Project: Magnus

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.”

Mor­ton Pen­win­kle stood watch­ing the skies. He wasn't so much watch­ing them as wait­ing for them to fall and he wanted to be sure he was look­ing when it started.

He shoved his hands deep in his pock­ets, it was after all fairly cold, and stamped his feet to make sure he stayed warm. In all hon­esty he wasn't really expect­ing the skies to fall. That would have meant some­thing went right, and based on the fact this was the fourth time in as many months that the end of the world had been pre­dicted, yet had failed to hap­pen (after all, if it had he wouldn't be here wait­ing). The doom say­ers were start­ing to get as bad as the weather men.

He shook his head remem­ber­ing the global pan­demic that almost was, but wasn't. Sup­pos­edly Mad Cow dis­ease had become so per­va­sive and stub­born this past win­ter that it was going to hit everycow all at once, then mutate into a new strain. Some CDC researchers pre­dicted it would re-​​animate the cows after killing them cre­at­ing what amounted to zom­bie cows. It didn't sound so bad con­sid­er­ing that peo­ple had got­ten really good at killing cows over the last few hun­dred years until he real­ized that it meant no more steaks or ham­burg­ers. He still wasn't sure how that was going to 'end the world' (and yes, he used air quotes every time he men­tioned it) but it def­i­nitely would have meant din­ners would be a tad less inter­est­ing. Although on the whole, it was bet­ter than zom­bie squir­rels. At least reg­u­lar squir­rels stopped chat­ter­ing long enough to sleep.

Then there was the comet that was going to pass extremely close to the moon, shift­ing it out of it's orbit and, at the very least caus­ing all kinds of destruc­tion as the grav­i­ta­tional forces worked to bal­ance them­selves. Worst case sce­nar­ios had it crash­ing into the Earth itself. All the sci­en­tists were in agree­ment that every­thing would work itself out and har­mony would once again reign, but there was a very likely chance human­ity would not survive.

Then of course the comet missed. Later it was dis­cov­ered that there was a round­ing error and that it had missed the moon by sev­eral mil­lion miles instead of the pre­dicted few hun­dred feet. Mor­ton always shook his head at that one. Being an accoun­tant for the Fifth National Bank of Welling­ton he always had a pro­found respect for num­ber and tended to guf­faw at the mis­take when­ever it came up in con­ver­sa­tion. Which it did. A lot.

And who could for­get the alien inva­sion. Mil­lions upon mil­lions of alien ships had sud­denly appeared in orbit just above the planet. It was cer­tain doom or so the pun­dits had pro­claimed on every talk show they could squeeze them­selves onto. No chance of human­ity sur­viv­ing this, it was most cer­tainly an inva­sion, then had pic­tures of the ships and everything.

Until one researcher had dis­cov­ered that the alien ships were in fact noth­ing more than space fleas and that the orig­i­nal dis­cov­erer had sim­ply mis-​​focused his tele­scope. Then every one that went to ver­ify it and dis­cov­ered the mis­take decided that since the gen­tle­man who had made the dis­cov­ery was so well respected and so very pop­u­lar that it must have been they that had made the mis­take and so pro­lif­er­ated the false claims for sev­eral days.

So it was with a shake of the head that Mor­ton turned around and shuf­fled back into his house when the PA sys­tem started to chirp to life and the announcer came on and stated that the launch of the nuclear mis­sile aimed at the enemy had been can­celled due to a mechan­i­cal fail­ure. He had hoped all along there wasn't going to be yet another post­pone­ment but had put a pie in the oven, just in case.


 Gus­tav sat up as the small grey and black dog walked into through the open gate. He looked around at the pack of dogs that flanked him on both sides.


He smiled, which con­sid­er­ing he was a large Golden Retriever made a fairly expres­sive grin.


"Sam. You have some nerve com­ing here. Espe­cially with out your lit­tle white bodyguard."


"I fig­ured she might upset you a lit­tle after the inci­dent last month, and I wanted to talk to you peacefully."


"Talk? Why should I talk to you? You and your lit­tle 'pets' mean noth­ing to me."
Gustav tried to put every ounce of dis­gust he had into pets. It was a lot.


