Tourist Trap

Chapter 37

Bruce the monster blinked his eyes as he looked around. "Oh my goodness. Where the heck am I?" 

"You're in Quartzwater City, son," Dr. Octavius said as he extended a hand in greeting. "What's your name?" 

"I'm Bruce," the monster lisped. 

"Hello, Bruce. I'm Dr. Octavius. Your arrival was most fortuitous. If you don't mind my asking, how did you happen to come here?" 

"I don't know. It was the strangest thing. I was going door to door looking for someplace to redecorate when I came across this horrid rundown little laboratory. The door was unlocked so I let myself in. Well, the place was in a complete state of disarray, I'll tell you what, so I went about doing some cleaning when I noticed this bookcase standing wide open. Behind it was an open door floating in the air. Well, I'm a curious boy so I stuck my head through it and the next thing I knew I was here. Oh gosh, I can't believe I landed on this poor man. Somebody get some medical attention quick!" 

"He'll be okay for the moment," Dr. Octavius said. "The important thing is our prophecy seems to have been fulfilled." Upon seeing their leader taken out of action, Trevor Mastodon's remaining henchmen had dropped their canisters and fled. 

"Wait, how has the prophecy been fulfilled?" Max asked. "This guy doesn't look like a half-monkey half-chicken!" 

"I'm not!" Bruce said indignantly. "In addition to monkey and chicken, I'm also made out of rabbit, dog, possum, snake, groundhog, squirrel, mongoose, deer, skunk, sea otter, and water buffalo. Dr. Wentworth made me out of road kill!" 

"Aha!" Dr. Octavius began chuckling. "So old Jonas is good for something after all. And it seems I need to pay better attention to specific phrasings. After all, Morton the Mystic said our ace-in-the-hole would be part monkey part chicken, not half and half. That does leave room for other animals to be in the mix as well. For now the question remains what do we do with Trevor Mastodon?" 

"We should torture him like he was going to do to us," Max said as he walked over and kicked him in the head. 

"Come now, we're supposed to be the good guys," Dr. Octavius said. "I suppose we could lock him up in the jail." 

"Yeah, Cuthbert's around here somewhere," Zeke said. "He works at the jail." 

Cuthbert had managed to give himself a black eye from his backfire but he appeared to have regained consciousness and be otherwise okay.  

"Well, what do you say, Cuthbert?" Dr. Octavius asked. "Do you have room for him in the jail?" 

"We have room. The problem is, well, um, we seem to have temporarily locked ourselves out of the building. We can't find the key anywhere although we're looking into the possibility that it may have somehow been ingested." 

"Hmm. That is a problem," Dr. Octavius remarked. 

"Hey, I've got an idea," Zeke said as he noticed Benjamin the tiger standing over in a corner munching sunflower seeds from his sphere. "What if we shrank him down with your miniaturizing ray and locked him up in Benjamin's sphere? You did say that thing locked, right?" 

"Oh, it locks all right, but let me finish eating my sunflower seeds first, okay? I don't want that jerk to have any." 

Dr. Octavius eyed Zeke suspiciously. "Did you touch my miniaturizing ray? You seem to have taken quite the unnatural interest in it." 

"Who me?" Zeke glanced around. "No sir. I'm just trying to 'think outside the box' and it seemed like a way to take care of our problem." 

"Well, I suppose it could work," Dr. Octavius said thoughtfully. "We'll have to haul him back to the lab though."