by Gavin Brown
“Whatever you want,” Spike said. “But you’re cleaning up the mess if it bleeds everywhere.”
Karim considered this for a moment. Did snipes bleed? And if they did, would they even see it? Suddenly, Karim could imagine the little guy, trapped underneath that box and about to be stabbed, possibly killed. “Hey! Don’t hurt it!” Karim grabbed Tommy’s arm as it drew back to swing.
“Ugh,” Spike grumbled. “You with the conscience again.”
“Listen, we don’t need to hurt it to finish the adventure,” Karim said. “We just have to hit it with the sword. Easy win, right?”
“Karim’s right,” Tommy said. “I don’t really want to hurt it. What if it squeals?”
Spike shook her head. “You’re both wimps. Okay, whatever. Tommy, you swing with the flat of the sword and I’ll pull the box up at the last moment.”
“Okay,” Karim said. “Thanks.”
Tommy swung, and Spike pulled the box back at the perfect moment.
The sword swished through empty air. There wasn’t a flash of teeth, or claws, or a bit of fur. Just emptiness.
Tommy kicked the box over. It was empty.
Karim finally figured it out, but too late. He looked behind the rack that the box had scooted out from and pointed down.
“Look, there are tracks in the alfredo sauce on the floor. They lead up to this point, and then back from away from it too. The snipe pushed this box out to distract us!”
“What?” Tommy said. “Why?”
Spike growled. “That little …”
Something bumped the back of Karim’s foot. He looked down. It was a tomato.
They all spun around, but far, far too late. The crate of tomatoes was torn open, and every single tomato had been pecked, or clawed, or chewed. The juice that hadn’t been sucked out of them was leaking on the floor.
There was a loud knocking on the door.
“What’s going on in there?!” Mr. Vespucci yelled from outside. “My cooks can’t cook if they can’t get into the fridge!”
“Uh-oh,” Tommy said.
“This is just too much,” Karim said. “I guess we’re not ready for real adventures. I never should have taken my eyes off the tomatoes.”
Spike shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. I was sure we had it.” She had really thought they were going to succeed. And the little jerk had somehow outsmarted them. Her, outsmarted by a common snipe! It was unacceptable. “The worst is that when Mr. Vespucci gives us a bad review, AppVenture will probably stop sending us notifications for adventures.”
“Guy. Guys,” Tommy said through slurps of his dinnertime Brotein (“Don’t judge a book by its cover—judge it by how much it can bench”) shake. “Maybe we lost. Maybe we failed. But it was still pretty cool! Don’t forget, we got to see an actual snipe! Well, I saw a tiny bit of its tail, I think. A couple weeks ago, what would we have given to see a real monster? And then we captured a basilisk! So maybe we just need more practice before we try again.”
“Yeah, that was pretty cool,” Karim reasoned. “I mean, we’ll get there eventually, right? We probably won’t get more jobs through AppVenture, but if we keep going to Adventure Camp, we’ll keep learning, keep getting better.”
“Well, maybe not for this year,” Tommy agreed. “But we’ll get there, I guess.”
Spike shook her head. She wanted to be an amazing adventurer now. “How did this happen?” she demanded. “How did we lose?”
“I think it just tricked us,” Karim said. “I knew the minute we saw those three-toed tracks in the alfredo sauce that we had—”
“Wait a second. Three-toed?” Spike asked. She tried to picture it for a moment. Come to think of it, that seemed right. The tracks had a clear third toe.
“Yeah, three-toed,” Tommy said. “I saw them too. What’s the big deal?”
“It was supposed to be a two-toed snipe,” Spike said.
“Yeah, there are a bunch of different varieties.” Karim immediately had his phone out and was poking at it. “That’s weird. Three-toed snipes are native to the Everglades … in Florida. They don’t exist anywhere else. What’s a three-toed snipe doing in California, thousands of miles away from its usual habitat?”
“Is that why we got beaten? Because it was a three-toed snipe?” Tommy asked, grinning.
Spike also had her phone out and was scrolling through the article.