"Maybe, but the sub­ject mat­ter of our con­ver­sa­tion will inter­est you a great deal. "


"Really. And what could you pos­si­bly want to talk about that I would be inter­ested enough in to pre­vent me from sic­c­ing Thun­der after your scrawny butt?"


"I'm help­ing a cat try to find his friend…"


"A cat!", if pos­si­ble Gus­tav man­aged to put even more dis­gust into cat than he had into pets, "Why on earth would I care about help­ing some flea bit­ten lit­tle furball?!"


"Because he might be a vic­tim of a cat­nap­ping and ani­mal traf­fick­ing." 
 Gus­tav froze with his mouth par­tially open. He close his mouth, licked his lips and looked around at the oth­ers sur­round­ing him. They were all look­ing back at him with a mix­ture of anx­i­ety and sadness.


Finally he low­ered his body to the ground, stretched his paws out in front of him and held his head up.


"Let's talk"


**********


Wat­son was on his hind feet with his front paws on the side of the house try­ing to push his nose as close to the open win­dow as possible.


"Inter­est­ing."


"Whats inter­est­ing?" asked Harley, trot­ting over to see what Wat­son had discovered.


"Sniff and tell me what you smell."


Harley put his nose to the ground and sniffed every­thing he could find. He cir­cled under the win­dow sev­eral times, occa­sion­ally look­ing around as if he expected to some­thing to sud­denly appear.
"Fear."


"And why is that odd?"


Harley sniffed.


He con­tin­ued to sniff and began to work his way away from the house towards the yard.


"Oh, because if he was run­ning away he wouldn't give off fear, but would be anx­ious or nervous."


"Right."


"So he was stolen!"


"Slow down, all it tells us is that he didn't runaway.


Harley sniffed again.


"There's else some inter­est­ing here."


He began weav­ing back and forth across the yard, try­ing to pick up the scent again. Occa­sion­ally he would look around as if expect­ing some­thing to sud­denly appear.
 Sud­denly he froze and looked up at Watson.


"Dog!"
 


**********


"So my con­tacts at both the Wilm­ing­ton and Tewks­bury police depart­ments con­firm what Gus­tav said." Zena said as she set­tled down into a lying posi­tion on the blan­ket next to Sebas­t­ian, "There have been 31 thefts in the last 3 months. No one has any idea who is doing."


"Is there any kind of pattern?"


"Not really. They are tak­ing all types of dogs from pure breed to mutt, cats, rab­bits, ham­sters and even a par­rot. The only anom­aly seems to be age. Older ani­mals aren't being taken."
 "So all young animals."


"Yep." replied Zena. She sat on the floor and looked around at every­one. The only miss­ing mem­bers of the group were Tim­o­thy and Mag­gie who were assist­ing Mal­com with the search for Peri.


Every­one had returned home and gath­ered to share what infor­ma­tion they had gath­ered. No one looked par­tic­u­larly happy.


Sam paced around in cir­cles. He went over to the water bowl, got a drink and water, and with his beard still wet sat down and looked at Watson.


"What did you guys learn at Peri and Chester's house?"


"There was a lot of fear scent all over the place under the win­dow and even some up the wall. Almost like he was try­ing to climb back in."


"Fear scent would be expected in a kid­nap­ping" replied Zena, "Even up the wall. He was prob­a­bly try­ing to get away."


"That was my orig­i­nal the­ory, but he wasn't kid­napped. We fol­lowed the fear scent away from the win­dow and across the yard to a tall oak tree. He appar­ently climbed the tree to escape a dog."


"Wait," inter­rupted Sam, "What do you mean escape a dog?"


"There was a dog scent that over­lapped the trail we fol­lowed out to the woods, but it doesn't look like the dog was actu­ally chas­ing him."


"Wouldn't the dog cause the fear even if he ran away?", Sam asked.


"The dog scent seemed to weave back and forth across Peri's. It appears the dog fol­lowed the scent to the tree, cir­cled a few times and finally gave up."


"Did you find any place where Peri came down?" Zena asked.


