Project: Magnus

Phineas stared. He wasn’t sure if he was hugely impressed, or supremely ter­ri­fied by what he was look­ing at. Either way, it held him in awe.

“What were you try­ing to do?”

“I was try­ing to cap­ture Santa!”

Phineas did a dou­ble take at Harley. Being four­teen inches tall and twenty seven inches long might be aver­age for a Dawg of his breed but it didn't’ allow much room for a grin the size of the one he was cur­rently wearing.

“Why.”

“Because I want my pressies.”

“What does that have to do with cap­tur­ing Santa,” asked Phineas as he sat on a stool and looked around for the plate of cook­ies he had brought down.

“You have to cap­ture Santa so he will give you presents. That’s how it works.” Harley, real­iz­ing some­thing wasn’t right cocked his head and looked at Phineas who was eat­ing a cookie, “Isn’t it?”

“Um, no. You don’t have to cap­ture Santa for him to give you presents. He brings them to all the good lit­tle boys and girls."

"And dawgs," Phineas quickly added, "He leaves them for you under the tree. No cap­tur­ing involved.”

“Are you sure?” Harley asked nar­row­ing his eyes and star­ing at the metal con­struct designed to hold Santa.

“Yes I’m sure you nut job.”

Harley looked crestfallen.

“Well he must have some really cool tech­nol­ogy,” he announced cheer­ing up and danc­ing around the room.

“I’m sorry?”

“How else would he be able to travel around the entire planet in a sin­gle night deliv­er­ing toys to all the good lit­tle dawgs everywhere?”

Harley bab­bled as he dashed around the room twist­ing dials and flip­ping switches. The Santa Trap was fairly new and had never been tested until today, but it was based on a pre­vi­ous design so he was con­fi­dent this would work.

Granted the pre­vi­ous design had blown up rather fan­tas­ti­cally. He cast glances over at the large metal object sit­ting in the mid­dle of the room. It eas­ily stood six feet tall, was shaped vaguely like a bul­let and had any num­ber of wires and hoses com­ing out and going in.

To this day Phineas was unable to fig­ure out how a Dawg as small as Harley was able to build some­thing so large. It didn’t seem phys­i­cally pos­si­ble since he was only twice his cur­rent height even when he stood on his hind legs.

Appar­ently Harley ignored the laws of phys­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties. At least it the the only expla­na­tion he could come up with.

“He must to have a quan­tum deluxe time dila­tor or flux capacitor.”

“A what or a what?”

“Or maybe he’s dimen­sion­ally transcendental.”

“What the heck does that mean?”

Harley stopped fid­dling with the screen he was adjust­ing and looked over at Phineas, “No idea but it sounds cool,” He said as he smiled.

They both jumped when the bang­ing started. It had been a quiet knock­ing at first, and think­ing back Phineas real­ized it had been there a while, he had assumed it was sim­ply part of the machin­ery. The sud­den increase in vol­ume and inten­sity dis­pelled that illusion.

“When you guys are done chat­ting would some­one please let me out of here?"

Harley flinched.

Phineas sim­ply stared.

“Who exactly did you catch?”

“I… I’m not sure.”

“You said this was designed to catch Santa.”

“Well yes, but that doesn’t mean some­one else can’t acci­den­tally get caught.”

“Some­one else did get caught,” came the voice from the metal container.

Phineas crept over to where Harley sat on the desk, “Dude, you caught the captain.”

Harley’s eyes widened. He stood, jumped off the desk and began to trot quickly towards the door.

“Where are you going, are you actu­ally run­ning away?”

“I pre­fer to call it a strate­gic retreat.”

Phineas walked over the the cap­sule and began try­ing to pry open the cap­sule doors, “Get over here and help me get the cap­tain out of here.”

“Are you insane? He’s going to kill you if you let him out.”

“No he won’t, he knows who is respon­si­ble for this. You’re the one he’s going to kill.”

“Me?!”

“Who else on this ship comes up with these kinds of schemes.”

“Seri­ously, you’re just going to throw me under the bus like that?”

“You two are aware of the fact I can hear you right?” came the muf­fled voice again.

