Season 3 Episode 7: SCARS OF A SHEPHERD! PAW PATROL MOVIE PART FOUR!
"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" Chase yelped as he shot up in bed, with Ben, Ryder, and the rest of the pups immediately waking up and running over to check on him.
The sun was beginning to shine on the city, but it was still rather early. Five in the morning. "Chase, what happened!?" Ben asked.
Chase started to break down, tears streaming down his face. "I had a nightmare…" Chase whimpered.
Everyone was awestruck as Chase began to recount the details of his dream. Ben and Ryder were horrified at the tale. "Oh god…" Ben whispered.
Ben and Ryder knew that Chase had been through a lot in his puppy years, and that the incident yesterday had been rather terrifying for him. But Ben didn't expect it to have impacted Chase this badly. "Chase, I know that's scary, but you need to know that won't happen in real life." Ryder soothingly said.
"H-how do you know that won't happen?" Chase whined.
"We'll make sure it won't. Even if the scenario from your dream plays out like that in reality, we won't send you alone to do that job. And if push comes to shove… we can always go Mighty." Ben promised.
Chase sighed as he was petted by Ryder and cuddled by the other pups. "T-thanks, everyone." Chase gratefully said.
"Hey Ryder, let's go and get some breakfast from the cafeteria downstairs." Ben suggested.
Ryder looked at him and then realized that Ben was trying to pull him to the side for a conversation without the pups. Nodding his head, Ryder stood up and followed Ben. "We'll be back really soon, pups." Ryder assured.
As they walked down the staircase, Ben making sure that none of the pups followed them, Ryder and Ben began to discuss Chase. "I'm really worried about Chase's mental state. The mistake he made with his parachute yesterday must have really affected his mental health badly. Should we… sideline him?" Ben asked.
Ryder shook his head rapidly in response. "Absolutely not. If we put him on the sidelines, we'll make him feel useless, and that's the last thing he needs right now. Remember how he got when he wasn't called on for a rescue for two weeks?" The spiky haired teenager reminded.
Ben nodded his head as the memories played in his head. Chase had gotten really upset when they had several rescues over the course of two weeks, and none of them needed him. If it weren't for Zuma giving him a talk, since he was the most situational pup as their water rescue specialist, then Chase might have done something unpredictable. Chase absolutely loathed being useless, and when he didn't get called on for multiple rescues in a row, or was injured and unable to help the team, he got upset and irritable. If he was put off on the line now… it would be disastrous. "We just have to be careful and keep an eye on him during our missions." Ben said.
Liberty smiled as she drove her wagon to the subway, wondering what their horrible mayor would do today. "Now, this is the Humdinger Hyperloop! Many of you folks who take the subway have expressed a desire to have a way for station A to go to Station D directly without any stops along Stations B and C. The Hyperloop utilizes anti-gravity locking technology to allow the train to do a loop-de-loop before zooming to Station D! A group of people signed the waivers for this experiment as they boarded the train for this test run. I know that yesterday's firework festival was a fiasco, but I can assure you I've run hundreds of simulations on this." Humdinger announced before the train came along and started to travel along the loop de loop.
Liberty gasped as she saw one of the mustached men who were working with Humdinger press a button on a remote, and part of the train track broke apart.
After Ben and Ryder had breakfast together with the pups, they got a call from Liberty. "Ben, Ryder, it's terrible! Humdinger's crazy new loop de loop subway system has gone crazy, and the train has stopped upside down, trapping a ton of people inside! You've gotta help!" Liberty exclaimed.
"We're on our way!" Ryder promised.
When they got to the scene, Liberty was already helping set up a perimeter. "Reporting for duty, everyone! U-unofficially, of course." Liberty chuckled.
"Keep this up and it won't be unofficial for much longer." Ryder proudly said.
The loop started to groan and sway. "What in the…!? I know the loop isn't supposed to become unstable like this, I ran the simulation hundreds of times and accounted for thousands of potential issues!" Mayor Humdinger gasped as he saw the loop becoming unstable.
