Chapter Six
By: Winston deLeon
As Tammy watched, the mouse who had delivered the tape seemed to stick to no particular direction. She wandered here and there, pulling the cart through fields, the yards of private residences, and other seemingly random places. She was, however, careful to stay off sidewalks and roads, and seemed to be generally trying to keep out of sight. Several times Tammy nearly lost her because she drifted through thick patches of hedge and weeds, cover that made her difficult to follow at a distance.
Eventually, the mouse came to the edge of a lake, and started pulling the cart around the shore, though she was careful to stay off the sandy strips of manmade beach that intermittently edged the lake. She skirted around the shoreline for a long distance, and it seemed like she was looking for something. Finally, she reached an old wooden pier sticking out into the lake, looked it over, and seemed to decide that it was satisfactory for whatever she had planned. With some effort, she managed to get the cart up onto the raised wooden planks. Tammy was watching from behind the stump of a long-felled tree a long distance away, but not too far to see what happened next. The mouse deliberately pushed the cart faster and faster down to the end of the pier, until at last it flew off the edge, hit the water with a splash, and vanished.
Once the cart was gone, she swiftly removed the hat and jacket she had been wearing. After tying a knot at the end of one sleeve, she stuffed the hat into the sleeve, followed by a generous amount of small rocks. She returned to the end of the pier and dropped the jacket into the water, and it sank instantly. After doing so, she turned and walked off the pier, heading away from the lake without looking back.
Well, this is certainly getting more and more interesting, Tammy thought. Something funny was definately going on. A feeling of excitement that came over her, mixed with nervousness - she was on to something important, and the big break that could unravel this whole business with the diamond, or maybe even something bigger, was in her hands now. She continued tailing the mouse, with the utmost care to remain unseen.
This time, the mouse started heading towards the city, moving faster without the burden of the cart to pull around. For a while, Tammy took to the trees and rooftops of houses, using her height advantage to keep a watchful eye on the mysterious mouse with little risk of being spotted. She jumped with ease from treelimbs to rooftops, never once touching the ground for quite a long distance. This went on for a good half hour as the mouse wound her way through the suburban areas. As the mouse approached commercial areas deeper in the city, however, trees grew too sparse for Tammy to be able to simply jump from one tree to another, and she was forced to return to the ground. Tall apartment buildings, the roofs too high for her to clamber onto, replaced the single unit houses. Pavement replaced grass. Tammy was forced to transition from using bushes and weeds as cover to using parked cars and other artificial objects. For what seemed like hours, she persistently followed the suspicious mouse.
Taking a short rest after ducking behind a dumpster, Tammy wondered when the chase would finally end. She couldn't be sure, because the grey clouds blotted out the sky completely and it was impossible to gauge how far the sun had moved, but it was starting to feel like mid-afternoon, maybe 3 PM. The last time she'd looked at a clock, at home about fifteen minutes before she'd arrived at headquarters and this whole chase had begun, it was about 9 AM. Six hours, and still more to go, it seemed. Her legs were getting tired from so much continual walking, and she was getting pretty thirsty with no time to stop anywhere for a drink of water lest the mouse slip away. Still, though, she thought as she tried to look on the bright side, it could be worse. "At least it hasn't been raining today..." she mumbled to herself. As soon as the words were out, however, a large drop of water spattered on the pavement right in front of her, followed soon by another, then more. Tammy thwapped herself on the forehead for jinxing her good luck and sighed. Rain was soon pouring down, soaking her completely.
Rain or not, there was nothing to do but carry on and see where this all led. Tammy stepped out from behind the dumpster and continued trailing the mouse, who, despite not having an umbrella, didn't seem bothered by the rain in the least.
Chip walked up to the door of Ranger HQ slowly, feeling like a failure. He'd
been out since 8 that morning, and it was now nearly 3:30 in the afternoon.
