My reply was always along the lines of, “Be serious. We both know you’re not the type of girl who likes being scooped up in that scenario. Plus, you were right behind us, and only missed Mouse by, like, fifteen seconds.”
In short, we basically engaged in an hour of playful banter, with Electra – who was sitting next to me – occasionally taking my hand. I was initially surprised by her doing so, but decided to just enjoy the moment rather than quiz her about her actions and what she was thinking.
Eventually, Alpha Prime came in – accompanied by Luna and Buzz – and the serious look on his face immediately set the tone for the discussion that followed.
“Okay, here’s what we’ve got,” my father began, as he, Luna, and Buzz took seats across from us. “The initial attack in the Combat Arena was probably a diversion – something to draw our attention. Then, while we were preoccupied with the aftermath of that, Mouse slipped into the Vault.”
“Makes sense,” Electra said. “We wouldn’t be expecting him back after he’d just put in an appearance.”
“No, it only makes half-sense,” I argued. “I agree that we wouldn’t be expecting him again so soon, but the Vault and Combat Arena are in close proximity. If he wanted a diversion so that he could sneak into the former, he’d have done it at the other end of HQ. Instead, he did it practically next door. I mean, Luna and the others only got there about a minute after the rest of us.”
“You’re right,” Alpha Prime conceded, “but as Electra noted before, Mouse isn’t himself right now. It may not be possible to rationalize his actions.”
“Or maybe we just can’t see the rationale,” I countered.
“Are you kidding?” Luna interjected. “Your buddy attacked us two times today in succession, and you even had a ringside seat for one of them. What’s it going to take for you to pull your head out and accept what the rest of us already know? Mouse has gone off the rails.”
“What I can’t accept is how quickly all of you turn on one of your own,” I shot back. “But not just any other colleague – your leader.”
“Ex-leader,” Buzz corrected. “Especially after what he pulled today in the Vault.”
“That makes for a nice segue,” Alpha Prime chimed in. “Let’s talk about what happened in the Vault.”
“So what do we know?” asked Electra.
“On the surface, it’s pretty straightforward,” my father stated. “Mouse broke in, the guards tried to detain him, and he knocked them out with some kind of concussion grenade.”
“But that’s not the explosion we heard,” I offered, making it more of a statement than a question.
“No,” Alpha Prime agreed. “That was Mouse trying to blow up Buzz.”
We all looked at the speedster, who stated, “I was first on the scene – happened to be nearby and heard the concussion grenade go off. Acoustics aren’t great in some parts of HQ, so it took a minute of running around and checking out various areas before I got to the place where it had detonated.”
“The rear room of the Vault,” Electra surmised.
Buzz nodded. “Yeah, and Mouse was at the back wall when I got there. I went straight at him, then noticed some kind of explosion starting to go off ahead of me. I was able to avoid it, but the place was apparently booby-trapped.”
I took in Buzz’s statement without comment. As a speedster, he wouldn’t have had any problem sidestepping a bomb that was going off. From his perspective, the explosion would have occurred in slow motion and would have been easy to dodge.
“I could tell the explosion wasn’t going to be massive,” Buzz continued, “so I just went around it. That said, it did make a lot of noise and shook the place, although it didn’t do much damage. Anyway, in trying to bypass it, I hit some liquid that was on the floor and lost my footing – ended up banging into the wall. Whatever it was, it was super-slippery. I had trouble just getting back on my feet, and then I couldn’t get any traction. I ended up just running in place. I wasn’t able to get to Mouse no matter how hard I tried, even though he was just a few feet away.”
“So how’d you get unstuck, so to speak?” inquired Electra.
“A few minutes after Mouse left, the liquid just evaporated,” Buzz answered. “I wish I knew what it was, because I’d definitely like to avoid it from now on.”
“Frictionless grease,” I said. Everyone turned to me with expectant looks, so I went on. “Buzz stepped in frictionless grease.”
Luna gave me a confused look. “What’s that?”
“I won’t explain it as well as Mouse,” I confessed, “but friction is the force between two objects that keeps them from slipping and sliding away from each other when they’re in contact. It’s friction between your feet and the ground that allows you to walk or run – or even stand up.”
“And frictionless grease, as the name implies, removes friction,” my father concluded. “That explains what happened to Buzz.”
“So that’s something that Mouse invented?” asked Electra.
“I don’t know,” I admitted with a shrug. “The concept has been around for a while and Mouse discussed it during one of my physics lessons, but I wasn’t aware he’d done anything with it.”
“What about this other thing that you guys had to deal with?” asked Luna. “The localized black hole.”
“It was a gravity well, created by this,” remarked Alpha Prime as he placed a small silver ball on the table. “It has a limited range, but it’s very powerful. I’m not even sure I would have been able to break away from it, if not for Jim.”
“Wow,” muttered Electra. “How’d you deactivate it?”
“We didn’t,” my father admitted. “Just like the frictionless grease evaporated, it just sort of turned off after Mouse left.”
“Or Mouse turned them off,” I added, “since he
