Kingdom Keepers Boxed Set

by Ridley Pearson

  philitup: does that include the music system?

  [ ]: i would imagine, follow me. and don’t write anything until I tell you to do so. it is not beyond consideration that the overtakers are monitoring vmk. they should never be underestimated, they are devious and powerful, and it’s apparent they will stop at nothing to control the kingdoms, we must be vigilant.

  Philby didn’t type anything. He guided his avatar toward the door and waited as instructed.

  Wayne approached. Asterisks appeared in his speech bubble. The door swung open.

  Philby’s avatar followed the white-headed figure out into the hallway. Wayne knew his way around VMK, taking Philby to places he’d rarely visited. They entered a private room that didn’t look particularly interesting. Philby realized this was a trick: the less interesting it looked, the less interested anyone would be in spending time in there. Wayne coded the door shut and then approached the far wall. Again, asterisks filled his speech bubble. A door swung open, and the landscape changed considerably. The walls and floors were silver and black. Dark blue signs with white lettering acted as trail guides:

  They turned left, following the signs to the Animal Kingdom.

  Access through the door marked AK CONTROL required yet another code from Wayne. The door opened, revealing a room with a flow chart projected on a large wall. It reminded Philby of a war room, like he’d seen in movies. The flow chart showed: MECHANICALS, SECURITY, STRUCTURES, ATTRACTIONS, GATES/ACCESS, BACKSTAGE. Under some of these were smaller tides like ASIA, AFRICA, CAMP MM, DINO L. It looked like a giant outline or family tree, with branches connecting a main tide to its smaller subtitles.

  Wayne’s avatar climbed into a cage on the end of a long mechanical arm. It reminded Philby of the cherry pickers road crews used to trim trees or repair phone poles. Wayne pulled the door to the cage shut, and Philby watched as he pushed levers and the cage rose to pass in front of the titles on the flow chart.

  He maneuvered them to stop at MECHANICALS. Wayne reached out and pushed against the screen. Immediately, the projection on the wall changed. Now MECHANICALS was listed at the top, and there were dozens of subcategories, including—Philby noticed—PUBLIC ADDRESS SYSTEM.

  Wayne reached out and tapped the title.

  The lettering folded back, opening an entrance like a window in the wall. Wayne opened the cage door and led them through this new opening in the wall and into a massively complex room. Philby gasped. He heard his own voice and only then was reminded of where he was: standing in a small hut, in Camp Minnie-Mickey. For the past few minutes he had almost become his avatar. He’d been transported. He hadn’t remembered where he was. Now, glancing behind him, he looked out through the open doorway into Camp Minnie-Mickey and reminded himself to remain alert; the Overtakers were not to be underestimated.

  He then looked to the screen; Wayne was waiting for him.

  [ ]: we’re safe now.

  Philby moved his avatar forward. He faced a large sound-mixer projected on the floor in front of him. He studied it, realizing this was a photographic image, probably of the actual soundboard somewhere in the Animal Kingdom’s control room. And, like the real thing, the virtual soundboard would not only allow him to change volume or inputs throughout the Park, it also displayed cables to switching stations and the hundreds of speakers placed throughout the Animal Kingdom. With a click of a button, he could then overlay either a satellite image or a map of the Park, making it easy to identify the exact location of the various sound-system elements. Wayne was right: it offered an easy method for troubleshooting problems or identifying problem spots without being in the Park.

  Slowly, he got the hang of the technology.

  philitup: whoa…

  [ ]: no one ever accused the imagineers of being stupid.

  philitup: this is incredible, i can follow any wire anywhere.

  [ ]: and perform tests on it i should think that was the purpose after all: long-distance testing and repair.

  philitup: how much time do i have?

  [ ]: no one will bother us here, take as long as you like, since i’ve gone into hiding, i have nothing but time.

