Disclaimer: I do not own Jimmy Neutron, or anything associated with him, or his SUPER-COOL Cousin (Seriously, Read-On, And You'll See What I Mean About That!)!
Accolades/Appreciation: Thanks for all my AWESOME readers/reviewers of this story, for your favorites, subscriptions, reviews, feedback, and generally awesome comments! ONWARD!
Author Announcements(s): There REALLY is no need for an A/N here, but, I just felt like writing one. I apologize for wasting your time—truly. You're still reading, aren't you? Why can't you stop? You do realize that you can just ignore this useless A/N and start reading the ACTUAL CHAPTER! No? You'd much rather be bored by me typing useless nonsensicalness (That IS A Real Word)? Why? Just start reading the chapter. Seriously. You're only wasting your own time. I did not waste my own time typing this. This is actually helping me alleviate some stress (And Some Other Stuff). You know what? Fine. I'll start the chapter, then. If you refuse to read the actual text of the story, rather than scanning through this idiotic, useless A/N, then FINE, I'll just have to start the chapter already. SERIOUSLY just READ the damn chapter! DAMMIT, I'll just have to sto—
III. New Friends and Old Flashbacks
The young Gorlockian lay there, helplessly, as the monster ended her father's life. All she could do was watch. So that is exactly what she did. Through her tear filled eyes, she watched as her beloved father's life was stripped away from him, slowly, painfully. Her tears began to sting her face, as the salty solution ran across her bruised, beaten and bashed face. The pain was intense as the salty tears graced the many cuts and abrasions on her face, but she did not emit any sound of pain. She didn't even wince. She was far too focused on her father—and on being strong. But she was failing horribly at being strong.
Her father had taught her to be strong—much stronger that this, this pathetic crying little girl that lay before the murderer killing her father. She had to be strong. But how could she? The one who had taught her all she knew about being "strong," was being killed, slowly, painfully, right in front of her eyes. How could she be strong while watching this? She couldn't.
The man's small piece of serrated steel surrounded itself in a field of electric blue flames, and the small piece of steel swung down, intending to slice the girl's father, thus separating his head from his neck. But, as the blade went to remove the Gorlockian's head, its speed slowed down significantly. The moment that the blade made contact with his green neck, the monster switched from a slicing motion, to a sawing motion. The monster intended to give her father a slow and painful death. And he intended for her to watch. And she did just that.
April watched as tears streamed down her face.
Her father did not give the man the satisfaction of hearing him scream, or even whimper for that matter. He held firm, and he locked eyes with his daughter. Her purple eyes saw his own through her tears, and he looked saddened. He was slowly losing his life, his head slowly becoming detached from his body, and his blood was pooling beside him, but his firm facial expression did not falter.
His daughter—the girl that had been taught and trained since birth, taught and trained to do one thing, to kill—sat there and watched her father die right before her eyes. His final words still echoed in her head.
"April. Live. Live, April. Live and remember." his hoarse voice croaked out before the blade finally made its way through his neck. April now shifted her view up to the man who had been the cause of her father's death, the man who had attacked her planet, the man whose face she would never forget.
The man stood up, walking as calmly as he could, and sheathing his knife in its case as he did so. His calm demeanor looked so very out of place, as the rest of the "Capitol Building" of "Planet Gorlock," behind her burned in ferocious flames that seemed to want to kill just as badly as the man—the monster—in front of her did.
He finally reached her side, and he kneeled down to the young twelve-year-old Gorlockian girl with tears in her eyes. He spoke to her, and they were words that would haunt her deepest nightmares, her deepest memories, her deepest fears, words that she would never forget, and would never want to.
"You are sad, little one? Afraid, perhaps? Well then, you should run, if you are afraid. That's right, honey, do what your daddy tells you. Run. He knew what he was getting into. He ended his own life; I was simply the tool he used to do it. It was his end. Everything has a definite end. Violence is a virus. We are the cure. You must understand that. Violence is spreading though, and it is an ongoing fight to stop the spread, and it is simultaneously a fight to the finish. We will meet again, and when we do, it will be yet another definite end in an everlasting and ongoing war. When next I see you, I should only hope that your eyes are free of tears. Otherwise, you would miss your certain end, and you wouldn't want to miss that, now would you?" he said and smirked as he stood up and walked away, leaving the small preteen green girl there to cry.
