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Chapter 16: A Plan for Escape
As soon as all eight pups got their new packs on, they joined their new friend in room 105. It appeared to be a sort of conference room. It was a nice, open area, and was lit by sunlight streaming through the far wall. A large, round table rested in the middle of the room. Its surface was shiny and black, surrounded by a mahogany colored wood rim. Gizmo was fiddling with what appeared to be some sort of control panel, putting cards into slots.
"What are those?" Skye asked the black dog.
"They're the schematics I got," he replied, not looking up from the controls. He finished inserting the objects, which appeared to be some type of SD card, before moving on to pushing buttons
Chase shrugged. "I guess we all take a seat?" he suggested as he walked over to sit next to Gizmo. Everyone followed suit, spacing themselves out around the table.
Rubble turned to Rocky, "So how is he showing us what he got?"
The recycling pup leaned toward him, "I think the table is a screen."
"Basically," the Lab confirmed without looking up from his work. "Sorry, give it some time; this thing is over seventy years old. I'm having some problems." After a few more seconds of wrestling with the controls, Gizmo held his paw in the air over the panel. His repulsor shoe materialized around his paw. The sole of the boot glowed purple as he blasted it at the table, causing the piece of furniture to shake. Immediately it whirred to life, the lights beginning to shine on the control panel. "There we go," Gizmo muttered. He pushed another button. The large black screen the majority of the tabletop was composed of flashed on, displaying a three-dimensional holographic model of the island, complete with cliffs and dome. At first everything was blue and translucent, but after some more tweaks the island became completely opaque while the cliffs remained see-through. A final adjustment changed everything to their natural colors.
"Woah! This is incredible!" Zuma yelled, jumping up and leaning his front paws on the table edge. Most of the other pups followed suit.
"I wasn't too far off with a screen!" Rocky laughed. The detail was incredible. It had phenomenal depictions of the rocks, trees, buildings, and even…
"The Air Patroller!" Skye exclaimed in awe, poking her paw through the cliffs to point at the image of their crashed ship on the beach. "How's that there?"
"It's a scale model of the island I rendered about ten minutes ago," Gizmo explained. "The scanning function was normally used to evaluate the integrity of the Island Dome and Rim, but it'll work well for our purposes." Reaching out his front paws, the black dog zoomed into the model, expanding the island to fill the table and cropping out the cliffs. A few of the pups flinched as the wall of rock raced toward their faces, but they marveled at the technology.
"Woah! Can I move stuff around too if I reach my paws out like that?" Marshall asked.
Gizmo shrugged, "Sure, I guess?"
The fire pup grinned as he reached out his front paws and spread them apart in an imitation of Gizmo's gesture. Instead of zooming in, however, the island flattened out like a pancake. "Oops!" the Dalmatian exclaimed. He tried to fix it by waving his paws around more, but only succeeded in completely distorting the entire model. All that remained was a glitchy, unrecognizable blob of color spiking out in every which direction. "Sorry…" Marshall apologized.
Gizmo glanced down at the screen embedded into the control panel. "Wow, I didn't even know it was possible to make over three-thousand edits in under five seconds." He pushed a button on the panel, reverting the model back to how it was before. "There."
"I think I'll let you do the editing from now on," the firefighter giggled, drawing chuckles from a few of the others.
"So what's the plan?" Chase asked. Everyone looked at Gizmo. He stayed silent, unsure of what to say.
Everest decided to offer input to start the ball rolling, "Well, first we have to find a way to disable the Island Dome. What's keeping it on?"
Gizmo immediately found his words again. "The Island Dome is powered by this Shield Sphere placed in the center of the island," he began as he zoomed into a machine resembling a giant globe on a short pedestal. "We can't turn it off. The islanders reasoned that turning it off for any reason was suicide, so they didn't add any sort of off switch."
Skye cocked her head to the side. "So how do we turn it off?"
"We're going to have to shut off the power, but it won't be easy. Here's the electrical lines." Zooming back out, he showed them a close-up of the city. Pushing a button, Gizmo highlighted the power grid throughout the city, shining them a bright yellow. Three places had the highest concentration of power lines. One was in the outskirts of the city by the edge of the volcano and seemed to be the power grid. A line of cords led up from there along a pathway into the next hotspot, a building in the side of the volcano, presumably where the geothermal turbine resided. Finally, the last one centered around the building housing the Shield Sphere.
"¡Vaya! That's a lot of wires," Tracker commented.
"The Island Dome is the most important piece of equipment on this island. In case of a power shortage, the shield is designed to be the very last thing to lose power. They went so far as to hardwire it into the power grid that way."