  Philby’s main interest was the separation of the Park’s background music, divided into the five sound areas. Each area had its own output, volume, and tone controls. He located the output wires on the back of the mixer—virtual speaker wires leading out into the Park.

  philitup: what are the chances the Overtakers have jez locked up in the sound control room? she could input her iPod into this mixer pretty easily.

  [ ]: i would doubt that but i can go check if you like.

  philitup: check, how?

  [ ]: all the security cameras are on the screen out there, where we just were: the main screen, i can go into the security control room and view any camera in the park.

  Philby had an idea. He wondered…

  philitup: some of those cameras connect to the Conservation Station, the TVs that visitors can control.

  [ ]: the AnimalCams. yes.

  philitup: could i reroute all the security cameras to one of the AnimalCams?

  [ ]: if you know what you’re doing, i suspect you could.

  philitup: I do all the cable TV stuff at our house, i can probably figure it out.

  [ ]: let’s finish up here, and i’ll take you over there.

  Philby spent several minutes following the speaker cables, quickly determining that from where he and the others had heard “Under the Sea” playing over the system, they’d actually been part of the Asia speaker system. He rechecked the soundboard, looking to see if he could explain Jez’s iPod having played over the system. There were so many knobs and dials he didn’t know exactly what he was looking at. He’d used GarageBand on his own computer, but this was far more complex.

  philitup: she’s either being kept in the control room or somewhere in asia.

  [ ]: asia is big.

  philitup: tell me about it. I’m done here, can you show me the security room?

  He felt excited as Wayne led him back out to the caged lift. Wayne directed the cage to the SECURITY title, selected the menu, and then navigated to the camera control room. Soon Philby’s avatar had again passed through a window in the wall and was standing in front of an enormous second wall of TV screens. There had to be hundreds of them. There was a control board here as well. It only took him a few minutes to connect a master cable from the video control board to one of the AnimalCam console inputs. This fed all the security cameras into a single AnimalCam console in the Conservation Station.

  Philby wrote to Amanda on D-Gamer, double-checking his work. Amanda located the console and took it over. Thrilled, she wrote back how she now had control of hundreds of cameras. She could view most of the Park now: inside all the attractions, outside walkways, parking lots.

  panda: this is incredible, philby. thank u.

  She waited for Philby to write back. But no message was returned.

  Philby never had a chance to answer her. Once again he’d lost track of himself—so engrossed in the virtual worlds of VMK and D-Gamer that he’d forgotten to keep an eye on his surroundings.

  But near the end of their discussion, he had finally looked around.

  And found himself face-to-face with a very angry tiger.

  OF COURSE, AT FIRST PHILBY couldn’t believe it.

  A tiger.

  He’d never realized how big they were: the tiger stood as high as Philby’s shoulder. Orange, black, and white stripes, like war paint. Its eyes were hypnotic; he couldn’t pry his own away from them. They stared at him like he was…lunch.

  The tiger blocked the door to the small hut. There was no getting past it, even if Philby’s legs had worked, and at that moment he had no sensation in his legs whatsoever. He felt nothing but tremendous fear charging his system. It took him over completely. Owned him.

  A tiger loose in the Animal Kingdom! Where were the sirens? Where were the animal police?

  He opened his mouth to scream, b
ut his throat proved too dry, and he croaked out a pathetic noise that didn’t even sound close to the “Help!” he’d intended.

  The tiger cocked his head, looking at him from an angle. Sizing him up. Preparing to attack, it crouched slowly and silently. As gracefully as a dancer, it squatted onto its haunches, its leg muscles flexing as if there were steel cables beneath the colorful hide.

  Philby couldn’t take it anymore. He squinted his eyes shut and braced himself for the attack.

  When nothing happened, he slowly edged his left eye open slightly, stealing a look.

  At that exact moment, the tiger jumped.

  Philby’s world went dark.

  He felt nothing.

  FINN ARRIVED TO THE RENDEZVOUS at the specified time. There was a tall guy in a Disney cap and green coveralls hanging out by the gate to backstage, and it took Finn a moment to realize it was Maybeck. With his face in the shadow of the cap, he looked about twenty years old. The two boys met up and stood to the side, near the jungle, amazed at the numbers of visitors that now jammed the Park.