That was the last time that she cried. She was done crying. After that she started killing.
She jolted awake, and her skin was covered in a sheen of sweat—cold, cruel sweat that reminded her that it was more than a nightmare, that it was a memory. Through the large viewport directly in front of her, the giant and gaping void of space stretched on to eternity in every direction. She looked around, and she surmised that she was still in the cockpit of her ship, spiraling through space at mind-shattering speeds. She had fallen asleep at the controls—again.
She sighed, and she quickly and quietly adjusted the controls on the consoles in front of her, before exiting the pilot's seat that she was sitting at. She set the autopilot, and she raised her stiff and sore body from the seat. She descended the small raised platform that separated the pilot's seat from the rest of the very small and cramped room that surrounded her. She exited the sickeningly silver and steel-feeling room, only to enter a small hallway where the same color pervaded every one of her senses. Before she could go any further, though, she saw something that stopped her dead in her tracks.
Right in front of her was a small boy, a boy with the same color skin, same demeanor, and same darkly deep purple hair—although his was spiked up in a chaotically organized manner. All of these features caught her eye, but it was the look on his face, the look in his deep violet eyes, that kept her attention.
April stopped moving, and she addressed the small boy before her, as she asked her question carefully. "What's wrong, Lucas?" she asked in a surprisingly sweet and sincere tone. He was the only person with whom she was ever sweet with. Everyone else, she clearly wanted to kill—or at least seriously maim.
"…I-I…" the boy named Lucas responded in a choppy voice, dropping off and trailing into the distance.
April smiled a genuine smile at the boy. She hadn't smiled a genuine smile in very long time. She knew what was bothering young Lucas.
"You have a bad dream?" she asked.
He simply nodded his head.
"About father?" she prodded even further.
He nodded again. Then, he lowered his head to the floor.
She smiled. "So did I." she replied honestly. Lucas looked up at his sister, seeming slightly hopeful.
"Really?" he asked.
"Yeah. Scared me a little too." she said, and he looked wide-eyed.
"…B-But, nothing scares you. You're so brave" Lucas responded.
"Lucas, everything scares me. That's why I'm so angry. Being brave isn't about not having any fear. Being brave is about having the power to overcome fear." April reassured him, and he smiled back at her.
"How do you do that?" he asked.
"…Well, me, personally, I turn my fear into anger. …And then I let it out on my enemies." she said, and Lucas laughed softly. She was telling the truth. She did have some serious anger issues, but Lucas always took that as a sign of her strength. She would never let an enemy defeat her, and he knew that she would never let anybody hurt her little brother. He took some solace in that.
"…You wanna see me rip apart some androids in the training room?" she questioned, and he beamed at her, as she giggled and scooped him up in her arms, bounding down to the training room.
Back in the cockpit of the ship, the computers and consoles kept reading out the distances between the ship and its destination—its target. And they were constantly getting closer.
"So, what sounds good? Looking at some sappy, ridiculously overacted, generically plotted, romantic comedy; gossiping about useless, yet somehow starkly entertaining and enigmatic things; or going down to the pool and pretending to drown, so that Tommy has to take his shirt off and jump in after you?" Betty asked, in a seriously sarcastic voice. These were all things that neither of the three girls in her living room would ever do. She was lightly making fun of the vast majority of the flimsy female population.
Libby giggled, and Cindy rolled her eyes. "I dunno about you, but I'll take option three." Libby responded a little too earnestly. Cindy gave her a look. "What? He is hot! He could use a little more shirtless time!" she refuted, and Cindy rolled her eyes at her friend—again.
"Libby, what would Sheen sa—" Betty started, before Cindy roughly elbowed her in the side, effectively cutting Betty off. It was too late though. Libby had heard enough. She looked downcast at the carpet beneath her. Sheen wouldn't say anything. Because Sheen wasn't here. No one knew where he was, and everyone assumed he was dead. Except Libby. She still held out hope, even after attending his funeral where there was no body was present. After Sheen left in Jimmy's rocket, everything and anything that could have gone wrong, did go wrong.