His last desparate search for anything that might help reveal the identity of
the thief had been a complete bust. Nothing else had worked, so he wasn't quite
sure why he'd expected to find something today, either, but he had somehow,
just the same. The Rangers hadn't failed to solve a case in a long time. Something
always came to light, they always got the break they needed somehow. This time,
though - nothing. Absolutely nothing. And to make the day even better, just
a half hour or so ago, when Chip had thought he might at least get lucky enough
to get home before any rain came down, the downpour had started, thoroughly
soaking him. As he stepped to the door, which was at least somewhat sheltered
from the rain by the branches of the oak tree, he took off his fedora, wrung
it out (as best as one can wring out a fedora, anyway), and plunked it back
on his head, then repeated the process with his jacket.
As Chip turned the doorknob and pushed the door open, he was momentarily relieved to hear the only thing he wanted to in the mood he was in: silence. He stepped into the house, closed the door, and hung his jacket and hat on a stand near the door to let them dry off. What a wasted day, he thought, shaking his head. He turned and walked to his room in disgust, planning to grab a Shureluck Jones book and read a story or two from it to try and calm down while the house was quiet. As he walked through the living room, he noticed the tape propped up against the couch, and he made a mental note to tell Dale to put it away as soon as he saw him.
When he entered the room he shared with Dale, Dale was already there, leafing through a comic book. He had a scowl on his face, rather than the entranced expression that he usually got when reading a comic, but Chip hardly noticed, he was too frustrated and annoyed with how his own day had gone so far to focus on much else. "Go put your tape away." Chip instantly scolded him. "And stop leaving stuff lying around all over the place!"
"It's not my tape." Dale grumbled.
"Well, then whose is it, and what's on it?" Chip asked with annoyance as he snatched a random Shureluck Jones book off of a shelf.
"No idea. It got delivered here this morning, but we don't know who sent it." Dale shrugged, brooding over the comic book with a frown. "And the guy who's declared that he's the grand dictator of the tree has decided that we can't watch it until Gadget examines it."
That last remark puzzled Chip, but something about the bitterness in Dale's voice caught Chip's attention even more. "What's with you?" Chip asked, finally catching on to Dale's uncharactoristically bad mood.
"Monty, that's what." Dale said, holding out the comic book. "Look at this water damage! The mud stains! This copy is completely worthless in the condition it's in, and I'll never be able to find another one." Dale continued.
"What does Monty have to do with this?" Chip asked. His suspicions that there was a hidden conflict between Monty and Dale were revived, despite their apparent tolerance for each other in the last few days. Suddenly, before Dale even answered, Chip simply couldn't take any more. A national treasure had been grabbed from under his nose, he still felt humiliated on account of that taunting note telling him it was going to happen, and three days of exhausting investigation all over the city in miserable, wet overcast weather had revealed absolutely nothing of any worth. Watching the team dynamic break down into squabbling, pointless conflict was absolutely the last thing Chip needed right now, and there was no way he was going to let it happen if he could help it.
Surprising both Dale and himself, Chip suddenly seized Dale by the collar of his hawaiian shirt and started dragging him out into the hallway. Dale was too stunned to resist. He stumbled along, following Chip's lead. "What are you doing, Chip?" Dale finally managed to ask as Chip progessed into the middle of the livingroom.
"Trying to get to the bottom at least one problem today, that's what." Chip said as he pushed Dale down onto one of the chairs at the dinner table.
"Monty, would you come in here for a minute, please?" Chip yelled. A few seconds passed, as footfalls from some distant part of the house grew louder and louder until Monty finally stepped through a doorway and into the main room.
"What is it, Chippa?" Monty asked as he came walking into the livingroom.
"Have a seat, would you?" Chip asked, motioning to a chair on the opposite side of the table from Dale.
Monty crossed the room and sat down. "What's going on? Break in the case?" Monty asked hopefully.
"I wish." Chip said grimly. "More like a crack in our teamwork." He said, staring at Monty.
"Whaddya mean, Chip?" Monty asked, looking puzzled.
