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The Country of Nehalym
Nehalym, an island country, is a very mysterious dictatorship. What will Dan and Nathan do to save their people?
Chapter 1: Welcome to Nehalym!
“KFC! KFC!” someone shouts through the streets. Nathan knows the call. He and a bunch of other eleven-year-olds bolt down the corridor.
Nathan has dark hair, tan-ish skin, and green eyes. Common qualities of a citizen who lives in Nehalym.
“Darn,” Nathan grumbles. “I hate running!”
CRACK! The sound of a Baseball bat cracks on the wall of the Slap-Store convenience store. Due to the laziness of the manager, Slap-Store only houses toilet-paper rolls.
A ten-year-old kid named Dan is walking out the automatic-sliding-doors of Slap-Store. He has blond hair, light skin, and blue eyes. Common qualities of a White Person. “What’s all this angry mob do-”
RUMBLE-RUMBLE! The eleven-year-olds accidentally collide into Dan. Dan stands back up and says, “Hey, watch where you’re going!”
“Sorry!” Nathan calls as he runs. “But there’s a Killer following us!”
“Wait, wha-” Dan doesn’t have a clue about this “Killer” thing.
“Don’t just stand there!” Nathan shouts back. “Do something!”
Without explanation, Dan would probably know what a Killer is, anyway. He jolts down the street. After a while of running, Dan has to wait to catch his breath. Then he hears footsteps. He turns around. A wrinkly-skinned, white-haired man shows up, holding an obsidian Baseball bat.
That guy? That old-man? How’s he a Killer? Dan wonders. Instead of running away, he considers seriously questioning the old-man. DONK! A Baseball bat slams against his thigh.
Chapter 2: Meet Nathan, Average Kid!
“Hi, I’m Nathan,” Nathan says. “Say ‘Nay-Than’, not ‘Nah-Then’.”
Dan is still shivering. He’s lying down against a brick wall, several yards from Slap-Store. “Who the heck was that stupid guy?”
“Hey!” Nathan scolds. “Watch your mouth. We can’t use foul language in-”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Dan interrupts, annoyed. “Well go away.”
“Don’t you want to know the name of this country? I hear you’re a newcomer.”
“Ha! Yes, I know the name of this country! It’s…um…uh…Nazi-Germany! I’ve time-traveled back to the 1940’s.”
Nathan frowns. He stares blankly at Dan. “I can see you’re American. Let’s see how far you can go with this.”
“Oh, yeah,” Dan continues. “That was just a little attempt at humor. I know how much you like to laugh!”
Nathan’s eyes narrow into slits. His facial expression is very smug. “Not funny,” he retorts. He sighs, pauses, and introduces, “Welcome to Nehalym. I suppose it’s the last country in the world that still has a dictatorship.”
Dan corrects, “No, China, several ones in Africa, parts of Europe, and other places still have bosses in place of presidents.”
Suddenly, without notice, Nathan walks away. “Bye.”
“Hey, where you goin’?” Dan steps up onto the sidewalk.
“Shh. My parents. I might get myself killed. I must go!”
Getting yourself killed is actually quite common in Nehalym. Dan used to live in The State of Texas, United States, but his parents moved to Nehalym, a dangerous place. Sure, these can all be rumors, but who knows?
Dan’s father had been frequently switching jobs ever since. He had to travel all over the state just to get to a different workplace. He dreamed of a calm, convenient Utopia where switching jobs is unnecessary. Overwhelmed, he stumbles upon a Daily Epoch Newspaper Report about an island country where you can’t leave. That’s Nehalym.
Dan’s family, the Slap-Jacks, wanted to bring everyone along to Nehalym, but there was one problem.
Dan has a brother named Swaggington, but he wasn’t allowed to transfer to Nehalym. Swaggington was seventeen years old at that time, so it’s generally accepted that he stays in the United States alone.
Swaggington was in college, and he wasn’t allowed to come to Nehalym because of that. Nehalym has zero Universities, so they didn’t want Swaggington to be worried about his education.
The people in Nehalym tried to be nice to Swaggington by concerning his education, which is considered a good thing.
And whether somebody is still a college student or not, they should always avoid Nehalym.
In the United States, you’re not allowed to go to North Korea at the time of writing. However, another country where leaving is illegal, and United Airlines still lets you fly there.
And because an island is small, and you can’t leave Nehalym, Dan’s father used lazy strategies. Dan’s dad always answers a job-change request by saying, “I decline the request, since I can’t leave my small country.”
Even though Dan is only ten years old, he knows better than to move to a country where you can’t leave.
Chapter 3: The K.F.C. and Kia!
“KFC! RUN!” Nathan jerks his head around as he shouts.
Dan is still asleep. It’s eight-o’clock in the morning, but Dan has no clue about government sleeping rules. Neither do his parents.
Voices come from outside the house.
“KFC! KF-”
SLAM! Goes a Baseball bat.
“Kia!”
WHACK! Goes a Baseball bat.
“Kia!”
BAM! Goes a Baseball bat.
BONK! Again.
BLUBRUB! Someone gets rubbed against a wall.
“Kia!”
Dan stutters. He wakes up, startled to find another angry mob banging people around. “Who’s Kia?” he mutters.
“KFC’s are chasing us! Everyone dodge West!” Nathan commands. A group of other kids dodge to the side as a Killer tries to strike them, but misses. What the heck? How is it possible, fast-food-restaurants chasing eleven-year-olds?
Dan rushes downstairs and slams the front door behind him. He runs out onto the road where the angry mob is. Except he’s still wearing his pajamas! At first sight, Dan sees a bunch of elderly men swishing Baseball bats around.
Suddenly, a tall slender woman trots across the road, holding her right hand up to signal “stop.” Will she stop the Killers? No. Instead, she drags a young boy on the dusty ground. It’s the boy who exclaimed, “Kia,” three times.
The boy refuses, and tries to let go of her hand. The woman scolds, “Get up, Sylus!”
Sylus, the boy who called for Kia, flinches. He stands up on his feet. He walked obediently to a doctor’s office with the woman.
Wait a minute… The mob of old-men was trying to hurt Gordon and others, yet he goes to a doctor’s office. Are the old-men, called Killers, actually supposed to do that?
“Dan!” calls Nathan. “Dan, are you all-right?”
“Yeah,” Dan replies. “I just got out. Who’re those people supposed to be?”
“Um, before I answer that question, I have a question for you. Why the heck are you in your pajamas?”
“Oh, uh…I had no time. Just to be quick.”
“Go dress up! Now! You’re going to get yourself killed! You’re lucky the Killers didn’t see.”
Chapter 4: The Hall of Open Records!
“Hey!” a Killer shouts. “You’re new here, right?”
Dan turns around.
“He’s talking to you,” Nathan points out.
“Uh, yeah, I guess so,” Dan tells the Killer.
“What’s your name?” the Killer lowers his voice.
“Daniel Slap-Jack,” Dan says.
The Killer thinks for a moment. “Okay, now go to The HOOR.”
“What’s The HOOR?”
“THE HALL OF OPEN RECORDS, MORON!”
Dan, whose real name is Daniel, still doesn’t know where The Hall of Open Records is.
Just as Dan is about to ask the Killer where it is, Nathan grabs him by the shoulder and points in the North direction. He explains, “We live on the South side of town. If you need to go to The HOOR, go straight North of your home, and left.”
After a tiresome thirty minutes of walking, Dan catches up to his destination. The HOOR is a very tall building suspended by white poles. It has a couple of sculptures carved on the roof. It looks a bit like the U.S. Supreme Court, not to mention that Nehalym doesn’t even have any courts.
“What do you want?” a female wearing a suit says. It’s the Director, who owns The HOOR. She sits in a tall chair behind a curved desk.
“Uh,” Dan stutters, “An old-man, who my friend calls a ‘Killer’, told me to go here.”
“Friend?” the Director asks doubtfully. “I never received your contract agreement.”
“What’s that?” Dan wonders. That’s another peculiar thing about Nehalym.
“You’re new here, right?”
Dan nods.
“Then you shall read this packet,” the Director says as she hands Dan an old, wrinkled stack of papers. “It’s the introductory information about Nehalym. Please take a seat.”
Dan sits down on a purple couch and starts to read the first packet. Unfortunately, he gets interrupted again.
“That’s for the aristocracy,” the Director points out in a matter-of-fact tone. She points to several ordinary chairs to the left of the purple couch. “That’s for the middle class.” Then she points to dirty ram-shackle seats in the corner of The HOOR lobby. “That’s for the peasants.”
Peasants? Aristocrats? Dan is stunned at the concept of these old Feudal System Classes. Anyway, he continues reading.
“Males must wake up promptly at eight o’clock AM, and no later than that. Females must wake up at seven o’clock AM, otherwise they’ll get slapped in the face. Females are allowed to take naps, but males aren’t.”
Dan becomes enraged. He throws the packet on the ground. He stomps up to the front desk, and points straight at the Director. “You guys are sexist!” Dan shouts.
“No, we’re not,” the Director replies calmly.
“Oh yeah?” Dan argues. “And you’re violent, too.”
“Me? I’m not.” the Director asks, gesturing to herself.
“You and all the people of Nehalym,” Dan says. “This country is absurd. What sort of a dictator has ‘Killers’ on his side?”
“What’re you talking about? Killers?”
“You know, those old people wearing white coats?”
“What? Those people are Community Convenience Workers. They help make the country a better place. They arrest people who break the rules.”
“But I didn’t break the rules. A Killer chased me down and hit me with a Baseball bat!”
“Then you must’ve broken a rule. Didn’t your family move here from the United States?”
“Yes, except for my older brother, who is in college.” Then Dan switches on his angry attitude again. “Where do they come from? Those Community Convenience ‘blah-blah-blah’s. They seem to catch people from nowhere. Do they hide behind buildings like spies? That’s very deceptive, you know!”
“Daniel, I am the Director of the Hall of Open Records. Don’t talk to me like that. But, as always, I’m willing to explain things to immigrants. Most buildings have a specialized office in them, built for Community Convenience Workers to work there. They monitor people through the building’s security cameras, if the building has any. Security cameras are attached to both the outside and inside of most buildings, and they also have built-in microphones.”
“Um… Okay, but I…uh…really…have to go,” Dan says quickly as he turns around. He walks to the HOOR entrance. He turns around to face the Director again, who has a confused look on her face. “Bye,” Dan says casually. “I’ll read the packets later. I need to go back home.”
A woman wearing a tight dress is about to walk through the entrance doors.
“Look out behind you!” the Director snaps.
Dan is about to turn around to see who’s behind him, but it’s too late. The woman in the tight dress bumps in to him.
The woman in the tight dress scrunches up her face. “Oh, so this is how you treat me?” she taunts. “Running into me like a childish old troll? Well I’ve got news for you, buddy. You’re going down, sucker!”
“What’s your problem?” Dan asks angrily.
The woman smiles. “Your existence. Why shouldn’t I kill you?”
“All right then, kill me,” Dan says sarcastically.
The woman tries to perform a karate-kick, but her dress is so tight that she can’t lift her leg more than two feet off the ground. “Dang!” she exclaims.
Dan scoffs, “Whatever.” He opens the door and walks out of the HOOR like nothing ever happened.
The Director is left speechless. His face is stuck at a raised-eyebrow position. Finally, she murmurs to herself, “About how Dan said that we’re violent…”
Chapter 5: Father’s Labor!
Dan has a good-night’s sleep, and he’s expecting tomorrow to be a normal day, sitting on the couch, watching television, being carefree as he wants.
Unfortunately, little does he know that Nehalym’s elementary school system has no absolute, set enrollment date.
“Dad,” Dan asks nervously. “What’s your new job?”
Dan’s dad sighs. “Labor.”
“What?”
“Laborer! It’s very heavy-duty work.”
“Heavy-duty…um…uh… Are you fatigued?”
“Compared to other workers, no, ‘cause I just took the job. People with more experience get harder work.”
“What’s it like compared to America?”
“Heh, heh. In America, it’s just eight hours of light to medium-duty work. I have a colleague named Betch, and her job is twenty-three hours of relentlessly smashing an axe on a block of refined obsidian.”
“Well that’s stupid!”
“Shh…” Dad points to a sound recorder screwed to the ceiling. “They can hear us! We don’t have the freedom to criticize things the government owns! And by the way, you’re goin’ to school, mister!”
Dan glances at the clock. It’s seven-o’clock in the morning, right when the government sleeping rules set in. He’d been talking to his dad for about one minute. “Right now?” he asks, shocked.
“Yes!” Dad replies in a congradulative manner. “Right now.”
Chapter 6: Going to School!
“Can I go to the restroom?” Dan asks during Math Class, First Period of Droop-Gloop Elementary School. It’s Friday, and Dan is a new student in fifth grade.
The teacher, Mrs. Danky-Pants, turns away from the whiteboard, and faces Dan. “I don’t know, CAN you?” she retorts.
“MAY I go to the restroom?” Dan corrects.
“What? Can’t you see we’re in class? Why would I ever let you use the rest-room? Students aren’t allowed to REST and sleep on the soft, cushioned-”
“Not rest-room, resTRoom, as in ‘bathroom’.”
“We don’t have tubs and showers at Droop-Gloop Elementary.”
“Not that kind of bathroom! The bathroom with the toilets.”
“Oh, I’d be happy to LET you have a TOY from the class Treasure Box-”
“NO! The one with the sinks and the urinals.”
“Well, from my experience, I’ve never heard of anyone who SANK in the ocean from a URINAL tract infection.”
“NO!” Dan argues, annoyed. “Mrs. Danky-Pants, why are you so literal-minded?”
“Oh, that. If you need to pee, students such as you should go outside and urinate in the pointy, prickly thorn-bushes.”
Dan grunts, and throws his pencil on the floor to show his distress. Then he stumbles out of the classroom reluctantly. What psycho pees outside the school?
“Huh. Just that old darn thing,” Dan mumbles. He had experience peeing in the woods before, so it’s no sweat to do it now. But there’s still no reason why ordinary teachers force students to pee outside, when schools in Nehalym clearly has bathrooms…or do they? Just as he starts to pull down his pants, “Aaaaagh!”
There’s a person who suddenly jumps in front of him. He screams, too, “Aaaaagh! What the- Oof! Ouch! Kia! Ki…” Dan blocks his hand in front of the other screamer’s mouth.
“Hey!” the other guy reacts. “Kia’s the community nurse! What were you thinking?”
“Kia’s a nurse?” Dan wonders. Although he’d just learned something new about this specific community of Nehalym, he tries to seem “normal,” and pretends he already knows it. “Oh, yes, I know that,” Dan lies. “But still, don’t you think it’s a bit weird to need medical care due to accidentally falling over?”
“Not at all,” the other guy replies in a matter-of-fact tone. “My parents, the moms and dads of Nehalym, have all taught us to shout the name of the nurse when injured. It’s a common habit now.”
“Wait…” Dan tries to recall the memory of Sylus being dragged on the ground to get to Kia’s place, back on the street where he lives. The memory of the angry mob, bashing people beforehand. He asks, “Why can’t the school have its own nurse? Seems kind of inconvenient to drag people all the way down Main Street.”
“Mrs. Danky-Pants sent me,” Nathan bursts out the door, catching his breath. “You need to get back to class. And you’re not even ‘peeing’! You’re just standing around, talking to your-”
“Friend?” Dan suggests.
“No, no, no. You haven’t even signed the agreement yet!” Nathan grumbles, signaling that the Friendship Agreement is common knowledge, and Dan should know the rules by now. “Anyway, you’re not-” Nathan continues his message from the teacher.
Dan completes Nathan’s sentence with a familiar phrase, “-following directions like Mrs. Danky-Pants told me to.” He walks back into the school, half-surprised that Nathan goes to his school, too.
Chapter 7: The Backfiring Plan!
The next day, Dan encounters someone familiar he met at school. He’s glad it’s Saturday, so he won’t have to go to school and pee in the bushes or what-not.
“Hi, ‘names Helix Supernova,” the guy Dan talked to yesterday introduces himself. It’s after Dan ate his breakfast, put on his clothes, and walked out the door, to find the guy right in front of him.
“Um,” Dan starts, “about that ‘Kia’ thing, one time the Killers were trying to hit me, but why call them Killers? I mean, smacking your stomach or your thigh isn’t going to kill you.”
“Ha,” Helix says in a cruel, sarcastic manner. “WELL THEN, GO AHEAD! They’ll do whatever they’re told. You want to die, then fine.”
Dan picks out one sentence. It’s unique, at least in the sense of Nehalym. “They’ll do whatever they’re told.” His mouth formed into a sly grin.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Helix detects Dan’s emotion, and predicts his plan. “Now, don’t be too clever.” He tells Dan a fable, where a fox wasn’t allowed to pick the grapes off a tree. But the fox punched the grapes off the tree, since the rules only applied to picking. Unfortunately, the grapes were poison, and the fox regrets his way of thinking.
“Tree-hugger.”
“Hey, hey, hey! No insults! You could get in big trou-”
The ground starts to shake. “Get him!” several old men yell in a raspy voice.
“Aww, not the KFC!” Helix groans.
Dan dashes up to a nearby stop-sign, and points to it with both index-fingers. This indicates “stop.” The Killers stop running, and stare at him.
“Look,” Dan persuades. “This won’t change anything. What’s the point of injuring people? This is unethical, cruel, and just mean. Back in my country, America, kids would get chastised in a non-physical way. So would you please stop-”
The Killers confer for a few seconds, and then one speaks up, “Look, you know those clichés in movies, right? Someone says something very ‘heartwarming’ or ‘meaningful’ to the villain, and he immediately transforms into a protagonist. Well that certainly ain’t going to happen!” The Head Killer holds back his Baseball bat, aims, and… BAM! He smashes into his OWN head!
Helix rolls his eyes. “Ugh. Your plan totally backfired! Let me rephrase that. They’ll do whatever EVIL they’re told,” he counters toward Dan. Then, there’s a scream. And a splash. Helix turns around, and he sees a person flying through the air and landing in water. Dan isn’t standing on the road anymore. But according to science, how is it possible that Dan gets shot so high?
Helix snatches the Head Killer’s bat, and trips him over on the asphalt. Then he grabs a shoe to examine it. “Aha!” Helix exclaims. The shoes are super-bouncy, and give off ten times the amount of energy it receives. That may be why Dan got “kicked” so far.
Just then, the Killer who fell rises up behind Helix, and grabs his arms. He locks Helix with handcuffs! “I’m an adult,” the Killer explains. “Don’t you touch me again.”
Helix starts shouting. “Hey! Somebody! Dan got kicked and…mrphof-”
The Killer slaps Helix’s mouth shut.
Chapter 8: Save From the Hidden!
