The Creature in Room #YTH-125

by Mark Young

  Thanks for your pure excitement whenever we talked about the characters and stories. This is for you, Joelle and Jill. —M. Y.

  CHAPTER 1 Half Brothers, All the Time

  “Attention, students! Today our lunch staff accidentally used the recipe for interdimensional meatloaf instead of international meatloaf. If your meatloaf has disappeared from your plate unexpectedly, you may choose another lunch special.”

  The loud chatter in the Franken-Sci High cafeteria died down during the announcement, and rose again to a dull roar when it had finished.

  Newton Warp looked down at the square of gray meat on his plate. He picked up his fork and attempted to stab the loaf, but it shimmered and disappeared because it could.

  “Rats!” Newton cried.

  Next to him Higgy, his roommate, burped loudly. “I ate mine before it could escape to another dimension,” he said.

  “How do you know it won’t still escape?” Newton asked.

  “What do you mean?” Higgy asked.

  “Well, you might have absorbed it into your—your goo,” Newton began. (He’d been going to say “stomach,” but Higgy Vollington was made of green protoplasm, and Newton wasn’t entirely sure his friend had a stomach.) “But it could still move to another dimension once it’s inside you, right?”

  “You may be right,” Higgy agreed. “Then I’ll just be hungry again! Better get something else to eat.” He slid off the bench and made his way back to the lunch line, making a pffft, pffft, pffft sound as he moved.

  Across the table Newton’s friend Shelly Ravenholt pushed her plate toward him. “Want to share my salad? It’s pretty good.”

  “That’s okay,” Newton replied. “I’m not that hungry anyway. Those protein pancakes at breakfast filled me up.”

  At the end of the table, a brain in a jar trained its eyeballs on Newton.

  “I don’t know why everybody makes such a fuss about eating,” said Odifin Pinkwad. “It seems like such a bother. And you have to do it three times a day, every single day.”

  “Five,” corrected Rotwang Conkell, a tall, skinny boy who had just sat down at the table. His plate was piled with a mountain of nuggets.

  The robot student sitting next to Shelly frowned. “Well, I don’t eat either, but I’m glad we get a break three times a day,” said Theremin Rozika. “Otherwise we’d just have three more classes.”

  “Didn’t I hear that your dad was working on artificial taste buds, Theremin?” Shelly asked. “That would be cool. Then you could see what you’re missing. You too, Odifin.”

  “I can assure you, I’m not missing anything,” Odifin said.

  Higgy came back and slapped a tray of purple gelatin onto the table. “It helps to be nice to the lunch ladies,” Higgy said. “They gave me extra helpings!”

  “They prefer to be called ‘dining engineers,’ ” Shelly reminded him.

  A feeling of happy calm came over Newton as he looked at all his friends.

  Just a few months ago, Shelly and Theremin found me in the library Brain Bank, with no memory of who I was or where I’d come from, Newton thought. I thought I’d never fit in or find out what my story was. But now…

  But now Newton was closer than ever to learning the truth. First he and his friends had discovered that Newton had special abilities. He could instantly grow gills if he jumped into water. He could camouflage himself if he was in danger. He could change his appearance to mimic others. His sticky hands and feet allowed him to climb up walls and stick to ceilings. And he was discovering new things all the time.

  Newton had done his best to keep those special abilities a secret. At the same time, he had tried to find out the truth about his past. Headmistress Mumtaz seemed nice, but whenever he questioned her, she’d say she couldn’t tell Newton anything, which was strange. Then a mysterious green-haired man had started following him around. The man had turned out to be Professor Flubitus, who said he’d come from the future to protect Newton, because Newton was somehow—in a way he did not yet understand—very important to the future of the school.

  This was interesting, but Newton didn’t necessarily want to know about his future—he wanted to know about his past. Finally Flubitus had revealed that Newton had a relative at Franken-Sci High. After an intense search, and some DNA testing, Newton had discovered who that relative was: Odifin the brain in a jar, was his half brother!

