"Hey?" asked Blossom looking around at breakfast next morning after a late night of partying; and it was a very late morning now. "Has anyone seen Jojo…?"
#
Jojo… Jojo… Jojo… Jojo… Mo—
"…Jojo, Jojo, Jooooojo," sang Bubbles, "what're you doing noooow…?"
She laughed in her musical way, and Jojo laughed in his panting simian manner as he touched her face so carefully, so gently, so delicately. She was so delicate. He was so strong. How different it was compared to… what? And she rubbed his head with all her tiny strength, which was so delicate, so different compared to—
He was not sure exactly how it started, except that he was playing with Bubbles. Bubbles took the colored sticks and pressed them to the white sheets. Jojo was offered a purple one, and he took it eagerly to copy her. It was not the first time. She loved it when he played this game with her, and her pleasure made his own pleasure swell.
He swirled his color around the blank white sheet until Bubbles offered him another color. Then he would drop the first color and take up the next. One particular sheet was Bubbles' favorite, or so it seemed. She appeared very pleased with it.
She leapt up with a laugh, and Jojo followed her with shared enthusiasm to the Professor's office. Bubbles showed the sheet to him.
"See, look what Jojo drew, isn't it weird?" she asked.
Though Jojo could not understand the words, he understood her amusement and that she was pleased with him.
"Aww, isn't that nice," said the Professor at first being more amused by Bubbles than by Jojo, but Jojo was family enough not to take offence.
The Professor turned back to his work but stopped two seconds in with a violent jolt to look back at the paper. He snatched it and looked at it and then gaped at Bubbles. "Jojo drew this?!"
"Uh, huh!" said Bubbles throwing her tiny arms around her back. She was still very tiny all around at this time. "It looks kinda like the stuff that you—"
"This is the symbol for pi! Distinctly pi! And along with some sort of equation too! Only half finished but—"
"That doesn't look like a pie, Dad," giggled Bubbles.
"No, no!" gasped the Professor leaping from his chair and grabbing his head with one hand. "It means—"
Jojo squealed with joy. Lab time! He knew those words!
The Professor spoke quite excitedly as he seated Jojo down in front of him seconds later in the lab down the steps. Jojo knew exactly what this meant. It meant it was time for not just an ordinary lab time where the Professor did his thing and Jojo did his with his toys. This was when the Professor wanted him to be part of it in-full even more than asking Jojo to get something for him. He loved it best when they worked together.
Oh, how eager Jojo was to have that thing put upon his head. He did not know what it meant, except that it was part of the serious games of the lab. He loved them so dearly. It was a heavy funny thing, but it was necessary for the experience. He trusted the Professor.
As it was set upon his head, the Professor latched it to itself so that it would not fall. Jojo understood perfectly and checked himself to make sure it was stable.
"Okay, you may feel something," said the Professor, and Jojo did not really understand what he was saying, except that it was all for reassurance.
Except… did he understand it? Did he understand the words that he was not supposed to understand anymore?
Anymore?! At one time had he understood?
Numbers or numerous calculations. Colors of a much harsher sort violently gleaming with metallic power and prestige. A tongue controlled with defined words of brutal elegance or stressed ramblings never-ending but always so clear, concise, and to the point! Or were they not clear…?
Did he understand the pictures? Did he understand the words? Did he understand what the Professor was trying to deduce? Was the Professor even there or was he alone in a cold dark tower of a mind palace brought to life before his eyes? Did he understand the explosion of a volcanic tower in an otherwise beautiful place with tree and grass? Did he understand the fear of the green gaseous fumes? The memories of blasting holes? The feelings of dread? The flying zipping flashes of pink, green, and blue? The monsters that crashed through the city? The strange figures who accompanied him on occasion? Fuzzy Lumpkins? HIM? The Rowdyruff Boys?
The smell of metal, oil, and hot plastic and wires assailed his nostrils. The feel of buttons, levers and pulleys he knew so well, and he knew they would perform what they were meant to by ingenious designs of his own mind?
The screams of humans with animalist terror? The anger of monkeys talking back with human speech?
But lab time!
It flashed before his eyes in memory to a time he felt rage that he could no longer be a part of something because of the rivals that had taken his place in the Professor's heart.
Breaking, smashing, crashing, glee. Alone? With the Professor? With the girls?
"It was me… it was me… it was…"
The sulk, the fear, the emptiness beyond his animal comprehension. The pain in his brain! The pain that was not physical so much as the pain of deep confusion. Oh, but there was real pain too. Pain in more blinding flashes of colored light. Pink. Blue. Green. Thoughts compounded that he barely understood that he understood.
