CHAPTER 2 - RETURN OF THE SCI-FI CONVENTION
PRESENT DAY - SURFER'S PARADISE STAFF HOUSE
One morning on the third floor of the staff house at Surfer's Paradise, the designated girls' floor, an alarm clock radio went off on the nightstand between Fin's and Lo's beds in Room 310, the room they shared with Emma. Upon being woken up by the alarm, Fin shut it off and groaned as she stretched out in her bed. "Oh, man, what a night last night," the blonde tomboy said after she yawned, then sat up in bed. "That night surfing sesh we had at the Office then sure left me beat."
"Maybe for you, but it really got me charged up," Emma declared as she hopped out of her bed and also took a stretch. "I feel like going on dawn patrol for a bit before we have to get to work."
"Hmm, sounds good to me," Fin agreed as she looked over to the clock radio and saw the time, 7:01. "We don't have to get to work 'til nine anyway, so I'm in."
"Unnh, what time is it?" a still-sleepy Lo said as she stirred awake in her bed, then started to check her wristwatch.
"It's 7:01, Lo," Fin confirmed, checking the clock radio again.
"What? That can't be," Lo said while looking at her watch. "My watch says 8:41."
"Say WHAT?! 8:41?!" a shocked Fin said as she went over to Lo's bed to check her friend's watch. "No way! How can it be 8:41 when my clock says 7:01?"
"Did the power go out or something last night while we were asleep?" Emma asked.
"Somehow, I doubt it," Fin said. "But if the time on Lo's watch is the real time, then we're running late! Forget dawn patrol, we gotta go spruce up and get ready for work!" Fin then grabbed a toothbrush and toothpaste with the intent of dashing off to brush her teeth in the bathroom, while Lo and Emma also scrambled to get ready by grabbing bath towels and their shampoo bottles.
When Fin reached the door to the girls' room, she turned the doorknob to open it - only to find, when she tried to pull the door open, that it pulled out of Fin's grasp and closed shut on her. She tried opening the door again, but it closed back on her again. "What the...?" a surprised Fin said when she tried to pull the door open a third time and found it was resisting her attempts to open it any further than just a crack.
"What's going on, Fin?" a worried Lo said as she watched her friend try in vain to get the door open.
"I'd sure like to know," Fin answered. "Between the door here and the time difference between your watch and my clock, I think something fishy's goin' on here!"
Fin's suspicions were echoed in Room 311, the room across the hall shared by Kelly and her grom roommates Ash and Bonnie, as Kelly was likewise having trouble opening her room's door after she and her roomies discovered that they had woken up later than they thought. "Come on, open up!" a displeased Kelly snapped as she pulled at the door to no avail. "What's with this door?!"
"I'm startin' to wonder myself," Ash commented. "The alarm clock said 7:01 when we got woke up, but my watch says 8:42 right now. Between that and the door - hey, you don't suppose..."
Right then, Kelly's suspicions kicked in. "SABRINA!" she yelled. "What did you do to the door?! SABRINA!" she yelled again and pounded on the door, this time joined by Ash, while Bonnie could only watch from near her bed. Across the hall, an angry Fin, Emma and Lo, who heard Kelly's yell and immediately figured out what was up, also began yelling "SABRINA!" while pounding on their room door.
Outside both rooms, the girls' suspicions proved right as the mischievous Sabrina, who had broken into both rooms while everyone else had gone night surfing and reset the time on the two rooms' respective alarms, grinned gleefully while watching the results of her handiwork, having tied each end of a rope to each of the doorknobs on the inward-opening room doors and putting the rope taut enough to prevent the doors from opening further than intended, as part of a mean-spirited prank to purposely make the girls late for work. "Ooohh boy, am I good, or what?" the devious and snobby blonde girl said with a giggle, taking pride in the success of her prank before she walked away to head to the hotel, leaving the six trapped girls stuck in their predicament as they continued yelling to be let out.
Nearly half an hour later, Sabrina was finishing up dusting the message boxes behind the front desk in the hotel lobby and was about to take her cleaning cart elsewhere when she spotted Fin, Lo, Emma, Kelly, Ash and Bonnie marching toward her, all dressed for work but also all wearing angry looks as they stopped in front of her. "Hey girls, what's up?" Sabrina asked, trying to play innocent.