Harley blanched. Which for a black and brown haired Dawg was an impres­sive feat.

Harley trot­ted back over this his chair and worked his way back onto the table. After a moments hes­i­ta­tion he flipped a switch and pressed a cou­ple but­tons caus­ing the metal mon­stros­ity to shiver. As it the door opened as the ships cap­tain slowly stepped out.

“Heh. Sorry captain.”

“Harley, what. Are. You. Doing?” asked the rather annoyed Cap­tain Remarkable.

Harley froze, his ears erect and swivel­ing back and form, search­ing, “I hear something!”

Phineas and the Cap­tain turned to look towards the door.

Out­side there was a sound. A faint, quiet lit­tle sound that echoed through out the entire ship. A sound that slowly grew slightly louder. It sound, at first, like a hard rain when it fell against the hull of the ship. As it grew it changed. Now it began to sound like bells. Hun­dreds of small metal bells. The kind one might find on a sleigh.

Phineas turned to look at the cap­tain, a look of dis­be­lief on his face,”Santa?”

Harley grinned, “Santa!”

“Uh, who exactly are you?”, Harley asked, wide eyed, as he sat on the console.

"More impor­tantly, how did you get on this ship?”, Cap­tain Remark­able stepped for­ward, address­ing the new­comer directly.

"I took the sleigh.”

“You took the what?” Harley perked up.

“That doesn’t answer my ques­tion, we are in the Cloud for cripes sake."

“Think of me as a hitch­hiker Captain.”

“Funny, I don’t remem­ber pulling over.” Phineas asked, walk­ing into the room,  “What I miss?”

“I don’t have time to go into details at the moment.  Suf­fice to say I work for the San­tas.  We can find any­one any­where, I was sent to seek you out and ask for your help., he smiled, “To answer your ques­tion Harley, my name is Faulkner.”

“Why are you here?

"Some­one stole the Santa Man­tle and kid­napped Santa Prime.

"Some­one stole the what and kid­napped the who?”

Faulkner sighed heav­ily and wearily.  This was the con­ver­sa­tion he really wasn't  look­ing for­ward to hav­ing for many rea­sons.  Not the least of which being time. Or the lack of it.

It was always the way in sit­u­a­tions like this.  The peo­ple involved need to know what has hap­pen­ing and why and how they were sup­posed to help, but the was always a time limit.  

"There isn't time to explain every­thing really, but I sup­pose I have no choice.  I'll com­press it as much as I can for now and will be glad to answer any ques­tions you may have when pos­si­ble. I sug­gest we all take a seat."

Once they were all seated Faulkner paced around the room.  Every­one twisted or swiveled in their respec­tive chairs to fol­low him as he told a tale that kept each of them enrap­tured.  Every­one except the Cap­tain.  He assumed this was all an elab­o­rate scheme to take over his ship.

“Let me start by say­ing that every­thing you know about the per­son called Santa Claus isn’t exactly true.”

Harleys ears drooped.

“Easy Harl.  Let me explain.  As I said, what you know isn’t exactly true.  Or at rather it’s not the entire truth.  The real­ity has become cor­rupted over the years, but since it actu­ally serves to help hide the truth of who Santa really is, we began to encour­age the tales and stories.

The one you call ‘Santa’ we call ‘Santa Prime’.  He is in charge of the other San­tas and man­ages the pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion of the toys and gifts.”

“Wait, so Santa is a CEO?”

“Tech­ni­cally speak­ing, yes.  How­ever he is also much more that that.  He’s also the guardian of the ‘Spirit of Christmas’”

“What’s christ­mas?”  

“Christ­mas, Harley, is what you call Yule Night.  It’s known as dif­fer­ent things in dif­fer­ent places.  It’s orig­i­nal name in fact isn’t Christ­mas but some­thing lost to time.  

Any­way, get­ting back to my story.  The ‘Spirit of Christ­mas’ that Prime guards is what we call the Santa Man­tle.  It’s what lets him dis­trib­ute joy and cheer through­out the year and what allows the other San­tas to travel and deliver so many gifts. “

“I told you he had cool tech­nol­ogy!” exclaimed Harley.