"I think you know what I mean." Chip said, pacing around the table, still holding his Shureluck Jones book. "The two of you have been antagonizing each other for a while now. I've seen it happening, and I hoped it might go away on it's own, but it doesn't seem to be doing that. Now, I want to hear all the details of what this is about. Why do you two have it in for each other?"
Dale and Monty stared icily across the table at each other for a few seconds, then both of them suddenly spoke at once: "He sent me good brie into Davy Jones's locker!" Monty said. "He dropped a rare first issue comic book of mine into a mudpuddle!" Dale shouted. Each was pointing an accusing finger at the other.
"Hold on... so this really boils down to being about a crate of cheese and a comic book? Nothing more complicated than that?" Chip asked.
"I guess that's about the shape of it." Monty said.
"I assume these were both accidents?" Chip asked them.
"Well... I guess." Dale said reluctantly.
"Yeah, I s'pose so." Monty agreed.
"And you couldn't just apologize to each other?" Chip said angrily.
"I ain't apologizin' till Dale does first!" Monty burst out. "I lost me cheese first, and he never said he was sorry."
"Yeah, well, that comic book was worth way more than a bunch of cheese, so I think I should get an apology first!" Dale countered.
"Whaddya mean, 'you first'?" Monty shouted. He started to say something else, but Dale burst out shouting in reply, which forced Monty to raise his voice further, and the two of them swiftly degenerated into heedless shouting, each trying to drown out the other with sheer volume. Chip could follow very little of what either of them was actually saying, but it was obvious that it wasn't going anywhere productive.
"Stop it!" Chip yelled wrathfully, silencing both of them. "Now, is one of you willing to take the initiative and apologize, or what?" He said softly once the room was quiet. Chip glared back and forth between the two of them, watching for any sign of weakness, but unfortunately both them seemed determined to stick to their position of "me first", and they both remained silent.
Chip tried to think of some way to get them talking reasonably, but he was simply too frustrated and annoyed with everything that was going wrong for anything to come to mind. Right now, he didn't have the patience or the desire to hold their hands and coax them into playing nice with one another, and besides, forcing an insincere apology wouldn't do any good at all anyway. "Right. Fine. If no one's ready to apologize, then so be it, go ahead and be mad at each other for a while until you are. At least you're not physically slugging it out. That'll have to be good enough for the moment, I suppose." Chip said in exhasperation.
With that, Chip stormed off to a quiet room in the upper floor of the treehouse to go read his Shureluck Jones book. He was curious about what was on the tape, but he had to admit that it did seem wisest to have it inspected before they did anything with it, and besides, if it was going to have anything on it that would cause him even more stress, then it could definately wait. After three days of driving himself nuts, a few hours off would be a great relief. Mercifully, Dale and Monty seemed to have separated themselves, and the house remained quiet for some time while Chip was reading.
At 5:30 PM, the rangermobile finally pulled up to the tree and into the hollowed
out storage hangar that it shared with the rangerwing. Gadget turned off all
it's electrical systems, then stepped out carrying a large toolbox. She grabbed
the battery charging plug from the wall and hooked it up to the rangermobile,
which desparately needed it's juice replenished after the kind of day it had
just been through.
As she opened the door to the main house and stepped inside, it was oddly quiet. She could smell dinner cooking, but the usual background noise of the house was gone. Or, rather, Dale's usual background noise was gone. She didn't hear him watching T.V., or pestering Monty with questions about when dinner would be done, or listening to loud music. Oh well, she shrugged. Maybe he went out for some reason.
As Gadget walked through the hallways to her workshop to put her tools away, the smell of dinner cooking made her feel hungier and hungier. The last thing she'd eaten was a quick breakfast early that morning, before she'd left to go help the people from the museum in their effort to construct submarines. After putting all her tools back in their proper places and scrubbing all the oil and grime of the day's work off of her hands, she headed down to the kitchen to see what was for dinner.
Evidently Chip had gotten the same idea. She and him entered the kitchen at almost the same moment, as Monty was working to fix dinner. "Hello, luv." Monty said as he saw her enter. "How was your day?"