“Not really. I think we just … didn’t win that one. It happens.” She’d always thought it wasn’t supposed to happen to her, but the universe didn’t seem to agree.
“I know adventure streamers are seeing monsters outside their regular habitats, but I haven’t heard of anything this extreme.”
“Um, guys?” Tommy was looking at his phone, slightly confused. “I guess we were wrong.”
He turned the phone around to show his friends.
A little notification from AppVenture had popped up: Adventure Ready.
Spike grinned. “I guess we get another shot, don’t we? Let’s not screw this one up.”
“Guys,” Karim started, “do you think maybe we should—”
“Admit that we’re going on this adventure and skip the argument about whether it’s too dangerous?” Spike interrupted.
“Yeah, I wanna have another shot,” Tommy said. “I want revengeance.”
“Revengeance?” Spike asked. “Is that even a word?”
“It’s revenge plus vengeance. Twice as vengey,” Tommy answered. “And prevengeance is when you strike first, twice as hard.”
Spike rolled her eyes.
Karim sighed. “Okay. Fine.”
“But this is a new monster,” Spike added. “So it is in no way vengeance, revengeance, or anything like that.”
“Nürevengeance it is, then,” Tommy said. “With that accent thing with two dots above the u, to make it cooler.”
The table in Spike’s dining room was covered in plates, pots, and silverware. At the center was a large stainless-steel pot full of spaghetti.
Tommy shoveled another forkful of pasta into his mouth. Karim was staring at the pot in the middle of the table in horror, while Spike glared at Tommy.
“Tommy!” Karim whispered when Ms. Hernandez had returned to the kitchen. “That’s … the pot! The one we trapped the gremlin in last week!”
Who cared what pot it had been cooked in? Tommy’s body was a powerful adventuring machine, and it needed maximum fuel. He just wished that Brotein (“Giving you the strength to be strong”) made a line of protein-rich pasta sauces. Tommy swallowed and spun another bite of pasta onto his fork. “So? This is delicious! Your mom really nailed it this week, Spike.”
“So?” Spike hissed. “The gremlin pooped in it!”
Tommy shook his head. “We washed it. No big deal.” His friends were so ridiculous. The pasta was good. Who cared where the pot had been last week? That was ancient history, as far as his stomach was concerned. “Besides, it’s really a cut above this week. You should try it.”
Karim shook his head and helped himself to some asparagus. Spike just sat, staring.
“Well, it’s a good thing we’ve been earning some money on AppVenture,” she said. “I may need it to get some food I’m not grossed out by.”
“Hey!” Tommy complained through a mouthful of pasta. “That money is for Adventure Camp!”
“Yeah, sure. But you have to admit we’re killing it,” Spike said. “We’re catching monsters left and right.”
“Well, we didn’t actually capture the shadow recluse,” Karim said with a grin. The spider in a local library had been a real hassle until Spike ordered a supercharged sun-tanning lamp. “We just blasted it with so much UV radiation that it ran into the sewers.”
Tommy laughed. “It ran so fast!” The spider’s shadowy cloaking had been pretty intimidating at first, making it almost impossible to see in the depths of the library basement. But the fifteen thousand lumens of light had stripped its magic away, leaving nothing but spindly little legs and
a very scared creature.
“The best part is, I just resold the tanning lamp online with a funny description and made the cost of it back the next day,” Spike added with a grin. She reached into the sauce with her fork and picked out a mushroom.
“Really?” Karim said, rolling his eyes. “Did you say it was new?”
“We only used it once! I said the package was open but it was unused. More or less true!”
“Your favorite sort of true.” Karim shrugged and kept eating his vegetables.
Spike’s mom bustled back into the room with a plate of brownies. Tommy noticed that several of them were missing from the side of the plate. Ms. Hernandez had another one in her mouth. He’d never seen her eat anything but sweets, but she never seemed to gain any weight. And the sweets seemed to put her in a good mood. She was always kind and gentle and nice to the three of them. The opposite of Spike, Tommy thought with a grin. How had that happened?