Wat­son waited and after a few sec­onds nudged Harley gen­tly with his nose.


"Oh right! Yea!" Harley exclaimed real­iz­ing it was his turn to share infor­ma­tion, "This was my idea! The branches in the trees are thick and look fairly sturdy. There are a lot of them close together and I think Peri, real­iz­ing there was a dog below, must have used the branches to travel with­out com­ing out of the tree."


Tim sud­denly appeared in the win­dow out of breath, "Malcom's patrols found Peri!", he shouted, "He's about 2 miles away in a lit­tle cul­vert. They said he looks okay but appears to be scared out of his mind. Not that I blame his with all those birds cir­cling overhead."


"It's far­ther than I thought he would be but if he used the branches like Harley sug­gested it would be pos­si­ble." replied Sam as he stood up and began pac­ing in circles.


"Far­ther than you thought? You know some­thing we don't?" Tim­o­thy asked as he leapt down from the win­dow and sat fac­ing Sam.


"I think have a fairly good idea of what hap­pened, and I believe I know how."
 
 


Sub­mit­ting this to the #tues­day­se­r­ial to see what hap­pens and in the hope it forces me to fin­ish the story . I'm leav­ing all the com­ments from the orig­i­nal sub­mis­sion waaay back in Octo­ber of last year (god, has it really been that long).

Wife edited and approved. Hope you have as much fun read­ing as I did writ­ing. Com­ments (even crit­i­cal) encouraged!

---

Tim­o­thy lay curled up in the big bay win­dow, his orange and white tail hang­ing casu­ally off the edge, swish­ing lazily back and forth while he ignored the seag­ull cir­cling overhead.

When the gull landed on the rail­ing out­side the win­dow he gave a big sigh but refused to oth­er­wise move.

"Hey youse guys," shouted the gull.

'Seri­ously? A Boston accent?" replied Tim lift­ing his head.

"Hey, I'm a gull from Baw­ston, whadda want?"

"Char­lie, you live down the street, eat out of our trash and have vis­ited Boston once."

Tim put his head back down, hop­ing the gull would take the hint.

He didn't.

"Believes what youse want cat. Any­ways, I gotta case for youse guys."

Tim heaved another sigh, gave up on nap­ping, stood up and stretched.

"Okay fine. Whats the case?"

"This mook down the street was telling me his room­mate got cat snatched yes­ter­day. He's afraid it might be part of that there theft ring that's going around. He asked me for help and of course I sug­gest he hire the Pack."

Tim sat and started at the gull. He squinted his eyes. He swished his tail.

"Theft ring?"

"Yea, there's been a bunch of these ani­mal thefts in da neigh­bor­hood lately. Dogs, cats, even a cou­ple rabbits."

Tim swished his tail some more.

"I assume you men­tioned our rates?"

"For­getaboutit. He can't cover, I will. You know I'm good forit."

"Right, " Tim stared some more, "Bring your mook by this after­noon, I'll let Sam know to expect you."

"Fan­tas­tic."

"And Char­lie? Lose the accent."

**********

Sam sat on the blan­ket on the floor fac­ing the oth­ers with a small grey cat sit­ting ner­vously beside him. In front sat 3 other dogs and 3 cats includ­ing Tim. Sam had his black and grey tail curled up against his back while he waited for the oth­ers to set­tle down.

"Let me intro­duce every­one. The black and white cat is Mag­gie, the two orange tab­bies are Tim­o­thy and Sebas­t­ian, the white Schnoo­dle dog is Zena, the black and tan Ter­rier that can't stay still is Harley, and the black and grey Schnoo­dle is Wat­son. Every­one, this is Chester. He was brought to us by Charlie."

The lit­tle grey cat nod­ded to each ani­mal as they were intro­duce. Each dog bowed their head when their name was called, the cats merely swished their tail.

"Accord­ing to Chester here, there have been sev­eral cats and dogs taken from their homes in the area over the last few days. Yes­ter­day his house­mate Peri, who is a small grey Burmese like him­self dis­ap­peared. Chester is afraid Peri was taken by the thieves. All he knows is that Peri jumped into a win­dow late in the after­noon, a win­dow with a locked screen, and when Chester return from the lit­ter box Peri was gone and the screen was missing."