  Speaking under his breath, Finn explained his encounter with the brooms.

  “Maybe the brooms mean the Overtakers are trying to clean things up,” Maybeck said, amused by his own joke. Finn didn’t dignify that with a response. “The DeVine Charlene is over by the bat enclosure,” Maybeck continued. “I walked around trying to find stuff from the diary. Ended up back at the Gibbons Temple, and I gotta tell you, Whitman”—Maybeck always called Finn by his last name—“there was some serious action over there. Bunch of the rangers all making a stink. From what I overhead, some orangutans pulled a fast one. One of the apes supposedly stole a key, hid it in his upper lip, and then pulled off a jail break. Some kind of smarts, these apes. Six of them are missing. There’s some serious stuff going down, no doubt about it. And far as I can tell, we’re the only ones who have a clue, and not much of a clue at that.”

  Finn checked his watch. “Where’s Philby? And Willa? Philby’s never late to anything.”

  “Haven’t seen either of them. Amanda’s hanging at the Conservation Station,” Maybeck said. “Philby hooked up a bunch of other cameras somehow. So now she can see basically everything going on: the attractions, the paths, and all the buildings, inside and out. But she’s stuck out there. She can’t leave her AnimalCam console because she doesn’t want anyone to discover what Philby rigged up for her. What about you?”

  “The thing about the brooms—” Finn said, starting to explain the way he’d felt. But then he cut himself off.

  “Yeah?”

  “Doesn’t make any sense.”

  “As if any of this makes sense! Hello? Try me, Whitman.”

  “Okay. So pretty soon after I arrived at Hollywood Studios, I thought this crow had spotted me. Then the brooms show up. You know? But they didn’t exactly come after me. They just kind of followed me there. At Voyage of the Little Mermaid it was almost like they were there to watch the show. The way I was.”

  “I don’t get it,” Maybeck said.

  “You see?” Finn said. “When the BlackBerry rang they saw me. Everybody saw me. But I think the brooms were surprised to see me there. Or maybe they didn’t care.”

  “I still don’t get it,” Maybeck admitted, though somewhat reluctantly. Maybeck prided himself on knowing things before others.

  Finn blurted out what he’d been thinking ever since the encounter. “Maybe the brooms were at Voyage for the same reason I was: to look for answers. My being there both confirmed they were in the right place and threatened them.”

  “Threatened them how?”

  “What if the crow was some kind of spy?”

  “Like the bat,” Maybeck said.

  “Yeah! Exactly! And what if the brooms were sent to follow me? So they did. Until The Great Movie Ride. They didn’t follow me into there. Why?”

  “I hope you’re going to answer that.”

  “Because by my going in there, they were no longer worried about me. And then when I got to Voyage, they weren’t even looking for me. It was the show that they were interested in.”

  “The show,” Maybeck said. “Listen, I’m not getting this. What’s up?”

  Finn gathered his courage. “I think the Overtakers heard ‘Under the Sea,’ same as we did.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Think about it,” Finn said.

  He watched as the mental tumblers clicked into place and unlocked Maybeck’s thought. Maybeck spoke slowly. “They’re following the music clue the same way we are…because…they’re…looking for Jez.”

  “She escaped,” Finn declared. “They had her in the stump on the savannah. We know that much. Maybe in transferring her, maybe sometime before they ever moved her, she managed to escape. She hid someplace here in AK. And for some reason yet to be determined, she used the music as a clue.”

  “She’s stuck in the Park,” Maybeck said, “and she can’t get out without our help. So she played the music to send us a clue.”

  “We heard it,” Finn said, “but so did the Over-takers. We both started looking at anything and everything that had to do with ‘Under the Sea.'”

  “It makes sense,” Maybeck agreed.

  Finn tried the D-Gamer chat room again, sending a shout-out to Willa and Philby. But the screen didn’t change. They weren’t answering.