“Are you sure he got kicked?” the Rescue Squad confirms through the telephone. Nathan overheard from Helix, and is reporting an emergency over the phone in less than a minute after that. To blend in and seem non-suspicious, he calls from a normal street phone booth.
“Yes, of course,” Nathan replies.
“But according to science, a shoe can’t give off twice the energy it receives,” Bob, a Rescue Squad member, says. How can Nathan explain this?
Then another Rescue Squad member named Max comes on the phone. He’s a physicist with a PHD in science. He tells several scenarios of facts, “Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. The shoes must have some energy source. If it’s the person who kicks, then his leg would be numb shortly afterward. The shoes might have a tank of fuel, but that can’t be gasoline or else he explodes. Using inductive charging is fine, but we hardly see that kind of tech in a pair of shoes.”
“But the shoes were really bouncy!” Nathan protests.
“But we’re the Rescue Squad. We rescue people who are lost or hurt. As for the ‘super-bouncy’ shoes that kick a person this far…let’s say, a mile…there’s no point of rescuing him. He’s probably dead. Who’s the owner of these mysterious shoes?”
“I don’t know his name, but he’s a Killer.”
“Killer? Killers give satisfactory corporal punishment to children as chastisement. The kid misbehaved, and that’s that. Kicking is a fair punishment.” Max hangs up the phone-call.
URRRGGGH! Nathan re-dials the telephone number for the rescue squad. He seems to be incredibly distressed. “Hello?” he talks into the phone’s speaker.
The same Max’s voice comes on the earpiece. “Hey, it’s you again, right?”
Nathan doesn’t know whether Max is angry or just questioning. Before he can reply, Max taunts, “No need to be rude, but we can call the police. Is this a prank call?”
Nathan considers the threat of calling the police. However, there’s no police in Nehalym, so Killers also serve as police. But their job isn’t to protect, it’s to do vigilante justice. And to them, vigilante justice basically means Baseball-bat-bashing.
“Uh, no,” Nathan answers unsurely. “But the main reason is that the Killer kicked him for doing something minor. It’s kicking as a punishment for name-calling.”
“Dude, we’re very busy. The Rescue Squad doesn’t deal with these situations,” Max replies. “Either hang up the phone, or JUMP OFF A CLIFF!” He yells the last phrase so loudly that Nathan’s ears hurt.
“Oww! Oof!” Nathan immediately drops the phone and falls on the ground next to the phone booth he’s calling from, without hanging up or canceling the call. What would happen next?
Nathan scoops the phone back up, and argues, “I’ve got to admit, you suck at insulting. ‘Jump off a cliff’ is basically nothing, and it’s not even offensive. How ‘bout this: ‘kill yourself’!” He’s yelling so loud that he’s practically shouting straight into the phone.
“That’s it,” Max says. “What started as an emergency call turned out to be an argument. NOW HANG UP THE PHONE, YOU IDIOT!”
Max shouted that last sentence so loud, and so sudden, that Nathan winces. The phone slips out of his hand again, and he accidentally bonks his head against the phone booth. He decides there’s enough pain to call for the help of Kia. “Kia! Kia! Kia…” Nathan calls into the open air.
After a few seconds, a sexy-looking woman escorts Nathan to a building that looks like a pediatrics medical center. Is she Kia?
Dan is a skillful swimmer, and he’s very lucky to land in the water, not on stone or dirt. He’s also very lucky to not land head-first, because even a water-landing might lead to brain damage. Despite his swimming skills, the water is easy to maneuver.
He realizes that the water is a shallow land-bridge connecting Nehalym to a nearby island. The island, as it seems, contains a circular wall of stone that had white-and-orange boards nearby. Maybe it’s an under-construction tower or something.
Dan wades through the water and steps back on the land, his soaked clothes causing perceived heaviness.
Before Dan steps off the coast and onto the man-made cityscape of Nehalym, he figures it’d be much more convenient to use a little lift. “Kia! KEEEAAH!” Dan roars at the top of his lungs. Soon, and I mean a couple of seconds, Dan sees a train speeding down the monorail. A curvaceous woman steps out. She’s wearing a red dress that looks very tight in relation to her body.
Dan feels confused. How did the woman hear Dan shout her name? The Nehalym Government must by eavesdropping on their citizens’ speech! But how’d they do that? Dan decides it’s too much of a mystery.
When she walks up to Dan, he hopes this “Kia” will drive him to the nurse’s office, or let him ride the monorail. Then he wouldn’t have to walk all the way home, right?
Unfortunately, the woman isn’t as nice as Dan thought. Dan wonders if he’s being too optimistic, but the woman snatches him by the shirt-collar. Dan lunges forward, sprawled on the sandy coastal-beach.
“Get up!” Kia scolds.
After Dan stands back up, he notices something strange. The type of dress Kia is wearing. What Kia’s facial features look like. She looks exactly like the woman in the purple dress who tried to assault him! In fact, Kia was the woman in the purple dress.
“It’s not my fault!” Dan implores. “You pulled me over! I got up anyway, but why should I listen to you?”
Kia frowns. “You talk back to me one more time, and you’re dead!” she threatens.
Dan flinches, and asks, “Um, aren’t you going to drive me there or let me ride the monorail?”
“Of course not! Do you think my job is to provide convenient rides for children? No. It’s to be a nurse. And there’s only one nurse’s office, and only one nurse. So it doesn’t matter how far away you are, because you’re still walking with me.”
It’s somewhat ironic that a nurse would injure her own patients. But Nehalym is Nehalym, right? Don’t judge a book by its cover, Dan thinks. ‘Same thing for women.
Chapter 9: Both Getting Arrested!
While Dan is walking, he tries to be extremely cautious. In his mind, Nehalym has a bad reputation.
But on the sidewalks, he sees the most unhappy, desperate people he ever sees in his entire life. Those people are young adult couples, but they seem to be terribly mismatched.
There is a woman walking with a man with a beard that drags on the concrete.
Another woman and a man that has horns in his…mouth?
This time, there is an old lady walking by with a man in a wheelchair.
And a woman with an…old-man who looks like a Killer?
Although this’s the first time Dan ever notices this, the sight astonishes him. He sees not one single car, not one single bike, not one single motorcycle. Everyone in the streets of Nehalym is a pedestrian! Nobody seems to own any personal motor-vehicle. Dan doesn’t know whether this is good or bad, but the dictator might be forcing people to walk so they take a long time and tire out.
Kia and Dan have walked a very long distance, but there’s one of natural life-forms that he doesn’t see: animals. There’re no animals in Nehalym. That dictator must be really mean!
After roughly an hour-and-a-half of “useless” walking, Dan becomes extremely thirsty. He pleads, “May I have some water?”
“Eh…” Kia replies, “no.”
“But I’m dehydrated!” Dan says.
“We’re almost there,” Kia reassures Dan.
“Where? Some dumb shank-”
“Shut up! You’re going to get yourself arrested!”
“But, there’s no police in Nehalym.”
“How did you know that?”
Dan is confused. It’s obvious, he knew. “Um,” Dan guesses, “I don’t see any police around here. It seems like the old-man-Killers are the police. Yet they’re not really police, since they’re unethical.”
“Dan! How dare you call our hard-working Killers unethical?”
Dan scoffs, and replies nonchalant, “Huh. ‘Hard-working,’ you say? I don’t think it takes much effort to kill somebody. You could just get out a gu-”
“Dan! Don’t talk like that. And it doesn’t work that way. Killers do work hard, but not the way you think. It’s uh, well for a classified reason.”
That doesn’t make much sense to Dan.
He enters the nurse’s office as Kia directed, but the room is dark and gloomy. There’re no patients, no counters, and no advertising brochures. There’s only one door, cast in the shadows at the back of the room. This doesn’t seem like a medical center at all.
Dan looks behind him, but Kia is nowhere in sight anymore. He realizes this is a total trick!
He catches a glimpse of a person sitting on a bench, wrapped around and around, from head to toe, in worn heavy-duty rope. As he walks farther into the room, he can see rows and rows of people tied up, all sitting on pews.
“What the…” Dan murmurs. “Wait a second, this ain’t a nurse’s office. It’s a-”
“Jail,” someone completes Dan’s sentence. Who just said that?
“Uh…” Dan hesitates. “Who…um…”
The person who finished Dan’s sentence giggles. “That was me,” Nathan says. He sits on the first row, third from the right.
“Nathan?” Dan exclaims. His eyes narrow. “What sort of a joke is this?”
“Oh, this isn’t no joke,” Nathan replies. “No need to explain. I called the Rescue Squad-”
“They have rescue squads here? I didn’t know that,” Dan comments.
“Shh! So the Rescue Squad, the guy on the other end… Never mind. I just accidentally fell and I called for Kia.”
“Yolo, we’d better tell the people about this,” Dan announces in a matter-of-fact manner.
Nathan lacks knowledge of American teenage slang, so he has no idea what “yolo” is. But that doesn’t matter, because Dan ran off.
Chapter 10: The Great Escape!
When Nathan notices Dan’s disappearance, he looks around. He sees two possible outlets: the door that you enter and exit the prison, and the door at the back. He squints, and he figures that door in the shadows is wrapped in caution tape that says, “GUARDS ONLY.” Nathan shouts, “Dan, we really shouldn’t be doing this!”
Dan looks around. He’s in the guards-only room, which is an administration control room. He notices a switch that says, “Emergency Rope Release.”
Nathan is still sitting on the long bench, but he suddenly forgets he’s tied up in rope. He tries to get Dan, but he instantly trips over and splats face-first on the floor. The rest of the tied-up prisoners laugh hysterically.
Someone yells a command. The prisoners turn around, and see a guard dressed in a gray suit. “What’s so funny?”
The crowd of jail-people remains silent.
“Well,” the guard tells everyone in a vain fashion, “if there’s nothing funny, then I shall return to my Jail Watch Duty.” He turns to a girl. “Azalea, keep an eye on the prisoner who just came in.”
Back in the Guards’ Administration Room, Dan flicks the switch. The alarm starts blaring, and prisoners who’d been tied in ropes are released. “Hey, what’s going on?” the guard asks angrily.
All the former-prisoners start running in chaos, and a few of them start cheering. The jail fills up with pandemonium.
The guard grunts as he opens the door to the guards-only room. AHA! Dan gets caught!
Chapter 11: Great Confusion!
Helix is about to enter Kia’s building, and like everyone, he thinks it’s a nurse’s office. The Killer, who handcuffed him, dragged him all the way over here. The Killer knocks on the door, and starts speaking, “Sir, we’ve got this dude named Helix who tripped me over and pulled my shoe off. Officer? Hello?”
Helix is confused. The Killer caught him for misbehaving, and now the Killer dragged him to a nurse’s office? Something fishy must be going on.
Both the Killer and Helix hear loud noises coming from inside the door. Helix asks politely, “Why’d you make me go to a nurse’s office? This nurse’s office doesn’t have any windows, and is has very loud patients.”
The Killer didn’t answer until a few seconds later. He replies, startled, “Oh! Um…uh… Oh, yes. You’ll see, once we go in.”
Even though this’s the first occasion a Killer ever talked to anyone nicely, Helix keeps asking questions. “How can we be sure it’s not someplace that just has a sign that says-”
“Look,” the Killer lectures. “Listen to me. You don’t want to get punished again, do you? I tell you that this ‘Kia nurse thing’ is completely true. I’ll even prove it.” The Killer opens the door.
“Hey!” a five-year-old prisoner squeals. “The door is open! We’re free!”
Helix gapes wide-eyed at the commotion. Here he is, expecting a “Killer” to bring him to a “nurse’s office,” and being greeted with escaping prisoners.
The prisoners run straight out the door. The door is only about eight feet high, so the people pile up quickly, and end up blocking the door. Ex-prisoners are literally pouring out of the jail!
Chapter 12: Famously Infamous!
If there’s a crowd of people, and you’re just like everyone else, it’s hard to pick you out since you blend in. That’s what Dan did to escape the jail-building.
Dan walks all the way down to his house, and it’s time for dinner already. Nehalym also has rules for male and female eating times, but Dan arrives home roughly five minutes within the parameters.
“Wow,” Dan’s mother exclaims. “What were you doing out there? It’s time for dinner. A few more minutes, and you’d break the rules! Let’s start eating now.”
“Hey Clara,” Dan’s father tells Dan’s mom, “you might want to check this out.” Dan’s dad is watching the News Channel on the family Samsung Television. Dan turns his head to the TV.
A news reporter is talking into a microphone. He announces, “Breaking news tonight! We’ve recently discovered that two-thousand prisoners have escaped from the local jail. One-thousand, three-hundred of which are bank-robbers. Jail Watch Guard, Bob Peterson, reports that a young boy named Daniel Slap-Jack may have caused all this fury with a flick of a switch in the control panel…”
Dan’s mom and dad exchange looks. Finally, Dad assumes, “Dan didn’t do this. He would never do anything like this. I seriously doubt if he even was arrested!”
Dan pipes up, and starts telling the truth a little too quickly, “No, I wasn’t ‘arrested’! I got hurt, and the nurse was supposed to bring me to the nurse’s place, but it was just a jail in disguise, and there were tons of people who weren’t supposed to be prisoners like my…um…future friend Nathan and Helix Supern-”
“Dan,” Mom interrupts politely, “you might want to explain more slowly. So start from the beginning: how did you end up at the jail?”
Dan tells his mom and dad all about what the Killers did, and how he swam up on the shore. He even describes the under-construction-building-or-something on the island next to Nehalym, as if it was something suspicious. He explains how calling the nurse’s name, “Kia,” is a complete hoax. The nurse’s office is just a disguised prison for innocent children. And, of course, how he released the prisoners for their own good.
“Whoa, Dan,” Dad remarks, amazed. “But I guess it’s not your fault. You just didn’t know that three-quarters of them were bank-robbers, did you, son?”
Dan scoffs, and answers, “Yeah, but it’s really THEIR fault. They made their banks ROBBABLE, so no wonder just about anyone can get away with hoards of money.”
Mom realizes an important fact. “So that might be why the country’s in a financial crisis! You’re a smart kid.”
Dan’s father resumes watching TV again. The news-reporter is still talking, “…in the past two hours, more than three banks have been robbed. We aren’t yet sure about whether Dan caused these incidents, but one thing’s for sure. Another infringement of the rules, and he’s dead!”
Dad chortles. Not at the threat of a death penalty, that’s for sure. He laughs at the three banks robbed in a mere two hours. “These banks are vulnerable, all right,” he retorts.
Mom glances at the clock. “Oh no!” she exclaims. “We haven’t eaten dinner yet! We’re going to get in big trouble with the government.”
Right at that exact moment, the door to the family’s home busts open. Chubby men wearing rubbery, yellow Hazmat suits walk into the house, holstering laser-blasters. Radio noises fill the room, and distorted voices coming through walkie-talkies are inaudible.
“We’re the Killers’ grandsons,” one Hazmat suit-wearing man says in a crackly voice. “But that’s not what we’re here for. That guy-” He points at Dan. “-didn’t eat dinner between six o’clock PM and seven o’clock PM. He ought to be executed!”
“Oh, really?” Dan’s mother taunts. “Just get a hold of that clock!” She points at a clock next to the microwave in the kitchen.
“Ha! We ain’t need clocks. We have watches here!” another guy in a suit proves a point. Although that was a false claim, since their watches just ran out of battery right then. They all groan.
The Killers’ grandsons look at the clock. They exchange confused looks. One of them chimes in, “Um, well we made a mistake. Sorry. Guess you still have a couple of minutes. Bye.” The Killers’ grandsons straighten up their yellow Hazmat suits, and exit the house, slamming the door.
Dan’s mom smiles. “I changed the clock,” she whispers into Dan’s ear.
Chapter 13: What’s It Like To Be A Prankster?
The under-construction structure on the nearby island is completed. To the average eye, it seems just like a century-old lighthouse. But this “lighthouse” isn’t used for any of those purposes at all. It’s a classified base.
Jim Kloss is the dictator of Nehalym. Everyone calls him “Kloss the Boss” or “Boss Kloss.” He’s a short man for a dictator, and he has an extremely round stomach. He has a large, brown mustache with a small beard on his pointy chin. He’s bald, so he wears a toupee even though it’s useless for a national ruler.
To the average eye, Boss Kloss looks like an average business-man. Just a little plumper.
Boss Kloss decides to hire a new helper. The helper arrives in the early morning on Sunday.
“Okay, let me introduce you to our new top-secret base,” Boss Kloss tells the new politician named Gates Bill, or G.B. They’re standing on the nearby island.
“Okay,” G.B. says, tentatively, “so let me get this straight. This is our top-secret base?”
“Yup,” Boss Kloss replies proudly. He and G.B. walk down the sidewalk as they talk. To the average eye, they look like tourists seeing the new tower. “I put the rock on the roof.”
“The…rock? Why’re you so proud of putting a rock on a tippy-cracker?”
“I usually just lounge around on the sofa playing video games. There’s really not much to do being the ruler of a whole entire country. I’m very proud of my most recent work.”
“Putting a rock on the roof doesn’t take much work. Plus, I’m pretty sure the secret base has an elevator.”
“I know, it seems easy. To you, it is. To me, it’s the most labor I’ve ever done.”
“Hey! That’s why you’re so fat!”
“Hey, you, we can call the cops.”
“I thought they’re called ‘Killers’.”
“Fat sat mat catted the get rat!”
“That doesn’t even make any sense. Are you stupid?”
Stunned by the rude statement, Boss Kloss fires G.B. His last words toward G.B. are, “It does make sense, you dumbhead!”
G.B. walks away quietly, shaking his head. The way Jim Kloss acts! How childish, inappropriate, mean, and unsensible! G.B. is fired.
One day later, Boss Kloss finds another person qualified to be his companion. Her name is Macy Marse. Boss Kloss is delighted, and he does his introductory sentence: “Let me introduce you to our new top-secret base.”
“That old thug?” Macy wonders in dismay. Then she became angry. “You know, I’d rather not work at a smugly, old tower. That’s it. I resign.”
Boss Kloss feels shocked again, and tries to persuade Macy, “Please, trust me. That tower is actually futuristic and modern on the inside.”
“I don’t trust someone with so much power,” Macy explains while looking at her newly-manicured fingernails. “I don’t want to work with a fat guy like you.” She walks away, clattering the ground with every step of her high-heels. She quit.
Two days later, Boss Kloss recruits a smart-looking geek with huge eyeglasses. Boss Kloss had already been through two people who didn’t seem to work with him. But this one seems so smart, he might be able to help Boss Kloss with their new plan.
This time, the geek introduces himself first, “Hi, my name’s Jamie Grimm. Other people call me ‘Freaky-Deekie’, but just call me Jamie.”
Boss Kloss cracks up with laughter. He thinks such a nickname like “Freaky-Deekie” is ridiculous.