Did he understand the flash of light exploding in his face? Did he understand the name 'Mojo Jojo'?
Hotwired, about to explode?
A laugh. Sadistic, cruel, spiteful, it was a laugh he knew. The Professor? The Professor's laugh was distant like a memory of a spring that would never come again. The swirling pixies? Their laugh was of a magic that only tooth fairies could conjure. Or was it coming from his own vocal chords deep and ruefully gripping his own heart with its reverberations and his mind with a tangled net of bewilderment and horror and wicked satisfaction that always left him thirsting for more but never truly gave him satiation?
"I am your creator!" The Professor? The swirling pixies? "I am your king!" Mojo Jojo. "I am—"
Rage consumed him. Frantic, benthic, and—
and then three fingerless fists slammed into all sides of his head.
#
DRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRING!
"Lab time!" gasped Mojo Jojo leaping up in bed; the words felt foreign on his tongue.
He panted loudly and crazed as though he had nearly been suffocated just seconds before and escaped some unknown hands at his throat. His eyes dilated, he was still seeing red spots like he'd just been hotwired like a machine and still not quite ready to go. His face was hot and wet as he stared out at his covers blankly until he took note in the alarm's source like a drill boring into his aching head.
Two tiny mechanical monkeys banged on either side of a little bell. They ended at 9:01. Then staring, blinking stupidly at nothing truly in particular, he felt his mind was a complete fog enough for a fog horn as he tried to reorient himself from a horrendously dizzying night of fathomless dreams. They shook him still to the core of his palpitating heart. He clutched his chest as though it would help to slow it down, but it just had to run its course.
At last his breaths slowed down to normal; then his feral heart went back to black stone.
He had woken up to his own calming blue metallic room, in his own king-sized bed with its blue blanket and huge round headboard. In his own striped nightshirt he sat there. A long night cap covered his long heavy but vastly important brain. His own little Monkey plush was fallen next to the pillow that was as big as Mojo's whole body. The alarm was on the nightstand left hand side. The lamp that looked like a death-ray was on its table right hand side. All was still. All was peaceful and familiar even if a little lonely.
He closed his eyes and sighed with a sort of relief that still felt somewhat off as he allowed his head to rest back and sink into the pillow.
At least there was no need for adrenaline.
"Which is to say," he sagely told the ceiling, "it was simply a nightmarish creation of my own deep melancholic subconscious mind from my psychologically destroyed youth as I slept, and probably due to having a late supper again at the end of a long night of evil plans that did not go well such as interferes with a good night's rest. I note to myself never to repeat this action."
Slowly he climbed out of bed, feeling stiff and sore and like he had been tousled a bit not too long before, especially under his arms like he had been dangling from a clothes line for hours. He clacked the roof of his mouth and scratched his back as he tried to recall if there was a fight last evening with the Powerpuff Girls, but his mind was still too clogged up with leftover sickly nightmares.
He was not a morning person. As he slipped his cold feet from the little rug into his fluffy slippers, he shuffled onward begrudgingly. Making a long grumpy face, he pushed a button to open the metallic shade to his broad bedroom window. Sunlight blasted in from a crisp, cheery, autumn morning. A few busy birds were flying south. The sun seemed to smile mockingly at him in a blue robin's egg bath. Not a cloud tainted the sky.
"Curses…" Mojo grumbled deep in his throat.
He shut the blinds that were more like a bomb prevention cover or at least a garage door.
Still in this same slow cheerlessness, he activated his "morning preparation sequence". The mechanical morning devices of the lair then went into motion like a parody of an old fashioned pushbutton home advertisement as he slumped onto the conveyer belt. The automatic shower cleaned him, the dryer dried him and combed his fur, the automatic teeth brusher did not activate until the second he opened his mouth and showed his sharp deadly teeth, and mechanical maid-arms changed him out of his pajamas as he raised his arms and put into place his super villain uniform: tunic, cape, boots, and brain cap placed with as much care upon his brain as Darth Vader's helmet. All went as smooth as the clockwork it was designed to be… by Mojo Jojo.
Then he was dropped off into the kitchen through a door in the wall instead of the main doorway.
"The energy of the breakfast I will prepare will remedy the night's depletion of mental focus," he muttered.
Eggs, toast, orange juice, bacon, coffee. Everything normal, but it took him a few moments before he decided to actually take a sample.
It was so quiet. Something about it unnerved him. Even though everything was exactly the way he liked it, he took his first bite of egg and felt that the salt was even lacking luster somehow. But he knew it wasn't. It was all in his head. Every morning was this quiet but voices haunted his mind like the ghosts of those who should be there and were not. It made his already sour morning mood even sourer.
