JMJ
Chapter One
A lotta Hoopla about Three Little Girls
The City of Townsville. Happy. Busy. Prosperous. Not a cloud in the sky. Not a cloud on the brow. And monsters? Nah. No villains either. Not like last year on this very same day, at this very same spot, at this very same time on the clock… well, perhaps it was a little too soon for that, but it is strange to think about some violent terror that happened in a spot that usually is so normal-looking. For it was but one year ago that Mojo Jojo had brought his reign of terror to this resilient but funny little city. Loved and hated, awful and good. Is it the beginning of a Tale of Two Cities or the beginning of a Batman Graphic novel? Either, way, this is the spot in which the most disastrous villain and monster appeared, and the most unexpected heroes proved their worth to the city as they vanquished him…
It was a chipper morning as was already stated, and this was most surprising, not because of monsters, not because of super villains, but because of Sara Bellum, most of all. The fact that she was just showing up proved that she had not been there previously, and at City Hall that could be more disastrous than any Mojo Jojo with a ray gun.
"Ah, did you enjoy your vacation, Ms. Bellum?!" exclaimed the Mayor.
She did not answer immediately as she turned this way and that examining the room for anything out of place. Although it was difficult to tell for certain, she seemed to be pursing her lips more perturbed by the idea of everything appearing normal than if there had been a big mess on the floor.
"Oh, uh, yes!" Sara said brightly. "It was hard to relax at first but… did you do alright here, Mr. Mayor?"
"Oh, like I told you, Ms. Bellum, I've decided to really take charge around here. You won't find one slip of paper out of place. It was a challenge but by dill and vinegar, I managed."
"Hmm," Sara allowed a little warm humor into her voice despite her continued suspicions. "Well, I did manage to schedule you a pretty quiet time of mostly hosting the annual pickle convention. Thankfully nothing interrupted that, right?"
"Exactly!" exclaimed the Mayor holding out a crisp beauty of pickle. "You should try the difference between extra butter bread and butter and sucker punch dill weed and mustard and lemongrass… you can try pickled asparagus and Chinese pickled ginger, Minnesota chilled cranberry pickles, and if you want to get extra daring there's the scorching Olympic Torch pickled achar-style by this guy who—"
"What's this?" asked Ms. Bellum; she was holding up a piece of paper sitting prominently on the Mayor's desk.
"Oh, that!" said Mayor as he popped an Olympic torch into his mouth that very moment.
A flame-throwing shock went through the Mayor's system as he swallowed leaving a few strands of Ms. Bellum's full red hair singed at the ends. She sighed and tried not to think about the beautiful calming resort she had left behind and the smell of exotic all-natural conditioner fried through with chili breath. She maintained instead her position.
"Yes?" she asked the paper gently but firmly in her hand so the Mayor could see it fully with its singed edges.
"Excuse me, Ms. Bellum. You really should try them," said the Mayor wiping the tears from his eyes as he resumed normalcy, and he took the paper. "These are my speech notes. I've decided to try my hand at them. Everyone respects a politician who writes his own speeches."
"But what 'hoopla' are you talking about?"
"Oh, the hoopla I'm planning for tomorrow's celebrations, of course. Have you forgotten with all that vacationing?" the Mayor teased.
"Of course not, if you mean the anniversary of the Powerpuff Girls saving the day for the first time in their short but powerful careers."
"Exactly! They deserve nothing better!" said the Mayor. "So I'm throwing them the biggest hoopla this town has ever known."
"Don't you mean 'party', 'gala', or maybe you mean a 'bash'?" offered Ms. Bellum.
"No, I mean a 'hoopla' with dancing and music and horse rides and lots of food, especially those Olympic Torches. I bought barrels and barrels of them!"
"A 'hoedown'?" offered Ms. Bellum even more gently and encouraging.
"Ms. Bellum, I mean perfectly well what I mean, and I mean a 'hoopla'! The first ever hoopla in honor of the Powerpuff Girls' first victory over Mojo Jojo and his monkey business fiends, and the girls' saving us and the town with their big what-fors and there pow-bang-twwweee-booms! Already had the banners made and everything! Bet you're pretty impressed with me. Didn't think an old man could do it all himself, I'll bet!"
"Oh!" moaned Ms. Bellum.
She was somewhat beside herself. Everything else seemed to be in order enough, and yet she hoped beyond hope there was no more secrets she didn't know about. As the Mayor went on, more to himself than to Miss Bellum, about all the amazing things he had planned for the girls with cake and games and everything else, Ms. Bellum tried to console herself.