  “So what do we do now?” he asked.

  “We can’t wait for them any longer. Maybe the dreams in Jez’s journal are supposed to help us find her.”

  “We need Willa and Philby,” Maybeck said. “There are a lot of drawings to make sense of.”

  Finn said what they both were thinking. “What if something’s happened to them?”

  The two boys met eyes with horrified expressions.

  AMANDA PRESSED THE right-hand button on the camera controls, zooming in to get a closer look at Finn and Maybeck.

  The AnimalCam stations—four in all—were enough like a video game that she had immediately gotten the hang of it: a small screen to her right displayed rows and columns of thumbnail images, each representing a different camera mounted somewhere in the Park. Normally, there were about a dozen vantage points offered, all of them devoted to the wildlife on display in the Park: giraffes, elephants, tigers. Philby had upgraded hers. Scrolling down the thumbnail screen, she had dozens of views available to her—maybe a hundred or more. Selecting a particular camera transferred the view to a much larger television screen mounted at eye level. She could then zoom in and out using the two buttons to the right, or maneuver the camera to look left or right, up or down, using a joystick. It provided her with a virtual tour of every aspect of the Animal Kingdom.

  At the moment, she was watching Finn and Maybeck as she was writing to Finn on D-Gamer.

  panda: have not seen either willa or philby on camera

  Finn: can u c the cast member entrances?

  panda: yes. but have not seen them, park is packed, could be here.

  Finn: i think the otakers may have heard the change in music same as us. U watch home base for Phily and Wila. also keep eye on us. watch our backs.

  panda: can do.

  Finn hesitated before writing the next message. But he felt he had to tell her.

  Finn: maybeck and i think there’s a chance jez escaped, it might explain some stuff that’s been happening, if so, she’s prob hiding in park.

  For a long time the screen flickered, but no message appeared. He couldn’t imagine what Amanda must have been feeling.

  Finn: we could be totally wrong, maybeck and i are going 2 track down each of the diary drawings, maybe her escape was part of her dreams. ????? r u ok?

  panda: scared 4 jez

  Finn: my dad’s crackberry does the internet, i will go onto vmk and try 2 find wayne. maybe he can help us find philby.

  panda: i’ll watch 4 them and i’ll watch u and maybeck too…

  The cursor hesitated. She wasn’t done typing.

  …but if she escaped, why haven�
��t we heard from her?

  Finn didn’t have an answer for that.

  Finn: ????? don’t know.

  Amanda zoomed the camera back and tried to stay with Finn and Maybeck as they headed off. It took her a minute to figure out how to follow them, one camera to the next—she lost them twice—but not long after, she pulled up their images as they moved from camera to camera. She pieced together the route they were taking to Discovery Island. At the same time, she studied the tiny thumbnail views, hoping beyond hope to catch a glimpse of her missing sister.

  * * *

  Finn and Maybeck walked the Jungle Trek in a hurry, though not so fast as to stick out. They kept about ten yards apart; if one of them was spotted, maybe the other wouldn’t be. The Trek had an occasional park ranger at an education station—there to give hands-on demonstrations to the curious—any one of whom might be an Overtaker. Finn paid particular attention to each of these rangers as Maybeck passed, glad to see that none seemed to take any particular interest in him.

  Soon, they reached the tiger-viewing yards, where they stood among the ruins of an Indian temple—the jungle and buildings so authentic that, although he’d never been there, Finn could imagine himself halfway around the world. The footpath rose here to where it was fifteen or twenty feet off the ground, the walls of the crumbling temple holding in the Park guests, offering views to either side, down into grassy knolls and fields. In the heat of the day, the tigers had taken to the shade at the edge of the wall that contained them. People crowded the temple’s viewing windows to get a decent look at the wild cats. The arching windows held no glass but were divided into small squares as if they did, or once had. And while there was no pushing or shoving to win the best view, there was some seriously competitive leaning going on.