"Any infor­ma­tion on this sup­posed rash of thefts?" asked Watson.

"It's not 'sup­posed' replied Chester, I heard from Lula next door that the dog across the street was taken!"

"Relax Chester, I'm not doubt­ing you. We take every­thing as con­di­tional until proven. " Wat­son shifted slightly on the floor, "It helps if we don't go into things with our minds already set on cat­nap­ping. Might miss something."

Chester nod­ded. He was still ner­vous being sur­rounded by so many dogs. Char­lie hadn't men­tioned there would be so many. He licked his paw to help calm him­self and tried to relax a bit. It didn't work.

"Bas­tion, can you escort Chester and make sure he gets home safely?"

"Cer­taintly." Sebas­t­ian replied as he stood up and stretched, "Come on kid."

Sam nuz­zled Chester with his nose gen­tly to encour­age him along.

"You'll be safe with Sebas­t­ian, he might not look like much but he can be tough when he needs to."

Sebas­t­ian glanced at Sam, flicked his tail twice and headed out the door, Chester fol­lowed gin­gerly behind. After they had left the room Sam stood up and began to pace.

"Some­thing both­er­ing you?" asked Zena

"Yes. I've heard rumors about the rash of kid­nap­pings recently, but this doesn't feel like one and it's bug­ging me as to why."

Zena stretched out on the floor as Harley twitched around in a circle.

"You think­ing this wasn't a cat­nap­ping but a run away?" asked Harley

"It had occurred to me, but there is still too much we don't know. You and Wat­son inves­ti­gate Chesters house, focus on the out­side for now. See if you can find any evi­dence or clues that will give us a direc­tion. Zena, you can­vas the neigh­bor­hood. Talk to any dogs or cats or any­thing else that will talk to you about the thefts and see what you can find."

"What shall Tim­o­thy and I do?" asked Maggie.

"I need you two to go talk to Mal­com. See if he can arrange some aer­ial sur­veil­lance of the area. Maybe they can spot Peri or some kind of trail"

"And what are you going to do?"

"I'm going to try to talk to Gus­tav. If there is kind of ani­mal traf­fick­ing going on he will at least have heard about it."

Harley sat and waited.

He con­tin­ued to sit, and con­tin­ued to wait but now added 'glare' to his action list.

He had con­sid­ered sim­ply star­ing but glare had more men­ace and con­sid­er­ing that as a Silky Ter­rier he was taller sit­ting than stand­ing it made more sense to glare and sit.

It hadn't moved for sev­eral min­utes, teas­ing him. He remained per­fectly still, only his hair moved now and again blow­ing in the occa­sional breeze.

Sud­denly it twitched!

A slight wind was start­ing up again so it made sense that it would move, but he had to be on his guard in case it decided that was the per­fect chance to escape.

Care­fully, he raised his back haunches and shifted, with extreme care, into a posi­tion more suit­able for stalking.

Slowly he lifted his left forepaw.

No move­ment.

He slowly extended it out in front of him and shifted his weight slightly.

Still no movement.

Care­fully, oh so very care­fully, and slowly, he low­ered it again and shifted his weight for­ward more.

A twitch.

Harley froze.

Had he been seen?

Did it know he was there?

Should he pounce now?

It was too far away to get to in a sin­gle jump, but it might be pos­si­ble in two.

The breeze came again.

A dou­ble twitch!

He crept for­ward a tad faster now.

Sud­denly the wind gusted faster, lift­ing it into the air.

It was escaping!

Harley gave chase.

It drifted upward slowly, just out of leap­ing range.

He was about to give up when the wind died a lit­tle and it sank back to earth, skit­ter­ing across the ground.

He sped up and just as it began to lift into the air again when the wind picked up he pounced.

He grabbed it securely between in his teeth, lifted his foot to free it, turned and trot­ted back to the porch with his head held high and a grin on his face as he car­ried the yel­low candy wrapper.