"It could've been worse. Just a misnomer. It could have been so much worse, and yet…"
#
"A 'hoopla'?" asked Blossom scratching her head.
Bubbles giggled.
"That's what they're calling it," chirped the Professor with a careless shrug.
"But you said it was going to be all formal," Buttercup protested. "If it's called a 'hoopla' I don't see why we need to wear these fluffy dresses and big bows."
"I like the fluffy dresses," said Bubbles helpfully.
Buttercup slumped and crossed her arms. "You would," she sighed and shuffled in her dress right now, tugging here and pulling there.
"Now, Buttercup," said the Professor gently.
"But—" Buttercup tried to protest.
"No 'buts' this time," the Professor insisted. "Whether a hoopla or a memorial, I believe that we should look our absolute best in honor of this anniversary. It's sort of a politeness like at a wedding or a visit to the White House. Sometimes it's good to dress special for an occasion, and admittedly, since I knew we were all going to only wear these clothes once, I rented them… I'm going to have to pay a really huge fine if these clothes get ruined, so please…"
"We're happy to wear them," Blossom assured him quite cheerfully.
"I don't see what's wrong with just going in our usual clothes," grumbled Buttercup.
"But I think you look beeeyoootiful, Buttercup," said Bubbles reaching out to touch the bow on Buttercup's lacy dress belt.
Buttercup pulled it away. "I think we look like powder cupcakes more than Powerpuff Girls. Besides, I just saw the Professor pulling on his suit before we got in the car."
The Professor coughed with embarrassment, but had the fortune of having to keep his eyes on his driving to have to face the comment head-on.
"Do you have to be contrary about everything?" sighed Blossom.
"I wouldn't've been if I could wear what I usually wear. Besides! What will the villains think seeing us dressed like this? They're all gunna laugh. It's one thing to dress like this at a private party, but in front of the whole town?!"
"You're basing this on what the villains think?" asked Blossom. "They'd fear us just as much in this as they would us wearing punk post-apoctolyptic motorcycle uniforms."
"It's got nothing to do with fear. It has to do with respect!"
"Girls," said the Professor.
Bubbles meanwhile was determined not the let the mood be spoiled by the bickering of her sisters. Though, strapped in her seatbelt she swished the shiny lace at the end of her dress and began to sing to herself, "It's like a fairy, fairy princess. La, la, la, la, la, la la. A fairy princess in her fairy coach. La, la, la, la, la, lee, la. Fairy coaches with fairy dragonflies pulling up ahead. La, lee, la, lee, la, lee!"
"We're gunna be a laughing stock," Buttercup said throwing out her arms.
"Stop being like that," huffed Blossom. "You can take it off when we go home."
"But—"
"Remember what we have planned for tomorrow?" offered the Professor with warning care.
"Chickie Cheeses!" squealed Bubbles bouncing in her seat.
Buttercup sighed. "Oh, alright. That makes up for it."
The Professor smiled. "Besides, I think you three look very dignified, not silly."
"Yeah," Blossom agreed.
"I said, alright," Buttercup grumbled. "Ugh."
#
"Curses…"
Mojo Jojo glared through the opening in the blinds between his outstretched thumb and forefinger. The balloon of him being bombarded with smaller Powerpuff Girl-shaped balloons was a nice touch to commemorate that fateful day of his first ever failure. How he resented it. He could pop the little girl balloons if he had wanted, but it wasn't worth the ridiculous manner in which the Mojo balloon portrayed himself. It would prove nothing. It was hardly worth an evil chortle about.
"Besides," he muttered to himself in a partial whine, "a whole year and what have I show for it? Humiliation, bruises, and the sour disposition of an old man who's been at this for fifty years rather than one."
He was not sure why but more than that foolish birthday party fiasco with all the Townville City Rogues this day was worse, and it had not even truly begun. The birthday of the girls should have been the end of all plans. Now this day had come. He had already woken up hitting his head on the headboard.
He let the blinds fall back into place over his kitchen window, and spun back into the room.
There was no way he could let this day end the way it had begun, but how? By shooting up the town? No, that was always his fallback. By rights it should have been something bigger and badder than his plan to have his simian fellows help him conquer humanity after tricking the Powerpuff Girls into aiding in the heavy lifting and all. It had been a good plan. A very good plan. But had his first plan been his best?
