Episode 3:
Positively 4th Street

You've got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend,
When I was down, you just stood there grinning,
You've got a lot of nerve to say you've got a helping hand to lend,
You just want to be on the side that's winning.

"Don't approach the glass-"

"I know," Gantu bared his teeth at the diminutive guard who directed him to the nearest visitor's window. He'd have tried to stomp on him if he didn't the guard would be quicker on the draw with the stun pistol on his hip.
Instead, he simply took his seat, looking straight ahead at the reinforced glass. Looking down, he found the microphone he was meant to speak into, along with his pink-furred visitor.
"So what brings you here?" He asked.

Angel simply looked up at him, clutching the neck of her electric guitar. He couldn't tell if she was glaring or not; her black eyes gave off a very acute kind of unhappiness.

"How was the wedding?" Gantu asked.

Angel only blinked. She shuffled in her seat as if she was about to say something, but she didn't.

"You know I was invited to a wedding once," Gantu said. "But I had to miss it. It was the week I started working for Hamsterviel…"

Angel heaved her head back and shut her eyes, her skunk stripe flopping between her antennae as she did.

"If your goal was to ignore me," Gantu said, "there are easier ways to do that than coming to visit me."

Angel snapped her fingers. She brought her feet up on the counter and pulled her guitar into her lap, taking a moment to tune it.

"If this is Your Song again-"

She drowned him out with a powerful opening chord. Gantu covered his ears, glaring around at the guards who were utterly unmoved by his irritation.
Finally, Angel sang.

You say I let you down, you know it's not like that,
If you're so hurt, why then don't you show it?
You say you've lost your faith, but that's not where it's at,
You have no faith to lose and you know it.

"You seem well," Gantu said to his visitor, who scratched the flat surface of his namesake nose.

"I should hope so," Hammerface said.

They sat still for about a minute, feeling the generated oxygen pressing in on them.

"I always thought we made a great team," Gantu finally said. Hammerface barely budged at the comment.
"We ran a tight unit that one time, didn't we? Quick, clean, efficient. I haven't seen elegance like that in the field from the Federation's best soldiers… A lot of that was because of your leadership, I think. You have a great way of making others listen to you."

Hammerface shuffled in his seat. "For better or worse."

"You know…" Gantu said. "I always thought we were alike-"

"Clip said I didn't have to come," Hammerface snapped. "She said I didn't have to bring all this back up again. But I wanted to know if fifteen years locked up on this rock was enough to finally get the gears in that thick skull of yours turning. But you're still drowning in your own ego and self-pity."

Gantu burned up at his words. His lips fumbled before they finally found a retort.

"There's no point getting upset with me for it! Look at this place! Can you really expect being locked up in a place like this for so long to change anybody in any meaningful way-"

"Yes," Hammerface said, his black eyes petrifying Gantu. "I can."

Gantu felt something swallow the burning inside him.

Hammerface sighed. "I should've listened to my better half. You'd think I'd have learned that by now."
He fixed Gantu with one more stoic look, then said only one more thing before leaving.
"Reuben says aloha."

Gantu felt colder and colder as the guards escorted him back to his cell. He sat on his bed, staring at a spot on the wall, replaying the conversation in his head.
When he got to the end - 'Reuben says aloha' - he punched the spot he'd been staring at with all his might. His hand burned.

I know the reason that you talked behind my back,
I used to be among the crowd you're in with,
Do you take me for such a fool to think that I'd make contact,
With one who tries to hide what he don't know to begin with?

"This is a nice change of pace," Gantu said. "I can stay in my room instead of being squeezed into that cramped visiting area."

The white-furred face on the screen regarded him with bemused scarlet eyes. "You and I both know that you speaking to me through video communications is the antithesis of a change of pace, Gantu. This is simply as close as the Federation feels comfortable getting us, as they should."

"Well, regardless, it's good to see you, Dr. Hamsterviel-"

"Milton."

"Oh… Your choice, I guess."

"They all took new names," Milton said, his hands folding over his dark blue overalls. "I thought I'd try it."

"So what have you been up to?" Gantu asked. "You know, I always thought you got the better deal out of the both of us."

"Running a farm with a dear friend. I enjoy the work. When I started, all those years ago, I enjoyed working with my hands, bringing something to life through effort and dedication. I lost that somewhere along the way. It's been good to reclaim that part of myself."

"And where is this farm?"

Milton gave a weary smile. "Wouldn't you like to know?"

Gantu's eyes narrowed; he burned up again. "You say that as if you're not the reason I've been in here for the past fifteen years!"

Milton's smile vanished. "You and I both know that I'm not. You dug your grave with how recklessly you pursued Stitch when you first went to Earth-"

"If Experiment 626 hadn't-!"