“Ms. Hernandez, this spaghetti is amazing. Did you put something special in the sauce?”
Spike’s mom grinned at him as she grabbed another brownie. “I did! I got some fancy organic meat and spices. And those new heirloom mushrooms my friend was talking about on her food blogs.”
Ms. Hernandez looked at Spike, who had one of the mushrooms halfway to her mouth. “Your father finally got a new job and started paying his child support and alimony again.”
Spike froze, staring at her mom like she had just sprouted medusa snakes from her head.
Tommy tried to slurp his spaghetti more quietly as the sudden icy look from Spike chilled the room.
Spike dropped her fork, letting it clatter against the plate.
“Mom. Seriously?” Spike stared at her mother, voice tightly controlled. “You know I don’t want any of his guilt money, or whatever it buys.” She gestured at the food on the table.
Tommy carefully avoided looking at either of them, like they had the gaze of a basilisk.
“It’s our money,” Ms. Hernandez said calmly. “He owes it to us. It’s the law. And anyway, it’s just money.”
Tommy couldn’t understand why Spike was so upset. How could someone be this mad when there was so much good food available? Usually dinner at Spike’s house was just plain pasta with a jar of grocery store sauce. Not that Tommy was complaining, of course; food was food.
Karim was sitting perfectly still, but Tommy couldn’t help himself. As the mother and daughter stared each other down, he tried to reach for a dinner roll. He would have to be like the shadow recluse, able to move silently without alerting his prey.
“I don’t care.” Spike pushed her plate away. “Do whatever you want. I just don’t want to be involved.”
“Honey—” Ms. Hernandez started, but Spike was already standing.
“I’m not hungry anymore,” Spike said. “Let’s go.” She stood and stalked up the stairs, not even bothering to clear her plate.
Ms. Hernandez sighed. They ate in silence for a few minutes.
“Sorry about that, boys,” she said when they were done eating. “You go ahead and have some fun with Spike. She needs it. I’ll handle the dishes.”
“It’s okay, Ms. Hernandez,” Tommy said. “Thanks for dinner. It was amazing.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Karim said. He was trying to strategize a way to get out of the house entirely, but it looked like it was too late for that.
Ms. Hernandez just smiled sadly and started clearing the table. Tommy and Karim grabbed their backpacks and headed up the stairs after Spike.
“Is Spike okay?” Tommy whispered.
“I dunno,” Karim answered. The last thing he wanted to do was face Spike in this state, but Tommy was behind him, so it was too late to turn around now.
Karim paused and took a deep breath before they went to Spike’s room.
“AppVenture,” Spike said as they walked in.
“What about it?” Karim asked, walking over to stand next to her. Tommy flopped down on a beanbag chair in the corner.
Spike yanked at her hair in frustration. “It’s AppVenture! His fancy new job is working in IT at AppVenture.”
“What?” Tommy asked. “Really?”
Spike sighed. “I looked at my dad’s Facebook. He got hired by AppVenture.”
“Hey, that’s cool! Maybe he can get us better quests or …” Tommy trailed off as Spike glared at him.
Karim just shook his head. He said stupid stuff sometimes, but even he knew that was exactly the wrong thing to say right now. Spike was breathing hard and Karim could almost see smoke coming out of her nostrils, like she was a baby dragon.
“That’s … weird,” Karim said, at a loss for what else to say.
“Ugh.” Spike threw her phone onto the bed in frustration. “As if he hasn’t ruined everything else in my life, now he has to mess up the one thing that I’m actually enjoying?”
“It doesn’t have to affect anything,” Karim said. “He doesn’t even know you’re using it.”
“Yeah, maybe. But I’ll know.”
Tommy seemed to slump in the beanbag chair. “I promised Elissa,” he muttered.
“Look, I get it,” Karim said. “Your dad sucks—”
“Yeah, Luis is crap,” Spike agreed. “Do you know what he got me for Christmas last year? A calculator. For a class that I won’t even take until high school!”
“I know,” Tommy said. “But can we just do a couple more jobs and take their money?”