Despite how everything was pristine, he grumbled under his breath, "Curses…"
Stupid world. Stupid existence. He hated it. When he was in charge he would do something about it all.
He stood up, turned on Antonín Dvořák's Serenade for Strings in E Major, and sat back down.
Well, speaking of the world, he picked up the newspaper.
"Something foul must have been happening even if those accursed Powerpuff Girls have stopped it. I can somehow just feel it," he told himself, and he felt he absolutely needed this to be true.
The newspaper headline was not about the Powerpuff Girls, however. His brow knit as he delved into what was in the paper. Something about a new law that would hinder humanity more than help humanity and some conflict about it between different political factions and other such nonsense.
Uninterested, Mojo yawned. He blinked sipping the remains of his coffee. He set the cup down rather roughly. He clicked the roof of his mouth and read something about a young assistant attorney and the last of some scientists working mad and had been forced out like a bad case of an invasive weasels. They were not people he had ever heard of even if the attorney did bear a striking resemblance to the leader of the Gangreen Gang.
Oh, but he was too old to be Ace in disguise.
Something about the Mayor? Not surprising, but that would be especially boring.
"I might go back to sleep if I do not pour an adequate amount of coffee for the adequate amount of caffeine in the refilling of my coffee cup."
With eyes half closed he stood up and shuffled for the stove and poured. Then he sat back down to read what drivel the Mayor was up to. One never knew. Sometimes that drivel came in use for evil plans.
But the picture in the paper was not the mayor he knew.
He blinked away all remains of sleep in a second without a single sip from his cup. He winced as he brought the paper to his face as though it might make the print more decipherable in a position more difficult to read in. Any closer and he would not have been able to read at all or see anything but little round dots instead of the picture of this pole of a woman who could not even be a relative of the Mayor's. He held the paper back. He slapped the paper on the table and felt a strange bout of nausea that was more mental than physical.
"'Mayor Shelby Warden'?" he snapped.
He flipped the paper to the front page. The date?
Ten years past what it should have been!?
"W—w—what?!" he sputtered smacking his head as though he forgot there was a helmet there and the clap of it against his gloved hand felt mockingly phantomlike.
Like it shouldn't be there! He thought.
A spine tingling chill froze him to the marrow more than any ice breath from Blossom. He could no longer blink. His spit lingered in a pool in the back of his throat. Then in a bolt of muscular strength even a surprise to himself, he leapt from his chair so that it fell over behind him. He raced on all fours through the lair and slammed the door shut behind him as he reached the bathroom. Here he clamped his hands onto the sink as though ready to rip it from the wall.
His terrified reflection trembled uncontrollably and panted back at him through his sharp white teeth, but it was not his face.
He blinked.
But yes it was his face!
The green of his skin was greener than ever. The pink of his eyes were like wide bowls of punch with huge black olives. The helmet— he threw it off and revealed the long cylinder of a brain longer than his face. Pink and almost elastic-looking, when he touched it, it did not hurt no matter how hard he pressed and ran his fingers along its gyri and sulci curves; though it did feel pretty squishy and weird and made him a little dizzy. His villainous outfit was bright blue, white, and purple. The cape was ridiculously long. He might have been colored from head to foot by Bubbles' crayons that she handed to him long, long ago.
Complete blankness overtook him at this last thought. He almost fainted from not taking a breath. Sucking in great gulps of air then almost knocked him out from the other side as a wave of memory came back in a single wall of information from ten years of experience with the Utonium family.
"CURSES!" he shrieked with an echo that reverberated right through the lair and out into the late morning where it was swallowed by the traffic and bustle of Townsville. Only a bird heard it enough to swoop away from his tower heights.
"But how!?" he demanded his own bewildered expression.
But it would be far better to think about it than to ask a reflection. What else would a brain that size be good for?
He leapt from the stool at the sink and immediately began to think.
"Things like this do not just happen without reasons that come from logical sources," he told himself rubbing chin as he paced about in the main hall and living room of the Observatory. "Even if it were a possibility that the Antidote X I consumed was reversed and that the Chemical X in me was reignited somehow, that would not explain how I came to be in the Observatory that is my old residence as it was destroyed in the same manner in which it was created. That is, in collaboration with my intellect and the use of the Powerpuff Girls; albeit they no longer had possessed their powers at that time. Yes, and the Professor and his nephew were also present."
He paused in step.
"Someone…" he said slowly.
He paced again, throwing his arms around his back and his head down towards the floor in the most absorbed concentration.