Jimmy died, and Sheen went missing. Jimmy died, surprisingly, in a self-sacrificial move to save his younger cousin's life. It was an effort gone in vain, though, because Eddie had been killed anyways. Eddie and Jimmy had been battling each other for some time, but soon they were forced to work together—although it didn't help much, as they were both beaten, regardless. The large battle that the two genius cousins had been involved in had been interrupted by a group of lethal Russian renegades. The two cousins were geniuses, but they weren't that smart. They had chosen war-torn, dangerously split, viciously violent, and enemy-occupied Russia to hold their fight in.
Of course it wasn't their fault that the two had been in this location. Jimmy had been led there by the U.S. Intelligence that claimed that Eddie was assisting these deadly renegades. Instead, he found that Eddie was actually trying to stop these Russian renegades. Eddie felt that these Russian insurgents—with their advanced technology, massive minds, and belligerence-and-battle-smarts—were encroaching on his "Evil Genius" territory, and he wanted to eliminate the "competition."
Eddie claimed that he too was fed information and intelligence by the U.S. Government. Jimmy didn't believe him—obviously—and the two engaged in their usual battle of the brains, when the Russians intervened—almost as if ordered to do so exactly on time.
Sheen, Jimmy, and Eddie were all gone, all dead. Yet, there was still some part of Libby that held true, and unwaveringly believed that Sheen wasn't dead.
Libby continued looking down at the carpet, and Cindy performed a similar action. She hadn't even gotten to hear what Jimmy had made of their one and only kiss after his month-and-a-half in solitary confinement, where he, as he put it, was "sorting out the scientific aspects of the unexpected display of affection." Cindy was furious that he had taken so long to make any decision about it, regardless of what it was. Even if he had decided to like the kiss, she probably would have killed him—after she kissed him again. But she never got the chance. He was dead.
Betty looked at her two downcast friends, and she felt terrible. This was her fault. She should have known better. Suddenly an idea popped into her head; it was an idea to cheer the two up.
"Hey guys, let's take a trip to the dojo." Betty said in sly voice, and both Cindy and Libby looked up at her with a mixture of disbelief and delight.
"You and Cin gonna fight?" Libby asked, and Betty simply nodded, smirking as she did so. Libby smiled in return.
"I'm going to make a few calls, then. We can leave in a few." Libby responded. She got up from her seated position on the floor, pulling out her cell phone as she made her way to the kitchen to make some calls.
A fight between Betty Quinlan and Cindy Vortex was something that no one would want to miss.
Ever since the night that Cindy had found Betty brutally bashing her fists against a training dummy in the dojo—the dojo that Betty had somehow broken into herself—Cindy had seen her skill and speed. Betty was untrained, untamed, and chaotic, but she had a toughness and tenacity about her that Cindy never knew could hidden behind her annoyingly sweet exterior.
There was something else that night that stupefied Cindy. The tears streaming down her face and the obscenities flying out of Betty's mouth had done nothing but surprise the already-shocked Cindy Vortex, who was watching Betty wail on the Dummy—until it was in mere pieces. Cindy was just finishing up a night class that fatefully fortunate night, and her dojo master had been watching Betty as well.
His instruction to induct Betty into their dojo and be her personal trainer was the last thing that Cindy wanted or expected, but she obliged the old man, because she had respect for him. That was four years ago, and two weeks before Jimmy's apparent death. Since then, the two were inseparable.
Betty was taken out of her reverie, only to return to the sight of a smirking Cynthia Vortex.
"…What…?" Betty asked her.
"Oh, nothing. …But, you do know that I won't be going easy on you, right? Don't be too mad, if you can't walk in the morning." Cindy said, and now it was Betty who smirked in return.
"If I won't be able to walk, then you won't be able to talk. This is a two-way street, honey. If we stand together—" Betty was interrupted, as Cindy finished the chanting creed of their dojo.
"—Then, we fall together." Cindy finished, smirking once again. This was just what she needed to get her mind off if things—a good, gruesome, gory fight.
Libby walked back into the living room, and the two other friends rose from their sitting positions, and stood to greet her.
"How many are coming?" Cindy questioned Libby cautiously.
"Entire school." Libby responded, smiling in victory. Betty and Cindy went wide-eyed. "C'mon, everyone's waiting." Libby urged her two friends to hurry up, saying the word "everyone" a little too literally. Everyone really was waiting.
A/N: Well, please R&R, and let me know what you think! Stay tuned for the next update!