“Stop inter­rupt­ing Harley,” Faulkner smiled, “It’s not tech­nol­ogy. It’s magic. A very old, very spe­cial kind of magic.  

The Man­tle was stolen yes­ter­day, pre­sum­ably when Santa Prime was kid­napped.  We must find it and get it back and the Prime back before Christ­mas Night… I mean Yule Night.

Right now Max­amil­lian, Santa Paws is track­ing the ones that took the Man­tle.  Horus, also know as Santa Claws, that’s C L A W S, is fol­low­ing up on a lead to locate Prime.  

We need your help Harley.”

“My help?  Why me?”

“The short answer is, there is a pro­vi­sion that should some­thing hap­pen to the San­tas we were to con­tact you.  There were some that argued it was too early, that you weren't ready but I won the debate.  Or rather I ignored them and came after you any­way.  I can’t really say more than that right now.”

“You’re ask­ing us to take a lot on faith Faulkner” the Cap­tain said as he stood up.

“Yes I know.  And I’m sorry.  I’ve told you all I can for now and we are short of time.  Yule night is in 2 days.”

“How many San­tas are there?” asked Harley cheerfully.

“Quite a few.  In addi­tion to the ones I already men­tioned there is Cyn­derk­las, Father Yule, and Saint Kristo­pher to name a few.

"So where do you come into all this?" asked Phineas

"I'm a Com­man­der in the E.L.F., and was assigned to pro­tec­tion of the Prime.  I'm respon­si­ble for him and it's my job to get him back."

"Wait, “said Harley, "You're an elf?"

"No, I'm a mem­ber of the E.L.F., that stands for Extremeis Liber­i­tus Forte.  It's essen­tially a police force assigned to guard and pro­tect the Santas."

"I don't under­stand.  You're wear­ing green, but aren't you sup­pose to be short, and have pointy ears?"

“I’m not an elf Harley.”

“Denial is the first sign."

Faulkner sighed, “I assume you've heard of the MCU?”

Every­one nodded

"We are the MCU for the North Pole.”

“North pole?  We don't have a north pole. We don’t even have a north”

"Every planet has a north Phineas.  Besides, it's not a place per se, that's actu­ally the code name of the Candy Cane Fac­tory, the place where all the gifts are man­u­fac­tured.  It's a heav­ily guarded secret and no, I won't take you to visit Harley.”

“Won’t you get in trou­ble?”, Harley asked in earnest.

“Prob­a­bly.  I intend to resign once this is over any­way.  In all the time since the ELF has been estab­lished no one has ever lost a Santa.  I'm the first. “

“What can we do to help”, vol­un­teered Harley to the unsmil­ing faces of Phineas and the Captain.

"I hon­estly don't know.  I was hop­ing you knew of a way to find a res­cue the Prime.  If you don't I …”

Harley grinned.

“Harley,” began the Cap­tain, “Am I cor­rect in assum­ing that the words "I have a plan" are head­ing with unwar­rented enthu­si­asm in the direc­tion of this conversation?

“Yes sir, how­ever, I don't think anyone’s going to like it.”

“When do we ever?”, Phineas smiled.

“No. Absolutely not. There is no way you are putting me in that… thing. Why don't you go?”

“Don’t be a baby Phin! I’d go but I have to stay behind to oper­ate it.”, Harley paused, “Unless you want to.”

Phineas looked over the con­trols for the San­ta­Catcher 5000, his eyes pass­ing over the hun­dreds of dials and knobs and levers and switches and other things that had to be pushed, poked or flipped and decided that it would be in his best inter­est not to attempt to oper­ate the device. How­ever that left him with the option of going into the thing and get­ting zapped to another part of who knew where.

“You have no idea what’s going to happen.”

“I do so! The blender I sent through last week and was fine.”

“Fine?”, Phineas shouted, “It came out in pieces!”

“Well, the fruit I put in it was blended wasn’t it?”

“So let me see if I under­stand this cor­rectly”, inter­jected Faulkner, “This device essen­tially encodes the object at a quan­tum level, trans­mits that data and recre­ates it at the destination. “

Harley just stared at Faulkner with his jaw gap­ing open, “In a nut­shell, yes.”