"And with how you doubled down thereafter. We'd both made our own mistakes long before we started making the same ones together. We brought out the worst in each other, Gantu. We were both wrong, but we made each other feel right."

"It's still your fault!" Gantu stood up, his spit flying onto Milton's projected face. "It was your abominations that got me into this mess! If you'd been a decent, law-abiding citizen, then nothing would've been able to drag me down!"

Milton shut his eyes, pinching the space between them with two fingers. "Don't lecture me on how wonderful you would be were it not for other people, Gantu," he said. "I've given it too many times myself."
He opened his eyes, which regarded Gantu with utter exhaustion.
"But perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. You learned from the greatest expert on that subject."

Milton nodded to somebody behind the camera and the screen promptly went to black. It retreated into a hole in the ceiling which then shut, leaving the cell as stark and gray as it always was.
Gantu turned and lay down on the bed, watching the place where the screen had been, imagining Hamsterviel's face still there. In his mind's eye, he'd discarded the blue overalls to take on his red cape again.
Gantu gritted his teeth. "You know that he's called Experiment 626."

You see me on the street, you always act surprised,
You say "how are you, good luck," but you don't mean it,
When you know as well as me, you'd rather see me paralyzed,
Why don't you just come out once and scream it.

Gantu instantly realized that he didn't know the woman's name. He knew that it was an older relative of the Earth girl who'd taken in 626 - mother or an aunt or an older cousin, most likely - but he couldn't put a name to her face.
He thought it best not to ask; it seemed most anything he said to his visitors lately didn't impress them anyway.
She didn't speak for the first two minutes of the visit. She keep turning between him and a pocket notebook she'd brought. He tried to glance at what she'd written, but she always held it at such an angle that even his admirable height couldn't catch a glimpse. Somehow, he knew she was doing it deliberately.

"So…" He finally broke the silence. "You've been giving shelter all this time to Dr. Hamsterviel's monsters. That must be chaotic."

She held his gaze at that. She clutched her notebook and finally spoke.

"The worst moment of my life…" She said, "was when you came into it. My sister, Lilo, the only family I had left, was trapped on your ship, and I had no way of getting her back. I thought I'd never feel more empty, more powerless, than when I knew that my parents were gone and my world would never be what it once was. Then you, marching in thinking you could fix everything, come in and took away everything I had left. To me, that was the end of the world. There is nothing worse than that feeling… And it's only thanks to… One of Dr. Hamsterviel's 'monsters,' as you call them - someone I love like a brother - that your mistake was fixed and my world didn't end after all."

Gantu blinked at her, feeling the air turn to ice around him. "I… I didn't know," he said, his trenchant voice weakened.

"Well, now you do," she said, standing up from her seat. "I thought you should know before they let you loose again."

Gantu watched her go, frozen in ice even when she was out of sight and the guards started prodding him to head back to his cell.

No, I do not feel that good when I see the heartbreaks you embrace,
If I was a master thief, perhaps I'd rob them,
And though I know you're dissatisfied with your position and your place,
Don't you understand it's not my problem?

Gantu didn't need his last visitor to say anything to make him burn; the very sight of his hairy blue face was enough to make him volcanic. His eyes were the worst part; those black, nebulous things full of yearning, as if Gantu were the more pathetic, contemptible sight out of the two of them.

"Come on," Gantu said through gritted teeth. "Get on with it."

Stitch raised an eyebrow. "Get on with what?"

"Fifteen years… It all ends tomorrow. You've forgiven all the rest - the trogs that attacked you, whether or not I had them do it. That Earth man who got hold of Experiment 029. Even Dr. Hamsterviel, or else you wouldn't be letting them both play Wizard of Oz on some backwater planet somewhere. It's my turn now, isn't it?"

"To be forgiven?" Stitch said, blinking with confusion. "Okay… What would you do with it?"

"What does it matter?" Gantu growled. "When it can just be handed out to mad scientists and conquerors and… abominations like you. Why should I be the odd one out? After everything I've gone through."

"Everybody's gone through a lot," Stitch said. "But what would you do with it?"

Gantu clenched his fist until it went numb. "Do you think you're better than me? Just because you've been allowed to walk around outside for the last fifteen years? Just because the Earth people took you in and made you their little pet? Just because you tossed me around and made me look like an idiot time and time again?"

"You were trying to toss me around," Stitch said, his gaze fixed on Gantu, warm but never burning as much as Gantu wished they would.
"Me and my cousins, my ohana. People I care about, who aren't as strong as you or me."

"You destroyed my ship! You terrorized a city!"

"I'm sorry," Stitch said. Gantu could tell that he meant it; that made it worse.

"Then why can't they give to me what they gave to you?!"

"What would you do with it?"