He poured himself some coffee and stared at the eggs growing cold on his plate. Even his jaws felt depleted of energy, sore, and ancient. It was the kind of tired that a good night's sleep could not remedy. His tongue felt dry and limp in his mouth. He swallowed hard. Reaching absently for the newspaper he felt his hand falter. It was just going to be announcing the stupid, old Hoopla the Mayor was so proud of.
Staring out into the empty corners of the blank kitchen ceiling he brought his mug to his lips. Slowly he sipped. He took his fork and stuffed half a lukewarm egg into his mouth, but before he had completely finished chewing he suddenly stood bolt upright from his chair.
"No!" Mojo snarled, bits of egg flying back onto the table, but he was too much in a passion to notice.
Dashing from the room, he made for the stairs. Down, down, down into the dark recesses of the volcano as though delving into the darkest recesses of his mind.
He had to reflect. He had to reflect deeply and truly, honestly and completely. Deeper than his bathroom with the tub all ready to soak his cares away, deeper than secret storage rooms where the best of sci-fi toys could distract him, deeper than his artist evil planning studio where the ambience would tempt him into false confidence. He needed the sub-level cellar. He needed… Com.
Com had never given him his real name. It was perhaps that he did not know it anymore, but Mojo knew it was resentment. Not so much resentment at Mojo Jojo but resentment at what he had been reduced to after whatever scheme he had been hatching all those months that felt like years ago. Now he was merely Com. He was better than an AI chat box. Mojo Jojo considered him one of his more successful sentient experiments.
Com was the best cyber genetic creature from an organically born creature just as Mojo Jojo was the best of a bioengineered being and one traditionally born himself. The main difference was that Mojo was an accident and this brilliant accident was able to harness his power of unnatural intellect to create one after his own image by machine.
Eat your heart out Pr. Utonium, he thought.
As the double sealed chamber opened before him, he felt relief at the cool air inside. He was so deep that even the advanced temperature controls gave way a little to the heat of the volcano in the vast corridor behind him, but Com's little abode was more cut off from the outside world than a nuclear bomb shelter.
In complete blackness, the door sealed shut behind him.
He closed his eyes nonetheless for a moment or two with a smile as he bathed in the artificial breeze: cool, dry, and propelled by a comforting white noise more solid and constant than the untamed irregularity of the wind in the park trees outside the observatory. Instead of floral scents mixed with vehicle exhaust, the smell was of faint metal and plastic and electric wiring and of overall cleanliness mixed very faintly with the stony primal air he had brought with him from the corridor that seeped from the volcano. Mixed with the artificial breeze was the sound of the heartbeat of software in the form of the gentlest beeping. Its breath was a hum as constant as the air circulation.
This was a planet of his own creation more than any other part of the observatory. It was as though he had slowly but steadily passed through the veils of Earth to another dimension altogether. Here he was god, and as the god of this sterile sightless calculating realm he knew the waking of his creation as the computer droning began to grow louder and a gentle but brief musical hum echoed from the speaker as the screen came to life. Glowing sickly in the gloom, it became his moon to govern the night, he would awaken his sun to govern the day.
"Let there be light!" said Mojo.
The ceiling bloomed and boomed, glowing with spotlights from artistic-styled lamps. Single strips of fluorescent lights were not worthy of such a subterranean think tank as this. Mojo himself could not help but feel a slight chill, and it made the old wretchedness he was feeling give way to at least some small semblance of rejuvenation. He remembered how very young and fresh he truly was.
Not like that ancient brain in a false cranium made of clear aquarium-like glass. Com's real self was a goldfish in a jar now instead of the center which ran a powerful body.
The mighty brain of Mojo Jojo in contrast needed no barrier of even that of bone. He covered it most of the time, true, but it was not necessary. He did not feel the need to take off his helmet to prove it. It was more the principal that the world, even this one, was unworthy to look upon it when it was working in its element.
"I have need of reflection," Mojo declared, which was the voice command that allowed Com to speak.
"How long has it been?" asked the mild-mannered tenor of the computerized voice Mojo had graciously bestowed to him. "Ah, a month or so. The anniversary of your initial defeat."
Mojo crossed his arms and frowned. He felt a bristling of anger, but the mild-mannered voice was only speaking truth. He rolled his eyes and threw himself into the large office chair.
"Yes…" murmured Mojo leaning back idly and swinging from side to side.
"Then what is troubling you, Mojo Jojo?"
"Oh, nothing much," sighed Mojo. "Just the usual. Just a lotta hoopla about three little girls. You know… and the fact that it's been already a year… No. the fact that it's been only a year! No! The fact that this anniversary is smacking me right in the face and I have nothing to show for it!"
