Chapter 6: New Member
Ten minutes earlier, Tammy was sitting cross-legged on the porch outside the meeting hall, stargazing. "Molly" seemed to have a strong fascination for the sky, particularly on clear days and nights. Tammy was busy pointing out the curve of the Milky Way, when she was surprised to hear the doors behind her open about a half-hour earlier than she had anticipated. She turned to see Monterey Jack walking out flanked by Gadget and Foxglove, with Zipper hovering above. From their expressions, Tammy instantly knew something was wrong. "Is there anything I can do to help?" she asked, getting up.
Gadget turned suddenly, surprised to find Tammy beside her. "I don't know," she said. "Monty appears to be having some trouble with his memory. Actually, I think we all are."
"Memory trouble?" said Tammy, seeing a chance to help her heroes. "Does Professor Nimnul have some kind of mind ray that he's using on all the animals in the park, hoping by sheer luck to deprive the Rescue Rangers of the knowledge of their very identities?"
Gadget rested her chin on one paw. "Hm...that would make a good story. Unfortunately, Nimnul's been locked away in the mental institute for months."
"Oh," said Tammy, deflating. "Maybe it's a concussion."
"I don't remember hitting my head," Monty said. "But then, if I'm forgetting things, maybe I forgot that."
"Hmm...does your head hurt? Does it feel hot to the touch?"
"Not any hotter than an armadillo's back side!" he asserted. "...Or front side. Whichever's hotter, I guess." Foxy flinched, but she tended to do that whenever someone mentioned armadillos.
"Well, as my mom says, 'Take care of the body first, and the mind will follow.' I'll get a cold compress from the apartment, just in case."
"Thanks."
Tammy dashed down the trunk of the tree to the next floor down, as only a squirrel (or a chipmunk) can. A few moments later, she returned with a small ice-filled bag, which she offered to Monty.
"I'm worried this memory problem could be affecting most, if not all, the Rangers," Gadget speculated out loud.
"Even Dale?" asked Foxglove.
"I'm not sure anybody could tell if Dale started losing his memory," Gadget replied seriously.
Monty took the bag of ice from Tammy and looked up at the three females now hovering around him.
"I think I'm feeling a little better," he lied. "Honestly." He got up and, linking arms with Gadget and Foxglove, prepared to return to the party. But first he stopped and looked back at Tammy.
Tammy shooed them forward. "Oh, I just need a breath of fresh air," she assured them. "You go ahead, I'll see you later."
"Alright," said Monty, reluctantly.
At the last moment, Foxglove excused herself and dashed back. "Congratulations on graduating, by the way," she confided in a low voice.
"Thanks."
"Don't be too long. It is your party after all."
On the way back to the door Foxglove tripped and fell to the ground. Tammy rushed to her side and helped her up. "Are you all right?" she asked.
"Oh, I'm fine. It's just this dress."
"Is there something wrong with it?"
"No," Foxglove said with some trepidation. "It's a very good dress, one of Dale's better creations. I...I just don't get along well with clothes. It's something my parents always told me: physical confinement is the first step on the road to slavery. Well, not 'told', but that was the feeling I picked up from them whenever we encountered some of the clothes left behind by human tourists. I don't believe that now, but it's hard to get that out of my head."
Tammy was confused by this last statement. "Your...parents. Your birth parents? Weren't they feral?"
Foxglove nodded. "My whole family was feral. We lived in a national park in northwestern Connecticut."
"Foxglove, you told me about your parents before."
"I did?"
"Yes, when we first met."
Foxglove rubbed her head with a wing in bewilderment. "I could have sworn..." she murmured.
"Anyway, what I didn't know before is that you weren't found by a Caretaker at birth and given to a foster family, like all the other feral-born I know."
"We didn't have a Caretaker. Chip's looking into the reason. His current theory is that there was some kind of disaster decades before I was born that caused my family to flee the main colony to the other side of Bear Mountain, and the Caretaker for the colony thought we had all died."
"Wow," said Tammy. "What was it like to be a sentient raised by ferals?"
"They're not really like the stories I hear told to the sentient children. They are not monsters, they are just trying to survive like you and me, but they lack a lot of the tools we have, and their life spans are so much less than ours. You wouldn't believe how much they can communicate without using words. And the way they lead their lives is so in the moment. In some ways I miss how simple and direct everything was with them. No feral ever lied to me." She said this last sentence with a strange, far-away look. "All the same, it was rather strange, growing up so slowly compared to my brothers, and thinking nobody in the world was like me."