Jamie frowns. Luckily, he doesn’t have the short attention-span of Macy, who quit immediately. Jamie folds his arms and snickers. “Look,” he tells Boss Kloss. “Don’t be immature. I’m here to work for you, but I don’t have that much goodwill to put up with you.”
“Okay,” Boss Kloss says. “Let’s go on an inside tour of out new base.” The two men rush into the old-looking tower.
Now it’s Wednesday, and Dan follows his usual morning routine. He gets up, goes to the restroom, dresses up, eats breakfast, packs up his backpack, and gets in the car with his mom to go to school.
Little did he know that there’re only three people at school, including him. They’re both standing in the schoolyard, chatting.
Dan notices one of them is Helix, but the other one is a Goth-Girl he doesn’t know. Dan greets Helix, but he doesn’t answer. They just keep talking. Dan taps Helix’s shoulder, and he arrogantly groans, “WHAT?”
“Um,” Dan starts, “is this a holiday or something?”
“Yup. It’s the dictator’s birthday,” Helix informs. “Our parents didn’t know. They just dropped us off here.”
Dan turns around, but his mother’s car already drove off. He’s trapped until three o’clock! “Did anyone bring a cell-phone?” Dan asks.
“Nope,” both Helix and the girl say answer in unison.
“Okay,” Dan’s mouth forms into a sly grin. “Here’s what we should do. We’re not going home…” The trio huddles together and discusses a secret spy-plan.
The three kids arrive near a landfill. Soon, Helix starts digging around in a trash-can. “Nope, not here,” he murmurs.
“What’re you doing?” Dan interjects. “Aren’t we supposed to get to the island, not look in trash-cans?”
Helix trots over to a dark-green, roof-shaped dumpster. He digs around in the great stash of trash. The trash makes loud CLANK-ing noises in the dumpster.
“Dude,” the Goth-Girl warns. “The Killers might come get us.”
Helix simply ignores the warning.
Suddenly, Dan and Goth-Girl dash up to the dumpster and close the lid on top of Helix’s hands.
“Yeeeoww!” Helix howls in pain. “What is your problem?”
“That’s what you get for wasting time messing around with rubbish,” Dan explains. “Now follow our plan. We have to get to the island.”
Helix sighs, and lifts the dumpster lid to take his arms out. But one of his hands contains the exact item he was looking for. He stuffs it in his pocket, and starts walking just like Goth-Girl and Dan.
“Oh, no,” Dan exclaims as he starts walking away. “The Killers have seen us! Quick! To the walls!”
“Um, there are no walls,” Goth-Girl says obviously. “Unless you’re talking about the side of the dumpster.”
Chapter 14: The Monorail Ticket!
A Killer walks out of an operating room carrying a bottle of mineral water. He gazes around, seemingly looking for mischievous kids. His eyes fixate on Helix, Dan, and the Goth-Girl. “What were you just doing?”
“Nothing,” Dan pipes up. “We were just walking around, that’s all.”
“Ha,” the Killer retorts sarcastically, “what were you doing by that dumpster?”
Dan frowns. “We didn’t take anything. And that’s final.”
The Killer makes a smug face, and walks back to the operating room. As he walks there, he shouts, “I’ll be keeping an eye on you,” with his back turned.
“HELIX!” Dan yelps at Helix’s face. “You nearly got us in trouble! What’s with your obsession with trash?”
Helix sags his face down. “Sorry. But we have to ride the monorail to get to the island!”
Goth-Girl frowns, and remarks, “Yeah, without a map or GPS.”
Helix simply takes a map out of his pocket and hands it to Goth-Girl. It’s a standard green, yellow, and white road map. The monorail is marked with a dark-gray line. “THIS was what I was looking for in the dumpster.”
“Really? I guess we shouldn’t have made assumptions of you messing about, then. I’m a fan of dark colors, but this map still works fine,” Goth-Girl says.
The monorail station has been newly painted a vibrant shade of silver. The benches have cross-hatched surfaces just like those types of metal fences. When Dan, Goth-Girl, and Helix arrive at the station, they’re already out of breath.
“Let’s…sit…down…” Dan tells the others, breathing heavily.
Goth-Girl closes her eyes halfway, and replies, “We need tickets to ride, moron.” She folds her arms, but then she catches a glimpse of something on the train-tracks. “Hey, get those tickets down there.” She points to slips of paper on the train-tracks.
Dan kneels down on the edge of the platform. He can’t reach the tickets on the track.
“Just walk onto the track!” Goth-Girl shouts.
“You know,” Dan starts, “I think this train goes a lot faster than you thi-”
The monorail shoots past Dan. He dodges away just in time. The monorail coasts to a stop, its brakes making a continuous noise of descending pitch. A huge gust of air blasts at Dan’s face. So hard that he falls over on his buttocks.
“Hey!” Goth-Girl says. “I didn’t even see the train pass by. I blinked, and then it’s just right there making a screeching sound.”
“Free ride!” the conductor calls through the closed monorail window. His voice sounds muffled from outside. The monorail’s automatic-sliding-doors open, and he shouts, “Free ride!” again.
Shortly after the trio enters the monorail, to doors slam shut like two razor-sharp-knife-blades slicing the air in half. Helix shakes his head and mumbles, “They should seriously consider their safety.”
Chapter 15: The Secret Tower!
Ten-or-so seconds later, the trio arrives on the beach that’s next to the island with the tower. “This is the beach,” Dan explains. “It has a land-bridge under shallow water that connects to that small island¬¬-” He points to the island with the tower on it. “-with an old-looking tower built on it.”
The Goth-Girl assumes, “Well, it just looks like a naturally formed island. That tower could be an old landmark. What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is,” Dan pauses mid-sentence, “that tower was under construction the last time I saw it.”
“So?” Goth-Girl says. “People build old-looking things in modern times.”
“It has no windows! People might want to not be seen. Modern towers have windows all over them. And why would they make it look like a lighthouse? Must be a secret spy base or something,” Dan analyzes.
“So?”
“Why would they build a tower on an island next to Nehalym instead of the mainland? Maybe it’s a remote military base. Just skinnier. And no tanks. Or missile-launchers.”
“If I tried to think of a word other than ‘so,’ I wouldn’t be able to do it. So what?”
“You don’t think it’s a big deal?”
“Nope. At first I thought I was supposed to buy a bikini from the swimwear shop, but no.”
Dan and Helix chortle.
Helix chimes in, “Jokes aside, but that island looks pretty deserted.” He points at the tower. “It’s just you, me, and you-” He gestures his hand at the other two kids. “-infiltrating some old tower, wide out in the open, on a tiny island. Man, there won’t even be a security camera!”
“No security cameras,” Dan repeats. “That’s it!” He runs off the shore and gets his lower-legs and shoes wet. The water above the land-bridge is only knee-level-high. Goth-Girl and Helix follow along, wading through the water flowing above the land-bridge.
The water is clear-ish, with an even hint of aqua. The land bridge is a road-like path connecting the two Nehalymian islands. The ocean-floor around the land bridge is about three feet deeper than the surface of the land-bridge. As for Global Warming, the land bridge used to be an actual path above land. But after the sea-levels have risen, shallow water fills over the land-bridge. Ocean waves erode and weather the land-bridge, so it shrank to barely a foot wide over thousands of years. The land-bridge used to be almost as wide as the land-bridge connecting Alaska and Russia, and even the puny island with the tower on it used to be bigger than Australia, millions of years ago.
Just as Dan, the leader while walking across the water-covered land-bridge, steps on the island, the tower seems to have grown larger. And there’s something peculiar about the “lighthouse” door…
Aha! The door to the old-looking tower. It opens like an elevator door. Dan is the first person to walk into the tower. It doesn’t look as skinny inside as it does outside. But most strange of all, the floor is made of glass. The door-frame is lined with a Neodymium magnet. Dan doesn’t know about chemistry so, of course, he doesn’t notice the technology in the doorway.
Dan casually paces around the tower, and notices stairs in the corner. No-wait, it’s a rugged ramp. No-wait, it’s an escalator. No-wait, it’s some sort of conveyor belt. The conveyor belt is much quieter than any escalator he’d seen in America. The conveyor leading upstairs, Dan wonders how any human can go up there on such a steep incline.
Goth-Girl and Helix run through the doorway together, but the map pulverizes into microscopic bits. She gasps.
“Huh,” Helix mumbles. He takes a BitCoin Wallet out of his pocket, and holds it out at the door-magnet. It vaporizes and fine dust snows down on him. “Uh…”
“BitCoin Wallet?” Goth-Girl exclaims. She saw Helix holding a dollar-bill-like note with the “B” symbol printed on it, right before it disintegrated. “HELIX!” she shouts. “You know we can’t use Internet money, right? Like BitCoins? It’s even worse now that you got it vaporized. You just wasted…um-”
“-more than a thousand BitCoins,” responds Helix.
Suddenly, a computerized female voice says in a flat tone, “Any non-human foreign objects other than clothing and shoes will be disintergenerated.”
Goth-Girl feels her hair. She used to have a headband, but now it’s not there. She shrugs as she nods, and remarks, “Not bad technology for a crappy country.”
The female computerized voice continues talking, “Analyzing object: BitCoin Note. Sending data to Dictator.”
“You darn freak!” Goth-Girl screams at Helix’s face. Her mouth opens wide and her eyebrows point down like she’s angry. “You just pulverized a BitCoin Wallet, something that’s illegal. You-”
Upstairs, Boss Kloss and Jamie Grimm are discussing a secret plan. They’re in their secret lab, covered in half a meter of sound insulation and thirteen authentication devices, not to mention digital key-locks and several more Neodymium magnetic doorways.
I’d say that’s pretty much useless when the sound insulation is already enough protection. They’re just talking, that’s all. It’s not like they’re testing bullet-blasters or anything. Even if they do test bullet-blasters, the amount of walls would bounce the bullets straight back, destroying the whole purpose of the inventions.
The sound insulation is to prevent the voice of the dictator and his helper from leaking out. There’re microphones and imaging devices to make sounds coming from the outside able to be heard inside, but not vice versa.
Chapter 16: The Bathroom Emergency!
“Now this is the bathroom,” Boss Kloss announces as he pushes open the clear-glass bathroom door in their secret base. “This toilet will provide the smelliest experience for you, Jamie…”
He glances at Jamie. But Jamie’s emotion isn’t what Boss Kloss expects, Boss Kloss thinks Jamie would be dazed by this. Instead, Jamie feels disgusted.
Anyway, Boss Kloss continues, “This bathroom has absolutely no privacy due to the clear door, and zero ventilation for defecation fumes. It’s the most luxurious flushing system, with eight-thousand pounds of force, enough to flush down an entire human posterior. Now isn’t that nice, Jamie?”
Jamie sighs. He answers, “Being the dictator’s sidekick, I officially decline this offer. This toilet sucks. Look! It’s even made out of splinter-y wood.”
“So? Look at that sink. As the dictator of Nehalym, I provide the top-secret base the most clean and bacteria-free sink.”
Jamie looks at the sink. There is slime drooping all over the sink. It’s even black, which makes it look even dirtier. “Such a lie,” he says sarcastically.
“Oh, but look at the bathtub. It fills up in five seconds, while most bathtubs in America take longer than thirty seconds to fill. Just like fast smartphone charge-times, this bathtub is a great convenience.”
“Fine.” Jamie walks up to the bathtub, staining his shoes on the poop-covered rug. Before he can even turn the water-faucet halfway, water blasts at the floor of the bathtub and shoots back up at Jamie, knocking off his glasses.
The water bounces off the sink mirror at a perfect angle, splashing the sink faucets. The sink faucets release skunk spray, which lands on the toilet-flushing-lever, affecting the smell of the bathroom, which already stinks.
“BEEP! BEEP!” an electronic alarm sounds.
“Hold on, I think I got a message,” Boss Kloss closes the bathroom door. He walks over to his circular workbench, housing several administrative electronic gadgets. Jamie follows up to check the computer after he puts his eyeglasses back on.
The bathroom pressure increases.
“Report,” Boss Kloss commands the computer.
A standard computerized female voice returns, “Systems have detected a BitCoin Wallet brought in by a ten-year-old male.”
The toilet continuously flushes.
“How should we punish him?” Jamie asks the computer.
“Standard Nehalym punishments include Baseball-bat-bashing, hose blasting-”
“No, no, no,” Jamie corrects. “A boy infiltrated our top-secret base. He also brought a BitCoin Wallet, which contains how much?”
“One-thousand, two-hundred BitCoins,” the computer replies happily.
“Oh, man,” Boss Kloss interjects. “Why don’t we just kick him out of this tower?”
The bathroom sink explodes.
The computer beeps again. “Systems have also detected a young female shouting at the boy who brought the BitCoins. The female is categorized as a lunatic, according to the past two minutes of behavior.”
A few seconds later, back at the ground-level floor, a loudspeaker instructs, “Helix Supernova and Amberlyn McKay, please exit this building immediately, otherwise we’ll literally ‘kick’ you out.”
“Wait,” Dan wonders, “Goth-Girl’s name is Amberlyn McKay?”
“Yup,” replies Amberlyn. She turns to Helix, “Sorry for shouting at you. It’s not our fault. We shouldn’t be in here anyway.”
Back in the secret lab, the toilet flushes down most of the oxygen supply.
The trio: Dan, Helix, and Amberlyn all walk out of the tower together, their faces glum and their shoulders sagging. And the doors close behind them.
Back in the secret lab, Boss Kloss checks the imaging sensors. The trio is nowhere to be seen. “All right, Jamie, those kids are out of here. Shall we lock the doors?”
The bathtub overflows.
“With pleasure,” Jamie agrees. He presses the lock button, which causes miniscule latches to lock the door that the trio walked out of.
Dan glances backward, just in time to see the latches lock the door. Now the three children are standing on the island again.
Back in the secret base, the faucet knobs implode on themselves. Brown smoke rises from the toilet. The toilet blows up, piercing wood into the walls. The bathtub drain-rim falls into the drainpipe. The bath-towels start retching under the negative air pressure. The electrical wires start wriggling out of their restraints.
Jamie hears cracking glass. He taps Boss Kloss on the shoulder, and they both turn around, astonished to see what’s happening to the bathroom.
Boss Kloss briskly turns away and picks up his smartphone from the workbench. “We’d better get this repaired.” He starts dialing the number for the Plumbers. Ironically, Boss Kloss owns the plumbing business, so he’s calling his own workers for help.
“Well hurry!” Jamie reminds him.
“Hello?” Boss Kloss speaks into the phone. “We have a bathroom emergency here.”
A plumber calling from the other side interrogates, “What kind of emergency? Buttock cramp? Pipe clogged of chest hair?”
“None of that,” Boss Kloss replies. “Our bathroom is…um…uh…let’s just say, ‘exploding’.”
“An exploding bathroom? Our plumbing business doesn’t deal with that kind of stuff. A plumber’s job is to fix pipes and such. If your bathroom exploded, there’re no pipes to fix.”
“Oh! You’re such a rat tat catted the slap met!”
“Sorry, but that doesn’t make sense. Someone else called me, so I’ve got to go!” The plumber hangs up on the phone call.
The dial-tone beeps on Boss Kloss’s side of the phone. “Hey! You can’t just-” Boss Kloss doesn’t get to finish his sentence, because the bathroom causes a fire emergency.
The smoke detector starts blaring. Actually, there’re more than ten smoke detectors per floor in the tower, so the noise gradually gets louder as more smoke detectors alarm-off.
“Get out!” Jamie shouts.
Boss Kloss runs swiftly up to Jamie, which, by the way, is probably the first time he even runs.
“I know!” Boss Kloss shakes Jamie’s body with his hands. “Why’d you have to make such a big deal of that?”
Jamie lightly jogs on his tiptoes out of the top-secret tower. Boss Kloss follows along, but due to his bulk, he stumbles like a rolling tumbleweed on the conveyor belt.
Boss Kloss attempts to reverse the conveyor belt, but fails to reach the lever. If the dictator owns such high-technology, why would he still use a lever anyway? Boss Kloss spins around, brushing against the glass panels.
“Warning. Bathroom on top floor may self-destruct at any moment. Please proceed with caution,” the female voice announces.
Uh-oh!
Boss Kloss tries to escape the tower, but he remembers that he locked the doors. Aww, man!
Basically what you just read happens in reverse motion. Boss Kloss has trouble getting up the conveyor belt, trips over, and goes back upstairs. He unlocks the door, which is just a one-inch red button, and the bathroom explodes right at that instant.
“Aaaaagh!” Boss Kloss screams as he falls off the tower. Luckily, he lands in the water. Not by the land-bridge, in the deep side.
With a big KABLOOSH! Boss Kloss bobs back up on the surface of the sea. Fat is less dense than water, so he has an easy time swimming to shore.
Chapter 16: The Puberty Surgery!
Back on the island, Dan, Helix, and Amberlyn get drenched in the water. Dan swims back to the mainland quickly, while the two others struggle to stay afloat.
Suddenly, a loudspeaker tied to a pole on the beach says in a raspy voice, “All children from ages ten to twelve, report to the HOOR for your Puberty ID Replacement.”
Helix and Amberlyn waddle up on the beach, their hair dripping and soaked. They start walking toward the monorail without saying a word.
Dan doesn’t go so fast. “Hey, hey, hey!” he says with his hands cupped around his mouth.
Helix and Amberlyn turn around. “What do you want?” Amberlyn releases her evil again. “YOU’VE MADE SOME SORT OF FAULTY PLAN, SOMETHING THAT BLEW UP OUR DESTINATION, AND NOW YOU…”
Dan runs up to Amberlyn and pushes her down on the sand. Dust flies up into the air. “Hey, Nehalym is already as corrupted as it is! That plan was to infiltrate the tower to apprehend the dictator.”
Helix argues, “Look. I have more experience than you do. I was born in Nehalym. The dictator isn’t like Adolf Hitler. He just sits around playing video games.”
“Whatever you say,” Dan agrees reluctantly. “Now what about the puberty what-you-call-it?”
Fifteen minutes later, Dan, Helix, and Amberlyn are tapping their feet, waiting in an extremely long line, a line full of every ten, eleven, and twelve-year-old in the country.
From far back, the long line looks like a casual setup for “Win Money” sweepstakes.
The three kids had joined the line after they saw the government setting up the Puberty ID Replacement Booth right here on the beach.
The Puberty ID Replacement Booth, or PIR Booth, is well…a booth. The booth is a worn-out, white, Polyethylene folding-table. There’s a big paper sign hung on the edge of the table that reads, “Ages Ten-Twelve: PIRB.”
Dan and the others walk forward. They’re almost at the front of the line now. Despite being extremely long, the line moves as fast as a bicycle chain!