  Newton gazed over at Odifin, who was talking to Rotwang. Odifin thought about what he wanted to say, and then his words came out of a speaker attached to his jar.

  “I hear they’re showing a movie called The Thing with Two Heads in the gym tonight,” Odifin said to Rotwang. “We should go!” Then Odifin looked at Newton. “Want to come, Bro?”

  “Thanks, Odifin, but I need to check my schedule,” Newton replied. “I think I have a homework assignment to do.”

  Theremin’s eyes flashed red. “ ‘Bro’? Aren’t you guys half brothers? Or is it more like quarter brothers?”

  Newton heard an edge in his robot friend’s voice, and suspected that Theremin was a little bit jealous about the fact that Newton and Odifin were brothers of any kind. Newton understood where Theremin was coming from. Until recently Odifin had been a rude, mean kid who wasn’t particularly nice to Newton and his friends. Newton and Odifin had only become friendly right before the big news.

  On the other hand, even though Newton and Theremin’s friendship had gotten off to a rocky start, they’d already formed a stronger bond than Newton and Odifin. Newton guessed that Theremin’s jealous side was showing through, and maybe this time it was for a good reason. All Newton had wanted since the moment he’d woken up in the school library’s Brain Bank was to have a family, and now he had found a family member. It didn’t matter to him that Odifin was a brain in jar, or that they weren’t related as much as brothers with shared parents would be. Odifin was family, and the first family member Newton ever had.

  “You obviously need to brush up on your genetics, Theremin,” Odifin snapped at the robot. “Newton and I share the amount of DNA you would expect of half brothers. And Professor Flubitus supported that conclusion himself. So Newton and I are half brothers, all the time!”

  Shelly took out her tablet. “That reminds me. We haven’t finished our brother similarity survey,” she said. “We’re on question twenty-one. Can we do a few more before the next class?”

  “More questions, Shelly?” Odifin asked. “They are getting a bit tiring.”

  “Well, I can’t get accurate results without at least a hundred questions,” Shelly pointed out.

  Newton was getting tired of the questions too, but Shelly had helped him so much with everything that he wanted to make her happy.

  “It’s okay,” Newton said. “Let’s do a few more, Bro.”

  “Fine,” Odifin said. “Continue, Shelly.”

  “Okay,” Shelly said, scrolling through the questions. “Do you prefer sleeping late or waking up early? Are you a night owl or an early riser?”

  “I prefer sleeping late, I guess,” Newton replied.

  “I wake up at precisely five fifteen every morning,” Odifin replied. “I don’t have superfluous limbs and organs that need cellular regeneration every night, so I don’t need much sleep.”

  Shelly nodded. “Mmm-hmm. Next question. What is your favorite color?”

  “Well, I like gray because of my gray matter, of course,” Odifin answered quickly. “But green is my favorite color.”

  Newton thought about what color made him the happiest. Maybe it was the color of Shelly’s eyes, or Theremin’s shiny silver arms, or maybe the blue of the sky outside? Then he thought of all the leafy green plants on the island, and how lately he had taken t
o going outside and, when nobody was looking, practicing camouflaging with them. It felt really peaceful to him to be in nature.

  “Green,” Newton replied.

  “A match! I was wondering if it would be another difference,” Shelly remarked, pressing her tablet screen to document it.

  “Can’t brothers be from the same family but like completely different things?” Odifin asked.

  “Yes, indeed,” Higgy piped up. “Take my little brother, Wellington, for example. He’s always polite, he never breaks the rules, and he keeps his room clean, unlike me. Can you believe it? It’s like we’re not even from the same planet, let alone the same parents!”

  “I’m just collecting data,” Shelly said. “Maybe finding out what Odifin and Newton have in common can help us figure out more about how they’re related. I’m not sure it will help, but it’s worth a try.”

  “It’s a good idea,” Newton assured her, and then he paused. He spotted something out of the corner of his eye—an ear!

  The ear was all by itself, and not attached to anyone’s head. It had tiny feet stuck to the bottom of it. It hopped off the bench of their lunchroom table and began to walk across the floor.

