For Once Upon A Time

"You sick bastard!" Jamall yelled, taking off towards the ninja clown, only to be quickly suppressed by two of the guards. Jamall struggled, but the strength of the ninja and clown were too much for him, so he gave in.

Michael tried a more civil approach. "Why would you do that, though? Melt all the popsicles... it just doesn't make sense. You'd die along with the rest of us. What do you plan to gain from all this?"

"I don't plan to 'gain' anything. I just want to see the world suffer." The grotesque man blew a large cloud of smoke from his mouth, then resumed chewing on the cigarette. Michael knew these kinds of people. Psychopaths. People with no regard for the feelings of others. People who only wanted more suffering in the world. He knew there was nothing he could say that would change this man's mind.

"But... who are you?" Jane asked. "And where's Rachel?" She demanded, remembering the reason they'd come here in the first place.

"I'm Bob." Said Bob. "And as for your friend, if you really want to see her, then I'll take you to her. Steve, Fred... show these kids their friend." A clown and ninja, apparently named Steve and Fred, led the four teenagers out of the solid gold room and back into the hallway. From there they entered an elevator and went down. Far down. Much farther than they did when they came up. When the elevator finally opened, they were in a cavern like passage with a string of dim lights over-head. All along one side of the passage were jail cells.

Steve and Fred led the teenagers down the hallway a ways, until they came to a jail cell containing Rachel. She was sitting on the ground, covered in a bit of dirt. Her black hair looked stringy and unkempt. The ninja opened the door to the cell and the clown pushed Michael, Jane, Jamall and Traytor inside. None of them resisted. They knew there was no point. The guards were much stronger than they were. After closing the barred door and locking it shut, Steve and Fred then left, walking down the corridor to the elevator.

"Are you okay, Rachel?" Asked Jane.

"Yeah... I'm fine..." She said in a defeated voice. There wasn't much else to say after that. The adventurers just lay on the dirt floor and thought. Seconds passed. Seconds turned to minutes. Minutes turned to hours. Jamall kept pacing back and forth, running his hands along the bars. There was nothing to do in the small cell. No one ever came with food or water. It was as if they had been left there to rot.

Finally, when he couldn't take it anymore, Jamall asked, in a voice weakened from hunger and thirst, "Traytor... how long have we been in here? I'm not sure how many days I've got left in me..." Traytor counted up the scratch marks he'd been making on the wall. "It's been... three hours and six minutes."

"God, we're going to die in here!" Jamall fell to his knees, grasping the bars.

"Calm down." Commanded Michael. "Something's not right." Everyone stopped what they were doing (which wasn't much) and waited for Michael to continue. "We're on the fourth island. We've only gotten four keys. That means we're only half-way done." Everyone nodded. "So why have we met him already? Bob, I mean. Why not build his base on the eighth island, like we were told. It just... doesn't make sense." The group agreed, but could provide no answer.

Then they heard footsteps in the corridor. Someone was coming. Everyone turned expectantly towards the cell door. The person who came into sight was neither ninja nor clown. He was human. The man was average height, with short blond hair and a white lab coat. He pulled a key from his pocket and hurriedly entered in into the lock, then opened the door. "Quickly!" He whispered. "Come with me!" No one objected and all five teens quickly and quietly followed the man down the hallway, and into the elevator.

The doors closed and the man pushed the 'down' button, to Michael's surprise. "Who are you?" He asked.

"I'll explain in a minute." The man seemed impatient and continually tapped his foot. Luckily the elevator only needed to go down two or three more floors, so their journey was short. As soon as it opened, the group entered what could only be described as a laboratory. There were vials of colorful liquids, blackboards covered in incomprehensible equations and cages full of white lab rats.

"My name is Doctor Frank Shelley." Said Doctor Frank Shelley. "This is my laboratory." The group looked around confused.

As usual, Michael was the first to start asking questions. "What are you doing here? Are you working for Bob? Why'd you let us escape?"

"Well... the answer to all those questions goes back to a few years ago... You see, I was a young up-and-coming mad scientist, trying to make his mark on the world, when I was approached on the street one night by a short man in a trench-coat. He asked me to build him the most fearful and powerful creature I could. Naturally, I took the job and immediately went to work. My first thought was that the most powerful thing in the world was a ninja... and the most fearful was a clown. I knew that if I found a way to combine the two, I would most definitely have the most powerful and feared creature on the planet." Frank sat down and put his head in his hands.

"I began by extracting the DNA from a ninja, and the DNA from a clown and mixing them together, then implanting them into a human embryo. Of course, it didn't take at first... or the next eleven times. But on my thirteenth try, it worked! Since it wasn't an actual child, it grew much faster, though I kept it in a test tube most of its life. Once it was about the size of a ten year old, I finally disconnected it from the tube and my creation took it's first breath. I had done it... I had created a clown and ninja hybrid... it was a freak of nature... a ninja-clown, if you will. If only I'd known how terrible my creation would become... I should've stopped it there, but I was a fool. I thought it would only seek to destroy small things, wreck a little havoc here and there... but now look at him... Bob... he's bent on destroying all the popsicles... and the whole world, along with them... he hired me to be his scientist... to create the machine that would heat the world to a temperature much higher than ever thought possible. Of course, I didn't know what I was building at first... not until it was too late..."

"But, if you built the machine, you must know where it is! And how to stop it!" Michael exclaimed.

"It's true... but the island it's on is hidden away... beyond the Eighth Island of the Storyline. The only way to reach it, is to obtain all eight keys... but trust me... the tests on the last four islands are the hardest... you'll have to make sacrifices... it won't be easy... not by a long-shot."

"But we have to do it." Said Jane. "There's no one else who has the chance we do."

"Just tell us how to disable the stupid machine! Let us worry about making it all the way..." Jamall told Frank.

The doctor looked at them, a glimmer of hope in the back of his eye. "Alright, I'll write the details down." He said, grabbing a piece of paper and drawing a quick schematic of what the machine looked like and how to disable it. "But you must hurry! The machine will reach full power in less than two weeks. The heat waves you've been experiencing so far, are just the effects of the machine warming up. When it's fully charged, the heat that will blast from this machine, will hit the world as if every nuke on the planet exploded simultaneously. The popsicles won't stand a chance... and of course, we'll die along with it... but what would be the point in living anyways, assuming there weren't any popsicles left..." Michael nodded and placed the paper in his jean pocket.

"You can escape through this door." Frank said, opening a door on one side of the laboratory. "It's a tunnel that leads under the island... you'll come up on the beach, hopefully near your ship. I wish you all good luck."

"Thanks." Said Michael. "I know you're taking a chance, letting us all go." Jamall, Jane, Rachel and Traytor started heading down the tunnel. "What'll they do to you when they find out you let us escape, though?"

"You needn't worry about that, Michael. Just go. The fate of the world's popsicles, rests in your hands."

"Yeah," Said Michael. "Tell me about it."