“Excuse me, excuse me,” Nathan whispers. He joins the line to get his PIR. “Dan!” he shouts. Dan is already in the front of the line, so he can’t hear.
Nathan looks across the line, and everyone wears an orange ID band around their left wrist. All except one. Dan!
“DAN!” Nathan shouts.
Dan turns around and squints his eyes. “Nathan?”
“DAN!” Nathan repeats.
“What?” asks Dan.
“DAN! They’re going to kill you! DAN!”
“Huh?”
“Don’t eat that! NO!”
“Weird.” Dan has no clue about what he’s supposed to ‘eat.’ Eat? Why? What?
Dan is second place in line, so he cocks his head, curious to find out what the PIR does. He sees a blond girl holding out her forearm. A guy sitting on a chair behind the PIR Booth rips a piece of cardstock paper off her wrist, and sticks a new one on. Then the blond girl walks away as if nothing happened.
Now Dan stands directly in front of the PIR Booth. He decides to be skeptical and ask, “What’s this for?”
“Oh,” the person at the PIR Booth explains, “the Puberty ID Replacement is for young adolescents. We replace your current ID tag with an updated ID tag that records reproductive health.”
Dan nods, trying to seem socially normal. But he doesn’t have an ID tag.
The PIR person reaches out to Dan’s arm, but Dan isn’t wearing a piece of cardstock. The PIR man gasps.
He produces a walkie-talkie from his pocket, and says in a frozen tone, “Jim Kloss, come in, do you read me?”
The walkie-talkie flares an inaudible voice.
“Jim Kloss, I’ve got a rouge agent here named Daniel Slap-Jack. Ten-year-old boy, enters Nehalym illegally in classified!” the PIR man reports.
“What?” Dan asks, both confused and angry.
The PIR man chuckles, and explains, “Everyone in Nehalym needs to wear an ID band around their wrists. That identifies them as a Nehalym citizen.”
“Then how’d you know my name?” Dan asks.
The PIR man laughs again. “I don’t need an identifier to know who you are. You’re the bloke who broke into the jail and released all the prisoners! Don’t you know how many banks have been robbed?”
“Phhhttt! That’s your fault, since the banks have zero security.”
“But that’s not the point. The point is, you’re a felon. We require you, and I presume your family, to have ID’s, but you and them didn’t, did they? Did you? Nope.”
The PIR person grabs a bottle of white powder and pushes it toward Dan on the table. “Eat this. Just chuck it down,” the PIR guy says scantily.
Dan remembers what Nathan said. “DON’T EAT THAT!” echoes through his head. It must be poison, he thinks.
“HEY-YAH!” Dan shrieks as he kicks the PIR booth table down. But he doesn’t make a run for it.
Dan tries to prove to the PIR person that he won’t fall for “eat this” pranks. He does that by doing Karate. Or what he thinks is Karate. He does an unbalanced kick and falls over. The people in the front of the PIR line chortle.
Dan stands back up, and prepares to punch. “HEE-YAW!” he mimics what professional Karate fighters yell. The people waiting in line all scoff again. Dan actually doesn’t know anything about Karate. In fact, the fake Karate makes him look like a wimp.
“Yah-hey…” Dan says in a quieter voice as he pretends to do a head-butt. “No, I mean hey-yah!” He stops talking when the line of people laughs again. “Never mind.” Dan dashes off.
After the old top-secret lab in the tower was demolished, Jamie and Boss Kloss made use of the lower levels as their new secret lab. This time, of course, it didn’t include a ridiculous bathroom invention.
Boss Kloss has installed a very, very heavy, solid wood entrance-door to the secret lab. The installation didn’t take much time because the solid wood door is a slab of birch wood cut from an old tree. And they do have chainsaws in Nehalym.
“Jim?” Jamie calls as he knocks on the solid, wooden door of Boss Kloss’s new secret lab.
Boss Kloss is slouching on his couch, playing a video game, fiddling his thumbs like crazy. The name of the video game is Grand Theft Auto V.
“Jim?” Jamie says again. Instead of barging into the new secret lab, he decides to be polite and ask to come in.
Boss Kloss has set the volume of the game console up to one-hundred percent per Decibel, so he can’t hear Jamie calling him. Boss Kloss presses the yellow button on his game controller. His virtual game character punches his own virtual car.
Jamie pushes opens the door. It’s much heavier than he thinks. He exerts his whole body’s force to push the door sideways. Right as he walks into the secret lab, the door slams shut again.
Jamie walks up in front of Boss Kloss, who’s now eating a pound-bag of potato-chips. “Hey, you’re the dictator of this country, right?” Jamie asks rhetorically.
Boss Kloss doesn’t hear. All he hears is the game SFX sound effects. He presses the green button and the red button at the same time, and his virtual character jumps off a cliff.
Jamie instinctively switches off the game. He repeats, “You’re the dictator of this country, right?” Before Boss Kloss can answer, Jamie concludes, “You don’t seem like one. Dictators don’t sit around playing games. They need to take matters into their own hands.”
For the sake of language, Boss Kloss explains in a matter-of-fact manner, “The definition of dictate is to tell people what to do. I tell people what to do, not do it myself.”
“Bad news,” Jamie declares.
“What?” Boss Kloss asks.
Jamie is shocked. “Have you seriously been playing Grand Theft Auto for five hours?”
“Uh, yeah!”
“Well I’ve got news for you, buddy. There’s a kid named Daniel Slap-Jack, and he’s on the loose. You’re the leader of a country. You have power. You’ve got to do something!”
“Fine,” Boss Kloss sighs. He stands up clumsily and walks up to the intercom microphone. The intercom broadcasts important news to people all over Nehalym through loudspeakers. He speaks loudly, “Attention! Go catch that kid!” Then he plops back on the couch and turns on the game console.
“That’s it?” Jamie asks angrily.
“Yup,” Boss Kloss replies. “I’ve done my duty.”
Jamie sighs, disappointed at the now lazy dictator. He starts grunting as he tries to pull the door back open. Jamie takes revenge by pulling the door all the way open ninety degrees, and then letting go harshly. BANG!
“Hey!” Boss Kloss ramparts. “What was that for, you Freaky-Deekie?” He gets up off the couch, but the craggy wooden shed is collapsing already. But as he tries to get back at Jamie, part of the secret lab’s ceiling falls straight down on him.
Dan is still running. He sees a black motorcycle parked next to a skyscraper lobby. This must be the only motorcycle I’ve ever seen in Nehalym, he thinks.
Dan hops on the motorcycle after he’s too tired from running. He looks down, and there’s a kick-starter lever in the foot-grasper. He kicks the lever, and a loud sound fires out from the motorcycle. The engine must be very powerful!
“Hey! Get him!” hundreds of Killers yell angrily. Their eyebrows are very pointy and symmetrical, sort of…robot-like. The Killers stomp their feet and come closer. But very slowly. They’re all holding Uranium Baseball bats.
Before Dan can get the motorbike going, his instinct stops himself. “What’s that abbreviation again?” he wonders, tapping his fingers in quick succession. “Oh yeah! KFC!” He takes a deep breath, and bellows, “KFC! Everyone get far away. Don’t run down the corridor behind me, though!”
Dan turns the right-hand acceleration knob on the motorcycle handlebars. But he gets a bit of wheel-spin skidding, which is a good thing for him. Dust blasts out behind the back tire, and the Killers in front cough and back up. The Killers standing in the second row fall over, leading the Killers to fall backward like a domino-effect.
He rides the motorcycle back to the PIR line, where everyone is running around in random directions. Helix, Nathan, and Amberlyn hop on the back of the motorcycle. It’s good there are covers above the wheels!
Dan shifts his position forward to the edge of the seat so everyone has room. “Be careful,” he reminds them.
Soon, Dan, Amberlyn, Nathan, and Helix are approaching the beach. The same beach with the tower-island next to it.
“Dan, slow down!” Amberlyn orders.
Dan tries to turn the left-hand-handle-knob, but it won’t budge. Now he figures it out. The dictator and his people own this motorcycle. This is a complete prank motorbike. You can’t even de-accelerate!
“Dang it!” Dan whines. “Wait. Friends, I’m going faster.”
“What?” Amberlyn, Helix, and Nathan exclaim in unison.
Dan explains, “This motorcycle can’t slow down. We have to go faster to bust the engine!”
“Bust?” Nathan says. “Dude, destruction isn’t the only way to stop something that’s malfunctioning.”
Dan ignores him. VROOM! The motorcycle goes faster. Amberlyn’s hair gets caught in the wind. VROOM! VROOM! VROOM! Dan turns the acceleration knob. The engine meter points to the number seven, which means seven-thousand engine cycles per minute. It’s very dangerous for a gasoline-powered motorcycle to go that fast.
PJAW! The motorcycle explodes like a fiery inferno. Motorcycle mechanics are flying out in all directions and explode in the gray, cloudy sky. Luckily, nobody’s clothes catch on fire because the motorcycle just plunges into the ocean.
And when I say that Dan is a skillful swimmer, he’s good at swimming above water. He’s not-so-great at holding his breath underwater. But, as I just wrote, Dan can easily swim to the top. And he does.
“Dudes!” Dan shouts. His head is above the water, but none of the other kids’ heads are. His body under the water feels strangely cold. “Morons! Idiots! Retards! Doofuses! Sucke-”
Amberlyn is the first one to get up above the water. She punches Dan’s mouth, but not at full strength.
Dan says, “You know how boys aren’t allowed to hit girls? At least, it’s not polite in my country. But why doesn’t it go the other way around?”
Amberlyn shrugs, Helix and Nathan bobs above the water. Their hair is soaking wet. Helix shakes his head quickly like a dog drying off, and sea-water splashes onto Amberlyn’s face.
Amberlyn doesn’t react. The three other kids look puzzled. Amberlyn explains, “I get that a lot. ‘Dictator made me be a fashion model for a whole week, last month. He made me do it on the beach when it was cold, and dumped soda-pop in my hair if I don’t do it right.”
“Hey!” Nathan announces as he walks backward onto the beach. “Good news! That evil dictator is dead.” He nudges Amberlyn on the shoulder, and she looks up at the tower. The upper level looks like something exploded in it. Which the bathroom did. A large slab of glass and drywall is hanging over the lower level.
“We heard you,” the Killers approach in defensive crouches. Or more like…offensive crouches. They’re holding Bismuth Baseball bats. Although those bats aren’t to be considered for sports use anymore.
Dan whispers to Nathan, and Nathan nods affirmatively. He rushes into the collapsed tower.
Dan, Helix, and Amberlyn run up to the Killers. Dan does a fake Karate combo-move. The Killers in front laugh hard. The head Killer tries to lift the “Baseball” bat, but solid Bismuth is much too heavy. His head slams against the sandy beach, making a big “SPLUNK” noise.
And something very surprising indeed, happens. The Killer’s skull cracks open. Well, it isn’t actually a skull, because it’s made of polycarbonate.
Robots! The “Killers” are android robots!
Dan has an idea. He dashes past the Killers and tries to tiptoe across the land-bridge. The Killers try to chase him down, but they fall into the ocean ad electrocute.
“Hey!” Amberlyn calls. “What’re you doi-”
“I’ll take that,” a Killer declares. He starts grabbing the tank-top that Amberlyn is wearing. “Unauthorized material must be penetrated immediately.”
Helix stares blankly at the Amberlyn, and then looks at the Killer who attempts to destroy her shirt. “Yup,” Helix says. “They’re definitely robots.”
Another Killer glances at Helix. Helix frowns, “Uh…”
“Halt! Who goes there?” that Killer orders coldly.
Helix takes the Killer’s speech literally. He tries to be sassy to make the Killer argue with him uselessly. Helix replies, “Who goes there? Me. I’m standing here. My name is Helix Supernova.”
“I said, ‘HALT, WHO GOES THERE’?” the Killer repeats.
Helix replies sassily again, “I’ve already halted. I’m not moving. I thought you guys had an index of every person in the country. But anyways, ‘name’s Helix Supernova.”
The Killer gasps. Then he yells, “Aaaaagh! WHY, YOU LITTLE-” He pricks Helix in the stomach with his bony index-finger. “WHO GOES HERE?”
Dan arrives on the island, and he tries to enter the collapsed tower. But the door is still intact. And the door is very heavy. Very, very heavy. A much more informative method of describing the door is, “impossible to open.”
Dan yanks on the door, his body shaking back and forth. His hair is also being dragged forwards and backwards because of the air-resistance. “Why this stupid door?” Dan exclaims.
Nathan hears Dan’s voice. But the Killers are blocking his way, so Nathan takes a big leap into the water and tries to swim.
The Killers try to chase Nathan down, but they can’t swim. The density of the water causes the Killers to trip over and fall into the water. Seawater enters the Killers’ mouths, and they electrocute and instantly fail. ZAPPP!
Nathan’s clothes are soaked, and suddenly he feels swimming to the island will be a very daunting task.
Nathan can’t swim very well, so he has to do a tremendous thrusting movement to stay afloat every time he starts sinking. He swims all the way to the east side of the island.
“Dan!” Nathan calls.
“Just help me open the dumb door already!” Dan mutters angrily.
Nathan frowns and shakes his head. “That’s all because we haven’t been working together!”
Dan’s facial expression is still very smug.
“We all need to use teamwork!” Nathan continues. “All this time, we’ve been running around, doing all sorts of different things. We need to work together!”
“So let’s open the stupid door together,” Dan says.
“What’s the purpose of that?”
“NATHAN, JUST HELP ME PULL THAT HEAVY DOOR OPEN, YOU RETARDED RUNNING HORSE!”
A couple of Killers run towards Dan. Dan flinches, and in the blink of an eye, those Killers tumble down in the water. That sparks a light-bulb in his mind.
Dan takes a deep breath, and shouts at the top of his lungs, “HEY! COME AND CATCH ME! I BREAK THE RULES! YOU GUYS ARE SO IDIOTIC! COME ON! RUN TOWARDS ME!”
The Killers don’t budge. They stay put exactly where they are on the beach.
Nathan slaps Dan in the face. “You think they’d fall for that again and again? The Killers learn from their mistakes.”
Amberlyn and Helix distracted the Killers pretty well, and now they’ve gone back to their own homes.
Helix kept sassing the Killers around with the “Halt, who goes there?” statement. Amberlyn tricked the Killers with the good-old “look over there” prank.
Nathan and Dan don’t expect their team of four to split up, but Dan stays stubborn.
“Now that Helix and Amberlyn are gone,” Dan suggests, “why don’t we just open the door to the broken building without them? Surely we can open a door. Just open it. How simple is that?”
Jamie Grimm has about the same physical strength as two children combined, and he was able to open the door. Standing by the fact, Nathan and Dan pull open the door. They take twice as much time as Jamie did, because their shoes keep skidding across the sandy island.
The Killers don’t chase after them this time. If they swim, they electrocute. If they pick up the Baseball bats, they crack their plastic heads open. If they walk on the land-bridge, they fall off, and they electrocute.
Dan is curious to see what’s inside, so he lets go of the door and steps through the doorway.
When Dan ran into the building, Nathan was still holding the door and didn’t expect Dan to let go. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Nathan exclaims quickly. He fumbles into the broken tower, nearly tripping over a large slab of concrete. The door slams shut, blowing a strong gust of wind at Nathan and Dan. The gust of wind combined with the force of the door slamming causes a bundle of electronics to fall from the broken ceiling.
“So…he died?” Dan ponders hesitantly. The large slab of concrete isn’t laying flat across the floor. There appears to be something under the slab of concrete, probably human-sized.
“You mean the dictator? He died?” Nathan replies.
“Well duh,” Dan says. “There’s nobody in this room.”
A faint buzz. Then a crackle. A voice speaks, “The identity of a young human male named Daniel Slap-Jack has been detected. He has reportedly infiltrated this tower earlier today. This message will be sent to the Killers.”
Nathan gapes angrily at Dan. Dan thinks Nathan doesn’t blink for thirty seconds straight! “Dude!” Nathan blurts.
“What?” Dan makes an excuse. “Like, it wasn’t my fault. Amberlyn and Helix also infiltrated this place.”
“So you guys are responsible for the dictator getting crushed?” Nathan confirms.
“Um, no,” Dan guesses unsurely. “When Helix, Amberlyn, and I infiltrated the tower, we kept hearing bathroom sounds. So maybe the bathroom blew up or something? Or maybe the door was so heavy it knocked the whole thing over.”
Besides the fact that Dan guessed it, what he said is exactly what happened to the tower that’s now only one story high.
“Why don’t we tell that computerized voice to-” Nathan mimics the talking style of the computerized voice. “-command every one of the Killers to altogether shut down indefinitely!”
Dan walks over the top of the concrete slab. He smirks at Nathan. He walks over to the dictator’s computer screen, and says, “Um…computer! Turn off Killers!”
The computer screen is black and stays that way.
Dan tries again. “Voice command!”
Nothing happens.
Dan repeats, “Enable voice command!”
Nothing happens.
“Turn on computerized voice!”
Nothing happens.
“Turn on the option that lets you talk to the computer!”
Nathan starts to chortle like a choking skunk. “You can’t tell the computer to turn on the feature that lets you tell it to do stuff,” he points out.
“Nathan, do you see that computer in the corner?” Dan asks.
“Yes,” Nathan answers. “It’s still intact.”
“Great! Now I need you to drag the icon.”
Nathan picks up the computer mouse, and literally physically drags it around the monitor’s screen. “That didn’t do anything!”
Dan repeats, “Drag it across the desktop!”
Nathan literally drags his mouse across the broken tabletop. “That didn’t do anything!”
Dan is shocked. “It didn’t? Now here’s the plan: open up the spreadsheet window, and go to the table labeled ‘REFERENCE’.”
Nathan spreads a sheet of newspaper across the physical broken window in the secret lab. Then he takes a long time to look around the broken table for a “REFERENCE” label.
“Nathan?” Dan says. “Are you still there?”
“I couldn’t find it,” Nathan replies.
“Of course you didn’t! You know what? Aaaaagh!”
“But what are we supposed to do?” Dan growls angrily. “Why are we even standing in the dictator’s lab? What’s the point?”
Suddenly, a high-pitched, rumbling noise comes from the door.
“What’s that?” Nathan shudders.
It took a lot of effort to push open the heavy, solid-wooden door. Dan doesn’t think it’s worthwhile to open the door again. Dan scoffs. “Aww, nothing. It’s probably just an old-man with his lawn-mower.”
The noise gets louder.
“Who would mow the lawn next to the dictator’s lab?” Nathan interrogates. “There isn’t even a lawn at all.”
“An old-man, that’s who.” Dan jokes. “I told you, it’s an old-man with his lawn-mower!”
But now there’s another obstacle for Dan. Internet memes pop up that joke about what’s under your underwear.