  “Does anybody else see that ear?” Newton asked, pointing.

  Shelly zoomed in closer on the object using the magnifier in her glasses. “That’s not a real ear! That’s a remote spy speaker from the Junior Mad Scientist toy line! I had one when I was a kid.”

  “Who would be spying on us?” Newton wondered.

  “Do you really have to ask?” Shelly replied, and she stood up and followed the ear. Newton and the others followed her.

  The ear led them right to the table of Mimi Crowninshield. Mimi scooped up the ear and shoved it into her pocket.

  “What gives, Mimi? Why are you spying on us?” Shelly asked.

  Mimi innocently blinked her blue eyes. “Why would I want to spy on you and your friends? I’ve got better things to do.”

  Shelly pointed to Mimi’s pocket and said, “We saw your remote spy speaker. Admit it. From the day Newton first showed up here, you’ve been convinced that he’s some kind of spy, trying to steal your family’s secrets.”

  Mimi smiled. “I might have been suspicious at first, but not anymore,” she said sweetly. “And we all know that this little spy speaker is just a kid’s toy. Besides, if you had anything to hide, you wouldn’t be talking about it in the cafeteria, would you?”

  “Um, no,” Shelly answered hesitantly.

  “Great,” Mimi said. “Then it’s okay if I let everyone in school know that Odifin and Newton are brothers, right?”

  “Half brothers,” Theremin corrected her.

  “Half brothers,” Mimi repeated. “Although, I knew all along. I mean, you look practically identical.”

  The kids at Mimi’s table laughed.

  “Very funny, Mimi,” Newton said. “Sure, you can tell everyone that Odifin and I are related.”

  Why not? he thought. Flubitus hadn’t told him to keep it a secret.

  “You tell her, Bro,” Odifin said, and they all turned away and walked back to their table.

  “I don’t care what she says,” Shelly said in a low voice. “She’s always been suspicious of you, Newton, and she still is. We’ll have to be more careful where we talk about your…”

  Her voice trailed off, but Newton knew what she meant. They’d have to keep hiding the fact that Newton had special abilities. Abilities that meant that maybe he wasn’t exactly human, or at least not fully human. That he was some kind of—

  The holographic head of Headmistress Mumtaz appeared in the middle of the cafeteria, interrupting his thoughts.

  “Good afternoon, Franken-Sci High students!” she said. “I’ve got a special announcement for the freshman class!”

  CHAPTER 2 The Future Is Now

  The noise in the cafeteria died down as Ms. Mumtaz spoke.

  “Thanks to a generous donation from the Crowninshield family, the entire freshman class will be going on a very special class field trip,” she announced, “to the newly opened Museum of the Future in New York City!”

  A holographic image of the museum appeared in place of Ms. Mumtaz’s face: a five-story building with no straight sides, but with walls that rippled like waves. The structure gleamed with polished steel, and glass windows. The students began to chatter and buzz with excitement.

  “There’s a new exhibit called The Future Is Now, which highlights ideas from science fiction that have become science fact,” the headmistress continued. More images popped up: robots, a submarine, a nuclear power tower. “This exhibit should inspire our freshmen for the Idiosyncratic Inventions course that is required next semester. And I’m told that some of the inventors featured in the exhibit are actually graduates of Franken-Sci High.”

  A cheer went up from the students.

  “The trip is one week from today,” the headmistress continued. “More details will be sent to you all on your tablets tomorrow. This is a wonderful learning opportunity for our freshmen, and I know I’m looking forward to it!”

  The holographic face disappeared, and everyone began talking loudly.

  “Where is New York City?” Newton asked his friends.

  “It’s in the US,” Theremin said. A red 3-D map projected from his chest. “Our island is here,” he said, and an X appeared on an island in the ocean. “And New York City is here.” Another X appeared on the coast of a large landmass.

  Newton stared at the map. “Wow,” he said. “I didn’t realize the world was so big!”

  “I forgot that you’ve never left the island,” Shelly said.