“Inter­est­ing.” Said Faulkner as he walked around the device rub­bing his chin and mut­ter­ing to him­self, “This tech­nol­ogy could help the San­tas tremendously.”

Phineas, in an effort to avoid hav­ing every­one for­get about his con­cerns, chimed in, “If I go, who is going to pilot the ship? Tell me that one.”

“I can put it on auto pilot”, replied Cap­tain Remark­able, “It can han­dle most basic nav­i­ga­tion chores. Besides, if we don't make it back it won't mat­ter anyway.”

Phineas glared at the cap­tain and flopped into a chair as he turned to look at Faulkner and Harley, “I don't like it.”

“Hon­estly, nei­ther do I”, said Faulkner, “I should be going with them.”

“You can’t, I need your help locat­ing the Mantle.“

“Be that as it may Harley, they will need some­one with them who knows how to deal with the rene­gade ELF team.”

“Rene­gades elves?”, asked Harley as he attempted to raise his bushy eyebrows.

“ELFs, yes. We believe that a rene­gade fac­tion of the ELF is respon­si­ble for steal­ing the Man­tle and kid­nap­ping the Prime.”

“And you think we need some­one to help us deal with them?”, asked the Cap­tain. ”We’ve dealt with pirates, I think we can han­dle them our own.”

“I imag­ine you can cap­tain, how­ever these aren’t like any pirates you’ve ever faced. These are highly trained agents charged with pro­tect­ing the world’s most valu­able secret.”, retorted Faulkner with a wary smile.

“World’s most valu­able secret? Isn’t that a lit­tle overboard?”

“Per­haps Cap­tain, but imag­ine if no lit­tle kids got presents on Yule Morn­ing. With­out the San­tas the Spirit of Christ­mas, the spirit of giv­ing and kind­ness wouldn’t exist. How do you think the world would react if they knew the truths?”, replied Faulkner.

Phineas paused for a moment, “Maybe. “

“Maybe?!”, squeaked Harley.

Faulkner watched as a minor squab­ble broke out between Harley and Phineas. He glanced to the cap­tain who just smiled and shook his head. Appar­ently this was a usual ocur­rance and he was con­tent to let it play out. Faulkner how­ever was in a rush, “We are get­ting off track. We need to res­cue Santa and retrieve the Mantel.”

“Okay how about this Faulkner, you and the cap­tain go after the santa-​​nappers while Harley and I attempt to locate the Man­tle? How does that sound.”

“You’re just afraid of meet­ing up with the evil elves.”, said Harley, teas­ing Phineas again.

“Evil Elves?”

“Well, they are evil and they are ELFs”, said Harley, “Evil sounds bet­ter than ’rene­gade’. It has a nicer ring to it”

“I’m not afraid”, said Phineas with air quotes, “The cap­tain was a mem­ber of the Knights of Orange, that makes him a bet­ter fighter than I am, and since Faulkner is the only one who knows how to deal with the bad guys it makes sense. Right Faulkner?”

“What you say does make sense.”

“How am I sup­posed to locate this Man­tle thing with­out Faulkner? Stick a candy cane in the tracker? Maybe a fruitcake?”

“You were able to pro­gram it to track Santa Prime cor­rect?” asked Faulkner

“Yes, but he’s not an inan­i­mate object.”

“Try to locate Santa Paws. He’s track­ing the Man­tle. You can trans­port or tele­port or what­ever it is you do to him.”

Harley thought for a moment. It wasn’t a bad idea, and if things were as Faulkner said, it would be a bet­ter plan. How­ever he had a feel­ing things weren’t going to go exactly as planned. They never seemed to. Real­iz­ing that was what made the adven­tures on the Daedalus so excit­ing, he made his deci­sion, smiled and said, “Okay then.”

—

Faulkner returned car­ry­ing a cou­ples of large bags which he placed against the back wall, “I’m leav­ing these for you two just in case. They are non-​​lethal and to be used for defense only. And Harley, no hacking.”

Harley let his face droop. He still planned to take a hard look at the con­tents, but wasn’t plan­ning to let any­one know.