"But you were found eventually, right?" Tammy asked eagerly.
"Yes, that's right. I was found by Winifred. She's..."
"I know," Tammy interrupted somberly.
"Did I tell you about her and forget that, too?" Foxglove asked, worried. "I'm getting as bad as the Rangers are!"
"No, you didn't tell me about her," Tammy assured her. "That was Gadget."
"Oh! That makes me feel a little better."
"Foxglove?" asked Gadget, who had stuck her head out of the door a few seconds earlier, "are you going to be much longer?"
"No," replied Foxglove, who stopped a moment to check her dress again, "I guess I'm done." "Don't take too long with that breath of fresh air," she told Tammy, before joining the party.
Tammy nodded. She waited until they were both inside, then took her promised big breath of night air, looked around to make sure she truly was alone, and sat down at the edge of the branch. Behind her she heard some kind of cheer from inside the meeting hall, but it was too muffled for her to make out much.
Tammy cast a silent look of anticipation over her left shoulder in the direction of the door. The invisible something over her left shoulder was, if possible, even more excited than she was and was in an even more nostalgic mood than before, sending her a barrage of emotions that seemed to be tied to memories of Tammy's years at the Academy. To calm down, Tammy turned her attention to the grounds of the park far below. It was late, and this corner of the park never was a gathering point for humans, so Tammy was surprised to discover a human sitting on the park bench between the spruce and oak trees.
The human was wearing a threadbare coat, more patches than fabric, over a rather angular body. Her nose was long, her eyes small, and the hair that escaped from a woolen hat was so thin and so red it looked like it was a part of the hat rather than a part of the human.
Now as a squirrel in a city park, Tammy had gotten plenty of opportunity to observe humans at park benches, and she knew that a sitting human must always be doing something: feeding animals, or filling out a crossword puzzle, or at least eating an apple. But this human was just sitting. There was a bag handmade from canvas beside her, bulging with who knows how many distractions, but she was just sitting there, waiting, like she was about to visit the doctor for a checkup, or the lawyer for a reading of the will.
Distracted as she was trying to figure out what the human was up to and still dealing with "Molly" in overdrive, Tammy was nevertheless not surprised when a chipmunk's hand came gently down on her right shoulder; it was like they had been planning for this to happen all night.
Her eyes fluttering, she turned to greet her visitor. "Yes, Chip?" she asked dreamily...
...And looked up into the grinning face of Dale. "You planning on coming back in?" he asked. "Or does your mom need to take you in on a pallet?"
"Oh," she said, disappointed. "Dale." She suddenly felt incredibly alone - her invisible friend had left her before she had even seen who the chipmunk was.
"It wouldn't be much use for her to go back now," Chip said from over her other shoulder. "The party's over."
Tammy looked around, seeing Foxglove and the other Rangers exiting the building. I still have a chance to pull this off, she told herself. "I, uh, wasn't keeping track of the time," she said. Through the slowly closing doors, she caught glimpses of squirrels and doves crowding their way to the rear exit, to start on their long-promised field trip. "Did I miss much?"
Dale shrugged. "Chip and I told a story. There wasn't anything else worth remembering."
Foxglove gasped softly. Her face was red and some tears had run down her face, but they appeared to be tears of joy.
Tammy rose to her feet. "Did I miss something?"
"I don't know, did you?" Dale laughed.
Chip reluctantly bonked Dale on the head. "That was for Foxy's sake, not mine," he hastily explained. He turned to Foxglove and gently led her forward to stand before the squirrel. "Tammy, I'd like you to meet the newest member of the Rescue Rangers: Foxglove."
For a few seconds Tammy was speechless. Finally, she hesitantly hugged the bat and was able to choke out some words. "Con...congratulations, Foxy."
"It was a shock," Foxglove said as they parted.
"It shouldn't have been that much of a surprise," said Chip. "You knew as well as anybody that we were looking for a sixth member, and who else could we have picked?"
"Who else, indeed?" said Tammy in a hollow tone.
"I still think we should have gotten Fat Cat," Dale joked again. Now it was Zipper's turn to bonk Dale.
Chip cast a critical look in Tammy's direction. "Are you alright, Tammy? You look like you've seen a ghost."
"It, it's nothing," Tammy said. "I must have been out for too long."
Chip, not trusting this response, walked past her and looked out in the direction he had seen her looking when the Rangers had first left the party.