"It does sound like a bit of depression," admitted the gentle voice of Com.
"Oh, it's worse than that!" said Mojo leaning back in his chair now and folding his hands over his chest like a stereotypically posed psychiatric patient. "I have master-planning block worse than any artist of my caliber can dream."
"Artist's block has nothing to do with caliber. It has to do with emotion and stagnancy, and you are suffering from an abundance of both. If I was a regular chatbot I would tell you that you are probably most in need of a vacation."
"That is out of the question," retorted Mojo.
"And that is exactly why I will not suggest it."
Without looking up, Mojo muttered, "I sense some patronizing in that tone that is very subtle and I do not like it, because I did not design the voice modulator for such subtlety. You are overriding it."
"But you know that a real AI would not be comforting because it would not be real."
"An AI of my own creation, created from my own desires is so easy to override by the maker who is me, that the opinion of an AI is not to be trusted by myself when I require honesty," retorted Mojo, "simply because it can be more easily trusted to mindlessly speak what its maker tells it to speak, but you speak with deception as any true sentient being does, and that it what is needed in these times of self-doubt and self-pity— so!"
And here Mojo straightened himself at the consol cracking his knuckles for the keyboard as for a piano concerto.
"Let us review! First to review the minutes of the last reviews. I would say that the review over the plan of transforming the citizens of Townsville into dogs led only to a review of the time I tried to fix the plans. Com?"
"You decided at the second review of the transformation of the citizens of Townsville into dogs that to completely redo an existing plan with only minor points changed was a waste of time because of the unpredictability of environmental factors which can never be replicated after said-plan has been enacted once before. That the mind of even stupid people remembers and therefore the plan is decidedly unfixable once it has been broken."
Mojo nodded sagely.
"Next."
"The full and comprehensive study of a past failure that almost succeeds in the form of a self-commentary is also proven to be a waste of time as it conjures up reliving the moment to the point of becoming too emotionally involved. This distraction takes away from the point of the review."
"Yes…"
"In the review of Operation: Sleepover you did not take the advice to yourself at the beginning not to get emotionally involved and you gave me permission to remind you."
"Yes."
"Your desire to see the events through an impartial spectator was overcome by your triggered emotional scars from living in that house no longer the one you remember from your infancy. The instability you have about your relationship with your enemies makes you untrustworthy in regards to seeing your work from a non-judgmental—"
"Yes! Yes! I get it! I get it!" snarled Mojo, hair bristling and teeth tightly clenched. "You don't need to keep reiterating the problem!"
"I am paraphrasing what you told me to paraphrase."
Mojo held his hand up authoritatively and squeezed his eyes shut.
"Okay, you know what?" he said pinching his aching temples. "I just decided that we are never to bring up the event of turning the Townsville citizens into dogs or to review reviewing it. I also just decided that we shall never under any circumstances bring up Operation: Sleepover ever again. It is now a forbidden topic for any reason ever except to mention that we are never to speak of it."
"Is this an 'emotional ranting' order or a 'never to question' order?"
"This is a never to question order forever!" retorted Mojo.
"I have erased the details of these reviews from the computer database, except that they happened and are never to be spoken of."
"Thank you," Mojo sniffed. "Now then."
He twirled majestically in his seat and began to search the files of his hidden cameras in his lair and news and internet outlets that he hacked. He had almost seamless records of his plans in this way, and he filed them all like episodes of a crime show with the main character an antihero.
"I propose we go about the reviews in a different manner," said Mojo Jojo calm again. "I propose we think about all the plans at once in a general and in a big picture sense, if you will. In a sense that cannot be focused on single points of humiliation. We systematically take out which points were good and which points were bad. No focusing on one failure over another. We know they are all failures otherwise I would be victorious right now as we speak and I would speaking to you from a throne on the reformed palace that once would have been City Hall, but then we would not be having this conversation at all as I would no longer be needing you to have these reviews so this also is an idle pointless exercise to think of a future that does not exist. This is a scientific study of master-planning, which is to say, we must not be distracted from the point of these very specific reviews…"
He paused, a twitch in his eyelid.
"…Even though meanwhile my arch enemies and rivals are celebrating as I hide away in misery as though I was still living in a soggy cardboard box of cheap merchandise from China instead of in this impenetrable sanctuary of my own making, making my life's work feel so meaningless, it almost feels pointless to continue! However! I will continue to work towards the goal of final domination over the world until my final breath upon this pathetic pile of dirt in the universe because I will not give my enemies the satisfaction that they have defeated me without trying! Is that understood, Com!?"