"Not especially good." Gadget replied. "We didn't get nearly as much done as I had hoped, because they were kinda short on parts. How were things here?" She asked.
"Err... interesting." Monty replied hesitantly.
"Interesting is hardly how I would put it." Chip said. "You and Dale..." He started to say something.
"Got a funny delivery this morning!" Monty interrupted him, speaking swiftly. "Other than that, Chipper, you're right, it wasn't very interesting."
"Huh? What kind of funny delivery?" Gadget asked curiously.
"A video tape, luv." Monty answered her. "Only we don't know who it came from, so we were gonna have you give it a lookover and make sure there wasn't any funny business in it."
"Oh... well, alright, I'll take a look at it after dinner." Gadget agreed.
Dinner was somewhat quieter than usual, Gadget noticed, although the food was very good. Dale, Monty, and Chip seemed to glance wordlessly between themselves an awful lot, which concerned Gadget a bit. She'd noticed something going on between Monty and Dale, a general hostility of some sort, but it had seemed to be vanishing in the last few days. Evidently it wasn't completely gone, however. She thought about saying something, because it was starting to worry her that it was dragging out so long, but she decided against it, hoping it would go away on it's own.
After dinner, Monty showed her the video cassette, still propped against the couch, and the bucket that had come with it. Gadget stared at the bucket's contents, mystified. It was little shards of something clear and colorless, like glass, only she didn't think so, because the particles were too evenly broken, and didn't have any especially sharp corners. "Golly, I don't know what this stuff is." Gadget told everyone, shrugging. "I don't think I've seen anything quite like it before. Maybe the video will explain it."
Moving on, she examined the video inside and out. It took nearly ten minutes as she went over every part to make sure that there was nothing unpleasant waiting for them. Finally, she was satisfied that the tape was perfectly normal, and they put it in the VCR.
Gadget turned on the TV and set it to channel 3. Chip pushed the play button. Everyone waited in silence for the video to start. There was a second or two of static, giving way to a few more seconds of a silent black screen, and then the image flickered in. It appeared to be the interior of an abandoned building, perhaps a warehouse. From the angle of the shot, the camera looked like it had been set on the concrete floor. The screen's lower right corner showed a date and timestamp. Neither of them actually helped reveal the exact date or time, they simply indicated the time as 12:00 AM, January 1st, 1900. Next to them was a battery indicator indicating full charge. Apparently, this video had been produced with a home camcorder of some sort.
There was no action for several seconds, until at last a female mouse, wearing a long sleeved grey shirt and black pants, her long brown hair tied back in a ponytail, walked in front of the camera. Dale instantly jumped up out of his seat, pointing at the screen in disbelief. "That's the person who delivered the tape!" He said with surprise.
Before anyone could respond or act, however, the mouse on camera started speaking: "Hello, Rangers. You don't know who I am... but I know plenty about you. I've read about lots of your cases. I've even watched you work on a few occasions, though you've never noticed me. I know that what I've put you through in these last few days must be very nerve-wracking, especially to you, Chip. I imagine that you're probably taking this harder than anyone else, with your determination to always solve the case, get your criminal into custody, and set the world right once again. Not this time, I'm afraid. This time, the victory goes to the... I guess you'd call me the 'bad guy'... I'm sure that's what you think of me as." She mused, then paused for a moment.
"I don't believe it... She was right here, at the door, and I... I just let her go!" Dale slapped his hand over his face in embarassment. Chip gave Dale a menacing look, seemingly ready to bonk him better than he'd ever been bonked before for being so naive. Gadget was about to stop Chip by reminding him that everyone thought with good reason that the thief was dead, and there was no reason to consider Dale to have been at fault.
Before Chip got anywhere near Dale, however, the mouse started speaking again, saving Gadget the trouble of interfering. "Trust me, though, when I tell you that there is a purpose behind what I've done. No, that purpose is not to make me rich, as I'm sure you're thinking. I don't want money, or power, or any other personal gain. Unlike most of the people you deal with, I'm not out to further my own interests..." She stopped to think for a moment.
