Chapter 1: The Beginning
Fidget sat, glued to the monitor
in front off her. Rikki stood by, tapping his fingers idly and feeling awkward
at being totally ignored. He decided to fix that.
"So, why's there flowers on
your chair, anyways?" he said, quickly picking a topic for conversation.
Fidget whipped her head around and glared at him. He cringed.
"Excuse me," she
said, loudly but not yelling, "I am trying to read a really good
story at fanfiction here! Mind cutting the yappin'?!"
Rikki waved his hands in mock
panic. "Oh, well excuuuuuse me!" he turned away, preparing to
stalk away angrily, but his attention was caught by a slow-moving Vinnie
waddling towards his owner. She looked down immediately, and picked him up,
cooing. Rikki rolled his eyes.
Sure, the lizard is welcome,
but the human friend? Nooooo!
Grinder walked in, he brushed
past Rikki, and headed for Fidget. Rikki grabbed his arm.
"Uh, I wouldn't bother her
if I were you. She's into a story."
Grinder shrugged. "So? I got
an opportunity for her."
"Opportunity?"
"Yeah, she could actually
win an award with this tape."
Fidget perked up at the word
'award'. "What?"
Grinder turned to her again.
"Yeah, we're doin' some stuff out in that dead space below us. Thought you
might like to tape it."
Her eyes lit up, and she stood,
dumping Vinnie on to the keyboard (he hiss-grunted, waddled around a bit, and
settled down again on the '0' key). "I'm there!" she cried, and ran
off to the back to don her Team Xtreme suit.
Alex carefully aimed for the sand
dune ahead, which he knew was a jump over a 20 ft deep pit. A 20 ft deep pit
with Fidget sitting at the bottom and complaining loudly in the earpiece about
how bored she was and would he please hurry up and hurtle the darn thing? Alex
shook his head minutely, thinking how crazy she was sometimes. Nobody had forced
her to come out here and tape it, it was just a practice. He pulled up suddenly,
and flew over the pit with surprising grace. Fidget, seeming to have forgotten
the earpiece was still on, screamed loud enough for him to hear her in the air,
and just about splitting his eardrum with the piece. At first, he thought she
was doing the usual: screeching her approval of his performance, but then he saw
the trucks barreling across the dirt towards them.
He pulled to a stop just as
Grinder walked over for a closer look, and Fidget yelled into the earpiece
again.
"Excuse me, but could
someone PLEASE GET ME OUT OF HERE?!" Grinder jogged over and pulled her
out, but Alex watched the trucks. He wondered what they were doing.
"What the heck are they
doing?" Fidget asked, as if reading his mind. Alex flinched, and clicked
his little piece off. If she couldn't learn to keep her voice down sometimes...
The trucks were right up to them
by now, and they pulled around to surround them. Fidget frowned. It was a
threatening thing to do, pulling all around and trapping them. She clutched her
camera tightly.
Rikki, still in Big Air, watched
wearily. He was worried, but at the same time, jealous. He never did get to do
anything, just sit around and watch things on a computer monitor. He slumped,
but kept an eye on the ground below, where men were stepping out of the trucks.
He saw one of them walk up to Alex and begin to talk, but he couldn't hear,
because Alex's earpiece was turned off. He wondered why that had happened. Alex
nodded, and Fidget immediately ran over and waved her arms around a lot. Not
only that, but her earpiece was still on, and Rikki was blasted by her
shrill voice.
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN,
'RESTRICTED'?! IS THIS AREA 51?! ARE YOU GONNA HAVE TO KILL ME BECAUSE I
ASKED?!"
Her voice startled Vinnie, he did
a reptilian pirouette off the keyboard and on to the floor, where he scampered
up Rikki's leg. This kept Rikki sufficiently busy, and he missed the rest of the
team getting into the back of the trucks and driving off.
Fidget put her camera in her
pack, and crossed her arms over her chest, glaring over Alex's left shoulder.
The truck bumped harshly along the ground, and she found it hard to keep up a
satisfactory grumpy-position when she kept bouncing comically up and down.
Suddenly, she realized the Army base they had been heading for was behind them.
The others were all half asleep, and she shook them awake quickly. Not that
shaking was necessary...
"You guys!" she hissed.
"We're going somewhere else!"
Alex shook himself awake. "Wha..somewhere
else?" he looked around quickly. "What the...?"
Bars shot up out of the sides of
the truck bed, preventing them from escaping. Fidget shouted something that
nobody ever managed to decode (it sounded a bit like "ArgshcrAHH!"),
and the back window flew open behind her. Arms grabbed her around the waist and
pulled her through. She screamed, and found herself in the lap of a very ugly
man. He grinned evilly at her with broken teeth, and she said 'urgh' and
attempted to hop out the door. But he held her too tightly, and before she knew
it the next truck had pulled close, opened it's door, and she was being passed
from hand to hand. She looked down at the ground, sand and dust rushing past
beneath her, and a small, choked gasp got past her throat. Her arms flailed
about franticly, and Alex rushed and stuck his arm full length through the bars.
"Fidget!"
