Chapter 9: Enter Night
"I'm blind!" Tammy cried.
She'd had the bad luck to be looking right at Foxglove at the moment Foxy lit up like a couple dozen suns. "What happened?" she asked, desperately trying to rub vision back into her eyes with her fists.
Herbie, who happened to have Tammy between him and Foxglove at the time, was unaffected. He quickly guided Tammy to a chair. "Foxglove went feral and liberated the Rangers. You stay here and recover. I'll try to catch them."
In one fluid motion he ran and vaulted over the balcony of the workshop, attempting to glide down to the living room, but he misjudged his descent and crashed into the remains of the couch. "Ouch," he said, rather less calmly than the last time. "You know, the Bat Guy makes this look a whole lot easier in the comic books."
Herbie got up and hobbled over to the broken window. "Monty and Gadget have just realized how high up they are and are frozen on the branch," he described to Tammy, "and Foxglove is gliding down to the ground. I can't see Chip or Dale, either on the branch or descending the tree."
"Try looking up."
After a pause, Herbie informed her that the chipmunks were indeed climbing up, which as both of them knew was a dead end.
"What about Zipper? Has he escaped?"
"No, he's still here," said Herbie, trying to simultaneously keep track of the locations of all of the feral Rangers. "He's trying to claw his way up the wall."
"Claw? Are you sure he's not walking up the wall?"
"No, I'm sure. He looks like he forgot how to do that."
Tammy cried out in frustration. "Why is this taking so long?" she said, rubbing her eyes even harder. "It's like looking through a sea of Citrus Delight!"
"I always preferred the 'purple stuff', myself." Herbie said with a smirk.
Tammy held a paw up before her befuddled eyes, trying to see between her fingers. Suddenly she snapped her fingers in realization. "That's it!" Taking off her backpack, she reached in and removed Gadget's photographs from inside the scrapbook she had stuffed in there earlier. Shuffling through the photographs one by one she confidently declared, "Mouse, mouse, chipmunk, chipmunk, turtle, bat!" Her earlier fear and depression had seemingly evaporated with this discovery.
"You've lost me," Herbie said.
"These pictures, I finally figured them out! Here, take a look!" Sweeping both arms in front of her to catch anything her faulty eyes were not telling her about yet, she made her way to the balustrade and held out the pile. "Catch!"
Herbie rushed over and caught the photographs before they reached the floor, then took them back to the window where he could continue to monitor the situation. "What am I supposed to do to see them?" he asked.
"You need to go blind," Tammy said, laughing.
Herbie took off his Coo-Coo Cola bottle glasses. "Now what?"
"Well now you need to use your imagination. You see I have dreams that look exactly like those photographs. I've been having them for the last two or three years. Couldn't make heads or tails of them at first, but eventually I figured it out. The trick is to mentally blur the colors together in your head, and then the borders just sort of draw themselves. Smashing your eyeballs into the back of the sockets helps, too."
Herbie moved the stack of photographs forward and backward before his eyes before the image suddenly clicked. "Oh!" he exclaimed. Looking though the pile, he named off the animals he could now clearly see: "mouse, mouse, chipmunk, chipmunk, turtle and bat."
Herbie blinked, then suddenly put his glasses back on and turned back to the window. To his relief, the situation outside had not changed. "Well I'm glad you were able to figure that out, but in case you've forgotten, we've got a crisis here, potentially the end of animal sentience as we know it!"
"But it's not as bad of a crisis as we thought it was! Those photographs are from Earth-A, right?"
"Right."
"And the Rangers' counterparts on Earth-A are feral, right?"
"Yes, although..."
"Don't you see? They match up! Mouse, mouse, chipmunk, chipmunk, turtle, bat! Are there captions on the back?"