"Well, perhaps that's not entirely accurate. I do have one personal reason for what I've done, but that's rather secondary and will become clear in a day or two anyway, so for now, I'll explain the reason that impacts more people."
She was silent for a few seconds. "Hard as it may be to believe, I'm actually doing this more for others than for myself." She continued. "In life, sometimes the only way to learn certain things is through tough experience. I'm going to teach one of these hard lessons to a great number of people. It's a painful lesson, and a bitter one to swallow, but I can't simply stand by and watch so many people live in their little fantasy worlds of material playthings anymore. They need to be woken up. It might not be pleasant for someone to wake you by tossing a bucket of icewater on your head, but in some cases, that's what it takes, so it must be done. In other cases, not even that will work, and they won't learn anything from what I'm about to do. Some, maybe even the majority, will no doubt refuse to awaken, and I feel sorry for them, but I've got to try, because if I can get through to even one person, then this will all be worth it."
"And what, you no doubt wonder, is it that I'm about to do that's so drastic? Watch for yourselves." The mouse walked off camera, and a second later, there was a scraping noise and the view of the inside of the building started rotating as the camera was turned on the floor, moving clockwise. As it rotated, a strange machine came into view not far from the camera. It was composed of a small sledgehammer with it's handle mounted on a pivot, allowing it to swing up and down, with a block of solid iron serving as an anvil beneath it. In back of the handle, there was a large metal wheel with two large metal teeth protruding from it, directly opposite from one another. It seemed to have some kind of piston mounted to it, but it was motionless at the moment. Gadget recognized what the machine was, but she didn't quite understand it's purpose.
"What is that thing, Gadget?" Chip asked.
"It looks like a steam-driven triphammer." Gadget said. "But unless she plans on doing some blacksmithing, I don't see what the point..."
The mouse stepped back on camera and spoke again, interrupting Gadget. "As Gadget could no doubt tell you, this is an automated hammer. It's really quite simple to operate. First, I'll start the heat source going, to generate steam." At that statement, the mouse started up a propane torch that was resting on the ground next to a small metal tank connected to the piston on the hammer. A minute or so passed, until steam finally started pouring out of a valve in the top of the tank. The mouse returned to the camera. "Once that's done, I just have to raise the hammer into position." The mouse stepped to a control panel that was mostly hidden off camera, and did something. The wheel with the two teeth on it started turning slowly, driven by the steam. One of the teeth finally came down on the end of the hammer's handle, and as the wheel continued slowly turning, it pushed down, causing the hammer to pivot upwards and rise. Once the hammer was in a horizontal position, leaving a good amount of space between it and the solid block of metal beneath, the wheel stopped moving, holding the hammer up but remaining motionless.
The mouse popped back on camera once the hammer was raised. "Now, here comes the fun part. Or, rather, the part that's going to make people gasp in disbelief." The mouse said. Once more, the mouse stepped off camera, and when she returned, she was pushing a chainfall rig mounted on wheels - and the Devil's Eye diamond was suspended in it. With an effort, she pushed it all the way over to the metal anvil under the hammer, raised the diamond high enough to place on the anvil, then unloaded it, pushing the diamond onto the middle of the large metal block. Gadget didn't at all like where this seemed to be going, but all they could do was watch.
"Now, as you might know, diamonds have perfectly aligned internal cleavage, because of the way their carbon atoms arrange themselves. This makes them incredibly hard - but it also makes them extremely brittle, as we shall see." The mouse in the grey shirt smiled. She walked back over to the control panel just barely offscreen.
"No... she can't..." Chip said softly, staring at the TV with his jaw dropped in disbelief. "...she's gotta be bluffing... some kinda camera trick..." He trailed off, unable to say anything more.
