Schrödinger sat on a stool in Marcie's laboratory, both admiring the girl's diligence and pleasantly daydreaming the irony of what he saw before him on Marcie's lab table.
Loops of curved tubes resembled colored, glass roller coasters as they moved bubbling liquid through them. Petri dishes, occupied with storing other samples and substances, sprawled out across the table in haphazard groups, reminding the cat of the surviving concession stands of the park, and a quietly humming centrifuge mixed solutions in a smooth spin that would have made her family's erstwhile tilt-a-whirl proud.
To him, it was easy for his imagination to just see Fleach's Folly Factory made in miniature using lab equipment, but in Marcie's mind, it was simply ordered chaos.
Marcie took an eyedropper of blue solution and introduced the liquid into a Petri dish that contained a cut section of the seaweed that she took from Ocean Land.
Upon contact, the plant began to bubble and sizzle as the chemical caused it to be broken down into a dark green liquid.
Drawing up a sample with a pipette, she released it onto a small, glass plate, which she then clipped under a microscope for her perusal, a series of hums of growing understanding.
Schrödinger glanced at the cd player in the corner with a sour eye. A ska slow jam was playing, one of a whole cd's worth of tracks, and the cat wondered if the bellows of the Sea Beast were, in fact, more melodic.
"Are you trying to hum to whatever that is coming from your cd player?" he moaned, quietly.
"It's ska," Marcie explained, not lifting her head. "It's nice and I'd like to finish listening to it."
"I thought you said that you still didn't want to go home just yet," Schrödinger reminded.
"Technically, my lab isn't my house," Marcie explained. "It's just on the property. Anything else?"
"Actually, yes. Have you come up with your analysis, yet?"
She didn't quite answer him, but instead, hummed some more. Then, she straightened her posture and went to the blackboard at the far end of the lab. She wrote across it, the word, organic, then went to prepare the Petri dish containing the sticky substance from the vault.
"Organic," the cat read. "The seaweed is real, then?"
"Very much so," said Marcie. "And probably local. The creature might leave Ocean Land and head for the sea. But if that's the case, why would he return? Why not just escape?"
"I dare say it might have something to do with one of us," Schrödinger reasoned with a gulp. "I thought that it was only after me, but it may be hunting you, as well."
Marcie scoffed at the notion while she peered into her microscope. "I don't have anything he wants. How could I? If he's still after you, then I just keep being in the wrong place, next to you, at the wrong time, still next to you."
"You could always excuse yourself from my presence when the creature appears again," Schrödinger offered with sarcasm.
"Well, I would but I told you I'd help and I would," Marcie said, then straightened to what she saw in the lens. "Wait a minute...that's strange. I'm gonna pop it in the spectroscope."
The cat reared in disbelief. "You have a spectroscope?"
"Hard to believe, huh?" Marcie asked sarcastically as she began feeding the sample into the analyzer's receiving bay. "It was a gift from a good friend of mine. A regular dumpster diver."
"Hmm, some of my best friends dove in dumpsters," Schrödinger mused.
The old machine hummed to life, heated the sample, and then printed its chemical composition across its elderly, green screen.
"Here we go," said Marcie, her curiosity rising as she read the face of the machine. "95.38% ethanol and 4.62% ethyl acetate. C20-H30-O2. Some other organic compounds and...SiO2. Well, that explains things."
The analytical breakdown made the cat's brain feel numb, but he needed to know the answer, just for satisfaction's sake. "What? What explains things?"
"Spirit gum," she said simply.
"Spirit gum?" Schrödinger echoed. "Who would put that on a wall?"
"Someone who wanted to stick something on said wall, I would think," Marcie reasoned. "But what?"
There was a moment of thought that both silently engaged in, but before it had gotten any longer, Marcie stood up from her stool, announcing, "We have to get back to Ocean Land."
"Young lady," Doctor Redding said to Marcie from within his office, hardly hiding his annoyance. "I do not make it habit of escorting teenagers through restricted areas, and certainly not more than once."
"I understand that and I want to say that I appreciate what you did for me earlier," Marcie placated with hands raised diplomatically. "But I had to come back, sir. Turns out that I did miss something pretty big when we were at The Vault. You know how editors are."
"And this something is back at The Vault?" Redding asked, worried that if anything was there to threaten the samples that remained, he might be blamed for it. "Are you sure?"
"Positive," Marcie told him. "But time is crucial, so we gotta get there fast."
"Why?"
"Because I don't want the adhesive to dry out," the doctor managed to hear her say as she departed from the office's doorway with Schrodinger.
He was mentally thrown.
"The what?"
"Miss Freep, why did you need a tape measure from Maintenance?"
"The only thing of interest here is The Vault," Marcie explained while she stood on a low stool while leaning against the corner wall and placing the metal tipped end of the measure up to the side of the x-marked location. She could still feel the sticky residue of the spirit gum, so affixing it to the end was not too daunting. "Or rather, its keypad."
"So what do you want me to do?"
"Run your end up to the keypad and hold it there."
The doctor couldn't fathom what this strange wanted from this course of action but he mentally shrugged and did as he was told, uncoiling the measure from his hand as he walked to the security device.
When he reached it and placed the spool on the keypad, the tape began to sag in the middle of its length, prompting Marcie to call out from the corner, "Make it taut and lock it off."
The doctor did as told, pulling gently until the tape's length straightened and he pushed the button on the spool that locked the tape in place.
Marcie peered down the tape. The angle was perfect, it lined up with the keypad. But with its height on her end, it was very suspect. Whatever was stuck up there, wasn't meant to be noticed.
