by Paul Tobin
There was silence in the room.
Nate and I were holding our breath.
The hum had stopped. The robots were motionless, not even creaking their tentacles or hissing their steam vents. Liz wasn’t making a single sound. There wasn’t the merest buzz from Melville, or anything from Stine, or Wendy, or Ventura, and no sounds at all from Maculte or Luria on the display monitors, and nothing from—
“Pffft.”
Okay, that was from Bosper, even though he was unconscious.
“Oh. Eww.” That was from Liz, her nose wrinkling up, holding Bosper at arm’s length.
“Robots!” Nate said. “Acknowledge new overlord!” Maculte’s face, displayed on hundreds of robotic monitors, was red with rage. He looked very near to screaming, or to venting steam the way the roboctopi were all doing now, with their tentacles returning to life, writhing and twisting as they tucked their globes back inside their bodies, their knifelike tentacles stabbing into the floor for balance as they turned as one, hundreds of robots facing Nate, the hum of their mechanisms rising in volume, louder and louder, an acrid scent of burning tires carried along with the steam billowing from each of them, and a taste of metal in the air, which was crackling with electricity. I could feel my skin vibrating with the power emitting from hundreds of robots, their mechanisms churning and surging, and the entire floor was shaking with the impacts of so many tentacles shifting back and forth as the robots bent lower and lower, submitting to their new master, bowing to Nate for the space of a heartbeat before suddenly, in an intricately choreographed moment, the robots lifted higher on their tentacles and then pivoted.
To me.
“Acknowledging Delphine Cooper,” the robots said, drowning out Maculte’s voice and his rage. He was sputtering about Nate “cheating,” about “revenge,” and so on and so forth, including a few choice utterances of what was, without question, questionable language.
“What’s happening?” I said. The robots had formed a circle around me.
Nate said, “It was one year ago today that we first became friends.”
“Really?” I said.
“Really,” Nate answered. For some reason, he was blushing. “And, so, because that was feasibly the most important day of my life, even though we’re not dating, I wanted to get you a present.”
“We are not dating,” I said, not only because it was true but because I didn’t want any rumors to get started, especially when all of my best friends were in the room, because friends have a tendency to blow things out of proportion, like how the only reason I suddenly jumped forward and kissed Nate on the cheek was because he’d gotten me a present, and not because he looked so handsome. That’s ridiculous. I looked up to Liz and saw that she was grinning, and she raised an eyebrow and nodded down to me in a meaningful way, and when I looked to where she was looking, I noticed I was holding Nate’s hand. When had that happened? I quickly let go.
“So, you got me a present?” I asked. I still wasn’t understanding, possibly because I’d been quite recently used as a flail and was more than a bit dizzy.
“I did get you a present,” Nate said. “I got you robots.”
So, thing is, I became the Queen of the Robot Octopus Army.
“You deserve being the one in charge of the roboctopi,” Nate told me. “I was looking at the problem all wrong. Too focused on beating the robots, but you were the one who understood we could just . . . bring them onto our team.” Nate nodded to my friends, to Wendy and Stine and Ventura, to Melville, and to Liz and Bosper above us. I could remember how it wasn’t that long ago that he’d been afraid of being around my friends, nervous about having them around, about trusting them, and now he was calling us a team.
It made me feel . . . good.
Like I’d helped Nate to grow.
I gave his hand a little squeeze.
Oh, umm . . . yeah.
His hand.
We were holding hands again.
I seriously don’t know why that kept happening.
I looked out over the room.
And took a deep breath.
What I was going to say next was very important.
Dad has told me that there’s a moment in everyone’s lives when who they are hangs in the balance, when what kind of person they are, what kind of person they want to be, is on a razor’s edge. He says it’s a moment when a person will know, deep in their stomach, or in their heart, and in fact in the very core of their soul, that the next words they speak will determine their fate, sculpting their personality, cementing it into place.
I was on the verge of that moment.
But I was ready.
I wasn’t nervous.
I knew what I wanted to say.
It was, in fact, what I had to say in order to be true to myself, and to the person that I, Delphine Gabriella Cooper, want to be.
I looked to my friends, to the room as a whole, and mostly I looked to Nate. And then I said . . .
“Release the robot octopi!”
And so Nate and I found ourselves charging down the hallways in the underwater headquarters of the Red Death Tea Society, leading hundreds of roboctopi into battle. The roar of the tentacles slamming against the walls was competing with me shouting orders to my robot horde, all but drowning out a series of beeps coming from a small mechanical device Nate was working on (it looked like a mechanical version of a half-peeled grapefruit, but smelled like a burnt match) and with Liz singing one of the first songs we wrote way back when we met in Rock Camp, a song called, “Rolly the Seriously Butt-Kicking Robot,” which . . . as I’m sure you’ve rightly assumed . . . centered around a robot with a hobby of seriously kicking butt.
The song was currently pertinent. My robots were kicking butt. Occasionally, one of the Red Death Tea Society assassins would pop out from a room, firing those disintegrator pistols of theirs, but my robot hordes were forming an impenetrable barrier around me and my friends, with my robots completely immune to the weapons and quickly wrapping up the assassins in their tentacles before spraying a burst of sleeping gas into their faces.