Everyone in the room sat in rapt silence, hardly even able to breathe, so intense was their stunned disbelief at what they knew was coming but were powerless to prevent. The thought dimly surfaced in Gadget's mind that the mystery of what was in that bucket was now solved. The wheel started turning, pushing the hammer up higher and higher, until at last the tooth slipped off the end of the wooden handle, and gravity pulled the heavy steel head back down, crashing loudly on the diamond. The diamond split raggedly in half, little chips of dust flying off in every direction. Every one of the Rangers simultaneously cringed as the blow fell. In seconds, the other tooth on the opposite side of the wheel caught the hammer's handle, raising it once more. As the hammer's head rose, the two halves of the diamond rolled apart, still resting on the anvil. The hammer rose and fell once more, cracking each half into yet smaller pieces. Over and over again, it rose and slammed down, each time sending out a shower of fine glittering dust. One by one, pieces of diamond cracked and shattered, crumbling away into smaller and smaller bits until they were practically nothing. For nearly ten minutes the hammer rose and fell, until at last all that was left of the giant Devil's Eye was a sad-looking little heap of fine shards. Nothing that was left seemed to be bigger than a grain of sand.
The hammer stopped, and the mouse put out the blue flame coming from the propane torch. Steam gradually stopped coming from the machine, as the wheel slowed and came to a stop. She approached the camera once again. "I know you probably don't believe that I've destroyed the real diamond, but I have. I'm sending this to you, along with this tape, as proof that this is no trick." She bent down and picked up a metal bucket, the same one that was now sitting in the livingroom. She walked over to the anvil and scooped several handfuls of the glinting dust into the bucket. "Run whatever tests you want on it. You'll see that this is real diamond. No tricks, no illusions."
"I know you don't appreciate with what I've just done - stolen a multimillion dollar irreplaceable gemstone and destroyed it - but I assure you, I know what I'm doing, and I have extremely good reasons for doing so. As bitter as this defeat might feel right now, in the long run, it might just make each of you a bit better off. Remember that getting caught up in games of accumulating material possession is ultimately an empty pursuit. All things rise from dust and ashes, and back into dust and ashes all things eventually return. Nothing lasts forever. Not even diamonds, hardest of all substances, endure very long in the grand scheme of things."
"And one last thing. Well, two, really: First, if you're watching this, Tammy, I'd like to apologize for the chloroform, I know it's unpleasant, but I couldn't let you raise the alarm. Second, to Foxglove, I'd like to apologize for the ultrasonic weaponry and that flashpowder rocket. Must have been disorienting, and I know how dangerous that is when you're flying. No hard feelings, I hope. Goodbye, Rescue Rangers." With that, the mouse walked offscreen, and the image turned to static as the tape ended.
No one moved to turn off the T.V. for several seconds, they were all too stunned. Finally, Gadget, looking around at the blank faces of everyone around her, got up and pushed the power button on the TV. The screen went black. Acting unconsciously, she walked over to the VCR and hit the stop button and then the rewind button without thinking. She didn't even realize she'd done it, because there were so many other things occupying her thoughts, burning questions that defied logic: How did that mouse, whoever she was, survive a plane crash in the middle of the bay, escaping with not only her life, but the diamond as well? How had they been so completely unable to track her down, in spite of her apparent brazenness? When she wants to be seen, she shows up right at the door, but then at other times, she might as well just not even exist for all we've been able to find out, Gadget thought to herself with puzzlement.
They might never get answers to those questions, she realized, but there was one important question she could answer: Whether or not that was really the Devil's Eye diamond being turned into powder. Grabbing the bucket of pulverized material that had come with the tape, she started heading to her workshop.
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Disclaimer:
The charactors of Chip, Dale, Gadget, Monterey Jack, Zipper, Tammy, Foxglove
and any other charactor originally appearing the animated series "Chip
and Dale's Rescue Rangers" are all © Disney and are used here without
permission. Any other charactors appearing herein that are not © Disney
are my own creations. This story may be freely copied, transmitted, printed,
distributed, used as bird cage liner, or whatever, I only ask that it is not
modified from it's original form and it is not used for profit in any way. I
believe that that concludes the legal mumbo-jumbo for now... On to the story!
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