While she thought, Doctor Redding still wondered why he, an accredited doctor of biology was standing next to a vault with an oil covered tape measure in his skilled hand. He gave Marcie a terse, signaling cough to get her attention.
"Oh! Sorry, Professor-" Marcie started.
"That's Doctor," Redding corrected. "And how long am I to be holding this thing? I have work to do, young lady. In my office."
"Yes, Doctor. I forgot."
"And don't also forget, dearest," Schrödinger added, seeming to take slight pleasure in seeing her flustered momentarily. "You wanted to go home and find your tablet or cell phone or something to take pictures of that carnival ride of your father's."
Marcie looked down on the cat. "I won't. I should've had a camera when I..." She stiffened in revelation.
"What?" asked Schrödinger.
With a smirk, Marcie answered. "A camera! That's what was stuck up here."
"That's ridiculous," the doctor scoffed. "To what end?"
"To record anyone using the keypad," Marcie said triumphantly. "If whoever planted this hidden camera managed to see the keycode sequence punched up, he'd know it now."
The logic of that stifled any future scoffing from the doctor. This needed prompt action. From him, of course.
"Then I'll get in touch with Security and tell them to change the keycode," he offered.
"Oh, that'll show him," Marcie snarked. "Change the locks after he's gone through your place like a tornado."
With pink creeping along his face, Doctor Redding amended his earlier course of action.
"Right. Of course," he murmured, still holding the tape measure in his hand.
Schrödinger's ears and tail twitched in anticipation of a possible hunt, and he asked Marcie as she descended from the stool, "Well, what now?"
"Well, one thing's for sure," she said. "This caper looks way to sophisticated for something that grew in a test tube, apparently."
Before Doctor Redding could discern anymore of the conversation, the duo's backs were seen as they began to leave.
He did, however, manage to hear Marcie call from the hall she and the cat rushed into on the way out, saying, "Get that for me, would you?"
The flummoxed doctor still held the tape measure and its released span sprawled all over the floor.
The teen and the cat had an animated conversation as they descended down the curved staircase that separated the labs above from the visitors' level below.
"What did you mean by that?" Schrödinger asked as he trotted slightly ahead of Marcie. "That the caper was more sophisticated than the Sea Beast?"
"I mean that maybe there's more than one player involved in this mystery. A human being.
"A human? What, helping the creature?" he asked again.
"Or maybe the other way around," Marcie posited. "Maybe the Sea Beast was the perfect distraction. Scaring everybody away while the person made off with the canister."
"You're saying that a person somehow communicated successfully with that creature? To what end? And what does the Sea Beast gain from such a partnership?"
"Maybe a share of the take. Food," she guessed. "If there are a lot of eggs in that canister, then maybe he'd give a hefty portion of them to the Sea Beast and still have enough to sell to interested parties."
"Like who?"
"Rival scientists or maybe what you said earlier, criminal gourmands. The eggs are still pretty fresh," Marcie reasoned, then added wryly. "At least, until the canister's battery runs out."
Marcie started to notice that the cat was steps ahead of her on their way to ground floor. She was eager to solve this egg enigma, as well, but she wondered why the cat was practically running ahead when even she knew that she would had to stop and think before the next move. He would have to do the same.
"Hey, Schrödinger," she called from behind him. "Where's the fire? We don't even know where to go next or who this mystery person is. If he exists."
The cat stopped by the foot of the stairs and raised his head experimentally, then crooked it towards her. "That's not why I went ahead. I...I smell something. A scent I have not smell since..."
Marcie finally caught up with the feline and they both stood pensively in the aquarium's central gallery, a picturesque hub that allowed visitors to take different corridors that would lead them to different exhibits.
Although she knew that her sense of smell was laughable compared to his, she glanced around the gallery suspiciously, but didn't see anyone but the occasional janitor or maintenance worker walking by.
"What's the matter, now?" Marcie asked the cat, almost feeling foolish for being so reactionary to his olfactory alerts. "You smell fish around here? I hate to break it to you, but this is an aquarium, after all."
Schrödinger hopped over to the center of the room and raised his head for another sniff. "No, if you must know. It's not fish," he explained in annoyance. "It's not briny or meaty...it's...it's sweet?"
"Sweet?"
"Yes." said the cat. "There!" He then swung himself in the direction of a set of grey doors set on the side of a corridor that warned visitors away with the word 'Basement.'
Marcie ran over to the doors with Schrödinger and experimentally turned one of the handles. Surprisingly, it opened.
The lower levels were a dank, sparsely-lit affair of cold, concrete walls, lined with thick, wide pipes that led through side accessways to huge water tanks and supply storage areas.
The two slipped by the doors and entered, descending, as quiet as possible, down a railed, utility ramp that the double doors opened up to.
They reached the bottom of the ramp and crept slowly along the basement's spacious path, Marcie following Schrödinger as he followed the scent he was locked on to.
Neither spoke as they silently stalked further up the way, passing two offices, one on either side of the cellar, and a row of unassuming lockers set along one wall.
A faint sound ahead in the dim light gave them pause. They stopped just short of an indistinct figure wielding what looked like a staff, stabbing it in a downward angle to the floor.
"Up ahead," the cat whispered before bolting ahead of Marcie.
"Wait!" the girl cautioned as she jogged behind him.
Under one of the weak, fluorescent light fixtures, the duo could finally make out a stern-faced woman wearing a business suit. In her hands was a broom that she was using with unwieldy annoyance on the floor by her tailored shoes.
Schrödinger's head pointed low and he breathed out, incredulously, "I knew it."
Marcie followed the cat's gaze and couldn't believe the luck, as dark as it was.
"No way," she muttered.
Coating both the woman's shoes and the head of the broom were incriminating wads of carnival-grade cotton candy.