Echo walked into class, bumping Aniesha's shoulder as the dark skinned girl blushed. The red-head giggled,
"Come on! You're even blushing. There's no way you don't like him." Keri caught Echo's eye and the broke into small fits of laughter. The three girls all composed themselves and turned to the two interacting teachers who seemed to always teach every class.
"Yes. Mrs King, I wonder if you could put this up, as well." Mr Flately unrolled a poster and showed it off to the class, "In case you'd all forgotten, today is the National Online IQ Test to find the brainiest peron in Britain." The headteacher paused to watch Roly mess around and the five teen spies all noted that they had to run off, "Yes. Well, everyone who wants to take part should come back here at lunch time. I'm sure we have some brains here somewhere."
The spies made their way through the elavator that was too smart to be normal and walked into a minor disastor. The usually neon green base was flooded with jarring red warning signs, all screaming 'RED ALERT'. The team walked in.
"Team. This is it- the big one." Frank said as he partially turned to face them, "We've had an anonymous tip off from inside KORPS. It seems the Crime Minister has a WMD."
Everyone's faces grew shocked and grim. "A weapon of mass destructon?" Keri asked for conformation.
"The PM wants it found and destroyed before news get out. There'd be mass panic. Every security force is on red alert" Frank nodded once, confirming the girl's fears
"Is this the tip off?" Dan said, indicating the screen where lines of code had been recloloured.
Tom read it out, "KORPS are building WMD Fox. What's Fox?" the team turned to Frank for answers,
"We've no idea. M.I.9 are interviewing every known criminal with the surname Fox, just in case."
"Frank, this might be nothing but I found a fox-like thing in the old KORPS lab under the playground." Aniesha interjected.
"You know, where Keri amlost created a supersoldier because she overheated?" Echo joked and Dan chuckled.
"Hey! I didn't... you stopped me before I could." Keri played the part of whiny little sister perfectly but broke out of character with another laugh.
"Can you imagine? Someone like Frank or Tom parading around screaming about destroying M.I.9 with their bare hands?" Echo grinned before reigning herself in and only keeping a small smile on her face.
Aniesha smiled but kept talking, "It was a symbol, like a fox head."
"Yeah," Tom agreed with an unpromising tone, "but Stella ordered us to stay away from the hatch, remember?"
As the team shared a look, in which they all seemed to have a mini argument, Frank's phone rang. He rached into his pocket and checked the caller,
"That's Stella now. You five get to the hatch, we'll keep this between us." The team made their way to the elavator of wonders as Frank picked up the phone and the door closed on Frank using his 'Stella voice'.
The spies ran out to the courtyard and jogged over to the hatch on the flower,
Tom tried to get the rest of the team to see how bad of an idea this was, "Guys, seriously the last time we went down there, Keri almost got us into a near death situation."
"Key word being almost." Keri sniped at him distratedly.
"Tom we need to take any and all leads we can get on this, before KORPS is too far gone." Echo stared up at his from where she leant over the hatch.
"At least this time we know what's down there." Dan grunted as he hoisted the metal door upright. The team made their way down and Aniesha turned in the lighting sistems so they wouldn't have to depend on miniscule torches.
Aniesha jogged across the room, "It's over here on this letterhead. It's got a fox." She picked up the piece of paper and let Tom and look at it from over her shoulder. Echo and Dan made their way over to a small, well preserved box as Keri surveyed the room dazedly.
"I wonder what's in here?" Dan murmured as he picked up the box.
"As if a KORPS base under the school wasn't weird enough," Tom quipped.
Keri made her way over to a metal bookcase and picked up a walking stick, paying as little attention to the others as they were to her.
"Well, whatever they were doing here it was 70 years ago. Can't be the fox that KORPS are on about." Dan said, still holding onto the box. Echo, reached out for it and he handed it to her; they then noticed that Echo's hand was on Dan's shoulder and she quickly removed it, blushing.
"Hey... It's a WMD." Keri called, in a world of her own. The team looked at her in apprehension and confusion, "I meant on the walking stick." Aniesha indicated for the chatty spy to hand it over and she did so.
"WMD... and it's got a fox head!" She looked up at her friend with triumph.
Keri looked amused and proud, "What can I say? It's a gift." she called as she jokingly leant on the bookcase, only for it to slide to the side, leaving her tripping on the air. Echo rushed to catch and support her while everyone else momentarilly stilled.
"Hidden tunnel - cool." Dan rushed forward, his inner cub-scout surging along with the same momentum as his body. Echo chuckled at the comparison in her head. Tom wasn't as amused but was more tired,
"Hidden tunnel - not so cool."