Nehalym, an island country, is a very mysterious dictatorship. What will Dan and Nathan do to save their people?
Chapter 1: Welcome to Nehalym!
“KFC! KFC!” someone shouts through the streets. Nathan knows the call. He and a bunch of other eleven-year-olds bolt down the corridor.
Nathan has dark hair, tan-ish skin, and green eyes. Common qualities of a citizen who lives in Nehalym.
“Darn,” Nathan grumbles. “I hate running!”
CRACK! The sound of a Baseball bat cracks on the wall of the Slap-Store convenience store. Due to the laziness of the manager, Slap-Store only houses toilet-paper rolls.
A ten-year-old kid named Dan is walking out the automatic-sliding-doors of Slap-Store. He has blond hair, light skin, and blue eyes. Common qualities of a White Person. “What’s all this angry mob do-”
RUMBLE-RUMBLE! The eleven-year-olds accidentally collide into Dan. Dan stands back up and says, “Hey, watch where you’re going!”
“Sorry!” Nathan calls as he runs. “But there’s a Killer following us!”
“Wait, wha-” Dan doesn’t have a clue about this “Killer” thing.
“Don’t just stand there!” Nathan shouts back. “Do something!”
Without explanation, Dan would probably know what a Killer is, anyway. He jolts down the street. After a while of running, Dan has to wait to catch his breath. Then he hears footsteps. He turns around. A wrinkly-skinned, white-haired man shows up, holding an obsidian Baseball bat.
That guy? That old-man? How’s he a Killer? Dan wonders. Instead of running away, he considers seriously questioning the old-man. DONK! A Baseball bat slams against his thigh.
Chapter 2: Meet Nathan, Average Kid!
“Hi, I’m Nathan,” Nathan says. “Say ‘Nay-Than’, not ‘Nah-Then’.”
Dan is still shivering. He’s lying down against a brick wall, several yards from Slap-Store. “Who the heck was that stupid guy?”
“Hey!” Nathan scolds. “Watch your mouth. We can’t use foul language in-”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Dan interrupts, annoyed. “Well go away.”
“Don’t you want to know the name of this country? I hear you’re a newcomer.”
“Ha! Yes, I know the name of this country! It’s…um…uh…Nazi-Germany! I’ve time-traveled back to the 1940’s.”
Nathan frowns. He stares blankly at Dan. “I can see you’re American. Let’s see how far you can go with this.”
“Oh, yeah,” Dan continues. “That was just a little attempt at humor. I know how much you like to laugh!”
Nathan’s eyes narrow into slits. His facial expression is very smug. “Not funny,” he retorts. He sighs, pauses, and introduces, “Welcome to Nehalym. I suppose it’s the last country in the world that still has a dictatorship.”
Dan corrects, “No, China, several ones in Africa, parts of Europe, and other places still have bosses in place of presidents.”
Suddenly, without notice, Nathan walks away. “Bye.”
“Hey, where you goin’?” Dan steps up onto the sidewalk.
“Shh. My parents. I might get myself killed. I must go!”
Getting yourself killed is actually quite common in Nehalym. Dan used to live in The State of Texas, United States, but his parents moved to Nehalym, a dangerous place. Sure, these can all be rumors, but who knows?
Dan’s father had been frequently switching jobs ever since. He had to travel all over the state just to get to a different workplace. He dreamed of a calm, convenient Utopia where switching jobs is unnecessary. Overwhelmed, he stumbles upon a Daily Epoch Newspaper Report about an island country where you can’t leave. That’s Nehalym.
Dan’s family, the Slap-Jacks, wanted to bring everyone along to Nehalym, but there was one problem.
Dan has a brother named Swaggington, but he wasn’t allowed to transfer to Nehalym. Swaggington was seventeen years old at that time, so it’s generally accepted that he stays in the United States alone.
Swaggington was in college, and he wasn’t allowed to come to Nehalym because of that. Nehalym has zero Universities, so they didn’t want Swaggington to be worried about his education.
The people in Nehalym tried to be nice to Swaggington by concerning his education, which is considered a good thing.
And whether somebody is still a college student or not, they should always avoid Nehalym.
In the United States, you’re not allowed to go to North Korea at the time of writing. However, another country where leaving is illegal, and United Airlines still lets you fly there.
And because an island is small, and you can’t leave Nehalym, Dan’s father used lazy strategies. Dan’s dad always answers a job-change request by saying, “I decline the request, since I can’t leave my small country.”
Even though Dan is only ten years old, he knows better than to move to a country where you can’t leave.
Chapter 3: The K.F.C. and Kia!
“KFC! RUN!” Nathan jerks his head around as he shouts.
Dan is still asleep. It’s eight-o’clock in the morning, but Dan has no clue about government sleeping rules. Neither do his parents.
Voices come from outside the house.
“KFC! KF-”
SLAM! Goes a Baseball bat.
“Kia!”
WHACK! Goes a Baseball bat.
“Kia!”
BAM! Goes a Baseball bat.
BONK! Again.
BLUBRUB! Someone gets rubbed against a wall.
“Kia!”
Dan stutters. He wakes up, startled to find another angry mob banging people around. “Who’s Kia?” he mutters.
“KFC’s are chasing us! Everyone dodge West!” Nathan commands. A group of other kids dodge to the side as a Killer tries to strike them, but misses. What the heck? How is it possible, fast-food-restaurants chasing eleven-year-olds?
Dan rushes downstairs and slams the front door behind him. He runs out onto the road where the angry mob is. Except he’s still wearing his pajamas! At first sight, Dan sees a bunch of elderly men swishing Baseball bats around.
Suddenly, a tall slender woman trots across the road, holding her right hand up to signal “stop.” Will she stop the Killers? No. Instead, she drags a young boy on the dusty ground. It’s the boy who exclaimed, “Kia,” three times.
The boy refuses, and tries to let go of her hand. The woman scolds, “Get up, Sylus!”
Sylus, the boy who called for Kia, flinches. He stands up on his feet. He walked obediently to a doctor’s office with the woman.
Wait a minute… The mob of old-men was trying to hurt Gordon and others, yet he goes to a doctor’s office. Are the old-men, called Killers, actually supposed to do that?
“Dan!” calls Nathan. “Dan, are you all-right?”
“Yeah,” Dan replies. “I just got out. Who’re those people supposed to be?”
“Um, before I answer that question, I have a question for you. Why the heck are you in your pajamas?”
“Oh, uh…I had no time. Just to be quick.”
“Go dress up! Now! You’re going to get yourself killed! You’re lucky the Killers didn’t see.”
Chapter 4: The Hall of Open Records!
“Hey!” a Killer shouts. “You’re new here, right?”
Dan turns around.
“He’s talking to you,” Nathan points out.
“Uh, yeah, I guess so,” Dan tells the Killer.
“What’s your name?” the Killer lowers his voice.
“Daniel Slap-Jack,” Dan says.
The Killer thinks for a moment. “Okay, now go to The HOOR.”
“What’s The HOOR?”
“THE HALL OF OPEN RECORDS, MORON!”
Dan, whose real name is Daniel, still doesn’t know where The Hall of Open Records is.
Just as Dan is about to ask the Killer where it is, Nathan grabs him by the shoulder and points in the North direction. He explains, “We live on the South side of town. If you need to go to The HOOR, go straight North of your home, and left.”
After a tiresome thirty minutes of walking, Dan catches up to his destination. The HOOR is a very tall building suspended by white poles. It has a couple of sculptures carved on the roof. It looks a bit like the U.S. Supreme Court, not to mention that Nehalym doesn’t even have any courts.
“What do you want?” a female wearing a suit says. It’s the Director, who owns The HOOR. She sits in a tall chair behind a curved desk.
“Uh,” Dan stutters, “An old-man, who my friend calls a ‘Killer’, told me to go here.”
“Friend?” the Director asks doubtfully. “I never received your contract agreement.”
“What’s that?” Dan wonders. That’s another peculiar thing about Nehalym.
“You’re new here, right?”
Dan nods.
“Then you shall read this packet,” the Director says as she hands Dan an old, wrinkled stack of papers. “It’s the introductory information about Nehalym. Please take a seat.”
Dan sits down on a purple couch and starts to read the first packet. Unfortunately, he gets interrupted again.
“That’s for the aristocracy,” the Director points out in a matter-of-fact tone. She points to several ordinary chairs to the left of the purple couch. “That’s for the middle class.” Then she points to dirty ram-shackle seats in the corner of The HOOR lobby. “That’s for the peasants.”
Peasants? Aristocrats? Dan is stunned at the concept of these old Feudal System Classes. Anyway, he continues reading.
“Males must wake up promptly at eight o’clock AM, and no later than that. Females must wake up at seven o’clock AM, otherwise they’ll get slapped in the face. Females are allowed to take naps, but males aren’t.”
Dan becomes enraged. He throws the packet on the ground. He stomps up to the front desk, and points straight at the Director. “You guys are sexist!” Dan shouts.
“No, we’re not,” the Director replies calmly.
“Oh yeah?” Dan argues. “And you’re violent, too.”
“Me? I’m not.” the Director asks, gesturing to herself.
“You and all the people of Nehalym,” Dan says. “This country is absurd. What sort of a dictator has ‘Killers’ on his side?”
“What’re you talking about? Killers?”
“You know, those old people wearing white coats?”
“What? Those people are Community Convenience Workers. They help make the country a better place. They arrest people who break the rules.”
“But I didn’t break the rules. A Killer chased me down and hit me with a Baseball bat!”
“Then you must’ve broken a rule. Didn’t your family move here from the United States?”
“Yes, except for my older brother, who is in college.” Then Dan switches on his angry attitude again. “Where do they come from? Those Community Convenience ‘blah-blah-blah’s. They seem to catch people from nowhere. Do they hide behind buildings like spies? That’s very deceptive, you know!”
“Daniel, I am the Director of the Hall of Open Records. Don’t talk to me like that. But, as always, I’m willing to explain things to immigrants. Most buildings have a specialized office in them, built for Community Convenience Workers to work there. They monitor people through the building’s security cameras, if the building has any. Security cameras are attached to both the outside and inside of most buildings, and they also have built-in microphones.”
“Um… Okay, but I…uh…really…have to go,” Dan says quickly as he turns around. He walks to the HOOR entrance. He turns around to face the Director again, who has a confused look on her face. “Bye,” Dan says casually. “I’ll read the packets later. I need to go back home.”
A woman wearing a tight dress is about to walk through the entrance doors.
“Look out behind you!” the Director snaps.
Dan is about to turn around to see who’s behind him, but it’s too late. The woman in the tight dress bumps in to him.
The woman in the tight dress scrunches up her face. “Oh, so this is how you treat me?” she taunts. “Running into me like a childish old troll? Well I’ve got news for you, buddy. You’re going down, sucker!”
“What’s your problem?” Dan asks angrily.
The woman smiles. “Your existence. Why shouldn’t I kill you?”
“All right then, kill me,” Dan says sarcastically.
The woman tries to perform a karate-kick, but her dress is so tight that she can’t lift her leg more than two feet off the ground. “Dang!” she exclaims.
Dan scoffs, “Whatever.” He opens the door and walks out of the HOOR like nothing ever happened.
The Director is left speechless. His face is stuck at a raised-eyebrow position. Finally, she murmurs to herself, “About how Dan said that we’re violent…”
Chapter 5: Father’s Labor!
Dan has a good-night’s sleep, and he’s expecting tomorrow to be a normal day, sitting on the couch, watching television, being carefree as he wants.
Unfortunately, little does he know that Nehalym’s elementary school system has no absolute, set enrollment date.
“Dad,” Dan asks nervously. “What’s your new job?”
Dan’s dad sighs. “Labor.”
“What?”
“Laborer! It’s very heavy-duty work.”
“Heavy-duty…um…uh… Are you fatigued?”
“Compared to other workers, no, ‘cause I just took the job. People with more experience get harder work.”
“What’s it like compared to America?”
“Heh, heh. In America, it’s just eight hours of light to medium-duty work. I have a colleague named Betch, and her job is twenty-three hours of relentlessly smashing an axe on a block of refined obsidian.”
“Well that’s stupid!”
“Shh…” Dad points to a sound recorder screwed to the ceiling. “They can hear us! We don’t have the freedom to criticize things the government owns! And by the way, you’re goin’ to school, mister!”
Dan glances at the clock. It’s seven-o’clock in the morning, right when the government sleeping rules set in. He’d been talking to his dad for about one minute. “Right now?” he asks, shocked.
“Yes!” Dad replies in a congradulative manner. “Right now.”
Chapter 6: Going to School!
“Can I go to the restroom?” Dan asks during Math Class, First Period of Droop-Gloop Elementary School. It’s Friday, and Dan is a new student in fifth grade.
The teacher, Mrs. Danky-Pants, turns away from the whiteboard, and faces Dan. “I don’t know, CAN you?” she retorts.
“MAY I go to the restroom?” Dan corrects.
“What? Can’t you see we’re in class? Why would I ever let you use the rest-room? Students aren’t allowed to REST and sleep on the soft, cushioned-”
“Not rest-room, resTRoom, as in ‘bathroom’.”
“We don’t have tubs and showers at Droop-Gloop Elementary.”
“Not that kind of bathroom! The bathroom with the toilets.”
“Oh, I’d be happy to LET you have a TOY from the class Treasure Box-”
“NO! The one with the sinks and the urinals.”
“Well, from my experience, I’ve never heard of anyone who SANK in the ocean from a URINAL tract infection.”
“NO!” Dan argues, annoyed. “Mrs. Danky-Pants, why are you so literal-minded?”
“Oh, that. If you need to pee, students such as you should go outside and urinate in the pointy, prickly thorn-bushes.”
Dan grunts, and throws his pencil on the floor to show his distress. Then he stumbles out of the classroom reluctantly. What psycho pees outside the school?
“Huh. Just that old darn thing,” Dan mumbles. He had experience peeing in the woods before, so it’s no sweat to do it now. But there’s still no reason why ordinary teachers force students to pee outside, when schools in Nehalym clearly has bathrooms…or do they? Just as he starts to pull down his pants, “Aaaaagh!”
There’s a person who suddenly jumps in front of him. He screams, too, “Aaaaagh! What the- Oof! Ouch! Kia! Ki…” Dan blocks his hand in front of the other screamer’s mouth.
“Hey!” the other guy reacts. “Kia’s the community nurse! What were you thinking?”
“Kia’s a nurse?” Dan wonders. Although he’d just learned something new about this specific community of Nehalym, he tries to seem “normal,” and pretends he already knows it. “Oh, yes, I know that,” Dan lies. “But still, don’t you think it’s a bit weird to need medical care due to accidentally falling over?”
“Not at all,” the other guy replies in a matter-of-fact tone. “My parents, the moms and dads of Nehalym, have all taught us to shout the name of the nurse when injured. It’s a common habit now.”
“Wait…” Dan tries to recall the memory of Sylus being dragged on the ground to get to Kia’s place, back on the street where he lives. The memory of the angry mob, bashing people beforehand. He asks, “Why can’t the school have its own nurse? Seems kind of inconvenient to drag people all the way down Main Street.”
“Mrs. Danky-Pants sent me,” Nathan bursts out the door, catching his breath. “You need to get back to class. And you’re not even ‘peeing’! You’re just standing around, talking to your-”
“Friend?” Dan suggests.
“No, no, no. You haven’t even signed the agreement yet!” Nathan grumbles, signaling that the Friendship Agreement is common knowledge, and Dan should know the rules by now. “Anyway, you’re not-” Nathan continues his message from the teacher.
Dan completes Nathan’s sentence with a familiar phrase, “-following directions like Mrs. Danky-Pants told me to.” He walks back into the school, half-surprised that Nathan goes to his school, too.
Chapter 7: The Backfiring Plan!
The next day, Dan encounters someone familiar he met at school. He’s glad it’s Saturday, so he won’t have to go to school and pee in the bushes or what-not.
“Hi, ‘names Helix Supernova,” the guy Dan talked to yesterday introduces himself. It’s after Dan ate his breakfast, put on his clothes, and walked out the door, to find the guy right in front of him.
“Um,” Dan starts, “about that ‘Kia’ thing, one time the Killers were trying to hit me, but why call them Killers? I mean, smacking your stomach or your thigh isn’t going to kill you.”
“Ha,” Helix says in a cruel, sarcastic manner. “WELL THEN, GO AHEAD! They’ll do whatever they’re told. You want to die, then fine.”
Dan picks out one sentence. It’s unique, at least in the sense of Nehalym. “They’ll do whatever they’re told.” His mouth formed into a sly grin.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Helix detects Dan’s emotion, and predicts his plan. “Now, don’t be too clever.” He tells Dan a fable, where a fox wasn’t allowed to pick the grapes off a tree. But the fox punched the grapes off the tree, since the rules only applied to picking. Unfortunately, the grapes were poison, and the fox regrets his way of thinking.
“Tree-hugger.”
“Hey, hey, hey! No insults! You could get in big trou-”
The ground starts to shake. “Get him!” several old men yell in a raspy voice.
“Aww, not the KFC!” Helix groans.
Dan dashes up to a nearby stop-sign, and points to it with both index-fingers. This indicates “stop.” The Killers stop running, and stare at him.
“Look,” Dan persuades. “This won’t change anything. What’s the point of injuring people? This is unethical, cruel, and just mean. Back in my country, America, kids would get chastised in a non-physical way. So would you please stop-”
The Killers confer for a few seconds, and then one speaks up, “Look, you know those clichés in movies, right? Someone says something very ‘heartwarming’ or ‘meaningful’ to the villain, and he immediately transforms into a protagonist. Well that certainly ain’t going to happen!” The Head Killer holds back his Baseball bat, aims, and… BAM! He smashes into his OWN head!
Helix rolls his eyes. “Ugh. Your plan totally backfired! Let me rephrase that. They’ll do whatever EVIL they’re told,” he counters toward Dan. Then, there’s a scream. And a splash. Helix turns around, and he sees a person flying through the air and landing in water. Dan isn’t standing on the road anymore. But according to science, how is it possible that Dan gets shot so high?
Helix snatches the Head Killer’s bat, and trips him over on the asphalt. Then he grabs a shoe to examine it. “Aha!” Helix exclaims. The shoes are super-bouncy, and give off ten times the amount of energy it receives. That may be why Dan got “kicked” so far.
Just then, the Killer who fell rises up behind Helix, and grabs his arms. He locks Helix with handcuffs! “I’m an adult,” the Killer explains. “Don’t you touch me again.”
Helix starts shouting. “Hey! Somebody! Dan got kicked and…mrphof-”
The Killer slaps Helix’s mouth shut.
Chapter 8: Save From the Hidden!