"Your time's up, that's what!" Kelly said tersely to Sabrina. "We know what you did."
"What're you talking about?" Sabrina said, pretending not to know what the girls were mad about.
"You know what I'm talking about," Kelly stated, showing Sabrina the rope she had used to tie to the doorknobs. "You used this to tie our room doors together and keep us from getting out so you'd make us late for work!"
"And you're accusing me of doing it? As if!" said Sabrina, who feigned offence at the accusation even though she knew they were on to her about the prank. "How do you know it wasn't one of the boys who did it, huh?"
"We know you pulled pranks on us before, blondie," Ash then spoke up. "You pranked us during grom initiation and several times since then, so don't serve us mud in a bowl and tell us it's chocolate puddin'."
"And I told you I didn't do it, so you can all take what you think and cram it!" Sabrina snapped, setting off an argument between her and the rest of the girls in the lobby, which caught the attention of hotel manager Carter, Johnny's cousin.
"Okay, whoa-whoa-whoa, time out, y'all," Carter said to defuse the quarrel as he approached the group. "Everyone step back and chill out a minute." Turning to Kelly, he then asked, "Everyone here except Sabrina's ten minutes late for work. What happened?"
"Ask Sabrina," Kelly replied. "She made me, Ash, Bonnie, Fin, Lo and Emma all late for work by tying our room doors at the staff house together with a rope so we couldn't open them enough to get out. Thanks to her..."
"Shut up! I did not!" Sabrina interrupted. "Kelly's lying! She's trying to blame me for her and her friends being too lazy to be on time..."
Figuring that Sabrina was lying, Carter cut her off. "Can it, Sabrina, don't interrupt when someone's talking," he told her before allowing Kelly to continue.
"Anyway, thanks to Sabrina," Kelly went on while directing a glare at Sabrina, "we got held up for a few minutes before I tied together some bedsheets and got out of my room by the balcony, then came back up to the third floor to untie the rope and let the rest of us out so we could go freshen up quickly before we came to work. And another reason we ended up late for work is because we woke up later than expected because someone broke into our rooms and tampered with our alarm clocks - and I think Sabrina did it to prank us," she finished, looking to the blonde girl again.
"Hey, shut up! I never..." an indignant Sabrina snapped again, still trying to lie her way out of trouble, but Carter stopped her in mid-sentence.
"Lesson three, don't antagonize your fellow workers if you want to last the summer here, Miss Dunn," Carter told Sabrina. "That's also a strike for you for makin' Kelly and the others late for work with your prank and for breakin' into their rooms to do it. I know the other girls have been reliable and hard-working with their jobs since they started here a while ago, but not only have you done very little work since you started here accordin' to Rosie, you ain't been gettin' along with your roommates at the staff house since you got here, and I even heard you tried bullyin' Bonnie a couple of times." Sabrina did not attempt to deny those incidents that time, but simply glared at the other girls.
"You gotta start shapin' up if you expect to stay employed here the rest of the summer, Sabrina," Carter continued. "If you don't, you'll have to pack up and leave and look for a new job elsewhere 'cause I don't got time for someone who's disruptive with the rest of the staff here. You think you can start to behave and improve your attitude from here on out?"
Sabrina, who was not happy about getting busted for her prank on the girls, rolled her eyes and sighed in frustration. "Okay, whatevs," she said cavalierly.
"There's no 'whatevs' about it, Sabrina," Carter pointed out to her. "I'm serious 'bout this. You're gettin' another chance to prove yourself, so don't waste it."
While Carter had been talking, Emma had noticed some objects hanging from the lobby ceiling, then looked around the lobby and made a discovery. "Uh, Fin," she said as she turned to her friend, "look around you. Is it just me, or..."
Fin also looked around. "Oh, my gosh," she remarked as she recognized model spaceships and life-sized standups of characters from popular science fiction and fantasy movies and TV shows on display all around the lobby. "The sci-fi convention's come back."