"Someone is trying to take advantage of me," he said. "This is the work of deliberate thought from some enemy of the Powerpuff Girls. There can be no other explanation than that. Someone wants to use me and thus pulled me back into this state. Someone with Chemical X. Even though virtually all Chemical X was canceled-out by the use of Antidote X. I know more than other people that Chemical X is not something that can be gotten rid of easily. It is quite possible that if someone was smart enough, clever enough, purposeful enough, and cautious enough in his or her undertaking, Chemical X might very well have been obtained somehow. But why waste it on bringing back a former villain unless it is part of a scheme wholly diabolical, and I am meant to be a diversion!"
He threw his hands to his chest in utter disgust.
"Someone dares to think that I would just play along with some scheme that is not of my own making. Someone dares to think that I will not think that I am being used. Someone thinks that even with a brain three times the size of a human brain cannot deduce that this is a trick?! That I will just storm the city with a few ray guns and zap some holes in a few building and through a few citizens while that secret someone goes about unseen?! That I will just go back to the way I was before without a thought?! SOMEONE DARES TO THINK THAT THEY CAN CONTROL MOOOOOOOOOJO JOOOOOOOJO!?"
He was uncontrollable as he stomped his boot onto the floor and snarled through his bear trap teeth and snorted through his flared nostrils and stared at only his own rage no matter how wide and bloodshot his eyes. Fists shook tightly so that claws dug into his palms as he slammed them both with monkey fury into the floor, his fur bristlier than a side-walk broom.
"No!" he snapped shortly like a spring was suddenly released with an anticlimactic twang, but he was not done yet.
With a broad sweep of his long cape he marched down the steps into the deep dark parts of his lair that someone had rebuilt. There was a slight dankness in the air that was not there before. He could tell the deeper he went that the structure was old, that the volcanic earthiness had possessed it for years, and that the reconstruction was not quite as solid as he had originally built it. There was even some construction dust lying about on the dimly lit steps, but he was not examining anything closely. He went to his storage rooms, banging each door as he went. All his old things were there, though not as he had left them. The only thing that was missing was behind the last door.
Where Com's brain had been attached the computer, there was nothing but an empty space. The computer was there humming. The lights were atmospheric, but not even a ghost of Com's presence was felt in this room.
Mojo Jojo did not go in, but he glared sullenly a moment into the sterile space before slamming the door shut harder and louder than any of the doors before this one.
Like the gale of a storm, he charged back up the steps and went back for his bedroom.
"I'll show this would-be villain!" he snorted as he rummaged through his closet like a monkey.
He threw off his tunic, his boots, and his cape last of all. His brain cap was still in the bathroom.
"This villain thinks he wants Mojo Jojo!" he mocked. "Thinks he can manipulate Mojo Jojo. Thinks he can put a treat in front of Mojo Jojo as if Mojo Jojo is a mere monkey in a circus ring. Well, I will show him up at his own game for I will not be Mojo Jojo, nor will I, in case there is more to this scheme than meets the eyes, return to the Utonium household and cry as simply infantile Jojo. I will not bring danger to them. Whoever this person is, is skilled, and therefore I must not underestimate the power he may have. After all, I find it suspicious and all around dubious that the Professor had been struck ill so suddenly and then so well suddenly again. I believe without a doubt that someone had been to that house, and that that someone may also desire that I return to the house with some unforeseen consequences.
"Therefore!" he declared sticking his head out of the closet, and soon the rest of his bare body with him carrying a heap of new attire. "I must be someone new altogether, an alias unknown to all and soon to be revealed to those I desire. The simian known as Jojo may be no more, but Mojo Jojo is even more buried and dead to me than Jojo. Mojo was a pretentious fool with a flair for pointless drama. Even this old outfit looks like it was designed by a bratty little boy with bad taste! And the cape?"
He kicked it in its purple heap on the floor.
"I'm surprised I did not trip on more often than I did."
And he dropped his new bundle heavily on top of his bed with more determination than any weapon he had picked up to use upon the Powerpuff Girls.
"From this day forward I shall be known as Nomo-Jojo! From the entomology of the language that is of wisdom and is known as the tongue of the Greeks, and the word is 'nomos'! I am Jojo of the law now, of the customs, and therefore I am a vigilante. The law is in my own hands, and my hands desire the face of the villain who desires to use me for his own diabolical purposes, but the only diabolical purposes that I can be used for are those I decide on my own terms. I decide what to do! The only vengeance I will plan for anyone is that upon that someone who thought I could be duped so easily! He is in for a revelation! My revelations! This fool tied the wrong monkey to his back! One which he will not be rid of until I finish this!"