Herbie turned over the photographs and read the captions written on them in pencil, "Earth-A Gadget, Earth-A Monterey Jack, Earth-A Chip, Earth-A Dale, Earth-A Zipper, and Earth-A Foxglove." He reached down and picked up Zipper, who cast a terrified expression at the floor below and buried his head in Herbie's shoulder. "Wait, turtle?" he asked, confused.
"The Rangers' counterparts don't have to be the same species in every universe, Herbie! Now tell me, is Zipper acting like a feral fly..."
"...or a feral turtle!"
"Exactly!"
"Then that means..."
"That means the Rangers did not go feral. They swapped minds with their feral counterparts on Earth-A! The world is not doomed."
"Except Gadget's machine is only a viewer."
"Maybe we need to take a look at it to be sure."
Herbie, holding Zipper between his wing and body, cast one last look at feral Gadget and Monty on the branch outside the tree, and then turned and walked around the wreckage of the living room, through an archway, around a corner, and then up a flight of stairs to a small sitting room with a large door. Tammy opened the door, allowing him into the workshop.
Herbie looked about in confusion. Gadget's inventions lined the walls and topped at least a dozen shelves that ran around the walls of the room. "Which one of these is the viewer?" he asked.
Tammy closed her eyes. "I was up here plenty of times last summer and over the Christmas holiday. Gadget has a very meticulous filing system for her inventions..."
"...appearances notwithstanding."
Tammy opened her eyes, mentally comparing her previous memory of the room to its current appearance. "I think...maybe..." she pointed at a corner next to the banister. "Yes, I believe that gray box is it. Only one new invention? Gadget must have been really obsessed with this viewer."
"Wouldn't you be?"
Tammy nodded. "Could you take a look at it? I still don't trust my eyes yet." She was struggling to get everything returned to her backpack.
Herbie obliged, first putting Zipper down on the large circular platform in the center of the room. "Well superficially, it resembles a human oscilloscope from the 1940's, but it has been extensively modified. For one thing, there's no power cord, and no on/off switch. There's a metal tag on the back: 'OHD-0035 Dimensional Viewer (#2 of 2).' A couple of bare metal poles have been inserted into the unit. According to Gadget, touching these would activate the unit." He tried experimentally grabbing the handles. "As I expected, nothing happened. This unit requires an electrostatic power source."
"We saw two flashes of what could have been electrostatic discharge."
"Yes, but I think those were an effect of the mind-swaps, not the cause."
Tammy looked around the workshop, relieved that her vision was finally back to normal. "The first mind-swap obviously did not happen in here, or this place would have been trashed just like the bedrooms we saw. And we were present for the second mind-swap - do you remember any sounds or flashes from this corner of the room?"
"No."
"Well, then that makes it unlikely that this machine was involved in the second mind-swap, either."
"Maybe there's some other invention, located somewhere else?"
"We've seen most of Ranger H.Q.; let's check out the rest," said Tammy, picking up her backpack with one paw and Zipper with the other.
Exiting the workshop into the sitting room, Tammy opened a door into Foxglove's room, clearly identified by the ceiling perch in place of a bed and the heavy curtains on the windows. The room was untouched by the pandemonium that had affected the other rooms.
Herbie climbed a staircase from the sitting room to the top floor. After confirming that Gadget's bedroom was in the same state as Chip and Dale's and Monty's bedrooms, he looked in the hanger to see that the Ranger Wing had been roughly pushed aside. This was the path that the feral Gadget had made to the tire slide entrance. He then took the stairs down three flights to return to the floor he and Tammy had first entered an hour ago. He walked through the remains of Monty's rampage in the kitchen and dining room, peeked into Monty's bedroom, and met up with Tammy in the gym, which was unaffected.
"See anything?" Tammy asked.
"Nothing that could have been used for a mind-swap. Besides, if the Rangers were scattered throughout H.Q. at the time of the first swap, why wasn't Foxglove affected until a half-hour later?"
"I was asking myself the same question. Not only was this swap performed by somebody outside the tree, but there's something else, one missing piece before this puzzle is complete."