For Fin, along with Lo, last year's convention brought back memories of going on their first night surfing session with Reef, Broseph and Johnny, while for Emma, she thought back to being stuck in an elevator with her unrequited crush Ty and two convention guests, a heavyset man in a Klingon costume and a woman dressed as a Vulcan who started making out with each other right after the power went out in the hotel thanks to a short-out in the circuit breaker caused by Reef's attempt to light up the waves with spotlights backfiring. For Kelly, it brought back unwanted memories of going on her blind date with Bummer in town, prior to her first meeting with David.
Sabrina, who watched as several convention guests walked by, including one dressed as a Hobbit, another one in an Imperial Stormtrooper costume, a Borg, a Wookie, a Man in Black, a vampire slayer and several Klingons, tried half-heartedly to stifle her laughter as she saw the guests go by. "Wow, like, what is this, Geeks-R-Us?" she commented in jest.
"Hey, I...I like...science fiction," Bonnie replied quietly, not liking Sabrina's knock against the genre.
"You would, wouldn't you?" Sabrina said snidely to the tall brunette. "That figures. Nerds of a feather and junk, right?"
"You know what, Sabrina?" Fin said next as she stepped up. "I like sci-fi too and I'm not a nerdy type. Know what they say about judging books by their cover?"
"And we saw you go runnin' to check when Reef said he thought he saw Robert Pattinson at the hotel a while back," Ash added, pointing out what happened during Reef's seagull prank on Sabrina as payback for her early bullying of Bonnie during the new groms' first day at the hotel. "So if y'all like him, then you must be into those vampire fantasy movies too, right? Just admit it, y'all know I'm right."
Knowing that Ash had her pegged, Sabrina could do nothing but roll her eyes again. "What-everrr", she quipped with a sigh.
"So, Carter," Fin asked as the rest of the girls then went their separate ways to go to work, "are we gonna have to volunteer for working the convention displays again like Bummer made us do last year?"
"Don't worry 'bout that, Fin," Carter reassured her. "I already got other staff on display duty, unless you actually want to help out..."
"It's okay, I'm good," Fin said, politely declining the offer as she thought back to when Bummer made her and the other then-groms, along with Johnny, volunteer to help with the convention in an attempt to prevent them from going out surfing on their time off.
"Well, if you change your mind, let me know," Carter said as he went to the front desk while Fin went off to the hotel beach to start teaching waiting hotel guests (that is, those not at the hotel for the convention) how to surf.
Meanwhile, Sabrina carried on with her dusting around the lobby when she looked toward the front entrance and spotted David, who had arrived in town to attend the convention himself but was not dressed up in a costume like the other guests, coming in. Sabrina became spellbound as she got her first look at David, taken in by his shaggy, moderate-length jet-black hair, handsome features and the teal polo shirt and blue jeans he wore as he carried two suitcases into the lobby.
"Well, hello, salty goodness!" an admiring Sabrina said quietly from a distance, grinning as she watched the tall and well-built David look around the lobby. "I think it's time you and I met." Just as she was about to make her move, however, she saw Kelly coming from her right, sprinting toward David and greeting him. "Oh crap, he's already taken?!" Sabrina said to herself as her grin vanished, feeling chagrined as she watched David greet Kelly warmly with a hug and kiss. And by the pirate dork, at that? she then thought resentfully while commenting on Kelly's work outfit.
"So how's my favorite pirate captain this morning?" David asked Kelly with a grin after they finished kissing.
"Great, now that you're here," Kelly said, pleased about her boyfriend's arrival. "You here for that sci-fi convention they're having this week too?"
"Sure am, but not for the same reason as the other guests," David replied. "I'm here because I'm the point man for one of the key events at the convention on Friday night and that event's taking place off-site."
"Really?" Kelly remarked. "Sounds really special. What's it about and where's it going to be?"
"I thought I'd surprise you about that during your lunch break later on," David said as he and Kelly headed toward the front desk for his check-in. "Remember last September when I told you about that business deal I made with Kahuna?"
"Sure," said Kelly, who was unaware of David's purchase of the Big Wave Theatre back then. "Does it have to do with the convention?"
"Something like that," David said. "But I'll show you when we head out for lunch later. It's something big though, that's all I can tell you for now." When she heard that, it made Kelly all the more eager to know what it was David had to show her as she awaited the arrival of lunch hour.
Coming up, Kelly gets to see David's big surprise, plus more in store...