They all crawled through the tunnel anyway, Dan in the lead with Echo and Keri slightly behind but no less excited. Tom and Aniesha trailed behind a little, moving only just fast enough to keep up with the rest of the team,
"Don't tell me you're afraid of the dark." Aniesha called to Tom as he slowed slightly.
"Nah," he rebuked, "I just- know how you feel about spiders." the boy indicated at a tuft of webbing that had caught in her hair before quickly scurrying forward as she scoffed at it in disgust.
Dan and Echo came up to a boarded circle covering the way, "It's a dead end." the adventurous boy huffed in annoyance. Echo put her ear near to the wood but not actually against it. It was thin and she heard muffled noises in what she assumed was the rest of the tunnel,
"Listen," She gave a small 'come here' motion to Dan, "I think there's something on the other side, perhaps even someone."
Dan didn't seem detered, instead he grabbed up on of the collapsed beams, "Here," he hoisted it up, "We can use this."
Tom clearly didn't want any part of this, "What? Look, someone obviously doesn't want is to be down here, and, her, I am cool with that"
Again, Dan did not care, "On three..." He grinned.
"Dan," Tom deadpanned to no result.
"Two..."
"Dan."
"One!"
"Dan! No!" Echo called but it was too late. Dan had charged and broke a hole in the blockade. Green light and alarms came through the hole and the red haired twins and their blonde friend looked through to see their boss jump and look over at them.
They had broken through to the spy base. Dan and Echo smiled apologetically at Frank as Keri hid her face and Tom facepalmed.
"I can't believe M.I.9 didn't tell me about this." Frank said, pacing wildly around the room, "First, there's a KORPS lab under the school, and now we find there's a tunnel-"
"Frank!" Keri cut him off, "We've found it."
Tom span to face him in his chair looking mildly annoyed. "It's the file on the bunker. Still classified."
Frank reached for his blazer pocket, "That's it, I'm calling Stella."
"And what? Tell her we went down the hatch against orders?" Neesh reasoned.
"I've got to do something." he raised his arms in exasperation.
"Yeah, well, Tom can open the file." Keri shrugged, seeing the obvious solution. Echo nodded along next to her, "That we can."
Frank gave a non verbal agreement, "How long will it take?"
"This is my own decoding programme." Tom said as he twisted a USB between his fingers.
"With my modifications too, it should take roughly 45 minutes for something this major." Echo interjected. Tom looked at her, only slightly annoyed that she had touched his programme without telling him but excited to see just how efficient the now code was.
Frank started pacing again, "Well you better get back, I'll get it started. But one way or another, I want some answers." Everyone made their way to the elavator bar Dan, who took Echo prompting him to get him to look up from the old box.
As the spies walked through school Echo handed her blonde friend a nail care kit, "Here," she offered, "It's all my lock picks and other mini-tools. I don't care enough to actually maintain my nails but it's the perfect size." Dan grinned at her as if to say 'thank you for enabling me' and looked through the kit, picking up a bent cuticle pusher and returning to the box. After a minute the lid swung open,
"Gotcha!"
Tom reached in and grabbed a vial of a dark, dish soapy liquid. Not hesitating he unstoppered it and gave the sixty year old serum a sniff, cringing slightly. He inspected the pristine vial, "G.S."
Lady J and her dance crew pushed past him, jostling his arm and knocking the stopper out of his hand. "You and your stupid dancing he said as he bent down to get the stopper. Felicity turned around in shock and indignation, her 'crew' following her, half a step behind
"Is you dissing me?" she asked him Echo put herself between the pick haired girl and her friend, "Is you dissing me in front'o my crew? Cause-"
"Felicity, shut the fuck up for five seconds." Echo cut her of as she pushed Tom further back, not noticing Roly until Tom stopped and started leaning back instead of walking, "Tom's under a lot of pressure from his fam and lashed out at you. You neeed to learn to respect other people's boundaries." The extroverted dancer looked baffled, "The only reason your not constantly made fun of is the fact that your personality is intimidating to inferior people, like men." She heard a half hearted protest from a passing Preston and she flipped him the bird.
"Look." She said to the musical girl, "Walk away, stop throwing hands, and get over yourself."
Felicity blinked at the shorter girl and stalked off sounding thouroughly scolded. Dan and Keri grinned and giggled as Echo looked smug. Aniesha ran up to them as Tom pulled the vial out from behind his back. He stared at it in shock,
"It's gone. It must've evaporated." everyone's smiles dropped.
"Nice one, Einstein." Dan quipped. Aniesha ignored him,
"Guys, Frank managed to open the bunker file."
"That was barely twenty minutes? I must've made a miscalculation." Echo said as she sprinted alongside her friends.