“Ugh” was all Spike said. Karim knew that was better than a flat-out refusal.
“We have to make enough so that we can all get to Adventure Camp together,” Karim added. “Don’t let him ruin that for us too.”
Spike glared at him for a long moment.
“And people need us!” Tommy reasoned. “Have you seen what’s happening out there this season? It’s crazy!”
“Like what?” Spike asked, clearly curious despite her anger.
Karim quickly pulled up the latest Mad Mackenzie video on his phone. “Look what she posted last night.”
In the video, Mad Mackenzie was standing on a mountainside, dressed in heavy padded armor—the professional version of what Tommy had worn when they’d gone after the gremlin earlier in the week.
“After catching a Saskatchewan razorback in a video sponsored by AppVenture, I headed to Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. Today, we’re three-quarters of the way up Grand Teton, the highest mountain in the park, on the trail of an alerion,” she said. “In case anyone thinks I’m making this up, here’s a video we caught yesterday.” The video showed a clip of a fiery-red bird swooping through the sky, and one of Mad Mackenzie’s two camera operators diving for cover from its wings.
“Now, here’s the thing,” Mad Mackenzie continued when the clip was over, “alerions aren’t supposed to be in the Tetons. In North America, they are found only in the Cascades of the Pacific Northwest. Something strange is happening this season—monsters are showing up in places they have no business being. Something is pushing them out of their natural habitats, and no one seems to know why. But I’ll say this—it makes for some unique adventuring challenges!”
Karim paused the clip. “Aren’t you a little curious to find out more?”
“And to earn money for Adventure Camp!” Tommy added, a bit too enthusiastically.
Spike sighed. “How many more do we need to do?”
Tommy jumped up, grinning. “Three, I think. Depending on the level of the monsters.”
Spike exhaled slowly. “Okay, three more. Just enough to get you guys to Adventure Camp. Then I’m out.”
This was going to be a tricky one, but at least they had a plan.
“Good luck down there!” their new client, Adam, said as they opened the door to the basement. “I can’t wait to be able to buy cereal again once you get that thing.”
“Thanks!” Tommy and Karim both said cheerfully as they headed down.
Spike said nothing; she just ground her teeth and kept her grip on the handl
e of the machine. They clomped down the steps into the basement, the sound of sneakers on wood stairs echoing against the concrete walls, three with bookshelves and one holding a bookcase full of what looked like old track-and-field trophies.
Adam seemed like an okay client, just an older guy who wanted his basement back. Apparently, the teleporting weevil had taken up residence in the basement of Adam’s house and had been breaking in and eating the poor fellow’s food. She could see how that would get very annoying, very quickly.
Spike hadn’t signed up for this. She’d agreed to go on adventures with her friends. But now whenever she heard the name AppVenture, it reminded her that she was basically working for Luis—literally the last thing in the world she wanted to do. Why did he think that just because he was technically her father, that gave him some right to ruin everything she enjoyed?
It was like when he showed up unannounced at her fourth grade talent show. She had been practicing that stand-up routine for a month and delivered it perfectly. And then she saw Luis sitting in the front row and forgot the punch line to her last joke. Everybody laughed, but for the wrong reasons, and Spike had humiliated herself in front of the entire school.
That was the problem with Luis. It wasn’t that he never showed up for anything or never cared about anything. It was that he wouldn’t be there for the things that mattered the most and then would appear with no warning when she least expected it, throwing her whole life off-kilter.
“Are we sure this will work?” Karim asked. “What if it just teleports away?” He had been nervous the whole walk over. No big surprise there.
“We talked about this. It says in Monsterpedia that they can only teleport short distances, right?” Spike asked. Usually Karim was so reasonable.
Karim pulled up the entry on his phone.
Teleporting weevils are beetle-like creatures and can grow up to eight inches in length. Unlike some beetles, however, they are not capable of flight, but they do have the ability to teleport short distances—an ability that they traditionally use to get inside grain silos, no matter how tightly locked they are. Be warned: Weevils are not afraid of magical items like most other monsters. In fact, they are attracted to them.