"Well, look who we have here!" He turned and addressed the group. "It's Freddie the Witch, still on probation...well, I think she's still on probation..." He wasn't very happy to see his taunt end so unsatisfactorily.
Everybody crowded over to get a look.
"What could she be doing here?" Gadget asked.
"That's Freddie?" Tammy asked. "I've read the case file, but of course it didn't have any pictures, and I never thought I would actually see her..."
Chip turned on her. "And where did you get your hands on that case file?" Chip didn't like word of the Rescue Ranger's more esoteric cases to become common knowledge, as he thought that would hurt the group's reputation as serious crime fighters.
"Well actually," said Gadget, "I let her see it. I didn't see what the harm could be."
"You didn't see the harm? She's the president of our fan club!" Chip exclaimed, turning to Gadget.
"What kind of probation could it be if she's allowed to visit a city park this late at night?" Tammy asked.
"A rather odd one, if you ask me," said Monty. "Did you know that she's serving her time working at the crazy house? The same place where Professor Nimnul is being kept."
Now Monty became the object of Chip's wrath. "Were you planning on sharing this vital tidbit of information anytime soon, or did we just get lucky?"
Monty looked down in shame. "I'm sure I would have remembered it. This head of mine..."
Chip sighed. "Just...don't. So they're working together; I knew Nimnul wouldn't stay locked up voluntarily! That's great, that's just great!"
Foxglove had been spending the last few minutes looking between the others with increasing nervousness as the volume of their voices had progressively increased. She hoped that Winifred hadn't noticed them bickering above her yet. "Do you mind if we leave now?" she asked. "Or at least I if do?"
Chip, catching her tone, took control of himself. "Right," he said, calmly. "First thing is to get her out of there before the students arrive. Zipper, I need you to get a human police officer to come here. Vagrancy is still illegal at this hour." Zipper saluted and flew off. "The rest of us need to get straight back to HQ and lock everything up for her inevitable return. Who knows what she and Nimnul are up to?"
Tammy shivered. "Can she use her magic against us?"
"I don't think so," said Foxglove. "That last spell of Winifred's would have converted her body into a conductor of magical energy, but since we ruined it, I think it might have had the opposite effect. Although..." she added as an afterthought, "she can still understand animals. That was her very first spell - she said it was in the nature of a 'dis-spell', actually, if that makes any sense."
Tammy moved to take a closer look at the woman being asked to leave by a patrolling police officer; a nearby street lamp winking out had attracted his attention. The woman looked rather sad to her.
"Hm," Dale said, "without her magic, she doesn't pose much, or any, threat then, does she?"
Chip shook his head violently in disagreement. "This is still Freddie we're talking about, people! She's a bad guy, and we're the good guys. It's as a simple as black and white."
"It wasn't always that simple for me," Foxglove said in a small voice.
Chip put an arm around the bat's shoulders "You're an exceptional case, Foxy. From what you've told us, that human down there is like so many of the others we have encountered: only thinking of herself and not caring who she hurts in order to get what she wants."
Tammy turned to face him, confused. "It can't be that simple, not even for her. Maybe she's here to help. Maybe she has a case for you."
"No." Chip turned his back on Tammy to address the Rangers. "We go back to HQ, we plan a schedule so one of us watches for her all night, and tomorrow we get her permanently out of the park before she hurts someone. Even without magic she's still capable of causing a lot of trouble."
"Just like that?" pleaded Tammy. "Isn't there a vote or something?"
Chip looked silently into the faces of the other Rangers, and did not find any argument. "Not this time."
"No argument from me," said Gadget. "My memory seems to be playing up."
"And what about me?" Tammy asked.
"And what about you?" Chip shouted Tammy down. "Fan club or not, you are not a Rescue Ranger! You're barely an adult, and at times like this, I question even that. I can't tell you what to do, but I would advise you, for your own safety, not to go anywhere near that human." He turned back to the others. "Come on, Rangers. We've got a rough night ahead."
Chip, Dale, Gadget, Monty and Foxglove, rejoined by Zipper, quickly made their way along the branch back to their home.
Tammy stood there, watching them, her hands balled into fists at her sides. She waited until they were out of sight, then turned at the sound below her of the Academy sophomores exiting the base of the spruce tree with their luggage.
"Good bye! Have a great time!" she cried out to the crowd, waving her arms wildly. She hoped none of them could see the tears streaming down her face.