The team walked back into the base to see that the alarms had finally been shut off,
"That tunnel, the lab, M.I.9 knew alright, and I found our WMD." Frank said as he pulled a digital version of a yellowing old photograph onto the main screen.
"Walter M Dainbridge." Keri deciphered. "Who is he?" Dan asked, his eyes not leaving the screen.
Frank turned to look between them and the screen, "Well, he's not a weapon of mass destruction; but that doesn't mean he didn't build one, and you're not going to believe where he built it.
"It seemed the sory begins in 1941. Walter Dainbridge was the schoold's Headmaster, and by all accounts he made Mrs King look like a pussycat."
Everyone digested that piece of information and Tom voiced his thoughts, "So, if Walter was the Headmaster, how come we found his cane in the lab?"
"Exactly," Frank said, "What no-one knew about Dainbridge was that he was also a scientist, and he was designing machines for the origional Crime Minister. Dainbridge discovered that the way down to the sewers was through the hatch in the courtyard. It was here, hundreds of metres below the school, that he found somewhere to build his machines." Frank went on uninterrupted, the young spies to shocked to form any words and explained the premise of the rock melting machine to them,
"The problem was, no matter how hard he tried, Dainbridge couldn't get the machine to work. Not only that but the machine was giving off harmful gamma-rays, and they were beggining to effect some of the pupils above."
A little while later, the team were mulling over the new information in the base when Frank got a call from Stella,
"Understood, Stella." He hung up and turned to the others, "The press have got wing of the WMD. We need to nail this before they go public."
"KORPS are building WMD." Dan murmured, "So... what're we thinking?"
Aniesha turned away from Echo and Dan and to the others, "They can't actually be talking about Dainbridge's machine."
"Why not?" The techy spy called out, "We know he sent the old designs to the Crime Minister. Maybe they've still got them."
"Oh, please," Keri huffed, "Why would they want some manky machine that's older than Frank?" Aniesha giggled at the indignation that flitted across Frank's expression before he got irritated,
"Look," he said, "That weapon was way ahead of it's time, but like I said, Dainbridge couldn't get it to work." The twins' fatehr figure entered a story telling mode, "The problem was clearly in the design, but he couldn't figure out how to fix it. So he began to develop a formula to increase his own intelligence - a genius serum. However, little did Dainbridge know that three of his pupils were onto him. As for Dainbridge, his serum would only make him a genius for a few hours. But again that was long enough to figure out what was wrong with his designs."
Over the next cople of minutes Frank continued to explain how Billy, Emily and Jack had foild Agent Fox's plan and led them over to the now massive hole in the wall.
"No way, those three were in here over 70 years ago?" Aniesha marvelled, gazing at the tunnel in awed disbelief.
"How come no one ever told us?" "Yeah, how come M.I.9 didn't tell us?" Echo and Dan spoke in unison once again and blushed even harder than normal.
"You two seriously have to stop doing that. It's creepy." Keri muttered, looking in the tunnel similarly to Aniesha.
"Frank, why was the file kept classified?" Echo asked him.
"All big cases are. Over time, these things just get forgotten about." Frank summarized but Keri was feeling sassy,
"Right up until KORPS to build Dainbridge's big weapon-y zappidy thing."
"They must still be working from his origional designs, and if Dainbridge couldn't finish it without some genius serum, then..." Tom trailed of from his mini-tirade and picked up the empty vial. Dan gripped Echo's wrist frustratedly,
"'G.S' Genius Serum. Which our genius lost." Frank got a call from Mr Flatley and grew slightly concerned, almost breaking character from his genial caretaker cover to comfort him. He hung up and looked at the team, puzzled.
"It's Roly. Come on." The team followed him into the elavator.
The team stood in the entrance to their tutor room and listened as Mr Flatley babbled about Roly going missing.
"Can you believe it? Donaldson? An IQ of 3000?" Mrs King proclaimed.
Tom turned to his friends, "3000! I mean- mines only 150."
Echo spoke up, "Last time I took a test I got 217 and I've been our highest scoriing student since I came here."
"And we're, well, you know." Tom said indicating to the two of them.
Keri smothered a small smile, "Humongous swot-heads?"
Echo gaped, playfully at her sister, "How do you know a word that complex?"
Everyone turned back to the conversation, "Come to think of it Roland, has been behaving rather strangely ever since lunchtime." Mr Flatley commented,
Mrs King interjected, "Right, Come on, we'll organise a search." She swept out of the room and the actual head teacher jogged after her, "Yes. You search the canteen and I'll see if he's gome to the donut shop"
The team walked into the classroom as the teahers exited, "Lunch time..." Dan mused, "Wasn't Roly standing behind you when we lost the serum?"
Frank balked, "You lost the genius serum?"
"Yes, but-" Tom began to argue, only for Echo to cut him off.