Rocky gulped, "So what you're saying is, if we want to turn it off, we need to go to the power grid and shut down the power to the whole island?"
The Labrador retriever shook his head. "No, I'm saying that if we want to turn it off, we need to stop the geothermal turbine."
"And how do we do that?" Zuma asked.
"It's hard without destroying the machine, but I'll take care of it. As for getting you guys out, I should be able to fix the plane."
Skye gasped, "You think you can fix the Air Patroller?"
"Oh, I know I can," Gizmo replied confidently. "You'll just need to transport it to the hangar." The map zoomed in on a large building next to the power plant.
"Us? How are we supposed to get it all the way over there?" Rubble questioned.
"Not sure, but you'll figure out something. Check around the city if you'd like. I'll be constructing the new wing."
"There's something I still don't understand," Chase pondered. "If you designed and built our vehicles, then why don't you have the Air Patroller?"
Gizmo zoomed out and focused the map on another building. "Well, I eventually stopped feeling the need to test all my inventions before publishing the designs, but the main reason was because it's too big and would have taken too much material. I probably would have had to dismantle a building." The Labrador pointed at the building, "Normally I would just use the reactor here, but something that big takes a ridiculous amount of energy." Gizmo grinned, "E equals m c squared after all."
"WHAT?!" Rocky blurted. "How on earth do you do that?! It's hard enough to turn matter into energy, but turning energy into matter?"
Gizmo's face fell. "No I don't really do that… That was a joke… We just modify the atomic number and isotope ratios of preexisting elements." He sighed. "So much for trying to be funny," he thought to himself.
An awkward silence hung in the room. All that could be heard was the quiet, high pitched humming from the hologram table. Chase cleared his throat. "So, our plan is to get the Air Patroller to the hangar. Well, we'll need something to transport it. Gizmo, do you have all our vehicles?"
He nodded, "Yeah. They're in the rooms downstairs. As I said, you can also use anything you find around, even if it's in here. There's some magneto-discs in 208, or you could try the bridge generator in room 113. It's unfinished, but might work."
"Hold up," Rocky stopped him. "Bridge generator? In room 113? You mean like a portal?"
"Yes?"
"Ha!" the recycling pup cheered. "Another point for me! Now we're tied!"
"Actually, it's still ten to eleven," Zuma pointed out.
Rocky narrowed his eyes. "Shush. Give me this moment." After pausing for a second, he turned back to Gizmo. "So you said it's unfinished. What's the worst case scenario if it fails?"
The scientist swiped his paw to the side in the air in front of him, pulling up a complex array of mathematical measurements, schematics, and gravitational fields. "Well, worst case scenario is the portal sucks you into the center then re-seals up, leaving you trapped in a bubble of spacetime never to be seen again. But don't worry. There's only about a five percent chance of that happening." The Lab swiped back to the island map before looking at Rocky. "Do you want me to go get it?"
The engineer's jaw could not have been open wider; he wore an expression of complete shock. Marshall whispered to Skye, "Wow, I haven't seen someone that surprised since Chase saw you as a merpup in my dream."
"Five percent chance for never being seen again?!" Rocky blurted. "And you don't see anything wrong with that?"
Gizmo blinked, shooting a glance to the others. "No?"
"Rocky, it's okay, we'll just stick with using something else. Okay?" Everest broke in.
"Sounds good to me," Rubble agreed. "Who should we have make sure the hangar is cleared?"
"Puedo ayudar. I can help do it!" Tracker exclaimed.
"And I can stay back and help too," Marshall volunteered.
"I'll be here if you need me." Gizmo offered, pulling up a complicated schematic of a bunch of metal discs attached a central rod surrounded by a metal can. "Need to figure out a way to shut down the turbine without breaking the plates."
"Alright, Rocky, you get some supplies to help us move it easier. Then let's all get into our pupmobiles and get to work!" Chase declared.
And now, after 14 or so chapters, the pups finally have a plan of escape. This chapter starts to portray what will eventually become a common theme in the story, and a good part of the character arcs. I won't spoil it, but you'd probably be able to guess it anyway. And yes, in this reality merpups don't exist. They were all just dreams. So far I've been pretty pleased at how I've been spreading out the character focus with the constraints I have. I haven't gotten to some, like Rocky and Everest yet, but I'm happy with how I've done. As of last chapter, I also finally felt like I got a good handle on Zuma as well, who was the hardest for me. (And that might just maybe be part of the reason he was one of the ones knocked out, but I tell myself I wasn't biased because Everest is my favorite and I knocked her out anyway. Really it just had to do with what pups could have done what jobs at the time.) Also my story itself (without these giant blocks of notes at the bottom) has now broken over 20,000 words! :)
