munch gleefully on the stale-looking delicacies. Rushing over to the location he'd indicated, Control Freak pushed some of the brambles aside to find a cardboard box full of fish sticks. The box was crumpled—in fact, the entire bottom was utterly crushed—and looking a little worn, and the postmark stated that it had been sent to Titans Tower the week before. Brain, who had followed the supervillain over, lifted up a corner of one of the flaps.
"Obviously part of a food shipment to the Tower," the mouse observed dryly, letting the flap fall back into place as he walked around the rest of the box, rubbing his chin. "What with all their duties, whatever they may be, these Titans don't appear to feel the need go grocery shopping." Looking up at the top of the Tower, Brain shaded his eyes and traced an imaginary line in the air before him. "What with the trajectory this box took in its fall, I would surmise that the food arrives by some sort of aerial transport, where in all probability they drop it down a hatch in the roof where it enters into the—" Brain's pink eyes abruptly widened, and he turned to Pinky. "Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
Pinky chewed thoughtfully on another fish stick. "Um, I think so, Brain," he managed past the mounds of breaded seafood, "but shouldn't we dry out the puppies before we get started on the horse?"
Control Freak gave the taller mouse an odd look, then returned his attention to Brain, who was shaking his head. "No, NO!" Brain replied, then pointed to the roof of Titans Tower. "If we can manage to command their food delivery," he enunciated slowly, rubbing his hands together expectantly, "then we can take over Titans Tower!"
Control Freak's hand immediately shot into an inner pocket of his Sith robe, from which he pulled a miraculously unharmed portable laptop—not the Couch Potato Laptop of Doom, though. Flipping it open, he immediately uploaded the wireless Internet connection and did a quick search on the Coven's website. Within moments, he looked up in diabolical glee.
"Guess who just happens to have a grocery delivery due today," he cackled implicatively, which made for a great dramatic effect until Pinky broke in.
"Regis Philbin?"
"Oh, forget it," Control Freak sighed in disgust, and he waited patiently for the Brain to come up with a plan.
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"THIS is your PLAN," he clarified some time later, sandwiched inside a now-empty box that smelled like fish sticks. "Getting into a BOX."
"SHHH!" Brain hissed from somewhere near his right elbow—Control Freak couldn't possibly contort himself around to see. "If we can convince the people in the delivery vehicles that they've DROPPED a package—US—then they will undoubtedly come down and get their 'dropped cargo' and transport us inside the Tower!"
"How come we can't do any more COOL plans?" the supervillain griped, trying desperately to ignore an itch on the back of his shin. Because of his odd curled-up position, the only relief he could possibly get was by rubbing it very carefully against his lower spine. "That first plan had a HEAT LASER and ROCKETS and EVERYTHING! Now we just have an old box that stinks of seafood!"
"I think it's an improvement," Pinky commented in a muffled voice from somewhere behind him. This statement was followed by an odd sound that Control Freak at first couldn't identify, then decided was Pinky licking the side of the box. He shuddered.
"Well, couldn't we at least do something OTHER than just trying to sneak in?" he hissed pathetically.
Brain made an odd sort of snort. "As I told you, my first plan was to take the delivery vehicles hostage and attempt to starve out these 'Teen Titans', but you insisted that we oust them today."
Ah, yes, the quota. These continued failings to infiltrate Titans Tower were taking up a lot of his precious time to do some dastardly Couch Potato-y deeds—it was already almost six-thirty, if he remembered the laptop's readout correctly. His pudgy hands curled into fists...well, they WOULD if his nerve endings weren't being strained by the close confines of the box. He couldn't disappoint his Leader, especially not with such high stakes. He had just bought the latest season of Star Trek: Enterprise the day before, and he hadn't even removed the plastic wrapping yet.
"All right, all right," Control Freak grumbled, and they lapsed into silence. Which was almost immediately broken by the overweight supervillain.
"I wish we could see out of the top of the box."
Control Freak had, in the short space of time he'd known him, figured out how to tell by sound that Brain was rolling his eyes. This was one of those moments. "Oh, yesssss, BRILLIANT idea," the mouse spat sarcastically. "Perhaps someone should have thought of it before we went into the box!"
There was a soft gasp from behind him. "Oooooh, I'm sorry, Brain!" Pinky wailed. "I didn't know!! Oh, I'm sorr-orr-orr-rrryyyyyyyy!!!!"
Next came a long, sloooooow pause. "Pinky," the Brain noted impatiently, "I was speaking to the other buffoon."
Grumbling, Control Freak jerked his leg in an anatomically impossible direction, and was pleased to hear a muffled whumf as it connected with something small and rodentlike. A few seconds later, though, two bloodshot pink eyes dropped upside-down in front of his face and glared at him. At first the supervillain was startled, then he was just plain confused.
"Heeeeeeeeey," he realized, stretching the word as he narrowed his eyes, "how come I can see your eyes when it's so dark I can't see anything else?"
The Brain made a grumbling sound, but it was obvious that he enjoyed discussing anything that Control Freak might not understand. "Recall, if you will, that my companion and I are genetically altered lab mice. During a botched experiment to give us night vision, our retinas became glow-in-the-dark."
There floated up to Control Freak a congested giggle and a "Zort!". "I liked that experiment where we got webbed feet, myself," he remarked. Control Freak himself was just trying to remember what the mice's feet had looked like when he heard the sounds of Brain becoming increasingly fed up.