  “He’s not the only one,” Theremin reminded her. “My dad created me in his lab here, and I’ve never left. Dad doesn’t believe in vacations. He says only weak-minded people need to take time off from doing nothing with their lives, so that they can do more nothing on a beach somewhere.”

  “The only two places I’ve been are here and Mom’s house,” Odifin added. “Mom always said the world wouldn’t be able to appreciate someone as unique and special as me. But as I got older, I realized she was trying to protect me. Mad scientists are only a small portion of the world’s population. We’re different, and people can be cruel about things they don’t understand. I wish it wasn’t true, but it usually is.”

  Odifin sounded a little sad, and Newton felt for his half brother. At least Newton could hide the things that made him different. To everyone else in the school, he was just another ordinary human… unless they saw him do something strange by mistake. Odifin, on the other hand, didn’t look like anyone else in school.

  “I don’t think that’s true everywhere,” Shelly said. She turned to Higgy. “You and your family live in London, right? And nobody there gives you a hard time about the way you look.”

  “That’s because we live a nocturnal lifestyle,” Higgy replied. “We all cover up our goo, but in the daylight it still freaks people out. Every time I go out, people stare at me. I hate being stared at so much! That’s why I still cover up here at school. I know that the school is different from the outside world, but I didn’t want to risk being stared at again.”

  Higgy was referring to the usual getup that he wore every day: rubber boots, a trench coat, a scarf, bandages wrapped around his face, goggles over his eyes, and a winter beanie covering the top of his head. The outfit hid all of his green protoplasm, but the end result was a not-quite-human-looking boy. The only time Newton had ever seen Higgy not covered in clothes was in their dorm room, or when Higgy roamed the school’s underground tunnels at night.

  “We mostly only go out after it gets dark,” Higgy continued. “Dad and Mum do their experiments in our lab at home, and run errands at night. That’s easy to do in a big city like London, where a lot of shops stay open late. And Wellington and I go to Miss Ravenwood’s Night School for the Perpetually Pale. That is, I used to go there, until I got kicked out. Then I came to Franken-Sci High.”

  “I’m glad
you’re here with us,” Newton said.

  “So I’m going to tell Mumtaz that I can’t go on the trip,” Higgy said.

  “Really, Higgy?” Newton asked. “It’ll be more fun with you there.”

  “Being stared at is not fun,” Higgy said.

  Theremin looked at Odifin. “What about you? Aren’t you worried you’re going to get a lot of unwanted attention?”

  “Maybe, but I’m really excited to see New York City!” Odifin cried. “The skyscrapers! The subway! Broadway! The Big Apple!”

  Newton frowned. “You mean they grow mutant fruit there?”

  “No. It’s just a nickname, because… actually, I don’t know why,” Odifin admitted. “But I don’t want to miss out on this trip!”

  “Maybe you could wear some kind of disguise,” Shelly suggested.

  “Yeah. Rotwang could put a lampshade on you, and you’ll look just like a lamp,” Theremin said.

  “Very funny, Theremin,” Odifin said with sarcasm in his voice. “Anyway, you shouldn’t talk. You’re going to stand out too!”

  “Didn’t you see the holograms?” Theremin asked. “There are going to be robots at the exhibit. If anybody asks, I’ll just say I’m wearing a robot costume. Get it? They’ll think it’s a costume but it’ll just be me.”

  Shelly wasn’t sure that would work. “I’m sure Ms. Mumtaz will have a plan so everyone can go on this trip, regardless of how they look,” she said. “The school rarely goes on field trips, because we work so hard to keep this place a secret from the outside world.”

  “Yes, I’m sure it will all work out,” Odifin said hopefully.

  “I don’t care if it works out or not,” Higgy said, sulking. “Have a—buuuuuuuurp!—good time without me. I’m not going.”

  Then the bell rang, and it was time to head to class. Newton watched Higgy walk away. Normally the fart noises coming from his goo squishing in his boots sounded joyful and upbeat after he ate: pffffFFFFT! pffffFFFFT! pffffFFFFT! But now they sounded sad: pfffffffft, pfffffffft, pffffffft.