"You mean, what if it didn't evaporate and it fell into Roly's drink?"
"Hold on," Aniesha told them, "Dainbridge needed a genius to make his device work. What if KORPS need one to make their device work, too?"
Keri followed the thought process, "Roly scores 3000 on a national IQ test and then he disappears."
"Ok." Tom said, "Say KORPS did set up the IQ test to find a genius, if we can find out where it came from we may be able to find Roly." He opened up Roly's laptop and propped his spy-pod against a pencil case, "I've got this programme on my spy-pod, it can figure out the source of any wesite, no matter how well hidden."
Everyone stood in silence for a few moments before Echo spoke out, "I worked on that with you, I know it's faster than this. What's taking so long?"
"Probably the excessive number of encryptions, firewalls and-"
"It's designed to bypass all of that."
"And a complete lack of appreciation." He said over her, "As impressive as your technological skills are, it's still manual."
There was a beeping and the location locked. Dan checked the coordinates, "Found it, only a couple of miles north of here."
"Just as well." Frank said, already making for the door, "When the serum stops working Roly could be in big trouble."
The team, including Tom made their way to the outside of the building in combat gear.
"This is it." Tom called, "The IQ test came from in there." Everyone pulled on a ski mask in preparation for a fight in close quaters with their classmate.
"Let's do this." Frak said as they forced their way inside.
"M.I.9! Freeze! Let him go!" Frank shouted at the thugs holding Roly back as the machine in the room went haywire. As another blast formed crackes in the wall, the Crime Minister screeched.
"Well don't just stand there!" The agents walked forward to try to take down the agents, only to get knocked out by falling debris. Frank gestured at Roly to come to them and he darted out as fast as possible to get behind them and away from the misfiring weapon. As the room grew less and less stable, the team rushed out to get the only civillian to safety, there was no time to try to apprehend anyone in the lab. "Do I have to everything myself?" was the last scream they heard from the Crime Minister as they sprinted out of the building.
"As Roly heaved against the wall trying to get his breath and nerves back, he asked, "Who was that? She was worse than Mrs King.
Frank didn't answer his question, "Don't worry, you're safe. I'll organise for an M.I.9 unit to take you home." the team walked a little ways off and began to discuss the events of the extraction,
"What happened to the Crime Minister?" Keri asked.
"No doubt already gone." Echo huffed, "Shame, I'd've loved to deck her."
"The main thing is we stopped KORPS getting that machine." Frank interrupted her biolent fantasy, "And we found Roly."
"Hello?" The boy in question said into his phone, "Hiya, mum. Yeah, turns out I'm a genius." the girls let a few quiet giggles slip, "Mum? Why're you laughing?"
Frank stood in overalls, fixing up the massive hole in the wall as the team discussed the mission,
"So Frank." The man turned towards the friends at Aniesha's words, "Are you sure we're in no trouble for opening the file? And, by us I mean Tom and Echo." She grinned at Tom's look of mock offence well Echo internally squealed at her ship.
"Well, Stella wasn't too pleased, but the PM said we did what was necessary. So, we're in the clear." He smiled at them.
"Are we though?" Tom disrupted the mood, "I mean, what if KORPS know about the lab?"
"Yeah." Keri agreed, "What if they come looking for it?"
"Frank looked slightly smug, "Ah, like the file said, Dainbridge kept the whereabouts of his lab a secret. At least he did something to protect the school."
"Just think," Dan said bringing a tray of drinks over, "Without all of that happening," He looked at the photo of the origional team, "We wouldn't be here."
The group raised their glasses, "To Emily, Jack and Billy." Frank toasted. The team repeated his toast, "The very first spy team."
Echo slumped back on the chair, "Someone do me a favour and toss me that photo." Frank came over and passed it to her, "Thanks dad." She said as she scrutinised the photo. The team stared at her in shock. After after seconds of silence she looked back up, "What?"
"You just called Frank 'dad'." Keri deadpanned. Tom chuckled as she turned the same red as her hair.
"No I didn't."
"I think you did," Aniesha laughed and Echo spluttered before changing the subject quickly, not noticing the small smile on Franks' face, "Don't you think these three look awefully simialr to you guys?" Dan looked over her shoulder,
"Maybe if I was the nerd instead of Tom."
"You would be cute as a nerd." She kissed his cheek, regaining some amused dignity as Dan spluttered, "No more or less than you do right now. But it would be a good look on you Sherlock."
Tom hopped over to them, ignoring the romantic tension, "Yeah... I see the resemblance. I think I have a grandfather called Jack."
"Well, you'd never've guessed it," Neesh called, sipping her tea from next to where Frank idly replastered the wall, "The spy gene's hereditary."