"That wasn't an EXPERIMENT!" he retaliated. "That was when you accidentally went through the laminating machine while we were printing up fliers for that plot with the 'Pokey-man' cards!"
"Oh, really?" Pinky answered, sounding confused. "I thought that was the time when we stole all the fabric softener from the laundromats so everyone on Earth would be in uncomfortable clothes!"
"No, no, no!" the Brain shot back, closing his eyes. The small pink pinpricks of light disappeared like a candle being blown out. "That was when I got a pair of denim jeans fused to my face."
A shower of dandruff against Control Freak's fingertips alerted him to the fact that Pinky was rubbing his head vigorously. "Actually, Brain, I'm pretty sure that happened during the time when we got stuck inside that tuba, don't you remember?"
Control Freak's eyes were flitting back and forth between the sources of the two voices. What exactly were they talking about?
"You mean that time with the horrible mix-up with the hypnotically-tuned instruments and the 3rd grade orchestra? It wasn't pantswear that time, that time it was—"
No one got to hear what it was that time, though, as suddenly the box left the ground. "WE'RE MOVING!" Control Freak cried excitedly, and for his trouble he got a whack on the nose from Brain.
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Outside in a large, white-and-blue helicopter were two men, one older with a strong-chinned stony face, black hair and mustache, and the other a young man with a mess of short brown hair piled on top of his head. Both were uniformed in blue collared shirts and slacks with the insignia "Superhero Caterers" sewed elegantly over the pockets.
"Dunno how we coulda' dropped that box there," commented the older man, glancing out the window to watch as a winch attached to the bottom of the copter swung the cardboard box into the air. Next to the relatively small package was another winch, holding up a huge net full of similar-looking boxes. "I was sure that net was tight when we left."
"Uh-huh." The younger man yawned, leaning back in his seat a little as he listened to the commotion outside the chopper. Then he looked back at the other man. "Hey dad, do grocery boxes usually say 'Ouch', 'NarfPoitZort' or 'Shut up Pinky or we'll be discovered'?"
"No, not that I know of."
"All right then," the younger man replied, and went to sleep.
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Inside the Tower, Robin was kicking a stuffed Slade dummy in his private training room when a red light began flashing on the ceiling. Seeing this, he paused in his "exercise", then walked to the wall and pressed a button. The red light immediately turned off. Satisfied with this result, Robin pulled a round yellow device from his belt and flipped the top open. "Beast Boy," he dictated into the communicator, "the copter's here. It's your turn to get the groceries."
"Awwwwww..." a voice moaned from the device, but the connection terminated. In a moment a green cheetah streaked down the hallway, soon transforming into a small green bird and flying straight to the uppermost room in the Tower. Once he was inside the empty, cavernous "pantry", the bird spun back into the shape of a green-skinned teenager, and Beast Boy sighed. "I did so get it last week too," he grumbled, but keyed in something on a nearby computer. Immediately the helicopter landing pad on the Tower roof slid back, revealing a cavernous hole in the ceiling of the room Beast Boy was standing in.
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As he watched the hatchway open beneath him, the older helicopter pilot pressed a button on the dashboard. Both winches let go of their cargo, and the net as well as the stray box plummeted into the "pantry". Suddenly waking up, the younger man watched sleepily as the roof slid back into place and the chopper turned to fly back home.
"Dad," the younger man started again, "do groceries usually scream like girls when they're dropped from the bottom of a helicopter?"
The older man turned to look at him, then placed a hand on the younger man's shoulder. "Son," he remarked, "you have a lot to learn about this business."
So saying, the helicopter flew dramatically off into the sunset.
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Inside the massive storage room of the Tower, Beast Boy let out another groaning sigh and walked over to the boxes, checking the labels to make sure nothing was missing. "Hmmm...there's the tomatoes, yeaaaaah, and the bread, and there's the turkey—eeeee-yew—and—oh, score, there's my TOFU!" The Teen Titan hopped up and down in glee, hugging the all-important package to his chest, then stopped and sniffed the air. "Oooouh," he shuddered, dropping the tofu (GASP!) and holding his super-sensitive nose. "GROSSSSSS!!" Following the odor, he found a suspiciously large, beaten-up box that, in the bad lighting, appeared to be trembling. "ICK! These fish sticks are a week old! And they smell like mice and SWEAT! DUDE, that is so wrong."
Sliding his hands underneath the box, Beast Boy struggled to lift it. "Ugh, this weighs a ton!" he wheezed, snapping his hands back out, then taking a deep breath he spun into the form of an elephant. Lifting the box with his tusks, Beast Boy used his trunk to push open one of the huge glass windows and chucked the crate out of the Tower, changing back into himself and closing the pane.
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"GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!" screamed Control Freak and his two mousy companions as the box sailed down the immense height from the top of the Tower. The flaps burst open, and the wannabe supervillains tumbled out of the crate in freefall, eyes widening in terror as they sailed over the town. The ground fervently rushed up to meet them, greeting the three with a bone-crushing hug and a heavy slap on the back. The sheer force of their fall sent them smashing straight through the ground, where they crashed (coincidentally) right into the Couch Potato Den of the Couch Potato Lair.
All was quiet save for a few painful groans. Then Pinky managed to wriggle woozily out from underneath Control Freak's massive forearm, wobblingly holding up a finger while his eyes unfocused comically. "He shouldn't...shouldn't be so picky ab...about wha' he, troz, eeeeats," he objected garbledly, then with a sickening thud the chapter ended.