The Occult Experience
Chapter Fourteen
It's not particularly hard to find where the Illustrious Doctor Membrane worked.
Getting into the production studio, on the other hand, was a test of frustrating minutia that Al had failed thrice over. His third time trying to qualify actually had a lower score than either of his previous attempts.
This was going to be his last shot before he called in some help and retrieved Shauna from the truck stop and set up a group planning session. If that didn't work, he'd be stuck crawling through varying planes, realities, dimensions and sub-dimensions trying to find one at-times frustrating little boy.
He turned the doorknob and pushed. Nothing.
He turned the doorknob and pulled.
"Sir! You can't come in here! This section is reserved for staff. Please leave before I have to call security!" A pencil-necked reed of a man said to Al before he'd even closed the door behind him. His voice was strangely high-pitched and cracked a few times as he spoke, as though he were still in the throws of puberty and he was wearing light body armor and a helmet with a clear, plexiglass visor.
Why would a television personality have guards pulled straight from the evil overlord list?
While Al pondered on this, he also wondered how, exactly, he should handle this. He hadn't exactly planned on being caught, coincidentally, he hadn't planned much at all. He supposed he could lie, but-
"Security!" The reedy-man shouted into a hand held walkie-talkie, interrupting Al's planning mid-thought. "There's an intruder at the employee entrance! He's dressed like a pirate!"
Al gave it a half second more of thought as the man drew a stun-gun. Al punched him in the throat, one of the weak spots not protected by the body armor. Closing his claw over one of the man's hands as he reached up to assuage his Adams apple, he forced the man to activate the tazer and shock himself. In the neck.
The man dropped like a twitching sack of potatoes.
Hurriedly, Al started to strip the man of his clothes, he'd taken off his top layer of the light armor when two things occurred.
One was the thought, the armor utilizing clear plexiglass in the helmets made the thought of trying to sneak around dressed like one of the guards useless.
The second was that he could hear a small stampede behind him as he was working the mans pants off. When he turned around he felt a pin lodge itself into his chest, and felt the air displacement of the other pin between his torso and left arm. The circuit incomplete, the stun-gun didn't activate and the pin in his chest, while painful, was no worse than a bee sting.
There were four more people at the end of the hallway aside from his shooter, all in blue light armor with helmets and clear visors lining him up in their sights as they aimed their stun guns at him.
"This is bad..." Al mumbled to himself. The security team paused for just a moment as they took in what was happening.
"He's molesting Joey! Everybody shoot him!"
Al had more than a dozen magical tricks that would distract, disorient or otherwise harm the guards enough for him to walk by perfectly unscathed.
Half of them would require a stupid chant because, while capable of using them, he wasn't practiced in certain skills.
A quarter of them were just plain fatal, and while violence was a very good solution, it was counterproductive to kill the lackeys of people you want to help you.
One of them was immensely draining, absolutely fatal and difficult to scale down from moon-sized-crater, which was the maximum and base amount of power used in it.
He instead threw Joey at the security team. The man spun a few times through the air, a handful of electrical leads sticking into his body, fired by his own comrades as he bowled into the four men and one woman who'd come to his rescue.
"That could've gone-" Al attempted to mumble to himself as he passed the groaning pile of bodies. Apparently one of the security force had remained quite capable of moving and had replaced the cartridge of their stun gun, quite happy to shoot him in the back as he walked by.
Al recovered quickly from the electrically induced seizure and descended upon the groaning dog-pile, his good will spent. With a series of loud cracks, the six people who'd initially impeded him were all left with concussions and quite unable to accomplish much beyond languish in place and wait for an ambulance or other medical personnel.
There'd been ten more security troops between him and Dib's father. He'd been getting frustrated, he'd admit as such, and the last five were unconscious and bleeding on the floor.
He'd been tazered three more times before he'd made it to the Professors dressing room, and were it not for his rather hardier-than-normal constitution he'd either be out cold waiting to be arrested, or he'd be doing the good old fashion Jerk n' Twist on the floor somewhere.
His fine motor control would probably be somewhere out the window as well. Possibly going for a nice jaunty ride on the back of a flying pig.
All things considered, Al thought he was rather polite to knock on the mans door. Admittedly his fist went through the door, and summarily opened it from the inside, but it's really the thought that counts. He also closed the door behind him, managing to not slam it shut.
"Well, hello there!" A gloved hand waved at him, but the professor, a man in a white lab coat, black gloves and a cowlick to put Dib to shame did not turn around to greet the intruder.
He was instead scribbling on a sheet of paper, hunched over a desk.
"Just go ahead and put whatever you want signed on my desk and I'll get to you in a moment."
"Actually Professor Membrane, I'm here to talk about your son." Looking around, everything in the room was either light-weight or on wheels. Nothing that would work too well to bar a door with. Except for the desk the professor was at.
Considering the scientist was doing a fairly decent job of ignoring him, Al didn't feel too guilty about moving the desk out from under the scientist and pushing it against the door. The professor, unused to such rudeness, stared from his seat at the demonic guest.
Well, he probably stared. Al couldn't really make out his expression under those opaque goggles.
"Do I actually have your attention now? Hmm?" Al sat down on the desk. The professor crossed his arms and most likely glared.
"Well, make your demands and get on with it. This isn't the first time I've been held hostage, you know." Al sighed. The man obviously hadn't heard him earlier.
"This isn't about you, you egotistical twit. This is about one of your kids." As one eyebrow rose above opaque goggles, Al wondered how often the man was insulted.
"Whom has Gaz beaten up this time that they'd hire some brainless thug to come after me? Whomever they are, I sincerely doubt you're being paid enough to justify-"
"No no no, you're other kid, Dib. About yay-tall, wears glasses and a trench coat?" Al held his hand just a little over the edge of the desk. "He went missing, not sure how long ago. A few of his friends are looking for him and I figured you mighta chipped him."
"Dib is missing?"
"No, I just beat up your security team because I thought it'd be fun. Did you put a tracking chip in him or not?" The professor flinched at the glaring sarcasm and inclined his head. From the creases appearing on the sleeves of the mans lab coat, Al could see he was tensing, either nervous or frustrated. Either-or, the growing silence probably meant he hadn't thought to do such a thing to his son.
"Great, just great. All the time I wasted trying to get in and talk to you, I could have actually been looking for him." Much to the astonishment of the professor, the one-eyed man who was glaring at him simply disappeared.
He didn't move the desk and walk out the door, he just... Disappeared.
What had his son gotten into? Who had that just been, the man who so readily defied scientific laws even he had yet to find a way around.
"Dib is... gone?" The empty room held no answer for the scientist.
A/N No Dib in this chapter. We're working on finding him though, don't worry