Faulkner quickly gave instruc­tions on how to use each device as the Cap­tain returned from his cabin. He was dressed in an old black uni­form from his days in the Knights of Orange.

“Start cal­i­brat­ing the machine to locate Max while we fin­ish the final prep.”

“Wait, how are you going to find Santa if the machine is pro­grammed to look for Paws?” asked Harley.

“Oh, I for­got to tell you. As a Com­man­der of the ELF I have access to a tele­port.”, Faulkner said as he fas­tened his har­ness. He glanced over to the Cap­tain who nod­ded to sig­nal he was ready.

“We’ll return as soon as we get the Prime. Locate that Mantle.”

Phineas grinned know­ing that the expres­sion on Harley’s face meant he was supremely jeal­ous of the tele­port technology.

Faulkner grinned, flicked his left wrist and both he and the cap­tain vanished.

“I so want that”, said Harley with barely con­tained excitement.

Phineas kept grinning.

“That is not nor­mal”, said Harley

“No, that is way past nor­mal” replied Phineas

The cause of their con­cern was a 6 foot tall ELF. Presently he was bran­dish­ing what looked, for all the world, like a toy gun. Only a few min­utes ago the ELF Com­man­der Faulkner and Cap­tain Remark­able had left on a mis­sion to res­cue the the CEO of the North Pole, one called Santa Prime. A being that wasn’t Santa, but appar­ently was one of many San­tas. A con­cept that still swirled around in Harley’s head.

Mostly how­ever, he was think­ing how he could score presents from all the Santas.

“I really hope that thing just shoots foam darts or some­thing.”, said Phineas inter­rupt­ing Harley’s thoughts.

“Hon­estly, I’m just hop­ing it doesn’t turn us into car­toon characters.”

The ELF solider stood in front of Harley and grinned. Not at all a pleas­ant type of grin, but more like an I'm going to get you kind of grin. It wasn't a grin Harley was par­tic­u­larly fond of and had every inten­tion of stay­ing very far away from.

Harley leaned toward Phineas and whis­pered," That's not nor­mal is it?"

"No," Phineas whis­pered back as he stared at the new­comer, " That is way past normal."

"Who are you?"

The ELF con­tin­ued grinning.

"In case you didn't hear me; I asked who are you?", Harley repeated.

"Call me Mel if you must."

"Mel?", chimed in Phineas, "What kind of name is Mel for an evil Yule Night terrorist?"

The ELF effected a look of mock indig­na­tion. It was eerily sim­i­lar to the _I'm gonna get you _​ grin, only with less men­ace. There was still plenty of menace.

"You've been talk­ing to Faulkner. I'm not a ter­ror­ist. Who am I terrorizing? "

"Um, " said Harley, "It's 'whom' and right now, me."

The ELF grinned again. That was enough for Harley. He turned and dashed across the con­sole head­ing for the other end of the room where he had stowed some of the gear Faulkner had left them before leav­ing with the cap­tain to res­cue the Santa Prime. He had no idea what any of the stuff did. He didn't remem­ber the instruc­tions Faulkner had given him because he hadn't paid atten­tion, fig­ur­ing there was no way any­one would find them out here in the Cloud.

He still wasn't sure how Mel found them, much less how he got on board. Come to think of it, he never got a clear answer for how Faulkner had man­aged it either.

He was going to have to pur­sue that line of ques­tion­ing fur­ther at a later time. Right now there was a mat­ter of the Evil ELF Mel on board.

Phineas real­ized where Harley was head­ing and quickly joined him. They both grabbed the first thing the came to, Phineas get­ting a large white and red bar­rel shaped object with what looked like a scope and a trig­ger. He shrugged, hefted it up to his shoul­der (not know­ing where else to put it) aimed in the gen­eral direc­tion of Mel and pulled the trigger.

Noth­ing hap­pened. The look on his face would have been price­less, and some­thing Harley would have teased him about for years, had he been pay­ing atten­tion. Instead he was focused on try­ing to fig­ure out the item he had pulled from the stash.