"Whatever the cause for it becoming unstable, we need to get it secure! Rocky, use your truck's pallet arms to support the loop. Tuck, your mechanic tow truck will be able to keep the loop in place. Rubble, lock it into place with some quick dry cement from your rig." Ben instructed.
"Skye, secure the loop in the air. Chase, I need you to go up and zipline over to them, use the manual release to open the doors, and help Skye use her harness to airlift everyone to safety. Preferably Marshall would use his ladder, but it's too high up. We don't have any other options right now." Ryder ordered.
"Green means go!" Rocky yelled.
"On the double!" Rubble added.
"Chase is on the case!" The German Shepherd shouted as he started to drive.
Rocky and Tuck sped their vehicles over to a loose section of the subway loop and secured it with their truck's hydraulic arms, while Skye used her plane-copter's afterburners to get the loop back to a safe angle. Chase ran inside a building and started to run up the stairs, with Ryder following close behind. "ZIPLINE!" Chase barked out, deploying the hook and attaching the ends to the brick corner of the building and the train window.
Suddenly, the scene became too real for him. It reminded him so much of his nightmare, with his zipline on both glass and the brick wall. Chase started to hyperventilate, and the bricks that he stood on started to collapse. Both of his front paws slipped off of the crumbling edge and he ran forward instinctively, getting stuck on the zipline in midair. Ryder came running up to the edge of the roof, worried. "Chase!?" Ryder called out.
"I-I'm… I'm okay!" Chase nervously said as he started to go forward.
Ben spotted a parking garage that Marshall could use to get to the loop. "Marshall, take the parking garage and get to the rooftop! You can use your ladder from there to get the people on the train down!" Ben urgently said.
"Okay, Ben!" Marshall answered, driving his fire engine through the parking garage with his sirens wailing.
The train car started to groan, and in an instant, it detached from the train tracks on the loop and hung in midair. The suction cup on the zipline broke free of the window, and Chase no longer had a destination with his zipline… leaving him to plummet to the earth. A horrified gasp from the entire crowd was heard as the zipline fell off. Ryder's eyes widened. He couldn't lose Chase! Not now! Almost as if he was guided by something, he reached into his vest pocket and pulled out the device his father had made, which had been given to him by Sky Tate. "EMERGENCY!" Ryder roared, running off of the building and making a leap of faith as armor formed around him.
Falling through the air, Ryder wrapped his arms around Chase and held him tightly as they both tumbled to the ground, with Ryder shielding Chase from the majority of the impact. Pain wracked through Ryder's body as the armor dissipated. "RYDER!" Ben, Marshall, Rocky, Rubble, Zuma, Ella, Tuck, Alex, Wild, and Liberty all cried out as they witnessed Ryder land on the ground.
Ben and Ella immediately stopped what they were doing and went over to Ryder, who was groaning in pain. "Ryder! Oh god!" Ben choked as he knelt by his injured friend.
"I'm… okay… god, that hurts. Marshall, handle the people!" Ryder grunted as he tried to sit up.
"Don't worry Ryder. I'll get them down from here! Ella will take you to the hospital!" Marshall assured as he started to use his ladder to rescue the people who were stuck inside the train.
Ben and Chase stuck with Ryder as they drove him to the hospital, with him being taken out of Ella's paws and into the emergency room to assess his condition. Soon after, the rest of the pups arrived. The EMTs came out of the emergency room that Ryder was in and began to tell them what had happened. "Your friend is extremely lucky. That armor he donned so suddenly absorbed the damage that he would have sustained. At the very least, he would have had broken ribs, and at worst he could have died on impact. You're very lucky he's okay. He's currently unconscious right now and we can't let canines into the emergency room. It's a nightmare to clean up your shedded hair. You can wait outside for him here or come back for him in a few hours." A female nurse told the group.
Chase felt awful, and he turned around, starting to walk away. "Chase!? Where are you going!?" Skye worriedly asked.
"I… I need some time alone. Okay?" Chase tearfully said before running out of the hospital.
He kept running until his puppy legs were so exhausted he couldn't go any further, and he curled up into a ball and started crying. Sobbing to himself, he felt ashamed. He had not failed once, but twice. Nearly coming face to face with death twice in forty-eight hours had taken a rather large toll on his emotional strength. "Chase, is that you?" A familiar voice asked.