“Are you sure he got kicked?” the Rescue Squad confirms through the telephone. Nathan overheard from Helix, and is reporting an emergency over the phone in less than a minute after that. To blend in and seem non-suspicious, he calls from a normal street phone booth.
“Yes, of course,” Nathan replies.
“But according to science, a shoe can’t give off twice the energy it receives,” Bob, a Rescue Squad member, says. How can Nathan explain this?
Then another Rescue Squad member named Max comes on the phone. He’s a physicist with a PHD in science. He tells several scenarios of facts, “Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. The shoes must have some energy source. If it’s the person who kicks, then his leg would be numb shortly afterward. The shoes might have a tank of fuel, but that can’t be gasoline or else he explodes. Using inductive charging is fine, but we hardly see that kind of tech in a pair of shoes.”
“But the shoes were really bouncy!” Nathan protests.
“But we’re the Rescue Squad. We rescue people who are lost or hurt. As for the ‘super-bouncy’ shoes that kick a person this far…let’s say, a mile…there’s no point of rescuing him. He’s probably dead. Who’s the owner of these mysterious shoes?”
“I don’t know his name, but he’s a Killer.”
“Killer? Killers give satisfactory corporal punishment to children as chastisement. The kid misbehaved, and that’s that. Kicking is a fair punishment.” Max hangs up the phone-call.
URRRGGGH! Nathan re-dials the telephone number for the rescue squad. He seems to be incredibly distressed. “Hello?” he talks into the phone’s speaker.
The same Max’s voice comes on the earpiece. “Hey, it’s you again, right?”
Nathan doesn’t know whether Max is angry or just questioning. Before he can reply, Max taunts, “No need to be rude, but we can call the police. Is this a prank call?”
Nathan considers the threat of calling the police. However, there’s no police in Nehalym, so Killers also serve as police. But their job isn’t to protect, it’s to do vigilante justice. And to them, vigilante justice basically means Baseball-bat-bashing.
“Uh, no,” Nathan answers unsurely. “But the main reason is that the Killer kicked him for doing something minor. It’s kicking as a punishment for name-calling.”
“Dude, we’re very busy. The Rescue Squad doesn’t deal with these situations,” Max replies. “Either hang up the phone, or JUMP OFF A CLIFF!” He yells the last phrase so loudly that Nathan’s ears hurt.
“Oww! Oof!” Nathan immediately drops the phone and falls on the ground next to the phone booth he’s calling from, without hanging up or canceling the call. What would happen next?
Nathan scoops the phone back up, and argues, “I’ve got to admit, you suck at insulting. ‘Jump off a cliff’ is basically nothing, and it’s not even offensive. How ‘bout this: ‘kill yourself’!” He’s yelling so loud that he’s practically shouting straight into the phone.
“That’s it,” Max says. “What started as an emergency call turned out to be an argument. NOW HANG UP THE PHONE, YOU IDIOT!”
Max shouted that last sentence so loud, and so sudden, that Nathan winces. The phone slips out of his hand again, and he accidentally bonks his head against the phone booth. He decides there’s enough pain to call for the help of Kia. “Kia! Kia! Kia…” Nathan calls into the open air.
After a few seconds, a sexy-looking woman escorts Nathan to a building that looks like a pediatrics medical center. Is she Kia?
Dan is a skillful swimmer, and he’s very lucky to land in the water, not on stone or dirt. He’s also very lucky to not land head-first, because even a water-landing might lead to brain damage. Despite his swimming skills, the water is easy to maneuver.
He realizes that the water is a shallow land-bridge connecting Nehalym to a nearby island. The island, as it seems, contains a circular wall of stone that had white-and-orange boards nearby. Maybe it’s an under-construction tower or something.
Dan wades through the water and steps back on the land, his soaked clothes causing perceived heaviness.
Before Dan steps off the coast and onto the man-made cityscape of Nehalym, he figures it’d be much more convenient to use a little lift. “Kia! KEEEAAH!” Dan roars at the top of his lungs. Soon, and I mean a couple of seconds, Dan sees a train speeding down the monorail. A curvaceous woman steps out. She’s wearing a red dress that looks very tight in relation to her body.
Dan feels confused. How did the woman hear Dan shout her name? The Nehalym Government must by eavesdropping on their citizens’ speech! But how’d they do that? Dan decides it’s too much of a mystery.
When she walks up to Dan, he hopes this “Kia” will drive him to the nurse’s office, or let him ride the monorail. Then he wouldn’t have to walk all the way home, right?
Unfortunately, the woman isn’t as nice as Dan thought. Dan wonders if he’s being too optimistic, but the woman snatches him by the shirt-collar. Dan lunges forward, sprawled on the sandy coastal-beach.
“Get up!” Kia scolds.
After Dan stands back up, he notices something strange. The type of dress Kia is wearing. What Kia’s facial features look like. She looks exactly like the woman in the purple dress who tried to assault him! In fact, Kia was the woman in the purple dress.
“It’s not my fault!” Dan implores. “You pulled me over! I got up anyway, but why should I listen to you?”
Kia frowns. “You talk back to me one more time, and you’re dead!” she threatens.
Dan flinches, and asks, “Um, aren’t you going to drive me there or let me ride the monorail?”
“Of course not! Do you think my job is to provide convenient rides for children? No. It’s to be a nurse. And there’s only one nurse’s office, and only one nurse. So it doesn’t matter how far away you are, because you’re still walking with me.”
It’s somewhat ironic that a nurse would injure her own patients. But Nehalym is Nehalym, right? Don’t judge a book by its cover, Dan thinks. ‘Same thing for women.
Chapter 9: Both Getting Arrested!
While Dan is walking, he tries to be extremely cautious. In his mind, Nehalym has a bad reputation.
But on the sidewalks, he sees the most unhappy, desperate people he ever sees in his entire life. Those people are young adult couples, but they seem to be terribly mismatched.
There is a woman walking with a man with a beard that drags on the concrete.
Another woman and a man that has horns in his…mouth?
This time, there is an old lady walking by with a man in a wheelchair.
And a woman with an…old-man who looks like a Killer?
Although this’s the first time Dan ever notices this, the sight astonishes him. He sees not one single car, not one single bike, not one single motorcycle. Everyone in the streets of Nehalym is a pedestrian! Nobody seems to own any personal motor-vehicle. Dan doesn’t know whether this is good or bad, but the dictator might be forcing people to walk so they take a long time and tire out.
Kia and Dan have walked a very long distance, but there’s one of natural life-forms that he doesn’t see: animals. There’re no animals in Nehalym. That dictator must be really mean!
After roughly an hour-and-a-half of “useless” walking, Dan becomes extremely thirsty. He pleads, “May I have some water?”
“Eh…” Kia replies, “no.”
“But I’m dehydrated!” Dan says.
“We’re almost there,” Kia reassures Dan.
“Where? Some dumb shank-”
“Shut up! You’re going to get yourself arrested!”
“But, there’s no police in Nehalym.”
“How did you know that?”
Dan is confused. It’s obvious, he knew. “Um,” Dan guesses, “I don’t see any police around here. It seems like the old-man-Killers are the police. Yet they’re not really police, since they’re unethical.”
“Dan! How dare you call our hard-working Killers unethical?”
Dan scoffs, and replies nonchalant, “Huh. ‘Hard-working,’ you say? I don’t think it takes much effort to kill somebody. You could just get out a gu-”
“Dan! Don’t talk like that. And it doesn’t work that way. Killers do work hard, but not the way you think. It’s uh, well for a classified reason.”
That doesn’t make much sense to Dan.
He enters the nurse’s office as Kia directed, but the room is dark and gloomy. There’re no patients, no counters, and no advertising brochures. There’s only one door, cast in the shadows at the back of the room. This doesn’t seem like a medical center at all.
Dan looks behind him, but Kia is nowhere in sight anymore. He realizes this is a total trick!
He catches a glimpse of a person sitting on a bench, wrapped around and around, from head to toe, in worn heavy-duty rope. As he walks farther into the room, he can see rows and rows of people tied up, all sitting on pews.
“What the…” Dan murmurs. “Wait a second, this ain’t a nurse’s office. It’s a-”
“Jail,” someone completes Dan’s sentence. Who just said that?
“Uh…” Dan hesitates. “Who…um…”
The person who finished Dan’s sentence giggles. “That was me,” Nathan says. He sits on the first row, third from the right.
“Nathan?” Dan exclaims. His eyes narrow. “What sort of a joke is this?”
“Oh, this isn’t no joke,” Nathan replies. “No need to explain. I called the Rescue Squad-”
“They have rescue squads here? I didn’t know that,” Dan comments.
“Shh! So the Rescue Squad, the guy on the other end… Never mind. I just accidentally fell and I called for Kia.”
“Yolo, we’d better tell the people about this,” Dan announces in a matter-of-fact manner.
Nathan lacks knowledge of American teenage slang, so he has no idea what “yolo” is. But that doesn’t matter, because Dan ran off.
Chapter 10: The Great Escape!
When Nathan notices Dan’s disappearance, he looks around. He sees two possible outlets: the door that you enter and exit the prison, and the door at the back. He squints, and he figures that door in the shadows is wrapped in caution tape that says, “GUARDS ONLY.” Nathan shouts, “Dan, we really shouldn’t be doing this!”
Dan looks around. He’s in the guards-only room, which is an administration control room. He notices a switch that says, “Emergency Rope Release.”
Nathan is still sitting on the long bench, but he suddenly forgets he’s tied up in rope. He tries to get Dan, but he instantly trips over and splats face-first on the floor. The rest of the tied-up prisoners laugh hysterically.
Someone yells a command. The prisoners turn around, and see a guard dressed in a gray suit. “What’s so funny?”
The crowd of jail-people remains silent.
“Well,” the guard tells everyone in a vain fashion, “if there’s nothing funny, then I shall return to my Jail Watch Duty.” He turns to a girl. “Azalea, keep an eye on the prisoner who just came in.”
Back in the Guards’ Administration Room, Dan flicks the switch. The alarm starts blaring, and prisoners who’d been tied in ropes are released. “Hey, what’s going on?” the guard asks angrily.
All the former-prisoners start running in chaos, and a few of them start cheering. The jail fills up with pandemonium.
The guard grunts as he opens the door to the guards-only room. AHA! Dan gets caught!
Chapter 11: Great Confusion!
Helix is about to enter Kia’s building, and like everyone, he thinks it’s a nurse’s office. The Killer, who handcuffed him, dragged him all the way over here. The Killer knocks on the door, and starts speaking, “Sir, we’ve got this dude named Helix who tripped me over and pulled my shoe off. Officer? Hello?”
Helix is confused. The Killer caught him for misbehaving, and now the Killer dragged him to a nurse’s office? Something fishy must be going on.
Both the Killer and Helix hear loud noises coming from inside the door. Helix asks politely, “Why’d you make me go to a nurse’s office? This nurse’s office doesn’t have any windows, and is has very loud patients.”
The Killer didn’t answer until a few seconds later. He replies, startled, “Oh! Um…uh… Oh, yes. You’ll see, once we go in.”
Even though this’s the first occasion a Killer ever talked to anyone nicely, Helix keeps asking questions. “How can we be sure it’s not someplace that just has a sign that says-”
“Look,” the Killer lectures. “Listen to me. You don’t want to get punished again, do you? I tell you that this ‘Kia nurse thing’ is completely true. I’ll even prove it.” The Killer opens the door.
“Hey!” a five-year-old prisoner squeals. “The door is open! We’re free!”
Helix gapes wide-eyed at the commotion. Here he is, expecting a “Killer” to bring him to a “nurse’s office,” and being greeted with escaping prisoners.
The prisoners run straight out the door. The door is only about eight feet high, so the people pile up quickly, and end up blocking the door. Ex-prisoners are literally pouring out of the jail!
Chapter 12: Famously Infamous!
If there’s a crowd of people, and you’re just like everyone else, it’s hard to pick you out since you blend in. That’s what Dan did to escape the jail-building.
Dan walks all the way down to his house, and it’s time for dinner already. Nehalym also has rules for male and female eating times, but Dan arrives home roughly five minutes within the parameters.
“Wow,” Dan’s mother exclaims. “What were you doing out there? It’s time for dinner. A few more minutes, and you’d break the rules! Let’s start eating now.”
“Hey Clara,” Dan’s father tells Dan’s mom, “you might want to check this out.” Dan’s dad is watching the News Channel on the family Samsung Television. Dan turns his head to the TV.
A news reporter is talking into a microphone. He announces, “Breaking news tonight! We’ve recently discovered that two-thousand prisoners have escaped from the local jail. One-thousand, three-hundred of which are bank-robbers. Jail Watch Guard, Bob Peterson, reports that a young boy named Daniel Slap-Jack may have caused all this fury with a flick of a switch in the control panel…”
Dan’s mom and dad exchange looks. Finally, Dad assumes, “Dan didn’t do this. He would never do anything like this. I seriously doubt if he even was arrested!”
Dan pipes up, and starts telling the truth a little too quickly, “No, I wasn’t ‘arrested’! I got hurt, and the nurse was supposed to bring me to the nurse’s place, but it was just a jail in disguise, and there were tons of people who weren’t supposed to be prisoners like my…um…future friend Nathan and Helix Supern-”
“Dan,” Mom interrupts politely, “you might want to explain more slowly. So start from the beginning: how did you end up at the jail?”
Dan tells his mom and dad all about what the Killers did, and how he swam up on the shore. He even describes the under-construction-building-or-something on the island next to Nehalym, as if it was something suspicious. He explains how calling the nurse’s name, “Kia,” is a complete hoax. The nurse’s office is just a disguised prison for innocent children. And, of course, how he released the prisoners for their own good.
“Whoa, Dan,” Dad remarks, amazed. “But I guess it’s not your fault. You just didn’t know that three-quarters of them were bank-robbers, did you, son?”
Dan scoffs, and answers, “Yeah, but it’s really THEIR fault. They made their banks ROBBABLE, so no wonder just about anyone can get away with hoards of money.”
Mom realizes an important fact. “So that might be why the country’s in a financial crisis! You’re a smart kid.”
Dan’s father resumes watching TV again. The news-reporter is still talking, “…in the past two hours, more than three banks have been robbed. We aren’t yet sure about whether Dan caused these incidents, but one thing’s for sure. Another infringement of the rules, and he’s dead!”
Dad chortles. Not at the threat of a death penalty, that’s for sure. He laughs at the three banks robbed in a mere two hours. “These banks are vulnerable, all right,” he retorts.
Mom glances at the clock. “Oh no!” she exclaims. “We haven’t eaten dinner yet! We’re going to get in big trouble with the government.”
Right at that exact moment, the door to the family’s home busts open. Chubby men wearing rubbery, yellow Hazmat suits walk into the house, holstering laser-blasters. Radio noises fill the room, and distorted voices coming through walkie-talkies are inaudible.
“We’re the Killers’ grandsons,” one Hazmat suit-wearing man says in a crackly voice. “But that’s not what we’re here for. That guy-” He points at Dan. “-didn’t eat dinner between six o’clock PM and seven o’clock PM. He ought to be executed!”
“Oh, really?” Dan’s mother taunts. “Just get a hold of that clock!” She points at a clock next to the microwave in the kitchen.
“Ha! We ain’t need clocks. We have watches here!” another guy in a suit proves a point. Although that was a false claim, since their watches just ran out of battery right then. They all groan.
The Killers’ grandsons look at the clock. They exchange confused looks. One of them chimes in, “Um, well we made a mistake. Sorry. Guess you still have a couple of minutes. Bye.” The Killers’ grandsons straighten up their yellow Hazmat suits, and exit the house, slamming the door.
Dan’s mom smiles. “I changed the clock,” she whispers into Dan’s ear.
Chapter 13: What’s It Like To Be A Prankster?
The under-construction structure on the nearby island is completed. To the average eye, it seems just like a century-old lighthouse. But this “lighthouse” isn’t used for any of those purposes at all. It’s a classified base.
Jim Kloss is the dictator of Nehalym. Everyone calls him “Kloss the Boss” or “Boss Kloss.” He’s a short man for a dictator, and he has an extremely round stomach. He has a large, brown mustache with a small beard on his pointy chin. He’s bald, so he wears a toupee even though it’s useless for a national ruler.
To the average eye, Boss Kloss looks like an average business-man. Just a little plumper.
Boss Kloss decides to hire a new helper. The helper arrives in the early morning on Sunday.
“Okay, let me introduce you to our new top-secret base,” Boss Kloss tells the new politician named Gates Bill, or G.B. They’re standing on the nearby island.
“Okay,” G.B. says, tentatively, “so let me get this straight. This is our top-secret base?”
“Yup,” Boss Kloss replies proudly. He and G.B. walk down the sidewalk as they talk. To the average eye, they look like tourists seeing the new tower. “I put the rock on the roof.”
“The…rock? Why’re you so proud of putting a rock on a tippy-cracker?”
“I usually just lounge around on the sofa playing video games. There’s really not much to do being the ruler of a whole entire country. I’m very proud of my most recent work.”
“Putting a rock on the roof doesn’t take much work. Plus, I’m pretty sure the secret base has an elevator.”
“I know, it seems easy. To you, it is. To me, it’s the most labor I’ve ever done.”
“Hey! That’s why you’re so fat!”
“Hey, you, we can call the cops.”
“I thought they’re called ‘Killers’.”
“Fat sat mat catted the get rat!”
“That doesn’t even make any sense. Are you stupid?”
Stunned by the rude statement, Boss Kloss fires G.B. His last words toward G.B. are, “It does make sense, you dumbhead!”
G.B. walks away quietly, shaking his head. The way Jim Kloss acts! How childish, inappropriate, mean, and unsensible! G.B. is fired.
One day later, Boss Kloss finds another person qualified to be his companion. Her name is Macy Marse. Boss Kloss is delighted, and he does his introductory sentence: “Let me introduce you to our new top-secret base.”
“That old thug?” Macy wonders in dismay. Then she became angry. “You know, I’d rather not work at a smugly, old tower. That’s it. I resign.”
Boss Kloss feels shocked again, and tries to persuade Macy, “Please, trust me. That tower is actually futuristic and modern on the inside.”
“I don’t trust someone with so much power,” Macy explains while looking at her newly-manicured fingernails. “I don’t want to work with a fat guy like you.” She walks away, clattering the ground with every step of her high-heels. She quit.
Two days later, Boss Kloss recruits a smart-looking geek with huge eyeglasses. Boss Kloss had already been through two people who didn’t seem to work with him. But this one seems so smart, he might be able to help Boss Kloss with their new plan.
This time, the geek introduces himself first, “Hi, my name’s Jamie Grimm. Other people call me ‘Freaky-Deekie’, but just call me Jamie.”
Boss Kloss cracks up with laughter. He thinks such a nickname like “Freaky-Deekie” is ridiculous.