It is lovely to have a robot horde. Everyone should do it.
In addition to protecting us, my robots were also energetically destroying any machinery they found. And any computers they found. And also anything they found. They were really into destroying things. Bosper was running along beside me, barking happily. Nate had given the terrier a pill to chew on (it was an “Un-Unconscious” pill, which immediately woke Bosper up) and then had given him a “Whiff Away” pill, because Bosper was still having his stomach troubles.
“Let’s be biting things!” Bosper said, charging along with the robots, biting at things.
“Let’s be biting Maculte,” I answered, because the leader of the Red Death Tea Society was hiding somewhere, and as long as he was out there, he was dangerous, and very much in need of biting.
It was at that moment, just as we were discussing what other things we would all prefer to bite (Wendy was voting for pizza, I was going for cake, Liz was going for pie, and Nate was talking about a carbonated acorn he’d invented, which none of us understood) that we burst through a doorway and were confronted with somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand members of the Red Death Tea Society, who are not actually the sort of people you want in your neighborhood.
“Welcome . . . to your doom!” Maculte said. He and Luria Pevermore were on a balcony high above the floor. The room was another vast Earthquake Cavern, this one even larger than the first.
“Oh,” I said. “Is this our doom? My bad! I was looking for a different room.” I tried to back out and close the door, but my robots were destroying the doors (and the walls, and even some of the floor), so there was no door to close.
“I’m impressed you were able to turn my robot horde against me,” Maculte told Nate.
“You forgot to close the third tangent of the beta branch in the ninth subset of the phase space,” Nate said. “Your Riemann surface allowed a fractur
e of the negative curve!” He looked back to me and rolled his eyes.
“What a dummy!” I told Nate.
“You actually understood that?” Liz whispered to me.
“Not a chance,” I whispered back.
Maculte told Nate, “I didn’t think you’d delve into the ergodicity.”
Liz looked at me.
“Not a clue,” I said.
“First place I looked!” Nate said. “You always mess it up. Your calculations are precise, but have no art to them.”
“Art?” Maculte said, his hands clutching at the balcony rails. “Art is for the weak! Nothing more than idle amusements for cretins! Math is the only thing that matters!” My robot horde was assembling in front of me, shielding my friends and me from the army of Red Death Tea Society assassins. The crystals of the Earthquake Cavern were beginning to vibrate, and the assassins were staring at us, full of menace but almost entirely unmoving, except whenever one of them would jog over to the tea dispensers at the edges of the room to refill their cups.
Nate told Maculte, “Math is merely a tool. You can build machines, formulate plans, grasp the secrets of the universe, but Delphine has taught me that you can’t use it to make friends. And these are my friends.”
He put a hand on my shoulder and said, “This is Delphine. She’s my . . . she’s . . .”
He paused, all but glowing red with a blush.
“Stupid honesty potion,” he muttered. I could barely hear him.
“What?” I asked.
“This is Liz!” Nate shouted out to Maculte, moving quickly on, nodding to Liz. “She enjoys archaeology, and writing plays.”
“I do!” Liz said.
Nate said, “And the one holding on to Liz’s hand so that she doesn’t float away, that’s Wendy. She loves animals and wants to be a veterinarian.”
“That’s . . . right,” Wendy said. “How do you know all these things?”
“And that’s Stine,” Nate said, avoiding Wendy’s question, likely because he didn’t want to explain that he has a complete dossier on everyone in Polt. “Stine enjoys making clothes and wants to be a fashion designer, and she has a crush on someone but I’m not supposed to tell.”
“Oh, you better not tell!” Stine said. She punched Nate in the arm, which made me a bit jealous, because Nate’s arm is mine to punch, but it probably wasn’t the best time to start any arguments between us, since the thousand or so weapons pointed in our direction seemed like more than enough trouble to deal with.
I did wonder about this crush, though, and how Nate knew about it. It was the first I’d heard.
“This is Melville!” Nate said. “She’s a bee.”
“Buzz,” Melville said. She dipped in midair, taking a bow.
“This is Ventura,” Nate said. “She’s from Barcelona and wants to join the boys’ soccer team. She’s better than most of them. I’ve already talked to the coach and got him to give permission.”
“You . . . did?” Ventura said.
“And this is Bosper,” Nate yelled, holding up the terrier so that Maculte could see him. “He’s my best friend!”
“Bosper is the dog that bites!” Bosper said. Then, his tail slunk down as he asked, “Does it okay if the dog bites?”
“Sure,” Nate said. “If you bite Maculte, I’ll even give you some peanut butter. Five jars. No, ten.” Bosper’s tail began wagging so fast that it reminded me of Chester, who was another problem we needed to deal with, as soon as we survived the imminent battle with the Red Death Tea Society.
Assuming we did.
Nate walked forward, even past my robots, to stare up at Maculte. He gestured back to us and said, “Most of them started out as Delphine’s friends, but they’re my friends now, and they’re much more important than any math equation in the entire universe, even Euler’s identity equation, or the true calculation of pi!” Maculte narrowed his eyes at this. I could tell he thought Nate was being absurd.