It was flat, about the size of a decent sized book and slightly thicker. There was a sin­gle but­ton on one side and what looked like a remov­able stick with a sec­ond but­ton on the other side. Harley removed the stick and vaguely remem­ber some­thing about not want­ing to be near when he pressed the but­tons. He quickly pushed the but­ton on the box thing and tossed it in the direc­tion of the Evil ELF Mel.

Now it's inter­est­ing to note that Mel hadn't moved. Well, in fact he had moved but only to sit down and watch with mer­ri­ment the activ­i­ties of Phineas and Harley. He watched with glee when Phineas failed to cor­rectly fire the CC Launcher. Not that being sprayed with hun­dreds of candy canes would have done much. True, it would leave a few welts but wouldn't stop him from his goal.

His mood changed how­ever when he real­ized what Harley had retrieved. A Gar­land Bomb. Some­thing he most def­i­nitely hadn't expected to see on this ship. Appar­ently Faulkner has been a lit­tle more pre­pared than he has expected.

His face fell as Harley tossed the bomb in his direction.

He turned and ran toward the door at the far end of the room in des­per­a­tion. His only hope was to out dis­tance the device. A hope that proved ulti­mately futile as Harley pressed the but­ton on the remote while the bomb was still air­borne. It det­o­nated between Mel and the Santa Trap effec­tively secur­ing him in place against the unit with fluffy, wispy, sil­ver ten­drils wrapped around the two. Not what he had planned and it put a seri­ous cramp on his day.

The whoop­ing from the other side of the room didn't help either.

"Nice shot Harley!", shouted Phineas

Harley danced in place.

Mel smiled to him­self. He had for­got­ten he was car­ry­ing a . He flicked his right wrist and dis­ap­peared. The Gar­land trap­ping him falling to the metal floor silently.

Harley stopped dancing.

"No fair!" he shouted.

Mel sud­denly appeared behind both Harley and Phineas with a soft pop­ping sound. They both turned to see him point­ing a small device at Harley. The device fired and green and red beams hit Harley, turn­ing him ice.

Phineas shouted and threw the CC Launcher at the Evil ELF, “Harley!”

There was a soft pop­ping sound behind Mel. He turned around to find a 6ft tall Dawger­ian Shep­ard dressed in a red coat and pants trimmed in white fur smiling.

The Shep­ard reached out to the shocked Mel and placed a small snowflake pin on his chest. A soft sil­very glow imme­di­ately enveloped the rene­gade ELF mem­ber, freez­ing him in place.

Phineas knelt beside the ice shaped lit­tle dawg, call­ing out the name of his friend.

He didn’t answer.

The first thing Cap­tain Remark­able noticed when the world came back into focus was white. The sec­ond thing he noticed was the dis­tinct absence of cold. No bit­ter 'wrap your arms and shiver' kind of cold that one would asso­ciate with so much white­ness, not even a notice­able change from the temp on the Daedalus.

“Where are we?” the cap­tain asked look­ing around.

“North Pole,” replied Faulkner.

“The toy fac­tory. Why isn’t it cold?”

“You’re assum­ing it is in a cold cli­mate area?”

“Well yea, it’s called the North Pole isn’t it?”

“It’s not called that because of it’s loca­tion Cap­tain but merely for his­tor­i­cal purposes”

“Okay, so why come here?”

“Because I don’t know any­thing about the loca­tion they are keep­ing the Prime so I want to be as pre­pared as possible.“

“And by that you mean?”

“I mean that I need to grab some gear and weapons and locate where they are keep­ing him. The plan is that we will tele­port in and extract him with min­i­mal muss and fuss. Now excuse me a moment while I check in and gather some things.”

“Under­stood.”

---

The first thing Cap­tain Remark­able noticed when the world came back into focus was white. The sec­ond thing he noticed was the dis­tinct absence of cold. Again. "And where might we be now?"

"Some­where I cer­tainly didn't expect to be, although when I think about it, it does make per­fect sense."

"What… oh my,” said the Cap­tain as he took in the vista before him. Every­where there were peo­ple. Peo­ple push­ing car­riages filled with chil­dren (scream­ing and oth­er­wise), peo­ple car­ry­ing bags full of shiny pack­ages with col­or­ful bows. Peo­ple going up and down mov­ing stairs and peo­ple going in and out of var­i­ous lit­tle shops. And every­thing was inside. That was the bit that took the Cap­tain most by sur­prise, the fact that all these peo­ple and boxes and bags and shops were all com­pletely enclosed in a build­ing that appeared to be many, many times the size of his ship.