She reached for him, but with one
last grasp and pull, she was in the next cab. The person who had a hold of her
shoved her backward through the back window. She toppled over, banging her head
painfully on one of the bars. But, she was immediately up again and slamming her
fists against the back window.
"WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?!
WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON HERE?! WHERE THE HECK ARE YOU TAKING ME?! OPEN THIS
DARN WINDOW THIS VERY MINUTE OR I SWEAR I WILL...!
The truck hit a nasty bump,
sending her flying backwards again and this time knocking her out on the hump
the tire made.
Rikki paced back and forth in Big
Air. He waved his arms about a lot, and wished very much to break something. He
turned in search of something to break, but saw only Vinnie, who looked up at
Rikki. Rikki stared back at him.
"How did I miss it?" he
demanded, looking as if he half expected the lizard to come up with a reasonable
answer. "I mean, people don't just stand there one minute and then,"
he flipped one hand off to one side, "POOF! disappear! It's your fault, you
know." he added, pointing an accusing finger. "It was your infatuation
with leaping on to me that got us here! Don't give me that!" he roared in a
very un-Rikki-like way when the reptile stuck out his tongue. "You can't
deny it, so just don't try. Now I've got to try and get us out of this
mess..."
He went back to pacing, but
stopped after a few minutes.
"I guess I'll call the
cops." he said, but then he shook his head. "No. That'd be just like
me, let someone else handle it. But not today." he looked determinedly at
Vinnie, who looked back at him with a much-less-determined-and-slightly-hungry
look. "Today, I'll save my friends."
Vinnie wasn't all that impressed
by Rikki's nobility. Mostly, he wanted to know why nobody was handing him
lettuce. That was pretty much all his life consisted of. Eating lettuce,
sleeping, and making grunt-hiss noises. Sure, there was the occasional leap on
to the tall Fidget-like form with blue bad-tasting-fuzz-on-top instead of red,
but even that got boring after a while. Vinnie realized then for the first time
that he wasn't completely satisfied with his life. He snorted sadly, and decided
to go off somewhere and eat something to make himself feel better. Let's see,
what was there to eat? Hey, there was some lettuce in the back of his cage that
had been there for more than 5 days! Hmm, he'd never eaten anything that
old before. Well, there was that one lollipop, but nobody cared about that...
Rikki climbed into Little Air. He
heard a frantic hiss-grunt, and Vinnie leapt into the cockpit with him,
something green-and-brownish-edged and crinkly sticking half out of his mouth.
The lizard waddled towards him, and hopped on to his shoulder. Rikki considered
this, shrugged, and started up the engine.
Grinder watched sadly as Alex sat
back down. He turned and watched Fidget fall through the back window, bang on
the back window, and finally knock herself out cold in the back. Alex put his
head in his hands, and sighed from the bottom of his toes. Grinder patted him on
the back.
"Don't worry, mate." he
said, "You couldn't have helped her. Not then, anyway. We'll find her and
rescue her."
Alex looked up and smiled grimly.
"Yeah. We always do."
He turned, newly confident, to
see the trucks barreling along a narrow canyon. Nothing too dangerous about that
in itself, but ten minutes later it looked too narrow for this many trucks to
come through. Suddenly, the ground opened up below them, and they blew down an
underground ramp. The top closed up above them, blanketing them in darkness.
"Heeey, I can't see!"
Fidget must have woken up, her voice echoed back to them in the darkness, '...see!'.
"Is anyone else here? Hel-looooo?"
"We're here, Fidge, hang
on!" yelled Alex, and he tried to think of something he could do that would
require her hanging-on anymore than she already would have.
Fidget shook herself awake, and
her head began to throb dully. She groaned, rubbed it, and saw...nothing. It was
completely dark. She stood, and yelled to see if anyone was there. Alex's voice
came back to her, sounding much farther away than she might have hoped. He
sounded like he had a plan, and he usually figured something out. She sat down
on the same hump she had knocked her head on, and tried to set her chin in her
hands. But something poked her hard in the cheek...
Her earpiece! She could talk to
Rikki! She turned away from the cab, and cupped her hand around the microphone.
She began to talk into it, hoping desperately that Rikki would pick it up.
In the auto-piloting Big Air, a
muffled voice called out, "Rikki? Hello? Are you alright? Hel-looo? Rikki!"
As Alex tried futily to come up
with a plan, he heard a frantic-sounding voice from somewhere off to the right.
"You guys? I think
something's wrong in Big Air. Rikki's not answering! No one is!"
Alex thought vaguely that if
Rikki hadn't answered, whom did she expect to do so? Vinnie?
"Hmm, maybe I don't want to
know. She does think an awful lot of that iguana..."
"What's that, A-man?"
Grinder turned back to his cage-partner. Alex shook his head.
"Nothing. I'm just thinking,
who's responsible for this?"
Grinder shrugged. "Dr. X,
who else?"
"I don't know, what would he
want now?"
"What does he ever want? He
wants to use your AMP factor."
"But he's done with me now,
remember? The whole Asazi thing?"
Grinder just shrugged again, and
Alex stared at his feet, feeling confused and aggravated. And on top of his own
problems, Rikki might be in trouble, and Fidget was going who-knows-where in
some other truck.
Well, this will be
interesting.