Chase stopped his sobbing and lifted his head to see the older dog from yesterday, Cricket. "G-go away…." Chase whimpered.
"I don't think that's a good idea. You look like you're in a really bad headspace right now, you need to talk to someone!" Cricket softly said.
"Like what!? A therapist!? A therapist isn't going to understand all of the things I've been through! Therapists aren't abandoned on the streets of Adventure City when they're two years old! Therapists aren't taken in by a human and trained to be a rescuer that can catch criminals and save lives! THERAPISTS HAVEN'T HAD BRUSHES WITH DEATH!" Chase snarled, tears streaming down his eyes as he snapped at Cricket.
"Maybe not most therapists, but I'm a therapist, and I was left on the streets of this stinking city too! I might not be a rescuer on the legendary Paw Patrol, but I do know what it's like to have to fight for your life every day! A friend of my owner spread nasty lies about me and my owner kicked me out of the house, dropped me off at a shelter, and I had to run off and survive on my own! I had to join an awful group of strays to get enough food to keep from starving! If it weren't for me finding a kind woman named Rose, I'd still be stuck with those mean mutts! So don't treat me as if I don't have any idea of what you might have gone through!" Cricket retorted.
Realizing that Cricket would understand, he started opening up about his past with Adventure City, and about the nightmare he had. "And now, with Ryder in the hospital, it just feels so hard…" Chase sobbed.
Cricket nodded, scratching behind his ear with his hind left leg before giving a response. "It sounds like you might have a touch of post traumatic stress disorder. Your experiences in this city have made things so difficult for you… I don't exactly have a license, so I can't give you a full fledged diagnosis or a treatment, but I can give you some recommendations. Talk to a veterinarian about this sort of stuff, and they can see if my diagnosis is correct. Then they can give you some therapy and some medicines to help you get through it." Cricket mused.
"Thanks Cricket. Hey uh, can we talk again sometime? Can you come by the lookout and talk to me from time to time while I'm in Adventure City?" Chase asked.
"Sure!" Cricket answered, wagging his tail before leaving.
Then, a net flew out and ensnared Chase, the German Shepherd squirming and trying to break free. The henchman, one of Humdinger's crooks, smirked as he reached behind Chase and tore off his collar. "I knew Humdinger was up to no good!" Chase snarled.
"HA! You think we're working for Humdinger!? We hate that purple bozo's guts! But we can't have you and your puppy dog pals messing up our plans." Butch snickered as he hauled Chase away, activating the SOS on his tag.
"I'll wait right here for them, Butch!" His comrade, Reuben, promised, getting his dart gun and net launcher ready.
Ben gasped as the warning alarm on his pup pad activated, which would only play whenever a pup tag was removed. "CHASE IS IN TROUBLE!?" Marshall cried out.
The last time the siren had sounded was when Skye had crash landed in the snow and lost both her pup tag and pup pack. "Tuck. Ella. Alex. Liberty. Wild. Stay here with Ryder. I'm taking the rest of the pups to go and find Chase." Ben ordered.
They ran through the streets of Adventure City, and they came up to a fence that had a hole large enough for the pups to squeeze through, but not for Ben. "We'll go through this fence, Ben! You go around and we'll meet you on the other side!" Skye suggested. "Got it!" Ben replied, and started to run through an alleyway as the pups dove through the fence.
They came to Chase's pup tag, and looked around. They couldn't smell him or where he had gone, the trail just ended! Suddenly, they heard whistling noises through the air, and felt something prick them. Their eyes started to get droopy and they collapsed onto the ground. Ruben smirked as he walked up and removed the tranquilizer darts that he had shot them with. "Hahaha! This was so easy! Now, time to put these pooches in the kennel and take them to the obedience school!" Ruben cackled.
Ben ran to where the pups had said they'd rendezvous with him at, and gasped in horror as he saw all of their pup tags on the ground. "NO!" Ben screamed in agony, quickly realizing that they must have been kidnapped.
Running back to the hospital parking lot, he got on his motorcycle and started to head to SPD. If he was going to save his pups, he needed help.