It was, need­less to say, a lit­tle intim­i­dat­ing. Even for the Captain.

"Wel­come Cap­tain, to the Mall,"

"What is this place?"

"Well, it's called a mall. Basi­cally it's exactly what it looks like, a but(but?) of stores and peo­ple under one roof. Think of it as a mar­ket indoors."

"But it's so… big."

"Thank­fully it's the same size on the inside as it is the outside."

"I'm sorry?"

"Noth­ing, inside joke. Okay, expla­na­tion time. Remem­ber how I men­tioned that there were mul­ti­ple ‘San­tas’? Keep that in mind, I’ll come back to it. The first thing you need to know is that we are in a dif­fer­ent dimension.

Any­way, see the crowd gath­er­ing on the far side of the open area? That is where they are keep­ing the Prime."

"What, out in the open like that?"

"It's a per­fect cover really. Here the peo­ple con­sider him the giv­ing of gifts to good lit­tle boys and girls and go on an annual pil­grim­age tak­ing their chil­dren to sit on his lap and relay to him what they want as gifts."

"Seri­ously? Kind of takes the fun and sur­prise out of it a bit doesn't it?"

"The peo­ple here have com­mer­cial­ized the hol­i­day to the point of hi-​​jacking sev­eral of the hol­i­days that typ­i­cally come before Christ­mas. They don’t care about what it means of what kind of psy­cho­log­i­cal dam­age it does to any­one. They just want stuff. It’s got really bad in recent years here so we tend to avoid this dimen­sion if we can.”

“You said to remem­ber about mul­ti­ple Santas.”

“Right. Well, we typ­i­cally have a Santa for each dimen­sion or plane. In some cases mul­ti­ples is there are worlds that require it. How­ever, this is the first time a Santa, Prime or oth­er­wise has been to this dimen­sion in many gen­er­a­tions. The rea­son is because they have co-​​opted the Santa image. Remem­ber I men­tioned that this was the per­fect place to hide and being a per­fect cover ear­lier? That’s because this world is filled with malls like this one. Hun­dreds of thou­sands of them. And every sin­gle one has a Santa. Not an offi­cial Santa, just some­one dressed up as what they have come to believe Santa looks like. You’ll notice that they the Prime has a white beard and a red suit now.”

Cap­tain Remark­able stood star­ing at the gath­er­ing crowd try­ing to get a glimpse of the Prime, “So how do we do that with all these peo­ple around?”

“It cer­tainly makes it more dif­fi­cult, but not impos­si­ble. And I’m sorry, but I need you to serve as a dis­trac­tion while I make a grab for the Prime. It’s risky but we don’t have much time, they will fig­ure out we are here soon but they don’t know about you yet. It might be enough.”

“Okay then,”the Cap­tain said as he took the gun look­ing thing from Faulkner, “let’s go get us a Santa.”

Faulkner smiled, “That is a Gar­land Gun. If they get too close just point and shoot. It will fire sil­very ropes to entan­gle them, but know this; the minute you fire it they will know we are after the Prime. You have to time it prop­erly or they will be able to cir­cle back and stop me.”

“I under­stand,” replied the Captain.

“And par­don me for say­ing so Cap­tain, but a few min­utes ago you looked like you were about to pass out, now you seem like this is a nor­mal every­day thing for you. I know I’m not that good of a sto­ry­teller, so what gives?”

“When I thought this giant Mall thing existed on a planet in which I’ve been just about every­one, it unnerved me. How could this exist and I not know about it?

How­ever, when you explained that it was a dif­fer­ent, what did you call it, dimen­sion? Right, when you explained that it began to sound like some­thing Harley would say, and after hav­ing him as a crew mem­ber and shar­ing in his adven­tures for all these years, I can deal with things I don’t understand.”

Faulkner barked a laugh, “Fair enough. Okay, let’s go.”