Jamie frowns. Luckily, he doesn’t have the short attention-span of Macy, who quit immediately. Jamie folds his arms and snickers. “Look,” he tells Boss Kloss. “Don’t be immature. I’m here to work for you, but I don’t have that much goodwill to put up with you.”
“Okay,” Boss Kloss says. “Let’s go on an inside tour of out new base.” The two men rush into the old-looking tower.
Now it’s Wednesday, and Dan follows his usual morning routine. He gets up, goes to the restroom, dresses up, eats breakfast, packs up his backpack, and gets in the car with his mom to go to school.
Little did he know that there’re only three people at school, including him. They’re both standing in the schoolyard, chatting.
Dan notices one of them is Helix, but the other one is a Goth-Girl he doesn’t know. Dan greets Helix, but he doesn’t answer. They just keep talking. Dan taps Helix’s shoulder, and he arrogantly groans, “WHAT?”
“Um,” Dan starts, “is this a holiday or something?”
“Yup. It’s the dictator’s birthday,” Helix informs. “Our parents didn’t know. They just dropped us off here.”
Dan turns around, but his mother’s car already drove off. He’s trapped until three o’clock! “Did anyone bring a cell-phone?” Dan asks.
“Nope,” both Helix and the girl say answer in unison.
“Okay,” Dan’s mouth forms into a sly grin. “Here’s what we should do. We’re not going home…” The trio huddles together and discusses a secret spy-plan.
The three kids arrive near a landfill. Soon, Helix starts digging around in a trash-can. “Nope, not here,” he murmurs.
“What’re you doing?” Dan interjects. “Aren’t we supposed to get to the island, not look in trash-cans?”
Helix trots over to a dark-green, roof-shaped dumpster. He digs around in the great stash of trash. The trash makes loud CLANK-ing noises in the dumpster.
“Dude,” the Goth-Girl warns. “The Killers might come get us.”
Helix simply ignores the warning.
Suddenly, Dan and Goth-Girl dash up to the dumpster and close the lid on top of Helix’s hands.
“Yeeeoww!” Helix howls in pain. “What is your problem?”
“That’s what you get for wasting time messing around with rubbish,” Dan explains. “Now follow our plan. We have to get to the island.”
Helix sighs, and lifts the dumpster lid to take his arms out. But one of his hands contains the exact item he was looking for. He stuffs it in his pocket, and starts walking just like Goth-Girl and Dan.
“Oh, no,” Dan exclaims as he starts walking away. “The Killers have seen us! Quick! To the walls!”
“Um, there are no walls,” Goth-Girl says obviously. “Unless you’re talking about the side of the dumpster.”
Chapter 14: The Monorail Ticket!
A Killer walks out of an operating room carrying a bottle of mineral water. He gazes around, seemingly looking for mischievous kids. His eyes fixate on Helix, Dan, and the Goth-Girl. “What were you just doing?”
“Nothing,” Dan pipes up. “We were just walking around, that’s all.”
“Ha,” the Killer retorts sarcastically, “what were you doing by that dumpster?”
Dan frowns. “We didn’t take anything. And that’s final.”
The Killer makes a smug face, and walks back to the operating room. As he walks there, he shouts, “I’ll be keeping an eye on you,” with his back turned.
“HELIX!” Dan yelps at Helix’s face. “You nearly got us in trouble! What’s with your obsession with trash?”
Helix sags his face down. “Sorry. But we have to ride the monorail to get to the island!”
Goth-Girl frowns, and remarks, “Yeah, without a map or GPS.”
Helix simply takes a map out of his pocket and hands it to Goth-Girl. It’s a standard green, yellow, and white road map. The monorail is marked with a dark-gray line. “THIS was what I was looking for in the dumpster.”
“Really? I guess we shouldn’t have made assumptions of you messing about, then. I’m a fan of dark colors, but this map still works fine,” Goth-Girl says.
The monorail station has been newly painted a vibrant shade of silver. The benches have cross-hatched surfaces just like those types of metal fences. When Dan, Goth-Girl, and Helix arrive at the station, they’re already out of breath.
“Let’s…sit…down…” Dan tells the others, breathing heavily.
Goth-Girl closes her eyes halfway, and replies, “We need tickets to ride, moron.” She folds her arms, but then she catches a glimpse of something on the train-tracks. “Hey, get those tickets down there.” She points to slips of paper on the train-tracks.
Dan kneels down on the edge of the platform. He can’t reach the tickets on the track.
“Just walk onto the track!” Goth-Girl shouts.
“You know,” Dan starts, “I think this train goes a lot faster than you thi-”
The monorail shoots past Dan. He dodges away just in time. The monorail coasts to a stop, its brakes making a continuous noise of descending pitch. A huge gust of air blasts at Dan’s face. So hard that he falls over on his buttocks.
“Hey!” Goth-Girl says. “I didn’t even see the train pass by. I blinked, and then it’s just right there making a screeching sound.”
“Free ride!” the conductor calls through the closed monorail window. His voice sounds muffled from outside. The monorail’s automatic-sliding-doors open, and he shouts, “Free ride!” again.
Shortly after the trio enters the monorail, to doors slam shut like two razor-sharp-knife-blades slicing the air in half. Helix shakes his head and mumbles, “They should seriously consider their safety.”
Chapter 15: The Secret Tower!
Ten-or-so seconds later, the trio arrives on the beach that’s next to the island with the tower. “This is the beach,” Dan explains. “It has a land-bridge under shallow water that connects to that small island¬¬-” He points to the island with the tower on it. “-with an old-looking tower built on it.”
The Goth-Girl assumes, “Well, it just looks like a naturally formed island. That tower could be an old landmark. What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is,” Dan pauses mid-sentence, “that tower was under construction the last time I saw it.”
“So?” Goth-Girl says. “People build old-looking things in modern times.”
“It has no windows! People might want to not be seen. Modern towers have windows all over them. And why would they make it look like a lighthouse? Must be a secret spy base or something,” Dan analyzes.
“So?”
“Why would they build a tower on an island next to Nehalym instead of the mainland? Maybe it’s a remote military base. Just skinnier. And no tanks. Or missile-launchers.”
“If I tried to think of a word other than ‘so,’ I wouldn’t be able to do it. So what?”
“You don’t think it’s a big deal?”
“Nope. At first I thought I was supposed to buy a bikini from the swimwear shop, but no.”
Dan and Helix chortle.
Helix chimes in, “Jokes aside, but that island looks pretty deserted.” He points at the tower. “It’s just you, me, and you-” He gestures his hand at the other two kids. “-infiltrating some old tower, wide out in the open, on a tiny island. Man, there won’t even be a security camera!”
“No security cameras,” Dan repeats. “That’s it!” He runs off the shore and gets his lower-legs and shoes wet. The water above the land-bridge is only knee-level-high. Goth-Girl and Helix follow along, wading through the water flowing above the land-bridge.
The water is clear-ish, with an even hint of aqua. The land bridge is a road-like path connecting the two Nehalymian islands. The ocean-floor around the land bridge is about three feet deeper than the surface of the land-bridge. As for Global Warming, the land bridge used to be an actual path above land. But after the sea-levels have risen, shallow water fills over the land-bridge. Ocean waves erode and weather the land-bridge, so it shrank to barely a foot wide over thousands of years. The land-bridge used to be almost as wide as the land-bridge connecting Alaska and Russia, and even the puny island with the tower on it used to be bigger than Australia, millions of years ago.
Just as Dan, the leader while walking across the water-covered land-bridge, steps on the island, the tower seems to have grown larger. And there’s something peculiar about the “lighthouse” door…
Aha! The door to the old-looking tower. It opens like an elevator door. Dan is the first person to walk into the tower. It doesn’t look as skinny inside as it does outside. But most strange of all, the floor is made of glass. The door-frame is lined with a Neodymium magnet. Dan doesn’t know about chemistry so, of course, he doesn’t notice the technology in the doorway.
Dan casually paces around the tower, and notices stairs in the corner. No-wait, it’s a rugged ramp. No-wait, it’s an escalator. No-wait, it’s some sort of conveyor belt. The conveyor belt is much quieter than any escalator he’d seen in America. The conveyor leading upstairs, Dan wonders how any human can go up there on such a steep incline.
Goth-Girl and Helix run through the doorway together, but the map pulverizes into microscopic bits. She gasps.
“Huh,” Helix mumbles. He takes a BitCoin Wallet out of his pocket, and holds it out at the door-magnet. It vaporizes and fine dust snows down on him. “Uh…”
“BitCoin Wallet?” Goth-Girl exclaims. She saw Helix holding a dollar-bill-like note with the “B” symbol printed on it, right before it disintegrated. “HELIX!” she shouts. “You know we can’t use Internet money, right? Like BitCoins? It’s even worse now that you got it vaporized. You just wasted…um-”
“-more than a thousand BitCoins,” responds Helix.
Suddenly, a computerized female voice says in a flat tone, “Any non-human foreign objects other than clothing and shoes will be disintergenerated.”
Goth-Girl feels her hair. She used to have a headband, but now it’s not there. She shrugs as she nods, and remarks, “Not bad technology for a crappy country.”
The female computerized voice continues talking, “Analyzing object: BitCoin Note. Sending data to Dictator.”
“You darn freak!” Goth-Girl screams at Helix’s face. Her mouth opens wide and her eyebrows point down like she’s angry. “You just pulverized a BitCoin Wallet, something that’s illegal. You-”
Upstairs, Boss Kloss and Jamie Grimm are discussing a secret plan. They’re in their secret lab, covered in half a meter of sound insulation and thirteen authentication devices, not to mention digital key-locks and several more Neodymium magnetic doorways.
I’d say that’s pretty much useless when the sound insulation is already enough protection. They’re just talking, that’s all. It’s not like they’re testing bullet-blasters or anything. Even if they do test bullet-blasters, the amount of walls would bounce the bullets straight back, destroying the whole purpose of the inventions.
The sound insulation is to prevent the voice of the dictator and his helper from leaking out. There’re microphones and imaging devices to make sounds coming from the outside able to be heard inside, but not vice versa.
Chapter 16: The Bathroom Emergency!
“Now this is the bathroom,” Boss Kloss announces as he pushes open the clear-glass bathroom door in their secret base. “This toilet will provide the smelliest experience for you, Jamie…”
He glances at Jamie. But Jamie’s emotion isn’t what Boss Kloss expects, Boss Kloss thinks Jamie would be dazed by this. Instead, Jamie feels disgusted.
Anyway, Boss Kloss continues, “This bathroom has absolutely no privacy due to the clear door, and zero ventilation for defecation fumes. It’s the most luxurious flushing system, with eight-thousand pounds of force, enough to flush down an entire human posterior. Now isn’t that nice, Jamie?”
Jamie sighs. He answers, “Being the dictator’s sidekick, I officially decline this offer. This toilet sucks. Look! It’s even made out of splinter-y wood.”
“So? Look at that sink. As the dictator of Nehalym, I provide the top-secret base the most clean and bacteria-free sink.”
Jamie looks at the sink. There is slime drooping all over the sink. It’s even black, which makes it look even dirtier. “Such a lie,” he says sarcastically.
“Oh, but look at the bathtub. It fills up in five seconds, while most bathtubs in America take longer than thirty seconds to fill. Just like fast smartphone charge-times, this bathtub is a great convenience.”
“Fine.” Jamie walks up to the bathtub, staining his shoes on the poop-covered rug. Before he can even turn the water-faucet halfway, water blasts at the floor of the bathtub and shoots back up at Jamie, knocking off his glasses.
The water bounces off the sink mirror at a perfect angle, splashing the sink faucets. The sink faucets release skunk spray, which lands on the toilet-flushing-lever, affecting the smell of the bathroom, which already stinks.
“BEEP! BEEP!” an electronic alarm sounds.
“Hold on, I think I got a message,” Boss Kloss closes the bathroom door. He walks over to his circular workbench, housing several administrative electronic gadgets. Jamie follows up to check the computer after he puts his eyeglasses back on.
The bathroom pressure increases.
“Report,” Boss Kloss commands the computer.
A standard computerized female voice returns, “Systems have detected a BitCoin Wallet brought in by a ten-year-old male.”
The toilet continuously flushes.
“How should we punish him?” Jamie asks the computer.
“Standard Nehalym punishments include Baseball-bat-bashing, hose blasting-”
“No, no, no,” Jamie corrects. “A boy infiltrated our top-secret base. He also brought a BitCoin Wallet, which contains how much?”
“One-thousand, two-hundred BitCoins,” the computer replies happily.
“Oh, man,” Boss Kloss interjects. “Why don’t we just kick him out of this tower?”
The bathroom sink explodes.
The computer beeps again. “Systems have also detected a young female shouting at the boy who brought the BitCoins. The female is categorized as a lunatic, according to the past two minutes of behavior.”
A few seconds later, back at the ground-level floor, a loudspeaker instructs, “Helix Supernova and Amberlyn McKay, please exit this building immediately, otherwise we’ll literally ‘kick’ you out.”
“Wait,” Dan wonders, “Goth-Girl’s name is Amberlyn McKay?”
“Yup,” replies Amberlyn. She turns to Helix, “Sorry for shouting at you. It’s not our fault. We shouldn’t be in here anyway.”
Back in the secret lab, the toilet flushes down most of the oxygen supply.
The trio: Dan, Helix, and Amberlyn all walk out of the tower together, their faces glum and their shoulders sagging. And the doors close behind them.
Back in the secret lab, Boss Kloss checks the imaging sensors. The trio is nowhere to be seen. “All right, Jamie, those kids are out of here. Shall we lock the doors?”
The bathtub overflows.
“With pleasure,” Jamie agrees. He presses the lock button, which causes miniscule latches to lock the door that the trio walked out of.
Dan glances backward, just in time to see the latches lock the door. Now the three children are standing on the island again.
Back in the secret base, the faucet knobs implode on themselves. Brown smoke rises from the toilet. The toilet blows up, piercing wood into the walls. The bathtub drain-rim falls into the drainpipe. The bath-towels start retching under the negative air pressure. The electrical wires start wriggling out of their restraints.
Jamie hears cracking glass. He taps Boss Kloss on the shoulder, and they both turn around, astonished to see what’s happening to the bathroom.
Boss Kloss briskly turns away and picks up his smartphone from the workbench. “We’d better get this repaired.” He starts dialing the number for the Plumbers. Ironically, Boss Kloss owns the plumbing business, so he’s calling his own workers for help.
“Well hurry!” Jamie reminds him.
“Hello?” Boss Kloss speaks into the phone. “We have a bathroom emergency here.”
A plumber calling from the other side interrogates, “What kind of emergency? Buttock cramp? Pipe clogged of chest hair?”
“None of that,” Boss Kloss replies. “Our bathroom is…um…uh…let’s just say, ‘exploding’.”
“An exploding bathroom? Our plumbing business doesn’t deal with that kind of stuff. A plumber’s job is to fix pipes and such. If your bathroom exploded, there’re no pipes to fix.”
“Oh! You’re such a rat tat catted the slap met!”
“Sorry, but that doesn’t make sense. Someone else called me, so I’ve got to go!” The plumber hangs up on the phone call.
The dial-tone beeps on Boss Kloss’s side of the phone. “Hey! You can’t just-” Boss Kloss doesn’t get to finish his sentence, because the bathroom causes a fire emergency.
The smoke detector starts blaring. Actually, there’re more than ten smoke detectors per floor in the tower, so the noise gradually gets louder as more smoke detectors alarm-off.
“Get out!” Jamie shouts.
Boss Kloss runs swiftly up to Jamie, which, by the way, is probably the first time he even runs.
“I know!” Boss Kloss shakes Jamie’s body with his hands. “Why’d you have to make such a big deal of that?”
Jamie lightly jogs on his tiptoes out of the top-secret tower. Boss Kloss follows along, but due to his bulk, he stumbles like a rolling tumbleweed on the conveyor belt.
Boss Kloss attempts to reverse the conveyor belt, but fails to reach the lever. If the dictator owns such high-technology, why would he still use a lever anyway? Boss Kloss spins around, brushing against the glass panels.
“Warning. Bathroom on top floor may self-destruct at any moment. Please proceed with caution,” the female voice announces.
Uh-oh!
Boss Kloss tries to escape the tower, but he remembers that he locked the doors. Aww, man!
Basically what you just read happens in reverse motion. Boss Kloss has trouble getting up the conveyor belt, trips over, and goes back upstairs. He unlocks the door, which is just a one-inch red button, and the bathroom explodes right at that instant.
“Aaaaagh!” Boss Kloss screams as he falls off the tower. Luckily, he lands in the water. Not by the land-bridge, in the deep side.
With a big KABLOOSH! Boss Kloss bobs back up on the surface of the sea. Fat is less dense than water, so he has an easy time swimming to shore.
Chapter 16: The Puberty Surgery!
Back on the island, Dan, Helix, and Amberlyn get drenched in the water. Dan swims back to the mainland quickly, while the two others struggle to stay afloat.
Suddenly, a loudspeaker tied to a pole on the beach says in a raspy voice, “All children from ages ten to twelve, report to the HOOR for your Puberty ID Replacement.”
Helix and Amberlyn waddle up on the beach, their hair dripping and soaked. They start walking toward the monorail without saying a word.
Dan doesn’t go so fast. “Hey, hey, hey!” he says with his hands cupped around his mouth.
Helix and Amberlyn turn around. “What do you want?” Amberlyn releases her evil again. “YOU’VE MADE SOME SORT OF FAULTY PLAN, SOMETHING THAT BLEW UP OUR DESTINATION, AND NOW YOU…”
Dan runs up to Amberlyn and pushes her down on the sand. Dust flies up into the air. “Hey, Nehalym is already as corrupted as it is! That plan was to infiltrate the tower to apprehend the dictator.”
Helix argues, “Look. I have more experience than you do. I was born in Nehalym. The dictator isn’t like Adolf Hitler. He just sits around playing video games.”
“Whatever you say,” Dan agrees reluctantly. “Now what about the puberty what-you-call-it?”
Fifteen minutes later, Dan, Helix, and Amberlyn are tapping their feet, waiting in an extremely long line, a line full of every ten, eleven, and twelve-year-old in the country.
From far back, the long line looks like a casual setup for “Win Money” sweepstakes.
The three kids had joined the line after they saw the government setting up the Puberty ID Replacement Booth right here on the beach.
The Puberty ID Replacement Booth, or PIR Booth, is well…a booth. The booth is a worn-out, white, Polyethylene folding-table. There’s a big paper sign hung on the edge of the table that reads, “Ages Ten-Twelve: PIRB.”
Dan and the others walk forward. They’re almost at the front of the line now. Despite being extremely long, the line moves as fast as a bicycle chain!