"Just say it!" Gantu's spit sprayed onto the glass, casting Stitch in a rainy scene. "You don't even have to mean it. Just…"
He buried his face in one massive hand.
"I just want it. It's all I want now. Isn't that enough."

He could feel Stitch's eyes on him like a warm blanket that he wished he could shrug off.

"What would you do with it?"

"I don't know," Gantu said.
He managed to look at Stitch again. His neck felt sore from craning down.
"Why do you have to look at me like that?"

Gantu recognized something else in Stitch's eyes; something that made him long for his other visitors. He'd spend another fifteen years stuck in here with visitors like them every day if it meant that terrible thing would vanish from Stitch's eyes.
Pity. What kind of thing got pity from an abomination?

"How else can I look at you?"

I wish that for just one time, you could stand inside my shoes,
And just for that one moment, I could be you,
Yes, I wish that for just one time, you could stand inside my shoes,
You'd know what a drag it is to see you.

Gantu couldn't believe it. He'd spent the better part of fifteen years picturing this scene in his head, and now it was here. He stood in a doorway, knowing the cold, cramped steel of years wasted lay behind him. Ahead, silver rock as far as the eye could see, and stars much further than that. He used to love being among the stars; now, at last, he could be there again.
Yet he wanted more than anything to turn around and go back inside.

"Take your time," the officer at his feet said; a diminutive thing with an armadillo's shell squeezed into a dapper blue uniform.
"It's perfectly normal not to want to move straight away. It helps to take it all in. Why, I once saw someone stand there for twenty minutes, just stargazing, before they finally set out on their way."

"Twenty minutes, huh," Gantu said. "... I feel like I could beat that record."

"You're welcome to try," the guard chuckled in his deep yet chipper tone. "Of course… Maybe you need more than twenty minutes."

Gantu swallowed. "A lot more, I think."

The guard cleared his throat. When he spoke again, his voice was even deeper, taking on a lofty tone Gantu only recognized from generals and professors.

"Then you'll have plenty of time to listen to me."

"... Sure," Gantu responded automatically, still fixated on the stars.

"Nobody's happy about your freedom. You've no place out there anymore."

"You know… I just might get a move on if you're only going to tell me what I already know."

"Trust me; I have a lot to say that will be of great interest to you… It's a difficult game out there, isn't it?"

"Yes… It's impossible."

"Yes!" The guard sounded almost childlike in his excitement. "Yes, you've got it! It is impossible! They have too good an advantage for anyone to have any hope of winning anymore. And you've given so much of yourself trying to win. You've made an admirable effort, more so than most, but at last, you're all spent."

"... Yes, I am."

"You're tired. And that's okay. There's no need to work up energy you don't have, trying to win a game where you have no chance anymore. Not when I can soothe your terrible pain."

Gantu looked down at the guard, who now wore a smile that seemed plastered to his scarlet face. It had been so long since Gantu had seen a smile, so he was willing to take what he could get.

"Who are you?" He asked.

The guard grinned. "My name is Dr. Tyr Zorek. I am speaking to you through one of my proxies; someone whose pain I've already taken away, as any good doctor ought to do. Wouldn't you agree?"

Gantu's eyes narrowed. "I think I've had my fill of doctors."

"I'm doing great things with computers, you know," the guard said. "And the brain is little more than a highly advanced and incredibly troublesome computer. Your brain is causing you a great deal of trouble, isn't it?"

Gantu felt cold, but it was a refreshing kind of cold. "Honestly… If I could climb out of it, I would."

"Ah, but that's the beautiful thing," the guard said, his eyes wide with excitement. "You can. It's how I intend to win the game, you see. I can make someone's brain behave in a very particular way. Any particular way, really. The others, they use persuasion and deception and all other manner of increasingly belligerent and nebulous means to win, but none of them have perfected as efficient a strategy as mine… And, it so happens, Gantu, that you have something I want."

"I do?"

"Yes. You have experience with the creatures built by Doctors Jumba and Hamsterviel. I have taken a special interest in them recently. Perhaps you could tell me what you know of them, and I could make it so you know only what you wish to know."

Gantu looked into those wide, ecstatic eyes. He'd been lost in so many eyes over the past few weeks, but these were the first that wanted to see him.

"What do I have to do?" He asked.

"Simply board the ship I've already sent to retrieve you," the guard said. "And let me take you away from all this."

"... How long will it take?"

The guard grinned. "About twenty minutes."

Gantu chuckled. "And here I was thinking I'd really beat that record."

"I knew you wouldn't…" The guard looked up at the stars. Gantu followed his gaze. "Just think; you'll be able to enjoy the stars again."

"Yeah…" Gantu said, letting the cold wash over him. "I'd like that."