“Did Nate say something about . . . pie?” Liz asked, but I’d already predicted she would ask that, and was ready.
“He means the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter,” I told her. “Not the yummy dessert that’s chock-full of fruit and makes me salivate nearly as much as cake.”
“Got it,” Liz said.
“You’ve got pie?” Stine asked, hopeful.
It was at that moment, before I could break Stine’s heart by pointing out that we had a grand total of zero pie, that Maculte started laughing. It wasn’t the laughter of mirth, but rather the laughter of disgust, the type of laughter that only evil people laugh, and I have to say that Maculte was particularly talented at this type of laugh, and that he likely practiced it in front of a mirror.
“Your friends,” Maculte said. He’d stopped laughing. The room went deadly still. My robots weren’t even moving their tentacles. The hundreds of Red Death Tea Society assassins were as motionless as statues, all excepting one who was halfway to the tea dispensers at the edges of the room, and who stopped when he realized that everyone was staring at him.
“Oh, sorry,” he said.
All eyes turned back to Maculte.
“Your friends,” he said again. “Are nothing. I don’t have friends. I have no need of them. I have . . . an army!” As one, the Red Death Tea Society assassins raised their weapons.
“Me too,” I said. Thousands of robot tentacles began to uncoil, and writhe.
And the fight was on.
Here’s the thing about fights. They’re chaotic. It’s hard to tell what’s really going on, especially if you happen to have several friends with you, and they’re the type of friends who are really terrific but have very little experience in any mass melee, barring only that of our weekly Cake vs. Pie meetings, which do feature some shocking violence, but only if you happen to think a well-delivered pillow is brutal.
So . . . the chaos.
My robots were tossing Red Death Tea Society assassins as if they were popcorn.
Nate was hunched over, working on that device of his, the one that looked like a half-peeled grapefruit.
Disintegrator rays were blasting wildly about.
Bosper was biting.
I was kicking.
Liz was floating.
Maculte was bellowing.
Luria was standing on the edge of her balcony with a spray can, spraying something into the air.
My octopi were releasing clouds of knockout gas.
I was stubbing my toe when I accidentally kicked a robot.
The Red Death Tea Society members were putting on face masks.
The entire room was vibrating, and the earthquake crystals were starting to glow.
Stine was shoving over all the tea dispensers at the edges of the room, causing an outcry from the assassins.
I was hopping on one foot, because of that “stubbed toe” thing.
There were tentacles everywhere, and a man grabbed me by my hair and was dragging me along and then Bosper was biting him, and then I was biting him, and then Bosper and I were bonding by biting the man together. The assassin yelled and let go of me, so I stomped him on his toes and then a robot tossed him almost fifty feet away and Bosper raced off to bite more things (yelling about how proud he was of my biting, which warmed my heart to hear such praise from an expert), and then Nate was walking casually through the fight, just touching assassins, and each time he touched someone (he was barely paying attention, working out an equation on his pants) there was this little spark of electricity and the person he’d touched would shiver for a moment and then fall unconscious, and then I noticed that the disintegrator pistols were now actually working against my robots, that piles of dust (meaning, ex-robots) were not that uncommon to run across, and then another man grabbed me from behind, and he was cheating because he was wearing steel-toed boots (thus negating my formidable toe-stomping skills), and then Wendy kicked him from behind in a not-socially-acceptable manner, and he fell on top of me, pinning me to the floor.
Where . . .
. . . there was a note.
One of Nate’s.
With my name on it.
I started to open it, but then the assassin grabbed it from me, and he had a smirk for about a tenth of a second before Melville landed on his forehead.
“Buzz?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
She stung him.
I grabbed the note from his hands.
She stung him again.
I opened the note.
She stung him again.
The note said . . .
"Delphine. We're going to need Chester. Immediately. Could you go get him? Also, there is a 74.78 percent chance of us not surviving this fight, so I would like to take this opportunity to point out that I've been unable to call you a friend when this honesty potion is in effect, not because you're not my friend, but because there's . . . something more. Some other word I should use. I'm not sure what it is. It's exciting to not know what's happening! And . . . one more thing, since we have a 74.78 percent chance of losing this fight, it probably won't come into play, but there's a 25.22 percent chance that I'll be hosting a victory party, in which case I'll need help planning the snacks. Do you think your friends . . . our friends . . . would like some carbonated acorns? Spaghetti with raisins? I've made some water-flavored ice cream, too. People like water, right?"
“Wow,” I told the note. “You are no good at snacks.”
I tossed down the note and called for Melville (I’d forgotten to tell her to quit stinging the man, so she was still merrily going overboard), and I called out for Liz (who was floating again, but able to navigate across the room by yanking on the hair of various assassins, pulling herself along), and we raced out of the room on a quest to find Chester.
Leaving Nate behind.
Liz had parked Betsy in a room with a whole armada’s worth of mini-submarines. The room was a natural cavern, and full of bats. I like caves. I do not like bats.
“Ooo,” I said. “I don’t like bats.”