“Excuse me, excuse me,” Nathan whispers. He joins the line to get his PIR. “Dan!” he shouts. Dan is already in the front of the line, so he can’t hear.
Nathan looks across the line, and everyone wears an orange ID band around their left wrist. All except one. Dan!
“DAN!” Nathan shouts.
Dan turns around and squints his eyes. “Nathan?”
“DAN!” Nathan repeats.
“What?” asks Dan.
“DAN! They’re going to kill you! DAN!”
“Huh?”
“Don’t eat that! NO!”
“Weird.” Dan has no clue about what he’s supposed to ‘eat.’ Eat? Why? What?
Dan is second place in line, so he cocks his head, curious to find out what the PIR does. He sees a blond girl holding out her forearm. A guy sitting on a chair behind the PIR Booth rips a piece of cardstock paper off her wrist, and sticks a new one on. Then the blond girl walks away as if nothing happened.
Now Dan stands directly in front of the PIR Booth. He decides to be skeptical and ask, “What’s this for?”
“Oh,” the person at the PIR Booth explains, “the Puberty ID Replacement is for young adolescents. We replace your current ID tag with an updated ID tag that records reproductive health.”
Dan nods, trying to seem socially normal. But he doesn’t have an ID tag.
The PIR person reaches out to Dan’s arm, but Dan isn’t wearing a piece of cardstock. The PIR man gasps.
He produces a walkie-talkie from his pocket, and says in a frozen tone, “Jim Kloss, come in, do you read me?”
The walkie-talkie flares an inaudible voice.
“Jim Kloss, I’ve got a rouge agent here named Daniel Slap-Jack. Ten-year-old boy, enters Nehalym illegally in classified!” the PIR man reports.
“What?” Dan asks, both confused and angry.
The PIR man chuckles, and explains, “Everyone in Nehalym needs to wear an ID band around their wrists. That identifies them as a Nehalym citizen.”
“Then how’d you know my name?” Dan asks.
The PIR man laughs again. “I don’t need an identifier to know who you are. You’re the bloke who broke into the jail and released all the prisoners! Don’t you know how many banks have been robbed?”
“Phhhttt! That’s your fault, since the banks have zero security.”
“But that’s not the point. The point is, you’re a felon. We require you, and I presume your family, to have ID’s, but you and them didn’t, did they? Did you? Nope.”
The PIR person grabs a bottle of white powder and pushes it toward Dan on the table. “Eat this. Just chuck it down,” the PIR guy says scantily.
Dan remembers what Nathan said. “DON’T EAT THAT!” echoes through his head. It must be poison, he thinks.
“HEY-YAH!” Dan shrieks as he kicks the PIR booth table down. But he doesn’t make a run for it.
Dan tries to prove to the PIR person that he won’t fall for “eat this” pranks. He does that by doing Karate. Or what he thinks is Karate. He does an unbalanced kick and falls over. The people in the front of the PIR line chortle.
Dan stands back up, and prepares to punch. “HEE-YAW!” he mimics what professional Karate fighters yell. The people waiting in line all scoff again. Dan actually doesn’t know anything about Karate. In fact, the fake Karate makes him look like a wimp.
“Yah-hey…” Dan says in a quieter voice as he pretends to do a head-butt. “No, I mean hey-yah!” He stops talking when the line of people laughs again. “Never mind.” Dan dashes off.
After the old top-secret lab in the tower was demolished, Jamie and Boss Kloss made use of the lower levels as their new secret lab. This time, of course, it didn’t include a ridiculous bathroom invention.
Boss Kloss has installed a very, very heavy, solid wood entrance-door to the secret lab. The installation didn’t take much time because the solid wood door is a slab of birch wood cut from an old tree. And they do have chainsaws in Nehalym.
“Jim?” Jamie calls as he knocks on the solid, wooden door of Boss Kloss’s new secret lab.
Boss Kloss is slouching on his couch, playing a video game, fiddling his thumbs like crazy. The name of the video game is Grand Theft Auto V.
“Jim?” Jamie says again. Instead of barging into the new secret lab, he decides to be polite and ask to come in.
Boss Kloss has set the volume of the game console up to one-hundred percent per Decibel, so he can’t hear Jamie calling him. Boss Kloss presses the yellow button on his game controller. His virtual game character punches his own virtual car.
Jamie pushes opens the door. It’s much heavier than he thinks. He exerts his whole body’s force to push the door sideways. Right as he walks into the secret lab, the door slams shut again.
Jamie walks up in front of Boss Kloss, who’s now eating a pound-bag of potato-chips. “Hey, you’re the dictator of this country, right?” Jamie asks rhetorically.
Boss Kloss doesn’t hear. All he hears is the game SFX sound effects. He presses the green button and the red button at the same time, and his virtual character jumps off a cliff.
Jamie instinctively switches off the game. He repeats, “You’re the dictator of this country, right?” Before Boss Kloss can answer, Jamie concludes, “You don’t seem like one. Dictators don’t sit around playing games. They need to take matters into their own hands.”
For the sake of language, Boss Kloss explains in a matter-of-fact manner, “The definition of dictate is to tell people what to do. I tell people what to do, not do it myself.”
“Bad news,” Jamie declares.
“What?” Boss Kloss asks.
Jamie is shocked. “Have you seriously been playing Grand Theft Auto for five hours?”
“Uh, yeah!”
“Well I’ve got news for you, buddy. There’s a kid named Daniel Slap-Jack, and he’s on the loose. You’re the leader of a country. You have power. You’ve got to do something!”
“Fine,” Boss Kloss sighs. He stands up clumsily and walks up to the intercom microphone. The intercom broadcasts important news to people all over Nehalym through loudspeakers. He speaks loudly, “Attention! Go catch that kid!” Then he plops back on the couch and turns on the game console.
“That’s it?” Jamie asks angrily.
“Yup,” Boss Kloss replies. “I’ve done my duty.”
Jamie sighs, disappointed at the now lazy dictator. He starts grunting as he tries to pull the door back open. Jamie takes revenge by pulling the door all the way open ninety degrees, and then letting go harshly. BANG!
“Hey!” Boss Kloss ramparts. “What was that for, you Freaky-Deekie?” He gets up off the couch, but the craggy wooden shed is collapsing already. But as he tries to get back at Jamie, part of the secret lab’s ceiling falls straight down on him.
Dan is still running. He sees a black motorcycle parked next to a skyscraper lobby. This must be the only motorcycle I’ve ever seen in Nehalym, he thinks.
Dan hops on the motorcycle after he’s too tired from running. He looks down, and there’s a kick-starter lever in the foot-grasper. He kicks the lever, and a loud sound fires out from the motorcycle. The engine must be very powerful!
“Hey! Get him!” hundreds of Killers yell angrily. Their eyebrows are very pointy and symmetrical, sort of…robot-like. The Killers stomp their feet and come closer. But very slowly. They’re all holding Uranium Baseball bats.
Before Dan can get the motorbike going, his instinct stops himself. “What’s that abbreviation again?” he wonders, tapping his fingers in quick succession. “Oh yeah! KFC!” He takes a deep breath, and bellows, “KFC! Everyone get far away. Don’t run down the corridor behind me, though!”
Dan turns the right-hand acceleration knob on the motorcycle handlebars. But he gets a bit of wheel-spin skidding, which is a good thing for him. Dust blasts out behind the back tire, and the Killers in front cough and back up. The Killers standing in the second row fall over, leading the Killers to fall backward like a domino-effect.
He rides the motorcycle back to the PIR line, where everyone is running around in random directions. Helix, Nathan, and Amberlyn hop on the back of the motorcycle. It’s good there are covers above the wheels!
Dan shifts his position forward to the edge of the seat so everyone has room. “Be careful,” he reminds them.
Soon, Dan, Amberlyn, Nathan, and Helix are approaching the beach. The same beach with the tower-island next to it.
“Dan, slow down!” Amberlyn orders.
Dan tries to turn the left-hand-handle-knob, but it won’t budge. Now he figures it out. The dictator and his people own this motorcycle. This is a complete prank motorbike. You can’t even de-accelerate!
“Dang it!” Dan whines. “Wait. Friends, I’m going faster.”
“What?” Amberlyn, Helix, and Nathan exclaim in unison.
Dan explains, “This motorcycle can’t slow down. We have to go faster to bust the engine!”
“Bust?” Nathan says. “Dude, destruction isn’t the only way to stop something that’s malfunctioning.”
Dan ignores him. VROOM! The motorcycle goes faster. Amberlyn’s hair gets caught in the wind. VROOM! VROOM! VROOM! Dan turns the acceleration knob. The engine meter points to the number seven, which means seven-thousand engine cycles per minute. It’s very dangerous for a gasoline-powered motorcycle to go that fast.
PJAW! The motorcycle explodes like a fiery inferno. Motorcycle mechanics are flying out in all directions and explode in the gray, cloudy sky. Luckily, nobody’s clothes catch on fire because the motorcycle just plunges into the ocean.
And when I say that Dan is a skillful swimmer, he’s good at swimming above water. He’s not-so-great at holding his breath underwater. But, as I just wrote, Dan can easily swim to the top. And he does.
“Dudes!” Dan shouts. His head is above the water, but none of the other kids’ heads are. His body under the water feels strangely cold. “Morons! Idiots! Retards! Doofuses! Sucke-”
Amberlyn is the first one to get up above the water. She punches Dan’s mouth, but not at full strength.
Dan says, “You know how boys aren’t allowed to hit girls? At least, it’s not polite in my country. But why doesn’t it go the other way around?”
Amberlyn shrugs, Helix and Nathan bobs above the water. Their hair is soaking wet. Helix shakes his head quickly like a dog drying off, and sea-water splashes onto Amberlyn’s face.
Amberlyn doesn’t react. The three other kids look puzzled. Amberlyn explains, “I get that a lot. ‘Dictator made me be a fashion model for a whole week, last month. He made me do it on the beach when it was cold, and dumped soda-pop in my hair if I don’t do it right.”
“Hey!” Nathan announces as he walks backward onto the beach. “Good news! That evil dictator is dead.” He nudges Amberlyn on the shoulder, and she looks up at the tower. The upper level looks like something exploded in it. Which the bathroom did. A large slab of glass and drywall is hanging over the lower level.
“We heard you,” the Killers approach in defensive crouches. Or more like…offensive crouches. They’re holding Bismuth Baseball bats. Although those bats aren’t to be considered for sports use anymore.
Dan whispers to Nathan, and Nathan nods affirmatively. He rushes into the collapsed tower.
Dan, Helix, and Amberlyn run up to the Killers. Dan does a fake Karate combo-move. The Killers in front laugh hard. The head Killer tries to lift the “Baseball” bat, but solid Bismuth is much too heavy. His head slams against the sandy beach, making a big “SPLUNK” noise.
And something very surprising indeed, happens. The Killer’s skull cracks open. Well, it isn’t actually a skull, because it’s made of polycarbonate.
Robots! The “Killers” are android robots!
Dan has an idea. He dashes past the Killers and tries to tiptoe across the land-bridge. The Killers try to chase him down, but they fall into the ocean ad electrocute.
“Hey!” Amberlyn calls. “What’re you doi-”
“I’ll take that,” a Killer declares. He starts grabbing the tank-top that Amberlyn is wearing. “Unauthorized material must be penetrated immediately.”
Helix stares blankly at the Amberlyn, and then looks at the Killer who attempts to destroy her shirt. “Yup,” Helix says. “They’re definitely robots.”
Another Killer glances at Helix. Helix frowns, “Uh…”
“Halt! Who goes there?” that Killer orders coldly.
Helix takes the Killer’s speech literally. He tries to be sassy to make the Killer argue with him uselessly. Helix replies, “Who goes there? Me. I’m standing here. My name is Helix Supernova.”
“I said, ‘HALT, WHO GOES THERE’?” the Killer repeats.
Helix replies sassily again, “I’ve already halted. I’m not moving. I thought you guys had an index of every person in the country. But anyways, ‘name’s Helix Supernova.”
The Killer gasps. Then he yells, “Aaaaagh! WHY, YOU LITTLE-” He pricks Helix in the stomach with his bony index-finger. “WHO GOES HERE?”
Dan arrives on the island, and he tries to enter the collapsed tower. But the door is still intact. And the door is very heavy. Very, very heavy. A much more informative method of describing the door is, “impossible to open.”
Dan yanks on the door, his body shaking back and forth. His hair is also being dragged forwards and backwards because of the air-resistance. “Why this stupid door?” Dan exclaims.
Nathan hears Dan’s voice. But the Killers are blocking his way, so Nathan takes a big leap into the water and tries to swim.
The Killers try to chase Nathan down, but they can’t swim. The density of the water causes the Killers to trip over and fall into the water. Seawater enters the Killers’ mouths, and they electrocute and instantly fail. ZAPPP!
Nathan’s clothes are soaked, and suddenly he feels swimming to the island will be a very daunting task.
Nathan can’t swim very well, so he has to do a tremendous thrusting movement to stay afloat every time he starts sinking. He swims all the way to the east side of the island.
“Dan!” Nathan calls.
“Just help me open the dumb door already!” Dan mutters angrily.
Nathan frowns and shakes his head. “That’s all because we haven’t been working together!”
Dan’s facial expression is still very smug.
“We all need to use teamwork!” Nathan continues. “All this time, we’ve been running around, doing all sorts of different things. We need to work together!”
“So let’s open the stupid door together,” Dan says.
“What’s the purpose of that?”
“NATHAN, JUST HELP ME PULL THAT HEAVY DOOR OPEN, YOU RETARDED RUNNING HORSE!”
A couple of Killers run towards Dan. Dan flinches, and in the blink of an eye, those Killers tumble down in the water. That sparks a light-bulb in his mind.
Dan takes a deep breath, and shouts at the top of his lungs, “HEY! COME AND CATCH ME! I BREAK THE RULES! YOU GUYS ARE SO IDIOTIC! COME ON! RUN TOWARDS ME!”
The Killers don’t budge. They stay put exactly where they are on the beach.
Nathan slaps Dan in the face. “You think they’d fall for that again and again? The Killers learn from their mistakes.”
Amberlyn and Helix distracted the Killers pretty well, and now they’ve gone back to their own homes.
Helix kept sassing the Killers around with the “Halt, who goes there?” statement. Amberlyn tricked the Killers with the good-old “look over there” prank.
Nathan and Dan don’t expect their team of four to split up, but Dan stays stubborn.
“Now that Helix and Amberlyn are gone,” Dan suggests, “why don’t we just open the door to the broken building without them? Surely we can open a door. Just open it. How simple is that?”
Jamie Grimm has about the same physical strength as two children combined, and he was able to open the door. Standing by the fact, Nathan and Dan pull open the door. They take twice as much time as Jamie did, because their shoes keep skidding across the sandy island.
The Killers don’t chase after them this time. If they swim, they electrocute. If they pick up the Baseball bats, they crack their plastic heads open. If they walk on the land-bridge, they fall off, and they electrocute.
Dan is curious to see what’s inside, so he lets go of the door and steps through the doorway.
When Dan ran into the building, Nathan was still holding the door and didn’t expect Dan to let go. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Nathan exclaims quickly. He fumbles into the broken tower, nearly tripping over a large slab of concrete. The door slams shut, blowing a strong gust of wind at Nathan and Dan. The gust of wind combined with the force of the door slamming causes a bundle of electronics to fall from the broken ceiling.
“So…he died?” Dan ponders hesitantly. The large slab of concrete isn’t laying flat across the floor. There appears to be something under the slab of concrete, probably human-sized.
“You mean the dictator? He died?” Nathan replies.
“Well duh,” Dan says. “There’s nobody in this room.”
A faint buzz. Then a crackle. A voice speaks, “The identity of a young human male named Daniel Slap-Jack has been detected. He has reportedly infiltrated this tower earlier today. This message will be sent to the Killers.”
Nathan gapes angrily at Dan. Dan thinks Nathan doesn’t blink for thirty seconds straight! “Dude!” Nathan blurts.
“What?” Dan makes an excuse. “Like, it wasn’t my fault. Amberlyn and Helix also infiltrated this place.”
“So you guys are responsible for the dictator getting crushed?” Nathan confirms.
“Um, no,” Dan guesses unsurely. “When Helix, Amberlyn, and I infiltrated the tower, we kept hearing bathroom sounds. So maybe the bathroom blew up or something? Or maybe the door was so heavy it knocked the whole thing over.”
Besides the fact that Dan guessed it, what he said is exactly what happened to the tower that’s now only one story high.
“Why don’t we tell that computerized voice to-” Nathan mimics the talking style of the computerized voice. “-command every one of the Killers to altogether shut down indefinitely!”
Dan walks over the top of the concrete slab. He smirks at Nathan. He walks over to the dictator’s computer screen, and says, “Um…computer! Turn off Killers!”
The computer screen is black and stays that way.
Dan tries again. “Voice command!”
Nothing happens.
Dan repeats, “Enable voice command!”
Nothing happens.
“Turn on computerized voice!”
Nothing happens.
“Turn on the option that lets you talk to the computer!”
Nathan starts to chortle like a choking skunk. “You can’t tell the computer to turn on the feature that lets you tell it to do stuff,” he points out.
“Nathan, do you see that computer in the corner?” Dan asks.
“Yes,” Nathan answers. “It’s still intact.”
“Great! Now I need you to drag the icon.”
Nathan picks up the computer mouse, and literally physically drags it around the monitor’s screen. “That didn’t do anything!”
Dan repeats, “Drag it across the desktop!”
Nathan literally drags his mouse across the broken tabletop. “That didn’t do anything!”
Dan is shocked. “It didn’t? Now here’s the plan: open up the spreadsheet window, and go to the table labeled ‘REFERENCE’.”
Nathan spreads a sheet of newspaper across the physical broken window in the secret lab. Then he takes a long time to look around the broken table for a “REFERENCE” label.
“Nathan?” Dan says. “Are you still there?”
“I couldn’t find it,” Nathan replies.
“Of course you didn’t! You know what? Aaaaagh!”
“But what are we supposed to do?” Dan growls angrily. “Why are we even standing in the dictator’s lab? What’s the point?”
Suddenly, a high-pitched, rumbling noise comes from the door.
“What’s that?” Nathan shudders.
It took a lot of effort to push open the heavy, solid-wooden door. Dan doesn’t think it’s worthwhile to open the door again. Dan scoffs. “Aww, nothing. It’s probably just an old-man with his lawn-mower.”
The noise gets louder.
“Who would mow the lawn next to the dictator’s lab?” Nathan interrogates. “There isn’t even a lawn at all.”
“An old-man, that’s who.” Dan jokes. “I told you, it’s an old-man with his lawn-mower!”
But now there’s another obstacle for Dan. Internet memes pop up that joke about what’s under your underwear.
